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The pair's efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
After surviving a contentious US Senate confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO turned secretary of education, received a profound first directive from President Donald Trump: “Put yourself out of a job.” Like other appointees, Mrs. McMahon has done exactly as ordered by a president who accepts nothing less.
As Secretary, McMahon has championed Trump’s executive order dismantling her department and delivering its K-12 responsibilities to state and local governments. She has fired 1,315 department employees, targeting jobs in the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, groups that investigate civil rights complaints in schools and provide advice on best practices in teaching. As a result, the department’s staff has been nearly halved since January.
And now Secretary McMahon is spiking the ball in a 50-state tour called “Returning Education to the States.” More than a celebration of the administration’s defeat of brainy bureaucrats at the Department of Education, the tour touts the passage of the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) as part of the president’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The act creates a national opt-in voucher system for students to attend private or religious schools, to be funded by an extraordinarily generous dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to Scholarship Granting Organizations.
The problem is that in these related cases—the attacks on the department of education and the creation of a national voucher system—Secretary McMahon and President Trump are not acting in the interests of students, nor do they seem to be thinking about them at all. These efforts to return education to the states appear motivated not by improving educational outcomes, as we’ll explore, but by creating tax breaks for the rich while privatizing public education and weakening teachers’ unions, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
To fully grasp the stakes of the attack on the Department of Education, we must remember why the federal government got involved in education in the first place. Conservatives rightly note that the Constitution does not mention education, leaving it instead as a reserved power for the states. They’re also correct that despite providing only 10% of total public school funding, the role of the federal government in education has grown significantly over the past half-century.
Yet federal power in education grew neither by accident nor by conspiracy, but in response to systemic failures that states could not and in some cases would not address.
In 1965, following the Civil Rights Act and amid the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration sought to tackle two forms of intransigence: the South’s resistance to school integration and the persistence of poverty amid plenty. A former schoolteacher himself, President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which directed federal funds, called Title I, to low-income schools and students. Crucially, it tied Title I funding to compliance with desegregation orders. This strings-attached model became the foundation of the federal approach to K-12 education and is critical to understanding its outsized voice.
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle.
Flash forward a decade: When President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979, conservatives saw it as the fulfillment of a politically motivated campaign promise to secure support from the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country. Politics was surely part of the calculus, which conservatives have long resented.
Yet beyond the politics of the moment, the new department was also created to increase efficiency and effectiveness, allowing the federal government to consolidate its education-related functions into a single agency. Navigating the two largest streams of K-12 funding—Title I and IDEA—would be less complicated under its purview. Continuing the strings-attached model, the department established an Office of Civil Rights to investigate whether schools receiving funds were in compliance with federal civil rights laws. But this last piece represented a continuation of federal oversight that some states resented, especially across the South.
So in 1980, when Ronald Reagan campaigned against the new department and called for returning control to the states, he appealed—intentionally or not—to two groups. The first were earnest conservatives who, after decades of government expansion, sought a renewed federalism that would respect greater state and local autonomy. The second were those who felt the federal government had overreached, in schools and elsewhere, by enforcing civil rights laws in the South. Reagan’s advisors seemed to understand this double-meaning and tapped into it with dog whistles, directing the Gipper to open his 1980 campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Neshoba, Mississippi, a town made infamous by the 1964 murders of three prominent civil rights activists.
President Reagan was ultimately unable to get rid of the Department of Education. Instead, Reagan decided that if he couldn’t kill the department, he would render it useless by appointing leaders, like Secretary William Bennett, who did not believe in its purpose. This was the template for Trump’s appointment of both Betsy Devos and Linda McMahon.
When Secretary McMahon announced that her “Returning Education to the States” tour would kick off in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, it sounded like yet another state’s rights dog whistle. Compounding that feeling is the fact that the secretary’s layoffs in March targeted the department’s Office for Civil Rights, leaving it unable to perform its oversight and investigative duties and leading to a long list of civil rights cases that may never be reviewed.
But more than civil rights oversight is at stake. The Institute of Education Sciences, which researches best practices in teaching and provides comparative data about educational outcomes, was also targeted in the Secretary’s layoffs. The institute additionally oversees the National Assessment of Educational Programs (NAEP) tests, which are used to gauge academic achievement by various measures across the country.
None of this is in the interests of students.
President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
The growing backlog of cases in the Office for Civil Rights does nothing to protect vulnerable students, just as the effective shuttering of the Institute of Education Sciences does nothing to improve teaching and learning. But rendering the Office for Civil Rights useless does give cover to states to do as they please—and if doing so hurts test scores, a dataless Institute of Education Sciences will lack the information critical for accountability.
