Teachers strike in Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma

Thousands of Chicago public school teachers are back in class.

Teachers returned to school Friday after going on strike for 11 days. They had picketed in the snow and rain until union leaders and city officials struck a deal to raise teacher pay and to put a social worker and nurse in each school. Some of the teachers’ most ambitious proposals, such as requiring the city to expand affordable housing, didn’t make the cut.

Teachers in the nation’s third-largest school district are on strike, indefinitely canceling classes for more than a quarter of a million students.

About 25,000 Chicago teachers and support staff didn’t show up for work Thursday after contract negotiations with city officials took a turn for the worse.

Oakland teachers are returning to their classrooms today after seven days on strike. And they’re bringing $38 million in pay raises with them.

On Sunday, the local teachers union and school officials in Oakland cut a deal after more than a year of contract negotiations. While the city’s 2,000-plus teachers didn’t get everything they demanded during the strike, they got a lot more than the district wanted to give them. Most notably, teachers snagged an 11 percent pay raise over four years and a 3 percent bonus — nearly double the pay raise district officials had offered before teachers walked off the job.

Oakland teachers just kicked off the fourth major teachers strike of the year.

On Thursday, nearly all of the 2,300 public school teachers in the district refused to show up to work, rejecting the superintendent’s latest offer of a 7 percent raise over three years.

Update: West Virginia’s House of Delegates voted Tuesday afternoon to postpone action on the controversial education bill indefinitely.

West Virginia teachers are furious with state lawmakers — again.

Teacher frustration keeps spreading.

Public school teachers in Oakland, California, said they will strike on Thursday, following 18 months of tense negotiations with district officials over pay raises and classroom sizes.

Denver’s teachers may soon be returning to school.

More than 2,000 educators, who have been on strike since Monday, said they reached a tentative deal Thursday with the local school district.

Last year’s labor unrest started with a teachers strike in West Virginia and ended with Marriott workers picketing across four states.

A record number of US workers went on strike or stopped working in 2018 because of labor disputes with employers, according to new data released Tuesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year — the highest number since 1986, when flight attendants, garbage collectors, and steelworkers walked off the job.

Denver’s public school teachers went on strike Monday, following the lead of teachers across the country who have refused to go to work until they get a raise.

The walkout comes after more than 15 months of tense negotiations between the school district and the teachers union over the compensation system, which relies heavily on bonuses that fluctuate wildly from year to year.

Los Angeles public school teachers have reached a tentative deal with city leaders to end a strike that has shut down the nation’s second-largest school district for more than a week.

As part of the deal, teachers would get a 6 percent raise and slightly fewer students in each classroom, according to Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, a labor union that represents about 34,000 public school teachers, nurses, librarians, and support staff in the city.

Richard Ojeda, the brash Army veteran from West Virginia who galvanized the state’s teacher strikes earlier this year, says he is running for president in 2020.

The Democratic state senator told the Intercept about his bid for the White House on Sunday, less than a week after losing his race for West Virginia’s Third Congressional District. He lost the seat by 12 points to his Republican opponent, Carol Miller — a race that was always viewed as a long shot. After all, Ojeda was a Democrat running for office in the heart of West Virginia’s coal country, a district Donald Trump won in 2016 by 49 points.

Arizona voters may soon get to decide if rich families should pay for teachers’ raises.

Last week, a Maricopa County judge allowed the Invest in Education Act to remain on November’s ballot, rejecting claims from business groups that the language is misleading. If passed, the ballot measure would nearly double income tax rates on the top 1 percent of earners in Arizona, reversing decades of budget cuts to the state’s public schools.

First they went on strike, now they’re running for office. Nearly 100 public school teachers and administrators are on the ballot in Oklahoma’s primary elections on Tuesday, trying to unseat Republican lawmakers who fought their demands to spend more money on public education.

Many first-time candidates participated in the nine-day teacher strike in April that shut down more than half of the state’s public schools. Teachers pleaded with politicians at the state capitol to restore millions of dollars in school funding that has been cut from the state budget in recent years and to give teachers a raise for the first time in a decade. Lawmakers agreed to boost their salaries, but teachers grew frustrated over the resistance to discuss investment in public education.

