What's Next For The Teacher Movement?

IN JULY 2017, OKLAHOMA THIRD-GRADE TEACHER Teresa Danks bought supplies at Dollar General and made this poster: “Teacher Needs School Supplies! Anything Helps.” She stood at a highway intersection in Tulsa holding up her sign, wanting to raise awareness about her district’s steep budget cuts. She was angry that Oklahoma teachers earn less than teachers in almost every other state. Danks, 51, has taught for 22 years and her salary is $34,366. She sometimes spends $2,000 a year of her own money on classroom supplies.

- Jessica Militare

In 10 minutes she raised about $50. When her husband shared a photo on Facebook, reporters came calling. Danks quickly became known as the Panhandling Teacher, and her GoFundMe page has brought in more than $30,000, which she donated to teachers in local school districts. “I felt like teachers’ voices were finally being heard,” she says. Today she runs Begging for Education Foundation, a nonprofit raising money for Oklahoma educators.

It turns out Danks’ picketing was a harbinger of a national wave of activism: Thousands of educators have banded together this year to fight for better pay and more classroom funding. In February, West Virginia teachers went on strike and won a 5 percent raise and a commitment from their governor to work to improve health care costs. Other walkouts in Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina followed.

Many of these were grassroots efforts organized through social media, and most happened in states where, under Republican legislatures, school funding has yet to be restored to prerecession levels. “We haven’t seen this intensity since the teachers’ strikes of the 1960s and 1970s,” says Michael Hartney, Ph.D., a professor of political science at Boston College. “Teachers feel squeezed by stagnant wages and policies they don’t agree with,” like Democrat and Republican plans for more charter schools and evaluations based on standardized testing. “This is also a women’s movement, since around 76 percent of teachers are women,” says Lois Weiner, Ed.D., who researches and writes about schools and teacher unions. “They’re tapping into the power of people coming together as workers to insist they be treated with dignity.”

While teachers have scored some wins across the states— an uptick in raises, higher per-pupil spending, and more funding for technology—the fight isn’t over.