Remembering May 1, 2019

BY STEVE NUZUM

On May 1, 2019, around 10,000 people-- most of them teachers and school staff-- stood on the State House grounds in Columbia, SC, chanting,  “I Teach, I Vote.” A sea of red shirts covered the grounds on the Gervais Street side and wrapped around the sides of the building.  It was perhaps the largest ever public employee demonstration in state history. 

The rally was organized by the grassroots teacher advocacy group SC for Ed; the date was inspired by planned demonstrations on the same day in North Carolina. 

While often described as a “walkout,” the event was consciously planned as a rally, and organizers asked teachers and supporters to take a lawful personal day to travel to the State House. Teachers did not leave classes unattended or leave districts without notice that they would be out, and most districts could have-- and some did-- deny personal days requested by teachers.  But in the end so many teachers ultimately requested days, and so many districts chose to honor those requests,  that several districts made the decision to close. 

This careful planning was a response to SC’s labor laws and court precedents-- arguably the most restrictive in the nation-- which do not formally recognize public employee collective bargaining. The event needed to demonstrate the power of teacher labor, in the absence of a formal system for a walkout or strike, which might involve strike funds and other union supports,  in a way that didn’t end up getting teachers fired.

The SC event followed a wave of more traditional labor actions in less anti-labor states, such as the teacher walkouts or strikes in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky and others states.  In many of these states, like West Virginia,  “wildcat” labor actions (not formally approved by a union) pressured traditional unions to eventually support a strike. SC’s event didn’t ultimately lead to a general strike, but it did remind the state that there is power in collective action.

What detractors often missed about the event is that the main demands that day were not in opposition to school districts but in support of them. Savvy leaders in multiple districts realized that they were being offered a gift when their frontline employees used their own time and energy to advocate for the things which districts also want: more equitable funding, more mental health services for students, better working conditions to help recruit and retain teachers.  

My own district’s superintendent was at the rally with several board members in support. As a result of the rally and its aftermath, a group of teachers was able to regularly meet with him in the years following the rally to help find ways to advocate for both teachers and the district. This wasn’t a perfect arrangement, but it was an improvement over the usual administration-teacher relationships in the state, which are often governed by fear rather than solidarity. 

In the years since that day, there have been other teacher rallies in South Carolina, but the energy of that day was largely blunted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As public events became a larger and larger risk, teacher groups were forced to pivot to smaller events.

Anti-labor interests seized on the pandemic and frustrations with virtual schooling to lean into an old narrative: that “teacher’s unions” were somehow anti-student, anti-family, and responsible for all the world’s ills.  More recently, Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership has called for Congress to “rescind the National Education Association’s congressional charter,” arguing that the NEA, which advocates and lobbies for teachers and student is somehow contrary to “parental rights”. They specifically singled out “union” policies during the pandemic calling for virtual learning prior to the advent of the vaccine, playing into a narrative that lazy teacher unions somehow benefited financially from virtual learning-- a ridiculous notion for most teachers, many of whom found the sudden pivot to teaching on a computer extremely stressful. 

But as education advocates across the country have pointed out, “teacher working conditions are student learning conditions”. The interests of teachers and families are usually aligned, and it’s the interests of school privatizers and “conservative” budget slashers that are most often the real obstacle to better and safer schools. Most Americans continue to support teachers and the organizations which represent them. As education writer Jennifer Berkshire recently told me, most parents “want schools that are fully-funded and staffed by adults who care about their kids and recognize them”.

If we want to get back to the pre-pandemic momentum, we have to start by being unafraid to rely on that majority of Americans (and parents) who want good public schools, and we have to enlist their help as we embrace traditional pro-labor, pro-civil rights tactics of direct action, the kind used to push for the Voter Rights Act in the ‘60s, the kind used to push for the federal minimum wage and child labor protections.

It makes sense that the architects of Project 2025, for example, have villainized “teacher unions” while also embracing an end to some child labor protections. Ultimately, behind all of the scary rhetoric is a coalition of groups— like SC’s Palmetto Promise— that doesn’t want working people to come together to achieve a better future for themselves and their kids, and that does have a deeply vested interest in alienating communities from their schools and pushing “alternative” education in the form of school vouchers.

We have to publicly call these organizations out for what they are: political and financial opportunities trying to build on a tradition of segregation academies and for-profit educational services, seeking to win over support for unpopular policies by offering government subsidies for private schools (subsidies that are most frequently used by parents who already send their kids to those private schools). 

We also need to put aside the factionalism that often divides pro-labor groups. While SC for Ed initially planned May 1, one thing that made it work effectively is that ultimately other teacher organizations, including SCEA and PSTA, supported it, tacitly giving their large combined membership the go-ahead to participate. 

Since then, we have been most successful when more groups have worked together. There will never be complete agreement about all details when it comes to fixing our schools, because passionate people by definition are going to hold onto strong feelings about the best way to accomplish their goals and to define those goals. 

This is not new. During the Civil Rights movement, for example, there was frequently a give-and-take between more “moderate” and “radical” leaders. At times, this led to bitter fallings out between sincere believers in the movement. But at others, such as during the planning of the March on Washington, “radicals” like John Lewis and more moderate leaders worked together to calibrate their message to benefit the movement as a whole.

This is why it’s so important for educational advocates to work out their own issues while also presenting a unified front against those who seek to undermine their interests. For example, it’s possible to support the NEA Staff Union in its labor negotiations with NEA, while still recognizing the need for all teacher advocates-- both members of the union and nonmembers-- to work together at the local level to continue to push for change.