By Dale Russakoff
Early on the morning of March 14, Kelly Berg went to her closet and picked out a bright red blouse. Until recently, she had rarely worn red, but she was heading to the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, and a red top would tell everyone exactly who she was: a teacher.
Red shirts and blouses had emerged as the official uniform of teacher uprisings against low pay that were spreading from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Kentucky under the rallying cry “Red for Ed.” Just one week earlier, a Facebook post by Noah Karvelis, a 23-year-old teacher in Phoenix, lit the spark in Arizona, asking teachers to wear red on March 7 to demand more money for the state’s chronically underfunded public schools. Within days, 6,000 people clicked that they were on board. Berg, a high school math teacher for 23 years with a master’s degree who was taking home $1,620 a month, was one of them. On the designated day, a Wednesday, thousands of Arizona teachers turned campuses red from the New Mexico line to California. Karvelis and other young teachers then took it upon themselves to keep the activism going, declaring every Wednesday Red for Ed day — but Berg decided to wear it daily. “I wanted people to come up and say: ‘Kelly, today isn’t Wednesday. Why are you wearing red?’ ” she said. “It was so I could tell them, This is how important it is. We need to make our voices heard.”
In the past, the idea of participating in anything that resembled a political movement had repelled Berg. “I would say, ‘Don’t talk to me about politics,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I think it’s a waste of time.’ ” A 46-year-old lifelong Republican, she called herself a “sleepy voter,” as if she sleepwalked through the voting booth every four years. “I was just voting for the person with an R by their name or not voting.”
This was true even though the Legislature and governor — unified under Republican control since 2009 — cut education spending more than any other state in the wake of the Great Recession. Berg suffered doubly because her husband, a web developer, lost his state job, and now the entire family of six — they have four sons, ages 7 to 13 — was on her health plan, with the premiums cutting her previous take-home pay almost in half. She was working three extra jobs to keep the family afloat, arriving home most nights barely in time to check her kids’ homework and kiss them good night. Across the state, teachers were taking in roommates, working second and third jobs and leaving the profession in such waves that substitutes without standard certifications were leading more than 3,400 classrooms statewide. Two thousand more couldn’t be staffed at all.
In December 2016, the day before Christmas break, Berg heard that her son Mark’s sixth-grade teacher had quit to take a private-sector job for more money, and suddenly she felt that she couldn’t take it anymore. She needed to understand why Arizona’s schools were so poorly funded and who was responsible. She turned for help to her best friend, Tiffany Bunstein, who followed state politics closely and, like Berg, had been teaching for more than 20 years at Dobson High School in Mesa, a sprawling, demographically diverse suburb east of Phoenix. “I went to Tiffany and said, ‘I want to know what you know,’ ” Berg said.
Bunstein, 47, an active member of the teachers’ union and a Democrat, told her friend that she had once been uninformed, too. “Then when you start paying attention and you see what’s been happening,” she said, “it’s like clearing your glasses: Damn, this is what’s been going on all along?” With Bunstein’s encouragement, Berg began educating herself. She learned basic, and alarming, facts: Arizona ranked 49th in spending per student and seventh from the bottom in average teacher salary: $47,403. It had the highest average class size after Nevada, and amid national alarm over school shootings by troubled youngsters, Arizona school counselors had an average caseload of more than 920 students each, the highest in the country. Berg joined a new Facebook group called Arizona Educators United, where teachers posted articles and anecdotes about the school-funding crisis and the various politicians they blamed. She read about a teacher in Yuma, near the Mexico border, who quit his job after six years without a raise and now commuted an hour each way to a school in California — for twice the pay. The post that got perhaps the most “angry” clicks was an Arizona Capitol Times article quoting the House majority leader, John Allen, a Republican from Scottsdale, saying that teachers took second jobs not to pay bills but to buy boats or bigger houses.
It was on this Facebook page that Berg learned of the March 14 hearing in the House Ways and Means Committee on a bill related to Arizona’s tuition tax credit program, which awards dollar-for-dollar state tax credits to individuals and corporations for donations for private school scholarships. In the previous school year, donors had given more than $157 million, and over the last 20 years $1 billion, avoiding the same amount in taxes — money that never reached the state general fund or public schools. The bill would increase the size of individual scholarships, at a predicted annual cost of $2 million in 2020, a pittance in a more than $10 billion overall state budget. But for Berg and many other teachers emboldened by the March 7 show of solidarity, that was $2 million too much. “Once again we’re undercutting public education, and it needs to stop,” she recalled thinking. It was spring break, and teachers urged one another on Facebook to attend the hearing.
Berg drove downtown, her heart pounding. “This is totally so uncharacteristic of anything I’ve ever done,” she kept telling herself. Arriving at the Capitol, she found hundreds of other teachers, all wearing red, and was surprised by how comfortable she felt. Before she could stop herself, she volunteered to testify about the bill. She stood at the microphone with rows of red-shirted teachers behind her and read from notes, her head down, nervously smoothing her brown hair and adjusting her glasses. “I don’t know much about politics, but I do know about math,” she began, introducing a lesson on how teachers’ salaries had stagnated. Other teachers told stories of financial crises in their schools, pleading for every available dollar to go to public, not private, education. When one teacher’s voice broke as she described a colleague covering two kindergarten classes at once because of a shortage of substitutes, the others applauded in encouragement. When a Democratic lawmaker called the private scholarships inequitable — exceeding the state’s spending per public school student by $9,000 in some cases — the teachers stood up in silent assent. The committee chairwoman, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, instructed them to sit. “And when they sit, you can answer,” she said to the bill’s sponsor, the Senate president Steve Yarbrough, “because we’re going to all show each other respect.” Despite the entreaties of the teachers, the bill passed the committee on a party-line vote — six Republicans to three Democrats.
Berg went home, signed onto the Facebook page, which by now had tens of thousands of followers, and poured out her rage. “We were told to sit down when we stood in agreement. … We were told to remain quiet when applauding when a teacher, who was in tears, was pleading for support for our classes and our students,” she wrote. “We were disrespected. We were mocked. We were listened to, but not heard.”
“That’s what radicalized me,” Berg said later. “As the kids would say, ‘I’m woke.’ ”