Secretary McMahon and President Trump have also expressed interest in turning Title I, the largest stream of federal money for K-12 education, into block grants. Doing so, as Project 2025 advises, would give states greater discretion over how the funds are used. Without vigorous oversight, it is likely that some states would not direct the money toward low-income schools and students. The president has already issued guidance for how states can redirect Title I money into voucher programs and, according to Politico, has worked with House Republicans to propose a $5.2 billion cut to the program for fiscal year 2026.
But the most immediate push for vouchers comes in an overlooked part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” called the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA). It establishes the first national voucher system, allowing students in states that opt in to use vouchers to send students to private or religious schools. The program is funded through federal tax credit. These breaks are an unusually generous dollar-for-dollar credit on any donation to Scholarship Granting Organizations. And, shockingly, donations can include stocks that will be valued at their pre-capital gains amount, meaning donors will save more from the donation than they would make from cashing out the stock.
More than an appealing program for the wealthy, the ECCA voucher program is politically appealing to Republicans because it undermines public schools—and their teachers’ unions—in states that opt in. When students accept vouchers to leave for private schools, the traditional public school they previously attended loses that money, forcing them to continue providing the same services for all students but with less funding. And while conservatives frame this as “school choice,” the choice lies equally with private schools that, unlike public schools that are required to educate every student, have the right to reject applicants on the basis of talent, character, and even disability—leaving public schools to educate only the most challenging students.
In other words, the program sets up public schools to fail—and when they do, they will likely be blamed for their own failure, leading to additional disinvestment and greater failure.
One thing is clear: The ECCA voucher program, like the rest of Trump and McMahon’s K-12 policy, isn’t about helping students, nor is it even about education; it’s about fattening pockets and weakening political opponents. The tax credit is a boondoggle for the wealthy at a cost of billions to the public. But the credit is also a tool for attacking a pillar of the Democratic Party by undermining traditional public schools and teachers’ unions. Children are in the crosshairs of this battle but under Trump, the Republican Party is unwilling to value them above entrenching their own political power and financial interests.
It is a tragic moment in K-12 education. To be clear, there are valid debates about school choice and vouchers. There have even been successes in certain targeted voucher studies, and we should learn from them. But overwhelmingly, recent studies show that voucher programs have yet to scale well and have consistently led to lower test scores. Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio have large, longstanding voucher programs. In the past decade, each has witnessed a decline in math and reading scores for students entering from public school.
In 2016, researchers at Tulane University found that voucher users who performed “at roughly the 50th percentile” before entering the program fell “24 percentile points below their control group counterparts in math after one year.” Martin West, professor of education policy at Harvard and a 2012 campaign adviser to Mitt Romney, described the results as “as large as any” he’s “seen in the literature.” Results are similarly poor in Ohio, where the erstwhile voucher-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute concluded, “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”
Even in the best cases of scaled-up experiments, as in Florida and Arizona, results are mixed. Some studies suggest slight academic improvement while others range from no benefit to moderate academic decline. And yet without nuance or humility, the Trump administration is all-in on vouchers as the future of education, at least in the Republican-led states. President Trump and Secretary McMahon have shown no consideration of the fact that, as research suggests, many of these programs will fail students, affecting millions of children nationwide.
If the administration truly had a non-ideological interest in vouchers as part of a commitment to improving educational outcomes, they would recognize the shortcomings of many recent voucher experiments and propose more targeted voucher programs that expand on areas where they’ve shown some success.
But they haven’t done that because it’s not about students. And for all the wrong reasons, we’re about to scale vouchers across much of the country at a time when the Department of Education, the leading K-12 oversight body, is on life support.
We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators.
Where does the spirit of Red for Ed, the teacher-led labor movement that began in 2018, stand today?
Red for Ed began that February when educators and staff at schools across West Virginia went on strike to demand better pay. Their direct action inspired strikes in other states, especially those with majority Republican legislatures (hence the name “Red for Ed”). Educators in Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma went on illegal wildcat strikes to fight against the poverty wages and chronically underfunded schools that were resulting in both intolerable working conditions and learning conditions.
Since then, the movement has seen ebbs and flows. But that’s the nature of organizing. There is no straight line of progress, but instead waves that slowly and determinedly wash against the shores—little by little changing the landscape.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see.
Of course, there have been other big waves too, such as the solidarity strike in Los Angeles in March of this year that saw members from United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) show up for support staff. The result was major wage gains for support staff, like bus drivers, teaching aides, special education assistants, and other workers who contribute to functioning schools. The strike also influenced a significant contract settlement for UTLA members as well.
Still, inflation, limited housing options, and political attacks against educators striving to just do their jobs have driven educators to leave the profession.
