“If they close the school, how will we find each other?”
This question was posed by a New York City high school student in 2010, as their school was being “phased out”—one of many caught up in the sweeps of school closings that characterized the violent austerity measures of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. The pedagogy of the question compels us to consider what is lost when a school is closed or phased out, and what public infrastructures, like education, have to do with “finding one another.”
The question becomes ever more urgent in our current context of the Trump administration’s austerity measures and the broader dismantling of public education. Far from perfect, for many, public schools have been quotidian diaries of state divestment, policing, and criminalization. Yet they have also—unromantically and consistently—been places of survivance: where everyday people have cared for and found each other and sometimes, come together for common cause. In recent months we have also seen the power of schools as sites of resistance, where the abolitionist principle of “we keep us safe” has countered fascist violence, criminalization, and disposability with fierce solidarities, community defense, and the praxis of sanctuary.
A recent New York Times article, however, highlights the right’s growing critique of praxes such as these—which it has labeled broadly as “empathy.” According to the critique, empathy encourages a sort of lawlessness, where the recognition of shared humanity becomes the driving force for action—instead of rigid and narrow conceptions of legality and rights. In other words, according to its critics, it is empathy that emboldened educational workers to unite and refuse the entry of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to public school buildings. It is empathy that inspired Jaime C., a Los Angeles Metro Bus driver who refused to let ICE agents onto his bus, noting, “Part of our job is to make sure everyone is safe… I’m not going to open my doors, regardless if there’s retaliation or not. I’m going to do what is right...” According to the critics of empathy, these brave, bold, and solidaristic actions—which for many of us have provided moments of inspiration during the dark year that has been 2025—are marked by confusion rather than clear thinking, due to lack of an understanding of the need for “order.”
The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other.
In her book, The Capital Order, Clara Mattei reminds us that the fascist order accelerated through the Trump administration’s austerity measures is an entirely old one, that needs to be understood as essential to capitalism. As many have noted, the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill [OBBB], accounts for the largest one-time upward redistribution of wealth. It also needs to be understood as a weapon that is meant to protect capitalism by targeting public infrastructures and by making us even more reliant on the market. As the remaining vestiges of the welfare state that guarantee some form of social provision for the reproduction of daily life and also present the possibility of finding each other are hollowed out—we become even further alienated and separated from one another: consumer-citizens entrenched in self-interest and perpetual competition against one another.
What austerity also makes clear, Mattei argues, is the entrenched relationship between liberalism, fascism, and imperialism. In the case of education, this alignment confirms, on one hand, what Black and Indigenous organizers have been saying for some time: that public schools are a site of confinement, violence, control, and harm—making clear, for example, that it is not about transitioning from school to prison, but rather, historical and contemporary nexus between the two. It also affirms what students and educational workers in solidarity with Palestinian liberation—exposing how schools run not only on exclusion and disposession “at home” but also on extraction and genocide globally—have likewise clarified about the limits of liberalism, demonstrating that democratic rights and institutional safety only exist for those who dare not question the terms of the capital order.
If a return to an imagined “normal” is then, actually only a mirror of the present horrors, just at a different scale, what does that mean for how we struggle for–or through—schools?
The question becomes ever more urgent with the passage of the OBBB which, alongside other measures enacted by the Trump administration, seeks to restructure education as we know it. One key piece of the “how” of the restructuring is the establishment of a national voucher program. While conservative efforts to publicly fund religious schools have been consistently blocked by the courts, the voucher program provides a work-around through what we might understand as a federal not-for-profit-industrial complex. The new federal program provides a 100% tax credit (a $1:$1 return) to anyone who contributes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO). The nongovernmental entity of the SGO can then redistribute funds that can be used to pay for religious, private, home, or segregated schools—allowing, as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos envisioned, funding to directly follow students instead of school systems or buildings. Any family earning up to 300% the area median income would be eligible to apply for funds.
Two provisions—a state opt-in requirement and a cap of $1,700 annual tax credit per individual—establish some guardrails for the immediate growth of vouchers. However, with the establishment of an infrastructure for the voucher program alongside the gutting of the Department of Education (McMahon v. New York) and the Trump administration’s Russian roulette of withholding (and then releasing) billions of dollars for public education, it is not hard to imagine how—with a push for increased devolution to states—that the program might soon grow (the cap for federal payouts for 2026 is $10 billion, with 5% increases annually). Moreover, the combined impact of the OBBB’s violent Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid cuts disproportionately impact families who rely on public schools as well as critical infrastructure for special needs students and food safety and mental and physical health services for students more generally—while the bill also exponentially expands federal dollars for surveillance, detention, deportation, and ICE. These provisions, along with the OBBB’s broader shrinkage of public benefits—or Health and Human Services’ reinterpretation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, which, among other aspects, bans undocumented families from accessing Head Start programs)—are not meant to “save money.” In 2024, for example, public education only accounted for 3.9% of federal outlays.
In the context of such assaults, the question is not if we fight to defend the public, but it is urgent to keep at the forefront what kind of public we are fighting for. The austerity measures enacted during the Great Recession provide some lessons. For instance, in New York City, some public schools sought to mitigate budget cuts by increasing individual and private foundation donations. Not only did this strategy (often enacted through the expansion of school choice programs and policies) intensify inequity and segregation, but it also ceded ground to the market, fortifying a sense of consumer citizenship and a version of the public that is not antagonistic to the capital order, or the relations it seeks to police. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore call “creative aggression” is helpful in thinking about what might be done differently. As they note, creative aggression clarifies that the violence of austerity need not always lead us to the trap of affirming the violence we are used to. Instead, its accompanying contradictions can help clarify opportunities to “[use] whatever weapons are available—which sometimes can be things like constitutional provisions, using lawfare to fight—to support that creative aggression reworking social reality to make abolition geography.”
If a return to “normal” is only an affirmation of violence, then key to fighting for the public in the context of austerity and fascism is the reworking of social reality to make abolition geography. The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other. As Robin D.G. Kelley reminds us, we cannot have socialism without anticolonialism; finding each other must be rooted in internationalism.
It is this clarity, coupled with creative aggression, that informed for example, the National Education Association’s (NEA) 7,000 Member Representative Assembly recent vote. In a stand of solidarity with Palestinian liberation and the advancement of worker, civil, and human rights, the NEA decided to cut ties—including contracts—with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Likewise, the Profession Staff Congress’ (PSC, CUNY) vote earlier this year to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds and (as part of a joint campaign with the MORE Caucus of the United Federation of Teachers) recommend that their pension system—Teachers Retirement System (TRS)—also divest $100 million from the same. Such organizing mobilizes the public as a space to widen the terrain, and terms, of struggle and is not only powerful, but also considered dangerous to the capital order: Both votes were challenged and eventually overturned.
Examples such as these are a reminder that in the struggle for public education—the schools and institutions we have—while not an end, does present a critical site through which to enact creative aggression and practice collective governance that builds capacity for protracted struggle, while rooting spaces where we can find each other to expand our political horizons and grow fierce, loving, and dangerous solidarities toward collective liberation.
