Rising Arizona: Participation and Results of the 2018 Red for Ed Strike - Article

Oct 15, 2026

Quantitative analysis of the 2018 Arizona educator strike “Red for Ed” examines who participated and how funding was allocated after the walkout. Following the strike, per-pupil funding, teacher salaries, and student support staff salaries increased, but added funds were routed through Arizona’s existing formula, favoring small rural predominantly White districts. Participating educators—often from large urban low-property-wealth districts—received less money and smaller raises, raising concerns about free-rider effects on union organizing types.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages24

Reading Time1 h 0 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Prior research on Red for Ed

Arizona’s distinct features and policy effects

Research questions

AERA Open January-December 2024, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1–24 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584241303493 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2024. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Rising Arizona: Participation and Results of the 2018 Red for Ed Strike Michelle Doughty Vanderbilt University In 2018, a wave of educator strikes called Red for Ed swept through several states. Educators in Arizona won additional funding from the state legislature, supposedly for teacher salaries, which school boards could spend as they chose. This article quantitatively examines the participation and results of the 2018 Arizona educator strike, using this example to speak to theoretical work on types of union activity. I find that after the strike, per-pupil funding, teacher salaries, and student support staff salaries all increased. However, poststrike funding was added to Arizona’s preexisting funding formula, which advantaged the small, rural, predominantly White districts whose educators were less likely to go on strike. Educators who went on strike (often from large, urban districts with low property wealth) thus received less money for their districts and smaller raises than nonparticipating educators. This raises important concerns about how free riders can affect different types of union organizing. Keywords: educational policy, economics of education, finance, teacher context, descriptive analysis, econometric analysis, teachers unions Introduction In the spring of 2018, public schooling came to an abrupt halt for 800,000 Arizona students in a historic statewide educator strike. My fellow educators and I marched on the capitol for a week as part of the Red for Ed movement, a wave of educator activism that sprung up in an unlikely group of conservative states with weak unions, including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona. Red for Ed is well known for prompting statewide strikes with an emphasis on gaining increased education funding and teacher salaries. These strikes framed themselves as an attempt to fight back against austerity politics that had kept school funding and teacher salaries low in many states for a decade since the Great Recession (Allegretto, 2020; McCartin et al., 2020) . However, Arizona does not perfectly fit into the broader Red for Ed narrative of statewide strikes focused on teacher salary. While West Virginia, which started the strike wave, famously shut down the school districts associated with all 55 counties (Catte et al., 2018), large portions of Arizona schools and educators did not participate, challenging the conception of the strike as fully statewide. Unlike West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, Arizona does not have a statewide teacher salary schedule (Henig & Lyon, 2019) . Therefore, while the Arizona strike has often been described as ending in a teacher salary increase (Blanc, 2022; Flaherty, 2018a; Leachman & Figueroa, 2019; Snow & Tang, 2018; Strassfeld & Strassfeld, 2020), the passed legislation only increased per-pupil funding, giving school boards full discretion on how to spend the additional dollars (Education Budget Reconciliation, 2018; Randazzo & Ruelas, 2018; Ruelas, 2018; Wells, 2019) . To my knowledge, this article is the first to examine who went on strike in Arizona and how the additional money was spent. Previous work has studied how the 2018 Red for Ed movement arose and succeeded in such hostile territory. Scholars have examined how Red for Ed was inspired by the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike and the Bargaining for the Common Good Movement (Bruno & Ashby, 2020; McCartin et al., 2020) . Some scholars have focused on the gendered aspects of the movement, given that teaching is such a feminized profession and teachers’ care for their students has been weaponized against their activism (Hanrahan & Amsler, 2022;

FAQs

What does the article study about the 2018 Red for Ed strike in Arizona?

It examines which Arizona school districts participated, for how long, and how the strike affected the financial outcomes educators cited in their demands.

What funding and salary changes occurred after the strike?

After the strike, per-pupil funding, teacher salaries, and student support staff salaries all increased.

How were poststrike funds distributed, and why did this matter?

Poststrike funding was added to Arizona’s preexisting funding formula, which advantaged small rural predominantly White districts. Educators who joined the strike—often from large urban low property-wealth districts—received less funding and smaller raises.

Oct 15, 2026

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