#RedforEd Teachers Strike in St. Paul, Minnesota, Part of Union Effort to ‘Defeat Trumpism in 2020’

Thousands of @SPFE28 members marching through downtown St. Paul to demand more mental heal
Twitter/@SPFE28
Michael Patrick Leahy

#RedforEd teachers went on strike in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Tuesday.

The strike came less than two months after Education Minnesota, the state’s 80,000 member teachers union, held a three-day summit to train teachers on using their “collective power to defeat Trumpism in 2020 and win a public education system in 2021 that can prevent Trumpism for the next generation,” as Breitbart News reported.

Minnesota Public Radio reported on the strike in St. Paul:

Thousands of union teachers and other professional school staff headed for picket lines Tuesday morning instead of classrooms. The St. Paul Federation of Educators [SPFE] and their 3,600 members went on strike after late-night talks failed to produce a contract agreement.

District and union leaders struggled to come to agreement after several sessions. On Monday, the district offered arbitration, but the union declined.

Union representatives said the district had not come close enough to satisfying their demands for more funding of mental health services for students, as well as more multilingual interpreters and special education funding. Educators also want more efforts to reduce racial inequity in discipline and other areas.

“The district’s latest proposal dramatically slashed the number of support staff the Saint Paul Federation of Educators proposed to help meet students’ needs,” the union said in a statement early Tuesday. “SPFE presented a plan that would stretch out increased staffing over a three-year period to give the district flexibility in budgeting.”

The SPFE’s Twitter account provided this first-hand report on Tuesday:

Minnesota’s Democrat Farm-Labor Party tweeted its support of the strike:

Minnesota’s SEIU added its support in this tweet:

As Breitbart News reported, the president of the SPFE sits on the board of a progressive group that endorsed Bernie Sanders in January, and  a vice-president of SPFE spoke at a Bernie Sanders rally on the eve of Minnesota’s Super Tuesday primary.

Despite the efforts of the Sanders supporting SPFE leadership, Sanders lost the Minnesota primary to former Vice President Joe Biden, who won ten of the fourteen Democratic presidential  primaries on Super Tuesday.

Biden continued his primary winning streak on Tuesday when he won decisive victories in four of six states (Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, and Idaho), narrowly lost to Sanders in the North Dakota caucuses, and is in a contest with Sanders in Washington that remains too close to call.

As Breitbart News reported in February 2019:

A well-funded and subversive leftist movement of teachers in the United States threatens to tilt the political balance nationwide in the direction of Democrats across the country as Republicans barely hang on in key states that they need to hold for President Donald Trump to win re-election and for Republicans to have a shot at retaking the House and holding onto their Senate majority.

This teachers union effort, called #RedforEd, has its roots in the very same socialism that President Trump vowed in his 2019 State of the Union address to stop, and it began in its current form in early 2018 in a far-flung corner of the country before spreading nationally. Its stated goals–higher teacher pay and better education conditions–are overshadowed by a more malevolent political agenda: a leftist Democrat uprising designed to flip purple or red states to blue, using the might of a significant part of the education system as its lever.

With former Vice President Joe Biden continuing to increase his delegate lead over Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination with each passing week, attention now turns to the four big states that have primary contests next Tuesday: Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona.

The most recent polls show Biden leading in Florida, Ohio, and Illinois, with Sanders ahead in Arizona.

Sources tell Breitbart News that the #RedforEd leadership in Arizona is doubling down on its support for Sanders, while the rank and file teachers who associate with the movement are less tied to Sanders and more interested in finding a nominee they believe can beat President Trump in the fall election.

In the event Joe Biden emerges as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, it is uncertain to what degree the #RedforEd leadership–in Arizona and around the country–will be willing to transfer the energy they have devoted to a Sanders primary battle for the Democratic Party nomination to a potential Biden general election campaign against President Trump.

It also uncertain how much it will matter if the Bernie Sanders supporting leadership that started the #RedforEd movement in Arizona in March 2019 is lukewarm in its support of a potential Joe Biden general election campaign for the presidency in November.

The SPFE teachers strike in St. Paul is an indication that high levels of energy for political activism among Sanders supporting #RedforEd leaders remains whether or not their preferred candidate wins the Democratic nomination.

The current #RedforEd strike in St. Paul could be an early indicator that teachers unions and the #RedforEd movement may accelerate teachers strikes throughout the country between now and November as part of their stated overall objective to defeat President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Minnesota is a key battleground state that Hillary Clinton narrowly won over Donald Trump by about 44,000 votes in 2016.

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