The Alberta Teachers’ Association

It is a truism that Alberta is the Texas of Canada. A close look at U.S. states with Alberta-like traits, however, reveals a much closer parallel. From a cowboy culture, to a strong oil and gas industry, to a population of around four million, to a strong Indigenous heritage, it is Oklahoma, not Texas, that is Alberta’s American doppelganger. Like Alberta, Oklahoma has seen its share of boom and bust cycles since the discovery of oil and gas. Unlike Alberta, though, Oklahoma is in the midst of completely man-made education disaster. The state provides a cautionary tale for what can happen when education funding takes a back seat to tax cuts.

One quarter of the state’s school districts have reduced the school week to four days. This has forced working-class parents into a difficult bind, as they decide whether to spend extra money on day care or stay home from work. The state has led the nation in cuts to education for four years in a row. More than one billion dollars in funding has disappeared in recent years as education took a 23.6 per cent hit from the state budget between 2008 and 2015. Due to decades-old textbooks, crumbling infrastructure and a lack of school buses, schools are in a downward spiral. Teachers have left the state en masse, ushering in a wave of uncertified “emergency” teachers.

Teachers had rumbled about the situation privately for years. Governor Mary Fallin came into office in 2011 pledging tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, ostensibly to spur more growth. But then oil prices declined, drillers cut back, and the trickle-down effect never materialized. The Gross Production Tax, already at a low seven per cent, was slashed to between three to one per cent, depending on the age of the well. State coffers were hit hard. Not only education, but state parks, prisons, health care and the highway patrol all took hits.

Oklahoma Policy Institute Director David Blatt calls this vicious cycle of revenue decline and tax breaks “death by a thousand cuts.” It took a few years for the impact to be felt, but when it came, the entire public school system reeled. Teachers took third or fourth jobs. Some went to neighbouring states, where salaries were anywhere from ten to twenty per cent higher. Others became disenchanted with teaching and left the profession entirely. Starting employees with no post-secondary education learned they could earn more at the local QuikTrip convenience store than they could as certified teachers with a four-year degree.

Shelby Eagan, an elementary school teacher on Tulsa’s working-class east side, decided she had had enough by 2016.

“I can’t imagine a future in a place that won’t fund basic education,” she said. “I loved Oklahoma, but at a certain point, you have to think about your own prospects.”

Eagan came to Tulsa on the Teach for America program in 2013, in which students promise to teach short-term at an underprivileged school to have their debt forgiven. It was an adventure that made her fall in love with second-graders. She spent her free time giving dance lessons to kids in the community and shopping for students.

“I found I could get pants for five dollars at Walmart,” she said. “I had very little money, but many of the immigrant students had one pair of pants.”

Another teacher from El Reno held back tears as she recounted having to move back into her parents’ house with two children. Ten, then eleven, years passed without a pay raise for teachers. Oklahoma fell to 49th out of 50 states in teacher pay (“thank God for Mississippi,” became a part of teachers’ dark humour repertoire). Finally, on that twelfth year, the rumbling from below turned into a movement.

Alberto Morejon, a Stillwater history teacher, remembers watching a teacher uprising in West Virginia that won major concessions from lawmakers. Oklahoma is an “at-will” state, meaning employers have the right to fire employees for anything short of age, race, religion or gender. A call to walk off the job was risky. Morejon looked around for a Facebook group to discuss a West Virginia-style intervention. He couldn’t find anything. Then, in March, he posted something on Facebook about a possible walkout, expecting maybe a few dozen people to support the idea. Morejon’s post went viral and within ten days, 65,000 Oklahoma teachers pledged their support.

School districts from hundreds of miles from Oklahoma City created walking groups, taking over highways to march to the state capital. When the teachers arrived, they met legislators who were clearly unprepared to deal with them. Tensions between the governor, legislators and the teachers ran high. Governor Fallin promised a meager pay raise, but shut down all talk about funding for new infrastructure or new programs. Teachers countered that Oklahoma needed to fully fund education, not just throw a bone to teachers. Fallin told the media that the teachers were “behaving like teenagers who want a new car.” Another legislator said, “I won’t vote for another stinkin’ measure when they’re acting the way they’re acting.”

Public sentiment held in favour of the striking teachers. Many educators saw an opportunity to jump into politics themselves. More than 100 education professionals (teachers, administrators, support personnel) threw their hats in the ring during the primary in spring 2018. Curiously, not all teachers running for office were liberal Democrats. About half were actually Republicans, who felt their party had finally gone too far for tax breaks. During the primaries, the educators eliminated all but five of the incumbent politicians who had opposed their demands.

It seemed like the hour of the teachers had arrived in a state in which Donald Trump had won every single county. Leading up to the mid-terms in November, there was talk of a “blue wave” in Republican strongholds like Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Many teachers, parents and students seemed crestfallen as a supposedly tight race between a pro-education Democratic governor hopeful and his Republican rival turned out to be a blowout. In an election that was supposed to be a referendum on education, the results were mixed at best. There were some bright spots, with a few teachers winning seats over incumbents. The teacher walkout mobilized a demoralized profession, instilled new hope in young people and demonstrated the importance of public education to a polarized electorate. It could not, however, flip an entire state from one party to another.

The single biggest single surprise nationwide on election night happened right in America’s heartland, in a suburban Oklahoma City district, where Kendra Horn, a Democrat no one gave a chance at winning, won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by beating a Trump-supporting incumbent. It was a shocker to those who followed Washington politics. At one point, Horn was given an eight per cent chance of winning, but she pushed on, avoiding talk about Trump and emphasizing the importance of education. The national media called Horn’s win a shocker, but Horn had an easy explanation.

“What we were hearing about was not the president,” she said. “It was about education.”

Dr. Russell Cobb is a writer and professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. His research and teaching emphasizes narrative explorations of identity, especially in the context of the Americas.