Craig Hoxie, an Army veteran and a father of two, still teaches physics at Booker T. Washington High School, in Tulsa, though hundreds of teachers have left Oklahoma for other states, in search of better pay. In the past decade, funding for K-12 education in the state has fallen by a billion dollars. In 2017, the Oklahoma State Science Fair was cancelled, until a retired teacher saved it by contributing fifty thousand dollars from his savings. Hoxie often supplies his classes himself, with help from parents, who give him gift certificates to Walmart and Lowe’s. Still, Hoxie told me, “Booker T. Washington is one of the more fortunate schools in the state.” Many schools, as a way to save money on heating and cooling, are open only four days a week.

In late February, Hoxie and other teachers in Oklahoma closely followed the nine-day teachers’ strike in West Virginia, which was prompted by low pay and insufficient health-care plans; the strike ended when the state legislature passed a five-per-cent pay raise. Teachers in Oklahoma are paid less than those in West Virginia, which spends forty per cent more per pupil than Oklahoma does. During the strike, Alberto Morejon, a twenty-five-year-old social-studies teacher in Stillwater, Oklahoma, searched for a Facebook group that was discussing a strike or walkout in his state. He couldn’t find anything: the Oklahoma Education Association has been weakened by anti-union laws. Morejon started his own Facebook group (Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!), invited friends, and went to sleep. By the morning, the group had twenty-one thousand members; soon afterward, it had seventy-two thousand.

In response to the threat of a walkout, the Republican-dominated Oklahoma legislature offered teachers a pay raise of around six thousand dollars a year. It funded the raise with an assortment of tax bills, most of which disproportionately affect the poor—a cigarette tax, a diesel tax, an Amazon sales tax, an expansion of ball and dice gambling, and a five-dollar-per-room hotel-motel tax. The Republicans touted the move as historic, and it was: the legislature hadn’t passed a tax increase since 1990. The Democrats, along with the teachers, argued that the bill was far from sufficient, since it included little additional funding for students or schools. On April 2nd, Hoxie drove to the capitol, in Oklahoma City, about a hundred miles away, to attend the first day of the walkout. He told me, “I think the legislators thought we would come out for a day and just go home.” The teachers protested for nearly two weeks.

Heather Cody, a teacher Hoxie met at the walkout, helped organize a protest march from Tulsa to the capitol. During a trip to Disneyland, Hoxie said, Cody had noticed that she “walked sixteen miles in a day, so she thought, We can do this.” Hoxie and other teachers packed enough food and water for several days, knowing that they would be walking long stretches through sparsely populated areas. “But it soon became very apparent we didn’t need to carry anything,” Hoxie said. “We’d top a hill and then we’d see a family there by the side of the road, with the bed of their truck loaded with water bottles, bananas.” This kept happening. “An interfaith alliance was feeding us dinner each evening. High schools opened their gymnasiums for us to sleep in, pulling out their wrestling mats.” The Tulsa superintendent, Deborah Gist, walked with them. They encountered snow, lightning, and an earthquake. “We were walking through parts of Oklahoma that have barely even recovered from the oil bust of the nineteen-eighties,” Hoxie said. “They all came out for us. I didn’t know how they even knew where we were.”

On the seventh day, Hoxie and the other teachers woke up in the high-school library in Jones. Several hundred people were waiting outside to walk the last nineteen miles with them. A high-school marching band led them the last mile to the capitol, where thousands of people greeted them. Aaron Baker, a teacher from Del City who took part in the march, told me, “I was on the docket to speak, and I remember being so moved, seeing a young girl, just a teen-ager, holding out a bottle of water to me. Then I realized it was my daughter.”

Oklahoma has a population of less than four million. During the walkout, the demonstration at the capitol was attended by as many as eighty thousand people—more than came to the state for the land rush of 1889. All the major school districts were closed, and lines to get into the capitol to speak with legislators often started forming around 6 A.M. The scene had the high spirits of a music festival and the nerdiness of people who really love school. “Can we please put the smart people in charge now?” one sign read. Many signs referred to Oklahoma’s infamously high incarceration rate and its private prison system, and to the fact that the state spends twice as much per prisoner as per student: “If we dress our kids in stripes, will you fund education?”

Though the teachers came from both sides of the political aisle—the legislators and teachers I spoke with estimated that more than half the teachers were Republican—their reception was markedly partisan. “I’m not voting for another stinking measure when they’re acting the way they’re acting,” the Republican state representative Kevin McDugle said, in a Facebook Live feed. Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican, compared the teachers to “a teen-age kid that wants a better car.” The day the teachers arrived from Tulsa, Fallin signed a bill repealing the hotel-motel tax that had helped fund their pay raise. Hoxie told me, “I didn’t know I was going to run for office when I started the walk—that was something I learned along the way.” He is now on the ballot for House District 23.

Oklahoma has essentially been under single-party rule for about a decade. The state legislature is eighty per cent Republican, and in the most recent midterm elections the Democrats didn’t field a candidate in nearly half the races. Governor Fallin is in her eighth year, and during her tenure nearly all state agencies have seen cuts of between ten and thirty per cent, even as the population that those agencies serve has increased. A capital-gains tax break was configured in such a way that two-thirds of the benefit went to the eight hundred wealthiest families in the state. An income-tax reduction similarly benefitted primarily the wealthy. The tax on fracked oil was slashed, and when it was nudged back up—it remains the lowest in the nation—the energy billionaire and political kingmaker Harold Hamm, whose estimated net worth is quadruple the budget that the legislature allocates to the state, stood in the gallery of the capitol, letting the lawmakers know that he was watching.

Reversing tax cuts is never easy, but it’s almost impossible in Oklahoma. In 1992, a law was passed requiring that any bill to raise taxes receive the assent of the governor and three-quarters of the legislature. The law was pushed by two of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma, Edward L. Gaylord and Clayton Bennett, after a previous teacher walkout led to new education funding. It doesn’t cost much, in billionaire terms, to fund a candidate in Oklahoma.