Giving Compass' Take:

· After the recent teacher strikes this spring, The 74 makes predictions for the possible strikes to come, with a lot of tension drawn from President Obama’s education agenda and teachers believing that their wages don't cover all the work they do.

· How can the government stop these predicted protests?

· Learn more about the causes behind teacher protests.

This spring’s historic teacher uprising, which emptied classrooms and rocked statehouses for three months, just claimed its first political casualty.

In Kentucky’s state legislative elections last week, House Majority Leader Jonathan Shell — a promising young Republican who enjoyed the patronage of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell — was defeated in the GOP primary by Travis Brenda, a high school math instructor and political unknown. Shell had spearheaded a controversial law to trim teacher retirement benefits, which led thousands of protesters to descend on the state capitol in April.

As Kentucky’s Shell can ruefully attest, primary season is underway for this fall’s midterm elections, when 36 governorships and 87 state legislative chambers will be up for grabs. Even in states that elected President Trump by commanding margins two years ago — including many of those listed above — incumbents now fear the rising blue tide that has already swept away dozens of Republican-held seats.

As a long-standing pillar of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, teachers unions could play a decisive role in many of those elections. Though headlines are expected to fade over the summer vacation, a renewal of strikes as September approaches — when parents are left with few options to cope with school closures — could provide a critical pre-election jolt.

“I think what this shows is something much deeper that folks need to be paying attention to, which is the resilience — I won’t even say of teachers unions, but of teachers in American politics,” said Michael Hartney, a professor of political science at Boston College.

But Hartney argues that much of President Obama’s education agenda — reforms to teacher evaluation systems, a push for new curricular standards under the Common Core, and a general friendliness toward school choice — helped ratchet up the tension as well.

“Regardless of what you think of the wave of Obama-era education reform policies … it’s simply not a debatable point that teachers, by and large, do not like this vision of school reform,” he said. “If you have stagnant wages, and working conditions at your job are misaligned with what you think they should look like, it’s no surprise there’s going to be a revolt.”

Read the full article about the next wave of teacher strikes by Kevin Mahnken at The 74