Chris Landsberger
step up rally
Oklahoma teachers marched for higher school funding in February, 2018.
Teachers who walked off the job this spring protesting poor salaries and inadequate school funding in multiple states are winning in the court of popular appeal. According to a new survey: “In the six states where there were wide-scale teacher strikes and walkouts—West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado—63 percent of respondents favored raising teacher pay. Public support in those states jumped by 16 percentage points since last year.”
The strong sentiments expressed by those in the teacher walkout states carried over to support for teacher pay raises from survey respondents across the country, with nearly half of those provided with information on average teacher salaries in their state saying pay should increase. Support for higher teacher pay increased from a year ago among both Democrats and Republicans.
In Oklahoma, the teacher revolt prompted 112 current or former teachers and family members of teachers to run for local, state, and federal office. More than seventy of those advanced in primary elections.
But since the walkout and the primaries, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v AFSCME decision essentially imposed “right to work” on teachers across the nation, and anti-union “reform” groups and politically conservative organizations have followed up with campaigns encouraging teachers to leave their unions.
Also, with a new school year starting, local teachers unions find themselves back in a familiar, but uncomfortable situation of having to collaborate with school systems and government leaders in the now super-charged political environment created by the walkouts.
Teachers have a good shot at continuing to build popular support and even at winning at the ballot box this November, but they need to stay unified in the face of new challenges to their unions. Key to this is confronting an emerging divide over whether their movement is being led from the top down or the bottom up.
On one hand, unions must persuade the legislature to fund education—or in the case of Oklahoma, not defund schools even more drastically. Yet on the other hand, unions must battle district administrators who have the power to limit the professional autonomy of teachers. And unions must balance this responsibility at the same time they try to minimize the damage done to their membership ranks by Janus and union bashers.
“Teachers will be passing out their textbooks—some of which might be older than their students.”
Further, teacher-candidates must walk a fine line between the need for unity on the eve of elections and opposing compromises that are designed to divide teachers and public school advocates. For instance, educators must now resist State Question 801 now on the ballot, which would pit poor and urban schools against rich and rural districts, allowing affluent systems to use property taxes for teacher salaries.
Since the walkout there’s also been a lingering concern over the gap dividing the grassroots teacher resistance and established unions. Before and during the walkout, the state’s teachers unions were sometimes criticized for not being sensitive enough to their members’ bitter frustrations. The labor action turned into a wildcat strike, as grassroots resistors led while and union leaders followed.
As long as teachers and education supporters remain united, they have a good shot of achieving victories in November. But will they?
Tulsa teacher John Waldron has long wrestled with the dilemmas faced by unions that have had to work within the system to survive. Waldron, who is making a second bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, is candid about the ways that educators should have resisted earlier attacks on education when financial austerity teamed with test-driven, competition-driven reforms were imposed.
“Teachers should have resisted earlier when test-driven reform and austerity hit the inner city,” he says, and when disadvantaged students were “the first victims of bubble-in accountability.”
Waldron also recalls how the concept of “disruptive change” was the cornerstone of corporate school reform. Their strategy was to blow up the education status quo and reinvent schools, claiming, for example, that tax increases would not be necessary if an “aggressive school-choice agenda” rewarded successes and left low-performing schools to be punished by “the market.”
Teachers and students got few or no rewards from experiments like these, and the punitive results were demoralizing. Waldron is concerned that educators not follow this example, “If we’re going to burn down established institutions [like unions] that fought for education, then we’re never going to get to the root of the problem: anti-education policies and politicians.”
Alberto Morejon represents younger Oklahoma teachers more eager to show their resistance. The 25-year-old, social media-savvy middle school history teacher with just three years of experience became a focus in national coverage of the walk out by the New York Times. Morejon has “little loyalty to unions,” the Times reporter wrote.
Morejon predicts that the Janus decision will not diminish teachers’ motivations to vote their opposition to incumbent lawmakers in November.
As long as teachers and education supporters remain united, they have a good shot of achieving victories in November. But will they?
“Teachers will be passing out their textbooks—some of which might be older than their students—looking at their curriculum maps, realizing that if they teach a tested subject, that they have to teach to the test. As they get to know their students and get to know them as ‘their kids,’ it will will keep them fired up to ‘Remember in November,’” he says.
Morejon says that while he has disputes with individual union leaders the Times’ coverage of his views was potentially overblown. “Teachers will rejoin unions,” he says, “as they see evidence that they are being listened to.”
In the short run, fears that disagreements between teachers and their unions will undermine political action are likely exaggerated. Teachers unions in some states may have been slow to resist budget cuts and accountability-driven, market-driven mandates, but both union leaders and grassroots resisters realize budget cuts, harmful reforms, and union-busting are long-term problems which will not be quickly defeated. In Oklahoma, and likely in other states, walkouts have produced mostly victories, and it seems like that energized educators will bury their differences and bring their protests to the ballot box.