Allie Newcomb, who teaches sixth-grade math at Mayfield Middle School, in Oklahoma City, was initially on the fence when teachers in her state started talking about walking off the job in protest of education cuts. But something shifted for her a couple of weeks ago, when there was an emergency lockdown—the kind called in response to an active shooter—at her school. She pushed tables against the door and ordered her students to be quiet, to move to another part of the room, and then told them that everything was going to be O.K., that they’d climb out the window if they needed to.
Newcomb told me that the terror of the incident, which turned out to have been caused by a BB gun found in a kid’s locker, threw into relief the ways in which teaching takes its various tolls on educators as they contend with tight budgets, understaffing, and the day-to-day practical and emotional strains of looking after children. “It’s a high-poverty school, and everything is a constant battle,” she said. “We don’t have the support we need to create a different culture in the school.” The school has two full-time counsellors for its eight hundred students. Newcomb, whom I first met when we were both undergraduates at the University of Oklahoma, teaches a hundred and thirty students, in five different classes. She said, “I know it could be worse,” and that it is worse for many teachers in the state, “but things feel at capacity. I got three new students last week, and I had nowhere to put them.” For now they’re sitting at her teacher table, in the back of the room.
The teachers walking out of classrooms in Oklahoma this week are asking for an overhaul of a system whose needs have been evolving for decades. The statistics are alarming: education funding per student in the state has been cut by twenty-eight per cent in the past ten years, the largest cuts of any state in the country, and twenty per cent of the state’s schools are in session only four days a week, because of the lack of funds. Schools have struggled to keep qualified teachers, many of whom leave for states with higher pay, and classes are taught by a string of emergency-certified teachers and short-term substitutes.
Landing in Oklahoma, I immediately started hearing anecdotes about the hardships of local educators: from the friend who gets her hair cut by a high-school history teacher who works in a salon two days a week for extra money, or the Lyft driver who says that her kid’s school always has flyers in the hall asking parents to donate paper and pencils and other supplies, or the acquaintance who told me that the teachers in her family joke about developing “teacher bladder,” the ability not to go to the restroom all day because there aren’t enough staff members in the school to allow them to leave their classrooms for a few minutes.
The Oklahoma walkout was stoked by the recent teacher strike in West Virginia, which closed schools throughout that state for almost two weeks and resulted in a five-per-cent raise for teachers there. The Oklahoma Education Association is demanding nine hundred and forty million dollars in new funding for education over three years, including money for teacher salaries and increased spending on school infrastructure and support staff. After rejecting multiple proposals in recent months to raise revenue for education funding, state lawmakers passed a bill last week that raised taxes by about four hundred and fifty million dollars and increased the pay of Oklahoma teachers, who are among the lowest paid in the country, by roughly fifteen per cent on average. It was the first tax increase in Oklahoma in twenty-eight years. In a move that was widely seen as a reaction to a teacher walkout and resulting tax hike in 1990, Oklahoma voters passed a ballot measure requiring a seventy-five-per-cent supermajority in the legislature, or a public vote, to pass any tax increase. (Tax cuts, meanwhile, can pass with just a simple majority.) Governor Mary Fallin signed the bill last Thursday and said, of the state’s teachers, “I hope they can come and say ‘thank you’ on Monday and go back to the classrooms.”
Newcomb said that the overwhelming reaction among her colleagues to the bill’s passage was, “This is not good enough. This is not what we’re asking for. We’ll be back where we are in three years.”
After the tax increase, public opinion shifted, and some who had been on the teachers’ side began to wonder out loud what more the teachers wanted, but, on Monday, the walkout went ahead as planned. Thousands of teachers showed up at the capitol, many shuttled in by school bus. Cheers broke out when a union leader said that the tax measure was only a down payment and the rest of the bill was due. There were boos when she said that the legislature was hoping that the teachers would thank them and go away quietly.
On Tuesday, the capitol was once again filled with thousands of teachers, some of whom took a sick day or a personal day to be there, because their districts hadn’t officially closed down. (Strikes by public employees are illegal in Oklahoma, so the action is referred to as a walkout. School closures have to be negotiated with local school boards.) By Wednesday, several districts had cancelled school through Friday.
Every teacher I spoke to in the past week said the same thing: they were in it for the long haul, and “this is not about the raise. It’s about the kids.” They told stories of teaching from badly outdated textbooks, or turning to crowdfunding sites to purchase books for their students or furniture for their classrooms, of passing unprepared students on to the next grade because another overcrowded classroom of children would arrive in the fall.
All day Monday, teachers lined up at the capitol entrance to meet with their legislators. In the afternoon, I went with Newcomb and two other teachers from her district to meet with their representative, a first-term Republican named Tammy West. The teachers asked West what it would take to get more education funding immediately. West pointed out that education wasn’t the only sector that had undergone punishing state cuts. “We’re trying to help everyone,” she said. She talked about previous attempts to fund schools, which had failed because of the state’s supermajority rule. As she framed it, the tax bill that passed had been the culmination of slow, incremental work rather than a response to desperate circumstances. The job of funding education would proceed slowly, and she cautioned that a supermajority of legislators would not vote for a second tax increase. “It’s just not going to happen,” she said.
Afterward, the teachers said that they found West forthright and sincere, and didn’t doubt her personal commitment to the issue, but felt uncertain that progress would ever be made if the educators didn’t camp on legislators’ doorsteps. “I don’t have any confidence that anything’s going to get done,” a middle-school teacher named Austin Rich, who is planning to move to Tennessee soon because of the higher pay, told me. “It’s not a coincidence that this bill got pushed through when we said that we’re walking and we’re going to keep walking.”
One of those who plans to keep walking this week is Kendra Abel, an elementary-school art teacher in Oklahoma City. Abel, who told me that she teaches five hundred and fifty-three students, and the funding she receives for their art supplies comes to about two dollars per child per year. She has spent more than five hundred dollars of her own money to outfit her classroom this year. She also does things like soaking dried-out markers in water to make watercolors, or melting down broken crayon bits at the end of the year to make new ones.
Abel makes thirty-six thousand dollars a year, although the take-home is lower, after paying high insurance premiums. She’s also slowly paying down medical bills from a surgery she had last year. She and her husband would like to have a baby soon, but they’ll probably have to move to another state to afford it. She chokes up as she talks about her own childhood, growing up in poverty in the small town of Stigler, and about the teachers who helped put her on a different path in life. She said that some of those teachers got in touch with her back when they first heard that she was thinking of becoming a teacher herself. “Don’t do it,” they told her.
