Direct Action

BY STEVE NUZUM

I think about the 1960s a lot, because I think in many ways we’re living through them again. 

Consider that the backlash to school integration created the “independent schools” movement in South Carolina, and led to a powerful collaboration, between anti-tax libertarians and anti-integration racists, to push for public funding to private (segregated) schools. 

Consider that reactionary politics in the 1950s and 60s fixated on banning books, making a bogeyman out of racial progress, attacking peaceful student protesters, and using the government to crush “ideologies” that were out of step with the status quo. 

Consider that the decade was perhaps most characterized by a clash between those who wanted to address systemic racial inequalities and those who wanted to return to a mythic (pre-integration) past. 

Consider that one of the most virulent contemporary opponents of public schools, Chris Rufo, has explicitly encouraged his peers to model their “march through the institutions” on the Civil Rights activists of the late 1960s. (Rufo, foreshadowing our current anti-“DEI” mania in 2022, pinpointed 1968 as the origin year of “identity politics” and argued for the need to create a reactionary counter-movement just as powerful. It’s not a coincidence that near the end of the same address Rufo famously said, “To get universal school choice, you have to operate from the premise of universal school distrust.”) 

And consider that individuals and groups drove much of the social progress during that decade through organized, mass direct action.

Direct action for South Carolina

The rally that took place on the South Carolina State House grounds on May 1, 2019, has been called “the largest gathering of teachers in state history.”  It was organized by SC for Ed, inspired by similar actions in other states, and ultimately joined by a staggering 10,000 public education supporters, including representatives of every major state teacher group. 

This was especially historic because South Carolina is by many metrics the most anti-labor state in the country. According to EPI, SC has the smallest share of union-covered employees of any state. 

Despite popular misconception, unions are not illegal in South Carolina. However, the 2000 Branch v Myrtle Beach state Supreme Court decision did strip even the meager labor protections provided by the state’s “Right to Work” law did not apply to public employees (while its major elements weakening unions definitely did apply). And while public employees, including teachers, can join unions in South Carolina, teachers cannot legally collectively bargain or strike. (Here it should be pointed out that very few of the most influential labor or civil rights actions in history were formally sanctioned.) 

Complicating matters further, some of the largest public sector professional associations in the state have argued about whether organized labor is even a good thing. Coming out of the significant progress 1960s, which saw the state’s segregated teacher associations combine to form the integrated, pro-labor SCEA, there was a backlash among some in the state against the idea that an education organization would be involved in Civil Rights policy or union-style labor advocacy. Many of these critics pushed the idea of teacher “professionalism” (seeking respect from the status quo, instead of specific workplace improvements and higher salaries) as a supposed alternative to teacher “activism” (often negatively associated with the supposed evils of national unions and, perhaps, with racial integration). 

Compromise, and working within the system, these critics argued, was the way, as opposed to the direct action of the Civil Rights and labor movements. 

The problem is that compromise isn’t always possible without selling out the underlying values of the profession. For example, the State Constitution, not teachers, requires that South Carolina provide a free, public education to every student in the state, and explicitly prohibits exactly the kind of voucher bill Governor McMaster just signed into law. 

Yet education supporters often find themselves in the position of being encouraged to “compromise,” on the unacceptable, to accept unnecessary pay cuts and unconstitutional legislation as an inevitability. They are encouraged to make bad bills “better” by suggesting small changes to, for example, legislation that censors libraries or bans books from schools, instead of being encouraged to collectively oppose policies that hurt students and educators.

A relationship of equals can’t exist without compromise, but it’s dangerous for education supporters to compromise on issues like human and civil rights, like the continued existence of our important public institutions, like the right of all children to receive a good education.

There is a reason Dr. King expressed alarm about pushback from the kind of person “who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension”. The call for compromise can be a more effective smokescreen for maintaining a harmful status quo than more radical and direct opposition to change. King expressed fear that the “white moderate” during the Civil Rights movement, who technically supported equal rights but opposed “radical” actions to obtain them, could cause more harm to the cause than the “White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner”. 

What works?

In 2019, SC teachers had clear policy positions, which we had pursued in every appropriate way leading up to the rally. We had held lobby days at the Statehouse. We had attended committee hearings on education- related legislation in record numbers. We had encouraged public education supporters to contact their legislators. 

