NOT A GOOD LOOK: Orval Faubus, segregation and corporate influence all got mentioned in national coverage of the Thursday teacher strike in Little Rock.

The Little Rock teacher strike Thursday was a successful attention getter, even if it doesn’t move Gov. Asa Hutchinson and related forces, including his Board of Education, intent on eventual end of a real public school district in the state’s capital.

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Hutchinson’s spin is that a majority of teachers went to work Thursday. True. A third didn’t show up. Many who worked couldn’t afford a day off, though sympathetic with the strike’s aims. The same for honking school bus drivers and others. More than half the students stayed home. Nothing like a real school day occurred yesterday. The vocal opponents of the strike were few. The loudest were Republican allies of Hutchinson or employed by organizations supported by Walton Family Foundation billions.

Meanwhile, the strike got national news coverage, from the Associated Press and others. New York magazine’s popular Intelligencer website reported on the strike, describing it accurately as partly a resistance to continuation of state-supported segregation. The headline shown above harkens back to the days of Faubus, not a flattering comparison.

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It is a fair comparison. It’s hard to ignore the segmenting of the district by the state into haves and have nots, the latter under control of the state, with the state simultaneously pushing to speed expansion of new schools in higher-income, predominantly white Northwest Little Rock while closing schools in black neighborhoods further ravaged by proliferating Walton-backed charter schools. There’s also state law now that favors school transfers, even for obvious racial reasons. Those rules were further ratified Thursday by the Hutchinson-controlled state Board of Education. There’s a reason for the signs you see in coverage of the strike referring to segregation of schools. It’s encouraged by state actors now, just as it was 60 years ago.

Particularly interesting was this extensive piece from a Buffalo, N.Y., grassroots nonprofit that follows the influence of money in politics. The facts assembled there — abut the influence of big money, particularly Walton money, on school privatization — won’t be news to readers of the Arkansas Times but ought to be jaw-dropping to a first-time reader.

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Like other teachers who have recently struck – from Los Angeles and Chicago to Arizona and West Virginia and beyond – Little Rock’s teachers are pitted against a billionaire-backed school privation agenda that wants to crush collective bargaining rights and advance charter schools. As in those strikes, Little Rock students have the backing of their students, thousands of whom recently staged a “sick out” protest in support of their teachers.

Facing South also has a good article by Olivia Paschal.