A Kentucky high school math teacher with no political experience unseated one of the state’s most powerful Republican lawmakers in Tuesday’s primary elections — a sign that the widespread teacher unrest could turn into a potent political force in November.

Travis Brenda, a teacher in Rockcastle County, narrowly defeated House Majority Floor Leader Jonathan Shell, a rising GOP star endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Teachers throughout the country have been making their voices heard and getting state governments to listen to their demands. It looks like some members of Congress are starting to pay attention too.

On Tuesday, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate made a bold promise: They will raise taxes on the rich to give teachers a raise. They just need voters to put them in control of Congress in November.

Richard Ojeda is projected to win the Democratic nomination in the race for West Virginia’s Third Congressional District, giving Democrats their best chance to flip a congressional seat in November in the state, which Donald Trump won in 2016 by 40 points.

The Third District is home to West Virginia’s coal country, and three in four voters there cast a ballot for Trump — more than any other part of the state. Yet Ojeda’s brand of populism resonates with working-class voters in the region, and his outspoken defense of West Virginia’s teachers earlier this year launched him into the national spotlight.

Of the three congressional House seats in deep-red West Virginia, the one with the best chance to flip blue is in the heart of coal country.

Seven Republicans are vying to take West Virginia’s Third House District, left open by Rep. Evan Jenkins in his bid for US Senate. But a Democrat, Richard Ojeda, has made the most noise so far, thanks to fierce support from thousands of teachers in the state.

Arizona teachers returned to class on May 4 after ending a six-day strike that closed nearly all of the state’s 2,000-plus schools. Educators returned to work after the state legislature gave them a 20 percent salary raise over three years and some extra funding for public education.

But there’s a catch: Lawmakers are going to make them and other middle- and working-class Arizonans pay for the raise.

The teachers striking in Arizona have been called Democratic operatives. Masterminds of a national socialist revolution. Architects of a plot to legalize marijuana.

The backlash is fiercer than in other states where teachers have protested or gone on strike. And the comments aren’t coming from the ideological fringes of the internet. State politicians, lawmakers, and journalists are making these accusations to discredit teachers who are demanding higher pay and more funding for public schools.

Arizona teachers are walking out Thursday in protest, after the governor and state legislature failed to meet their demands.

Republican Gov. Doug Ducey tried to avert the strike by promising a 20 percent raise over the next three years — a promise that some say is tied to overly optimistic growth projections.

Teachers across the United States who are protesting years of school funding cuts have the American public on their side.

Most Americans agree that teachers are underpaid, and slightly more than half of adults support striking as a strategy to change that, according to a new AP/NORC poll. Half of Americans also said they are willing to pay more taxes to fund schools and pay teachers more.

Two Republican state lawmakers are trying to shut down a potential teachers strike in Colorado with the threat of jail time.

The bill, introduced in the state Senate Friday, prohibits districts from supporting a teachers strike and requires schools to dock a teacher’s pay for each day they participate in a walkout. The teachers could also face up to six months in jail and a $500 daily fine if they violate a court order to stop striking. Under the new law, sponsored by state Sen. Bob Gardner (R) and state Rep. Paul Lundeen (R), a teacher could be immediately fired without a hearing.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) is facing a backlash for comments he made Friday blaming a widespread teachers strike for child abuse and rape.

More than 30 school districts were closed Friday because thousands of teachers had gone to rally at the state Capitol in Frankfort. The teachers were urging state lawmakers to override Bevin’s veto of a two-year budget that would boost school funding by $480 million through various tax hikes.

The Oklahoma teacher walkout is over — but not for everyone.

On Thursday afternoon, Oklahoma’s largest educators association announced an end to the nine-day walkout, saying lawmakers “won’t budge an inch.” The group said that it would take the $479 million in extra school funding educators got from lawmakers before the strike — a fraction of the $3.3 billion they had demanded — and that members would return to work.

If there’s ever a moment to capture the existential crisis at Facebook, it was these past couple of weeks.

On Wednesday, the CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, testified in front of the House Committee on Energy and Finance, where he faced fierce questioning about Facebook’s role in a range of misdeeds — from ethnic genocide in Myanmar to election meddling.