Expanding Cultures of Solidarity in Red State Teachers Unions

For those of us education workers in “red” or right-governed, “right-to-work” states where labor unions have been weakened through legal tactics, it feels as though our unions have limited power to respond to the post-pandemic onslaught of harmful policy changes. In my state of Oklahoma, every day is a new crisis in K12 education – from the 2023 passage of “critical race” censorship bill that has produced new teacher surveillance systems, parental choice tax credits that funnel public education dollars to private schools, pathologization of LGBTQ+ teachers and students that have led to violence against queer and gender-creative students, last minute authoritarian insertions of Christian nationalist, free market fundamentalist ideals into the state’s revised social studies standards, and the expansion of influence of edtech and AI in reshaping teachers’ work post-pandemic.

The state department of education’s bible mandate, requirement for current and prospective teachers to pass a U.S. naturalization as part of their certification requirements, and requirement for schools to collect citizenship information on students and families have been met with legal and legislative setbacks. The latter two requirements have been rejected by the legislature amid concerns the state department of education had overstepped its authority. While they are no longer an immediate threat, the efforts behind these will likely continue in other ways. The work to oppose these and other moves to wield public education as a tool of control and repression must grow and move beyond the limited successes of litigation and lobbying.

With limited resources, the state’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association-affiliated Oklahoma Education Association (OEA), and the much smaller American Federation of Teachers-Oklahoma¹, have largely focused on legislative advocacy, even after education workers walked out of schools across our state and many red states in the spring of 2018 for increased education funding, liveable wages, and lower health insurance premiums. These statewide actions were a mutually constitutive part of a national, perhaps even a global², resurgence in teachers’ direct action, which carried into early COVID-era struggles for safe and healthy schools, as Riley Collins importantly documents in the context of Arizona.

Teacher strikes in red states did not revolve around contract negotiations, they targeted state legislatures. Many red states cannot legally collectively bargain or only some locals are able to do so (e.g., Jefferson County Teachers Association in Kentucky). In Oklahoma and in other red states that struck in 2018, the walkouts were not instigated or, in some cases, even initially supported by state unions. They were carried often by strong locals, strong locally interconnected teacher networks, and rank-and-file, often ad hoc organizations that worked beyond yet in connection with the structures of the unions).

In Oklahoma, the 2018 walkouts ended badly. While teachers won paltry raises just before the strike began (which aimed for much more), no additional gains were won before the OEA, AFT-OK, and district superintendents called teachers back to work after two weeks of walking out.³

This post is inspired by a study collaboration between myself, Scout Anvar, research and campaign organizer for the OEA and PhD student, and Reid Harris, high school teacher, union leader and PhD student, to refuse to let the experiences and not-yet-learned lessons from the 2018 walkouts fade from our collective memory, in conversation with the oral history narratives I and other Oklahoma K12 educators collected and studied after the 2018 walkouts. This oral history project effort emerged after conversations about the utter lack of information or recorded experiences during Oklahoma teachers’ four-day strike in 1990 (and previous histories of union power!).

I share a brief version of our main idea, forthcoming as a longer piece we aim to publish by the end of the summer: that we need to collectively study power (especially our own) as part of using it effectively. In doing so, we can create and expand cultures of education workers’ solidarity in their unions and with their students and communities.

The Right Fears Teachers Unions

In the early hours of New Years’ Day in 2025, a U.S. army veteran drove his truck through a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, tragically killing fifteen people and injuring many more. Days later, Oklahoma’s State Department of Education (OSDE) put forward a news release suggesting this and similar acts of violence are the result of teachers indoctrinating their students. The release highlighted a video from State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, specifically suggesting that teachers’ unions are to blame for the mass murder in New Orleans.

You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil. You have the teachers’ unions pushing this on our kid (sic). The radical left wants people to hate this country. … This is a real uncomfortable truth. I know the left is going to lose their mind. But listen, we cannot allow our schools to become terrorist training camps.

