Social media can be a wonderful tool for communicating and sharing information. It can also be the first place to spew vitriol and emotional outbursts without considering context and whole picture.

The number of educators and advocates who recently have gone to Facebook, Twitter, and other popular outlets calling for immediate action and/or blaming existing organizations for not doing more is both gratifying and disheartening.

I know. It’s a contradiction.

Righteous anger can be a great motivator. It can be a call to action for those who have not been active on advocacy for valid reasons in most cases. Being an educator in North Carolina and trying to balance it with personal lives is a monumental task.

But righteous anger can sometimes keep people from “seeing the forest because they are so focused on the trees.”

Please understand what makes North Carolina rather unique.

It is the only state in the country with the lowest legal minimum wage, no collective bargaining rights, no Medicaid expansion, loosely regulated vouchers and charter school expansion, a school performance grading system that measures achievement over growth, and the lowest corporate flat tax in the nation.

Not to mention that North Carolina has the nation’s worst unemployment benefits.

AND at the same time be a Right to Work / At Will state. Please look up what those designations mean.

The ban on public sector collective bargaining itself was established in the Jim Crow-era. It literally is the last holdover as far as those laws are concerned. And NC is one of seven states that makes collective bargaining illegal.

Now consider all of the actions that have been directly aimed at public education teachers in the last decade that have been championed by the John Locke Foundation / Civitas Institute and the lawmakers who kowtow to them.

Those actions from the last decade have been systematic, surgical, and deliberate. And they have been enacted with patience, planning, and organization. They set up a network of people, organized them, and gave them resources to alter a narrative and grab power.

To write a budget in secret, keep it hidden for months, get people to change parties in a gerrymandered NCGA, and hold votes at inopportune times takes organization.

Getting fired up about possibly walking out to show the lawmakers that you are pissed is literally 1% of what it takes to successfully change the public education landscape here in North Carolina.

Effective action takes place when people are investing TIME, MAKING CONNECTIONS, SEEKING ANSWERS, AND SUPPORTING OTHERS – EVEN IF IT MEANS PAYING DUES.

People have every right to “point fingers at others” and scream loudly about what someone or some group did not do for them. But with that right comes the duty to look in the mirror and honestly assess what sacrifices were personally given.

Successful walkouts / strikes / mass actions that have resulted in gains for teachers in other states took time and a concerted effort built personal relationships.

Not from going to a FACEBOOK page and putting out a poll and hoping that it motivates people with a righteous anger that magically never will go away and automatically unifies all of us.

A lot of educators have asked, “Where is NCAE?” “What are they doing?”

Actually, they are doing a lot and have always been active. Every right that teachers had in 2013 that were taken away from new teachers starting in 2014 were originally taken away from all teachers no matter their seniority. NCAE stopped that and kept teachers who already had due-process rights and graduate degree pay to keep it.

When the state stopped financing professional development opportunities, NCAE ramped up their offerings to provide workshops.

The number of local initiatives surrounding statutes, local supplements, resources, and employment where NCAE has played a part are numerous. Not to mention the legal protections that have time and again proven steadfast for its members.

And for this teacher, those dues are well worth it.

The inroads that NCAE has with lawmakers and local school boards is vast. And the potential for an even bigger NCAE scares the NCGA powers-that-be so much that they specifically have passed laws to weaken unions from deducting dues from paychecks.

NCAE has been so active that the very people who have been passing laws and budgets that hurt public public education are the same people who have for years attempted to erode the power and potential strength of a collective body of educators.

Remember this?

Either that makes the John Locke Foundation / Civitas Institute wimpy enough to spend so much money to suppress a teacher “union” within a Right to Work / At Will state that outlaws collective bargaining rights for public employees and has instituted constricting limitations on teacher rights and incomes all while financing a non-transparent voucher system and unregulated charter schools, …

…or they absolutely despise educators who advocate for fully funded schools at the hearts of communities.

Probably both.

And for those rural county teachers and advocates – what this budget does with vouchers will hit you first. Just look back at that letter written by 19 superintendents of rural school systems.

There is so much more that you as an educator can do than just vote – you can tap into something bigger that can affect change.

That’s why I am a member of NCAE.