Larry Smith
Weaving my car through construction on my way to Northeast High School in Oklahoma City to join some 35,000 educators marching on the state capitol on April 2nd, I couldn’t help but recall the last Oklahoma teacher strike I participated in. That was thirty years ago.
During the Oklahoma teacher strike of 1990, the state’s economy had cratered, savings and loan banking systems across the state had collapsed, and a downturn in the real estate market left foreclosed, abandoned houses throughout central Oklahoma City.
The backdrop of today’s Oklahoma teachers strike is a stark contrast. Today, Oklahoma City is booming, and metropolitan areas across the state have been transformed. But just as in 1990, schools and other public services have been left behind.
The 1990 strike resulted in a tax increase, which saved the state’s schools but also led to the passage of a state constitutional amendment two years later requiring three-fourths of the legislative majority to raise taxes.
During the last decade, the state’s legislature has passed a series of tax breaks for the rich and the oil industry while cutting the state education budget by 28 percent, more than any other state. Teacher salaries dropped to forty-ninth in the nation, resulting in an exodus of educators. The state has had to compensate by issuing more than 1,900 emergency teaching certificates. One fifth of school districts operate on a four-day school week.
Stories in the national and international press have been documenting ways that Oklahoma teachers struggle with huge classrooms, lack of teaching materials, and the exhaustion of working multiple part-time jobs—not to mention the indignity of selling plasma and going to food pantries to feed their families. Compounding the pressure on teachers, more than 60 percent of Oklahoma public school students are economically disadvantaged, and 85 to 90 percent of urban students are eligible for free and reduced lunch.
At Northeast, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten took the stage, but the school’s speaker system sputtered out just as she began to speak—a tangible reminder of the damage done by budget cuts. Weingarten resorted to using her “teacher voice,” and waded into the audience, reminding us that the work stoppage isn’t just a battle over salaries. It is a fight for high-quality education for all children.
Outside in their parking lot, state Health Authority staff expressed frustration that they couldn’t join teachers marching on the capitol without permission of their bosses. It has been a decade since Oklahoma state workers have seen an across-the-board pay raise—the state suffers from a 20 percent annual turnover rate in public employees.
It was hard enough in 1990 to not be overwhelmed by the unbelievable conditions for teachers and other public workers. It’s much tougher to understand how such brutality has been allowed to continue. Marching past housing projects nearly three decades later, it dawns on me how even as gentrification rules in Oklahoma City, so many of the city’s schoolchildren suffer from severe economic hardship.
As is true in Kentucky, where teachers walked off the job, and in Arizona, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states where educators are pushing back against austerity measures, it’s hard to predict the outcome of the resistance in Oklahoma. The legislature has funded pay raises with a supposed $474 million tax increase, but followed up less than twenty-four hours later with a $47 million hotel tax cut. State Representative Scott Inman says the state may be $150 million short of paying for its promises.
Between 800 to 1,000 state employees joined the work stoppage; their situation is even more precarious than that of teachers, who at least have the support of their schools.
So far, urban charters have supported the broad, grassroots campaign to restore education funding. But the pro-charter, pro-voucher organization, Choice Matters, has already sent a divisive message, implying that teachers have helped themselves but not their students. The fear is that the unified support for teachers and students will fray, and solutions will be put on hold until after the November election.
Weingarten also warned of the effort to “pit children versus teachers,” and said that it is “as important to find a way back in as it is to find a way out.” She offered the best single explanation of the need for Oklahoma teachers to stand in defense of their students. Sharing that her own mother, a teacher, once went on strike for six weeks, she said that Oklahoma teachers must recognize that “the age of passive resignation must be over.” Educators are exhausted, she added, but “despair cannot be a strategy.”
Perhaps moved by teacher activism, the Oklahoma legislature has agreed to a modest increase in the gross production tax on oil—other states have far higher rates. But it is likely the voters, either through the November election or citizen-generated initiative petitions, will decide whether the state will continue to subsidize the petroleum industry and tax cuts for the affluent, or invest in schools and other public services.
In the meantime, teachers will engage in the “broken-field running” strategy, improvising their way through one of the most consequential political movements of the Trump era.
As National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García put it, this is an “education spring.”
John Thompson is a former award-winning historian who became an inner city teacher after the “Hoova” set of the Crips took over his neighborhood and he became attached to the kids in the drug houses. Now retired, he is the author of A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving, and Listening to Our Kids.