Walters’ has consistently and openly identified teachers unions as “terrorist organizations” in press releases, social media videos, and even in public legislative hearings. To be clear, Walters and his ilk do not fear that teachers are terrorist indoctrinators. (Walters was previously a teacher, and much has been documented about his opportunistic shift in rhetoric and politics since his initial appointment as state secretary of education).⁴ They are afraid of teachers unions’ power to impede, even halt, their plans to wield the education system as a tool in a project to upwardly redistribute wealth and political power into the hands of a few. As Lois Weiner has written in her first post, “We are witnessing the culmination of a far Right ideological and economic project in education that has been years in the making.”

This rhetoric pathologizing teachers unions, part of a much longer tradition, should be understood as a general deep-seated fear of teachers unions. This fear is a result, not of their potential for social corrosion, as the rhetoric suggests on its surface, but actually because unions have immense potential power to resist the Right’s power- and profit-seeking political program. Teachers and other education workers who may be unionized, including nutritional service staff, educational support staff, and bus drivers, are core to the functioning of their schools and wider communities. Education workers comprise the densest union membership of public employees in the U.S. Even in states that have outlawed collective bargaining and strikes, NEA- and AFT-affiliated state union associations and locals still create a remarkable web of interconnected and (in theory) democratic organization across the U.S. with the potential for widespread disruptive actions – as the Red for Ed education strikes in red states demonstrated in 2018 and 2019.

Despite efforts to push a public narrative of teachers unions as dangerous, deviant, and even murderous, the state’s largest union, the OEA, has seen an increase in membership since Walters took office in 2023. OEA staff attribute this to the many policies heralded by Walters to criminalize teachers. In states like Oklahoma where union membership is low, overall (just 5.3% of all workers), teachers unions have much higher union density (59.4% in 2017-2018).⁵ The Right’s demonization of teachers unions and passage of laws and surveillance policies that seek to target teachers for engaging in “DEI” in the classroom aim to disenfranchise education workers from political activism – activism that is by and large popularly supported by Oklahoma residents.

Just prior to the 2018 Oklahoma walkouts, the OEA conducted a survey of members, employee nonmembers, parents, community members, and students and found that 80% of respondents supported the walkouts. Five days into striking, News 9 public polling demonstrated that the vast majority of Oklahomans supported educators to continue their strike until all demands were met. More recently, polls have largely demonstrated that Oklahomans do not support Walters’ policies and governance. In one poll of more than 4,000, The Oklahoman found that 95% of respondents would give Walters an F for his performance.⁶

If we read this rhetoric as fear of teachers’ labor solidarity and potential to interrupt the political project of those in power – then in what specific ways do teachers have power to do so?

Studying and Using Our Power

In some places with strong cultures of teachers union solidarity, more folks than not may be on the same page about how to confidently answer this question, at least in the abstract (our labor power!). In most places, this is a worthwhile question to examine together with co-workers and fellow union members and to consider what it means for taking action, locally and in our states. This question cannot be answered prescriptively, especially in dictating action. Expanding cultures of solidarity cannot be premised on education workers’ coercion or claims to technical authority.⁷

The answer to this question comes from education workers learning about who they are and who they want to be in relation to one another and the world – present, past, and future. It comes from meaningful participation as an embodied, ethical-political practice of knowing, questioning, and acting together.⁸ We can learn how to respond to this question from the oral history narrative experiences of Oklahoma educators who participated in the 2018 walkouts.⁹ These narratives teach us that we need to create spaces within our unions to empower each other to understand and use our power as education workers (rather than only as voting citizens – a power that is severely limited, especially in red states, by gerrymandering, powerful political action committees, and so much more).

