Organizing Insights from the 2018 “Red State” Education Strikes Can Deepen Resistance to Educational Censorship

• In Event: Activists, Advocates, and Agitators: Teacher Unions and Grassroots Organizations as Remedies and Repair

Abstract

“I don’t negotiate with the teachers union. They’re a terrorist organization,” said Ryan Walters, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction (Weber, 2023, para. 3). Education has only become a more intensified site of political struggle in the years since the 2018 statewide educators strike, in which the majority of education workers walked out for two weeks to fight for increased wages, benefits, and overall school funding. Despite the historic educator uprising and the centrality of educator demonization to garner support for white supremacist and Christian nationalist educational censorship laws and policies, few recent analyses substantively engage or refer to the ongoing impacts or lessons learned during the 2018 statewide strike. Engaging Oklahoma as an exemplar, this paper reads analyses of educational censorship and related policies alongside teachers’ work/teachers labor organizing literature on the 2018/2019 “red state” strikes.
The years following the 2018 educators’ strike in Oklahoma have, as in many other places, been tumultuous and uncertain. Pandemic responses in local districts and at the state level politicized health and safety efforts as projects of unfreedom (Maton, 2023). Educational censorship through policy and witch hunt (e.g., Martinez-Keel, 2024) against practices and curricula perceived as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory (CRT) or “radical” gender theory have proliferated under the fraught leadership of the white Christian nationalist state superintendent of public instruction and his supporters. These troubling efforts have been discursively justified via the demonization of public education workers as indoctrinators, predators, parents’ enemies, or worse (Finley & Esposito, 2022).
I draw on my and my co-author’s book-length oral history and interview study of the spring 2018 “red state” education strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky in which we utilize the longer intellectual traditions and praxis of solidarity and social movement unionisms to analyze the organizing contexts surrounding the actions (Author & Coauthor, 2023). In our analysis, we illustrated how rank-and-file labor organizations with stronger democratic social movement infrastructure; where organizers’ attended more directly to tensions surrounding race, colonialism, class, gender, among other systemic oppressive forces that shape peoples’ different experiences, perspectives, and desires for public education; and rank-and-file-led organizations that undertook more cautious collaboration with state union leadership and/or intentionally cultivated independence from electoral politics were able to sustain their movements for longer and with greater impact.
I engage this analysis of the 2018 “red state” education strikes in order to read academic literature, local news and prominent Oklahoma education social media discourse since the passage of Oklahoma’s 2021 HB 1775 (anti-CRT bill) aiming to make sense of and offer insights for resisting the intensification of education worker demonization inherent in driving educational censorship laws, policies, and its local-national network of political support. Overall, I suggest the importance of forefronting organizing insights gained from the “red state” education strikes may be critical for imagining and enacting responses to white supremacist, Christian nationalist policies enacted in the very places these strikes viscerally demonstrated the collective labor power of education workers.

Author

• Erin Lee Dyke, Oklahoma State University