Giving Compass' Take:

• The recent wave of teacher strikes and walkouts is indicative of a broader phenomenon blurring the boundaries between national and local school politics, however, this is changing and Education Week goes over why education politics are going national. 

• How can teachers, school boards and philanthropists work together to create stronger changes? 

• Learn about finding the way to equity in education through policy changes.  

Over the last 12 months, teacher strikes and walkouts have spread across the country, including in Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and cities such as Denver, Los Angeles, and Oakland, Calif. While it is tempting to tell this story as a simple narrative about teachers pushing back against years of austerity and get-tough accountability within their states and communities, we think something bigger is going on.

"Local arenas have become important strategic fronts in a larger national battle over the future of public education."

While each of the recent teacher protests has home-grown causes and place-specific demands, they have more in common than one might expect. Strikers in large cities like Oakland and Los Angeles drew inspiration from last spring's strikes in weak-union states, for example by borrowing their "Red for Ed" imagery. And in red-state West Virginia, where strikers last year focused almost exclusively on bread-and-butter issues like wages, teachers now have taken on the battle against charter schools and privatization more generally, ideologically charged issues taken straight from the national political arena.

Read the full article about education politics going national by Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow at Education Week.