Studying together was intimately connected to teachers’ participation in the 2018 walkouts. Yet, we found, in the years following the walkouts, teachers’ oral history interviews for our project were often the first time since the action that they substantively reflected on their experience, even among those who were or became active in their local unions! In some cases, these interviews took place up to two or three years later. As one of many examples: in recounting the origins of teachers’ organizing in the lead up to the walkouts, one Oklahoma teacher explained how teachers at her junior high school came together to make sense of building- and district-level changes to their working conditions, which grew into something more:

There had been a lot of tensions with some new mandates that administrators had been passing down, paperwork that we had not been previously made to do, common assessments. And so people were frustrated. And we met in PLCs [professional learning communities] to talk about things that we were frustrated with. And sometimes these PLC meetings were very driven by administration and so we were veryfrustrated with that. It didn’t feel like a true PLC community. And so we started having “extra” meetings, if you will, after school and during our planning periods throughout the week.

Teachers collecting and de-isolating their frustrations at the shift from teacher-led to administrator-driven and data-focused weekly PLC meetings and general intensification of datafication became important motivation for teachers to organize their district to walk out. She goes on to explain that at these “extra” unofficial PLC meetings, “we started to delve into the bigger picture.” She said, “And so, when those talks [about a statewide walkout] started bubbling, it really started to get more organized and [we started] saying we need to do something about this and now is the time.”

Her story is just one among so many of our narrators participating in study and struggle. Another Tulsa-based elementary school teacher interviewed a couple years after the strike described how he began his first year in the 2017-2018 school year as a brand new Teach for America (TFA) teacher and did not actively participate. He and other TFA teachers were discouraged by TFA staff and told not to get involved. Through his relationships with teacher union friends and especially his building rep, a veteran Black woman teacher in a predominantly Black neighborhood of North Tulsa, he grew his motivation and commitment to the union. The year after the strike, his elementary school was slated for closure. He explained:

And so to have lived through that to now see that what we had at one time which was the model – which wasn't perfect by any means. I won't even say it was great, but it was something in North Tulsa for once to then just completely be decimated and turned into one of those schools again that we see in Tulsa Public Schools you know like burned out teachers, teachers quitting through the year – we have never had that. We had great retention. Teachers came back every year.

After describing how his veteran teacher and union building rep was pushed out of teaching in Tulsa, he took on becoming a building rep in his new school. He went on to state: “I would walk out for my kids obviously, my students. I mean I would honestly walk out right now just because of what they did to us in North Tulsa and now what they're kind of doing to other schools.” At the same time, he explained that he feels unmotivated to put his energies toward activities that feel ineffective at making urgently needed changes: “And so I think that I would feel more of a push to be active in anything honestly that [my local] wants to support. And I think that would really only be if it were something that looked like a walkout.”

We Need Cultures of Solidarity to Study and Take Action

In Lois Weiner’s (2012) The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice (the title of which serves as inspiration for our collective substack newsletter), she describes the prevalence of business or service unionism, which tends to view teachers unions as mainly providers of legal, benefits, and advocacy services to their members. This approach to unionism is advantageous to attacks on public education workers and students in this new gilded age. If teachers unions are merely service providers, then the uber right Teachers Freedom Alliance private insurance program that Walters is pushing teachers toward would be an equivalent option. Some educators have been drawn to the anti-union Professional Oklahoma Educators, which provides legal and benefits services in addition to some legislative advocacy. Those in power in our state are taking specific aim at the AFT- and NEA-affiliated unions. Because these organizations are rooted in (largely women) teachers’ organizing as workers to create and/or exert influence and power within their unions, over their working conditions, and for their students’ learning conditions.¹⁰

In 2018, red state educators organized within their locals and within their localized networks to harness (however imperfectly) the resources and infrastructure of their state unions to take direct action on their grievances. We are fewer in numbers (the entirety of education workers in the state of Oklahoma is less than that of the Chicago Public Schools), but we are also a crucial site of national conservative political experimentation. We still have so much to learn from how to do this better and differently and in solidarity against interrelated attacks¹¹ on our students and communities and the community-based movements already addressing these in our states.¹² The first, and most important, is to embrace our power. We are the union.

