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 ...