“For Once We’re Asking for MORE Testing”: U.S. Educator Movements and the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Part One: Teachers’ Unions, Educator Organizing, and Global Struggles for Educational Justice

Proposal

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been widespread debates around how best to support both educational and health equity. This has included debates around the significance of schools as sites of community spread and the merit of implementing mitigations such as masking, distancing, testing, vaccination, and closures in schools. These public health measures were politicized throughout the pandemic, with policymakers adopting an individual rather than communal public health approach (Tomori et al., 2022). Nevertheless, through sustained struggle, educator unions in cities across the country successfully organized for more equitable public health and education policies, including safety mitigations and student support.

Educators have organized through a range of structures, ranging from caucuses to unions to statewide and national educator networks. In some cases, they have used the bargaining process to win safety measures in their contracts, while in others they have used direct action and unsanctioned strategies such as sick-outs. While this organizing responded to specific public health and political contexts, they also grew out of the existing organizing structures and traditions within each context. There is a small but growing body of research exploring contemporary educator movements in the United States (Givan & Lang, 2020; Maton, 2018; Maton & Stark, 2021; McCartin et al., 2020; Stark, 2019; Uetricht, 2014), including a burgeoning subset of research on educator organizing for equity within the COVID-19 pandemic ​​(Maton, 2022a, 2022b).

In this paper, we will build on this research to explore how U.S. educators have organized through a range of organizations to advance equity for their colleagues, students, and broader communities in the COVID-19 pandemic. We will consider the role of unions and other educator organizations, including caucuses, networks, and informal and grassroots organizations in this work, linking this organizing to the growing traditions of social justice unionism and social movement unionism in the United States. Moreover, we will consider the relationship between this organizing and contemporary social movements, including educator movements and disability rights movements. In doing so, we will consider to what extent and how educator organizing for safe schools might be considered a social movement in its own right.

This paper analyzes data collected by the three authors as part of our engaged, activist ethnographic research within educator networks. Because we have each completed multi-sited research on educator organizing across the United States, we will focus this paper on struggles in several contexts, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Seattle. These contexts were selected to provide a glimpse into the range of organizations that educators have used to advocate for safe schools throughout the pandemic. In our discussion of educator organizing in these three contexts, we will analyze interviews, (auto)ethnographic field notes, documents, policies, social media, and news reports.

In our analysis, we argue that educators in the United States organized movements for safe schools throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and that these social movements intersected with ongoing educator movements as well as related movements for social and racial justice in schools and communities.

Authors

• Lauren EW Stark, University of Maine at Augusta

• Rhiannon Maton, State University of New York at Cortland

• Rebecca Tarlau, The Pennsylvania State University