I’ll end with ​​West Virginia teacher, Nicole McCormick’s reflections from her chapter in this fantastic book: Educators’ organizing during the 2018/2019 strikes, in a job that feels like a highly gendered “debt sentence,” in a “disorganized right-to-work mess of West Virginia,” was accomplished “by talking to each other and learning to own our labor”.¹³

***

Thanks to Scout Anvar and Reid Harris for allowing me represent our ideas here and providing feedback on a draft version.

1. While this may vary across states, in Oklahoma, at least, OEA represents the majority of teachers and education support professionals in the state. In Tulsa, certified staff and education support professionals are unionized with OEA, while bus drivers and other non-instructional support staff are represented by AFT. In Oklahoma City Public Schools, teachers and some support staff are represented by AFT. OEA represents the rest of the state. It is also important to note that non-certified education workers were largely not involved in pressing for or organizing the walkouts and the demands did not necessarily impact their (low) wages, as the narrative and demands focused mainly on certified staff.

2. See Lauren Ware Stark and Carol Spreen’s chapter in this edited book (2020) documenting the global moment. The book also includes many chapters from organizers of the 2018-2019 education strikes reflecting on their experiences.

3. For a detailed recounting of the red state strikes, see my and Brendan Muckian-Bates’ (2023) Rank-and-File Rebels: Theories of Power and Change in the 2018 Education Strikes. In the book, we recount how some teachers organized wildcat strikes for a day or two after teachers were called back to work.

4. And, to be fair, Walters has inspired bipartisan frustration at his consistent inflammatory remarks against teachers and teachers unions. However, while the legislature has pushed back against some of his most extreme rhetoric and rules, they have stopped short of checking his political power to remake the state department of education.

5. Nationally as of 2024, higher education faculty are unionized at a rate of 27%, a 7.5% increase since 2012 in largely blue states. Graduate student employees are unionized at a rate of 38%, which is a 133% increase since 2012, again in largely blue states. In Oklahoma, higher education workers involved in teaching and research do not currently have union representation.

6. Attacks on teachers’ unions are intimately connected to the state’s recent passage of HB 1027, which severely limits Oklahoma’s ballot initiative process, or the ability for citizens to put forward state questions to popular vote on election ballots.

7. Fire with Fire’s blog series on relationship-based organizing is very helpful for understanding this more deeply as well as the ways in which the labor movement is structured in such ways that privilege specialist knowledge and strategy, which tends to deny rank-and-file workers’ own agency in their movements.

8. The title of this essay is inspired by Rick Fantasia’s (1989) book, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary Workers. The essay is also very much inspired by scholars and participants of abolition movements, who think and question deeply about how we act relationally within movements that do not reproduce the cultures of disposability that compose much of the design of our education, prison, and other systems. In abolition and transformative justice movements in education, in communities, and in jails and prisons, organizers have produced important knowledge that union and labor movements can (and do) learn with and from. Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022) by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Ritchie and Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s edited volume (2020) Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement are both great resources that I have read with fellow education workers to help us think about our own work and organizing.

9. Also see this collection of oral histories of West Virginia teachers on their strikes, created by Nicole McCormick. The Labor History Resource Project also hosts a collection of recent oral histories and other resources in their collection, When Teachers Mobilize. Relatedly, several other first person oral history projects document teachers’ social movement activism throughout history. Teachers in the Movement is another great oral history resource.

10. See Marjorie Murphy’s (1992) history of the AFT and NEA.

11. ICE immigration raids on K12 schools have already begun in districts across the U.S.

12. I will write about this in subsequent post. So much more to say about this. Vanessa Siddle Walkers’ work speaks to this in important ways, and Jon Hale’s work makes important direct connections to the Red for Ed movement.

13. From pages 8-9 in the book.