I Didn't Become a Teacher to Watch Public Education Be Sold for Scrap

I didn’t become a teacher to picket in front of rocket test sites.

But I also didn’t become a teacher to watch public education be sold for scrap. So two weeks ago, I loaded up my car with signs, snacks, and plenty of water and drove out to the SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne, California. I spent the day rallying alongside a sea of educators, parents, students, and union members, gathered at Elon Musk’s place of business to protest his corrupt crusade to decimate our public schools and privatize our public goods.

I’m a special education teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Our schools, like schools all across the country, are facing pressure to tighten the belt in anticipation of DOGE cuts and federal disinvestment.

We reject that logic. As should every public servant and elected official in the country.

Preemptive austerity measures play right into the hands of the people dismantling our government. Now is the moment to dig deep. Educators across California and the nation are calling on our electeds and our superintendents to pour back into our communities, not abandon them.

Our protest was one of several rallies held across the country in response to threats to dismantle the Department of Education. From Los Angeles to Washington D.C., teachers have come together to defend every student’s freedom to learn and to stand against the extremist politicians trying to gut the resources our students and families depend on.

This administration’s end game relies on a population that is uneducated and disempowered. One where our children don’t know our histories or learn from them. Instead of nurturing young people who question the world around them, they want to produce workers that can be underpaid, mistreated, and controlled. This is about power, not policy.

And yes, the appointment of WWE’s Linda McMahon as Education Secretary is a clear sign of this administration's disdain for public education, but that agenda has long been fueled by Musk’s own contempt. His hostility toward public schools began well before his time in Trump’s orbit. Case in point: Hawthorne served as SpaceX’s main headquarters for years, until Musk opened a new hub in Texas, supposedly in protest of a California education law that protects LGBTQ+ students and upholds their right to learn.

It’s time people stop seeing Elon Musk as a visionary when he’s clearly a political actor. His attack on public education is part of a larger strategy. This administration’s end game relies on a population that is uneducated and disempowered. One where our children don’t know our histories or learn from them. Instead of nurturing young people who question the world around them, they want to produce workers that can be underpaid, mistreated, and controlled. This is about power, not policy.

Our children are not under-resourced by accident. They’re being robbed. And Elon Musk is a prime example of how that works in a democracy that’s captured by corporate interests. These people don’t want public services to work. They want to own them. Musk says our budgets are bloated, but refuses to pay property taxes. He attacks public educational programs like NPR and PBS, yet collects billions in public subsidies for SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter/X. While teachers are forced to strike for reasonable pay raises, Musk is handed public money and then uses it to bankroll campaigns to abolish the Department of Education. This isn’t innovation, it’s extraction.

But their agenda isn’t just about schools. The forces behind Project 2025 are pushing plans to shut down entire federal departments and destabilize the programs our communities rely on. They’re calling for the elimination of Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Social Security, and more. These cuts would devastate poor and working-class Americans, veterans, the elderly, and most of all, our students and their families. They want our kids hungry, our elders unsupported, and our communities too desperate to fight back while they steal and profit off our labor.

Although the threats to dismantle the DoE, as well as the ICE raids against our immigrant students, have made this personal, we educators are always on the frontlines of democracy. We work with students of all abilities, from all racial and economic backgrounds. We see inequity firsthand. We are workers ourselves and we know what it means to be overworked and underpaid. When we organize, we’re not just fighting for a contract. We’re fighting for a country where a child’s zip code doesn’t decide their worth.

Trump, Musk, and their wealthy allies want to run the country like a company. But a nation isn’t a business, it’s a collective promise to each other.

When we shortchange teachers, we shortchange students. And when we underfund schools, we make inequality permanent. In 2023, our union was able to enact a groundbreaking contract that provided some financial relief for many educators in our city. But for many of us, that just meant catching our breath — not catching up. We’re still behind on rent. Student loans are resuming, and many educators who had hoped for relief are facing renewed financial strain. Teachers are working second jobs, burning out, and leaving the field altogether. And when teachers leave, students feel it: high turnover leads to instability; under-resourced classrooms lead to deepened inequity.

The real crisis isn’t overspending but underinvestment. At every level, federal, state, and local leaders claim there’s no money. But the money exists. The district has it. The state has it. The feds definitely have it. They’re just hoarding it, or worse, handing it to billionaires. You don’t solve a shortage by starving the people doing the work. You solve it by investing — in people, in classrooms, in kids.

Trump, Musk, and their wealthy allies want to run the country like a company. But a nation isn’t a business, it’s a collective promise to each other. They’ve already come for federal workers. Now it’s teachers. Next, it’ll be nurses, postal workers, transit operators or anyone who doesn’t fit their agenda to drag us backward. This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s a fact.

But we will not let billionaires steal our future. We will not disinvest. We will not capitulate. We believe in a future where every child has a safe, well-funded public school. Where public goods serve the public good. And where educators are respected, not discarded.

They may have rockets. But we have each other. And we’re not going anywhere.