On the sixth day of their walkout, Arizona teachers have won a partial but real victory, as the state legislature pass and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill including a substantial pay raise for many teachers and an increase in education funding. The increase, though—$100 million in what Ducey calls “flexible dollars to improve our public education system”—falls far, far short of what teachers were calling for:

“The people down here, a lot of them, don’t listen to our voices,” said Noah Karvelis. He is one of the organizers of Arizona Educators United, the group that crafted the #RedForEd movement that, along with the Arizona Education Association, organized the strike that began last Thursday.

“They don’t respond,” Karvelis continued. “If they did, we’d have $1.1 billion for education in this budget.”

Legislative Republicans brushed aside Democratic efforts to include school support staff in the teacher pay raise, to require one counselor for every 250 students, to limit class size, and to pay for increased education funding by “phasing out some tax exemptions and eliminating the ability of individuals and corporations to divert some of what they owe in state income taxes to help children attend private and parochial schools.”

Many teachers expressed disappointment about what isn’t in the bill. And they should. The additional funding still leaves Arizona schools behind where they were in 2008, and lawmakers didn’t establish solid, responsible revenue sources for school funding. But it’s still a win in the sense that, without teacher activism, there would have been zero progress.

This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on May 3, 2018. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.