{"id":792132,"date":"2019-01-17T11:17:34","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T18:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=780515"},"modified":"2019-01-17T11:17:34","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T18:17:34","slug":"steven-van-zandt-why-i-joined-the-l-a-teachers-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/steven-van-zandt-why-i-joined-the-l-a-teachers-strike\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Van Zandt: Why I Joined the L.A. Teachers\u2019 Strike"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Anyone scrutinizing photos of those picketing the current teachers\u2019 strike in Los Angeles may have seen a familiar face (and clothed head) Wednesday: Steven Van Zandt<\/a>. The strike, which involves 30,000 teachers and affects about 350,000 students, is centered around issues like charter schools (Los Angeles has 224, a huge number for a major city), class size and funding for more staff.<\/em><\/p>\n

Van Zandt, who has just launched TeachRock, an education program that uses the history of rock as a way into American culture and history, shares his front-line memories to<\/em>\u00a0Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n

I happened to be here; I was finishing a new record, and someone said, \u201cBy the way, people are striking here,\u201d and I said, \u201cI might as well join them. Get some action here.\u201d This celebrity thing is really only good for a couple of things. You can get into a restaurant, and you can do something that\u2019s actually usable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the unsexiest issue ever, but we\u2019ve been engaged with teachers for a couple of years, trying to raise awareness. Teachers are an underfunded and underappreciated part of our working class. We just finished a tour [the Teacher Solidarity Tour, with free tickets for educators] and everywhere we went, there were teachers on strike \u2014 West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma. Teachers are right there on the front line fighting against ignorance, and, boy, do we need that right now.<\/p>\n

There was a lot of good energy out there. People were holding signs that said, \u201cBeep if you support the teachers,\u201d so it was one big beep-fest. I was on the picket line with a kid who spent last year on the floor in chemistry class. There weren\u2019t enough desks in the room. Jesus Christ! Dozens of teachers told me they\u2019re buying pencils and paper for their classes or starting GoFundMe campaigns for a class trip. These are things we took for granted growing up, but it\u2019s not that way anymore. They have to pay for those things out of their $40,000-a-year salary.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTeachers are right there on the front line fighting against ignorance, and, boy, do we need that right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The most classrooms in my day would hold was 30. That\u2019s already too many. But in Los Angeles, they\u2019ve got 45 in a class. How can you teach 45 kids? Come on. Eighty percent of the schools here don\u2019t have a full-time nurse or psychologist. I never heard of things like that in my life. They don\u2019t have basic things like librarians. I was the worst student\u00a0 [in Middletown, N.J.], but the school librarian was great. She turned me on to Allen Ginsberg and things like that.<\/p>\n

The big-picture philosophical thing is privatization. It\u2019s happening in every single town. The privatization of education is almost two steps better than the privatization of the prison system, which is the single most insane thing in our society. It\u2019s fine that charter schools exist. I understand some of the reasoning of trying to raise the standards and have a more protected situation. It\u2019s the world in between private and public school. But it\u2019s not an equal-opportunity situation. It\u2019s a more selection version, and who gets left out are the poor, the homeless and the handicapped. Charter schools pick who come in, and they\u2019re taking a lot of the [public] funds and leaving behind the poorest part of our population. So it\u2019s a philosophical question: Do you believe in the public school system or not?<\/p>\n

Like almost everything else these days, it\u2019s a war of the rich vs. the poor. And it\u2019s not going to help our society to keep separating the distance between them. We\u2019re going to become India in a minute. \u00a0For the first time in my life, we are going backwards in every single way, and you have to say, \u201cEnough is enough.\u201d Where will this be in 20 years? We need to make some serious adjustments. So you do what you can do.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone scrutinizing photos of those picketing the current teachers\u2019 strike in Los Angeles may have seen a familiar face (and clothed head) Wednesday: Steven Van Zandt. The strike, which involves 30,000 teachers and affects about 350,000 students, is centered around issues like charter schools (Los Angeles has 224, a huge number for a major city), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-792132","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-12 15:11:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}