And we had, essentially gotten nowhere. Teacher wages had lost pace with inflation (and would be frozen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that the legislature was sitting on a major surplus, emergency reserve funds, and federal funding). Legislators paid some lip service each year to the idea of improving the teaching profession or retaining teachers, but what they actually sponsored and passed was much more likely to be from national groups hostile to the mission of public schools, like Heritage Foundation and ALEC. 

But in the years since the rally, there have been several increases to teacher wages, resulting in a budget this year that, if passed, will mark a 72% increase in the minimum starting salary. The state actually passed some first steps towards long-demanded reforms with the Educator Assistance Act.  

I don’t believe that would have happened without strong collective direct action to add teeth to the efforts of educational lobbyists and advocates.

As Representative Justin Bamberg said about the 2019 rally on the House floor two months ago, “only a few of us were willing to go out there and face them”. More bluntly, as I’ve heard from several insiders at the legislature, that show of collective solidarity “scared the crap out of” many public officials members that day. 

I believe this is true, because a few years after that rally, the prominent school voucher advocate (and “former” neo-Confederate publisher) Oran Smith of Palmetto Promise labeled nearly every pro-public education group a part of a “constellation of the left” that was involved in the “indoctrination” of students.  You don’t write a panicky “dossier” about a movement that doesn’t threaten your goals.

Notably, Smith singled out one educational advocacy group somewhat more positively-- explicitly because it was “centrist,” opposed collective action like strikes, and “focused its efforts on lobbying” legislators. (His one complaint was that even this organization opposed school vouchers.) This tells me that anti-public school forces are explicitly aligned with the status quo in our state, and that a strategy which only involves playing nice with that status quo is doomed to fail to bring positive change.

What can go wrong?

First, education supporters can spend too much time doing exactly what the status quo wants us to do: arguing among ourselves about details.  

Instead of being the “constellation” of  Oran Smith’s dossier suggested, we have often acted like a bunch of loose factions up against an organized, well-funded group of opponents that includes Palmetto Promise-- a Heritage Foundation aligned “think tank” previously run by State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver-- Moms for Liberty, and the national “Freedom Caucus” movement. (That at least two of these are part of the formal advisory board to Project 2025 is telling in itself.)

We can also try to create a “big tent” (perhaps in the interest of driving membership) that’s perhaps too big. Membership is important,  but what is the point of educational advocacy that doesn’t take clear positions even on controversial issues facing education? 

And we can get tired and lose steam. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented further actions on the scale of the May 1 rally for the next several years-- it simply didn’t seem safe or responsible to have large public gatherings.  By the time it became safe again, many educational advocates had understandably become overwhelmed, and thousands more state teachers had left the profession altogether.

But we still managed to shift the conversation.  

Teachers in 2019, collectively, thwarted the passage of an education omnibus bill that was largely authored by many of the same pro-voucher forces that are currently dominating the education conversation in SC.  And in the years since, we have seen modest but significant increases to salary for the first time since the last recession.

It is unlikely that the average public official or district administration is ever going to credit teachers and their allies for their part in making those changes. And unfortunately, while it was thrilling to hear thousands of teachers chanting “We teach! We vote!” at that 2019 rally, I’m afraid voting didn’t prove to be enough.

And while I’ve heard many blame teachers for the way they voted in recent elections, it is also true that South Carolina is incredibly gerrymandered, to the point that the state’s dominate political party, which controls every branch of government with a sizeable supermajority, acknowledged openly that it had drawn the state’s voting districts for partisan gain in court, if only so that it could deny it had drawn them to be racially discriminatory. 

What is also true is that the leaders of our legislature have often taken an anti-democratic stance, as when Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said he was not a “lowercase d democrat” and that the only way for the people’s voices to be heard is if their parties “win some freakin’ elections”. (Easy to say when you’ve drawn the voting districts in such a way that your own party virtually  can’t lose.)

Direct action

When teachers are explicitly prohibited from collective negotiation, and when our elected officials increasingly elect themselves, direct action, targeted at specific, attainable, and measurable goals. is our best hope. 

Sitting in an Alabama jail in 1964, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, in the margin of a newspaper a draft of these words: “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.”  He went on to write in the letter, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

May 1, 2019, was a decent first step toward dramatizing the issues facing schools precisely because it took teachers out of the classroom and closed those schools. It showed the public what would happen if we did nothing, if we let the intensifying exodus of teachers shut down and undermine schools in a much more passive and lasting way. We need more of that.