For those of us who will be in the classroom this coming year, we need the public to see what we see. Throughout my state of New Hampshire, public educators are confronting a new school year without enough guidance counselors, with support staff getting crushed by the cost of living, and with money that could be used to help our students being used to fund voucher programs. It’s the same scenario playing out all across the country.
The question now, it seems to me, is what do we do about all of this?
For one, we can’t stand idly by. We can’t believe that officials above us will save us. We must see opportunities to build something new, to create resilient communities, to strengthen relationships between educators.
We cannot close our classroom doors and expect the problems of the world to go away. We have seen too many times before that there is no stopping the downward slide of gloom unless we meet it with the kind of positive energy force that we bring to classrooms—we need a collective energy that exceeds the force of the push for privatization.
This energizing force can only come from one place and from one direction: from the grassroots.
It was the animating force of Red for Ed, it is the power of organized labor, it is the simple idea that everyday folks can come together to address the issues that they see everyday—issues that other folks don’t seem to acknowledge.
Each time teachers and support staff stand together to bring issues of working people to light, we bring meaning to the idea of a union as a collective working toward a common goal and sharing the same collective fate.
Unions, at their best, are built around a love for our fellow colleagues and our fellow workers. It is expressed when the voices of the seldom heard echo in the halls: the halls of schools, of board rooms, and ultimately, in the halls of power.
Voucher schemes in states like my own are evidence of the need to build stronger unions. We need unions that can make the case for the public good that public education provides, unions that are unabashedly of and for the educators who go the extra mile each day for kids, communities, and the common good.
We cannot ignore the ugliness of the status quo, with fear driving people apart, books being banned, and teachers training for active shooter drills. Each one of our students are too precious to turn our attention away from the work that we must do together to bring about change.
This school year, let’s recommit to the labor of love that is standing up for public schools, our students, and the communities we serve by building stronger and more inclusive unions. The movement for public schools isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
To this day, I have yet to meet a person incapable of naming a teacher who made an impact on their life. No matter if they attended an under-resourced or well-off school, nearly everyone has had a teacher who made them believe in themselves, taught them to love a subject they thought they were terrible at, or opened up their view of the world.
Whether it was the teacher of my Pastor Bernard in Oakland who taught him to read and write through lived experiences rather than textbooks; or my fiancé’s who recognized her potential and fast-tracked her into more advanced courses; or my history teacher who helped me believe in my abilities and cultivate my love of social studies—teachers change lives. They deserve to be paid fairly for their impact on all of us.
Teachers—alongside emergency responders, doctors, and the military—represent a profession that is critical to the lifeblood of society. Yet unlike these other professions, which provide sustainable salaries, our nation gives thanks to our teachers with a week of appreciation. Even then, the burden of that thanks is often placed on our kids or parents to bring them gifts.
The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
Now this is not to discredit those gifts. I still have the homemade gifts from my students when I was a teacher in Hawai’i. The problem is not with our children bringing tokens of thanks; the problem is with the policies we have allowed to underpay teachers, and thus, undercut the entire value of the teaching profession.
We must do more than take a week to say thank you. We must pay teachers for the work they do to support our society. The evidence is clear that we have been failing in this regard.
Even before the pandemic made teaching even more difficult, teachers were leaving the classroom at harrowing rates. More than half cite low compensation as what is driving them out the door. In California, which has the largest number of public school students in the US, 80% of districts reported a shortage of qualified teachers in 2017-2018. The problem is compounded by the fact that we can’t fill these spots with new teachers as enrollment in teacher education programs fell by 35% between 2009 and 2014.
Teachers are so undervalued in America that 62% of parents do not want their students to become teachers, citing low-teacher salaries as the number one reason why.
We have the power to show teachers that they matter. This starts by paying them a minimum nationwide salary of $60,000. There is a bipartisan bill in congress right now that can help make this a reality. We should not be a society where the correction officer who is responsible for keeping people in jail gets paid more than the teachers who can help keep the kids out of jail.
While paying teachers a minimum national salary of $60,000 is far from the silver bullet that will fix teacher shortages, it is an integral improvement that can help demonstrate to teachers that they matter and are deeply valued.
Let’s make Teacher Appreciation Week mean something more. Let’s use the week as a time to call on Congress to pass meaningful legislation that shows just how much we support and appreciate teachers.
Greedy titans of industry have a plan to keep working people down and the Republican governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate is more than happy to oblige.
Florida’s 2023 legislative session has kicked off with a pair of bills chock full of new labor regulations long sought after by anti-union activists.
The bills—SB 256 and HB 1445—would deliver huge wins for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who called for virtually all of their provisions in his anti-labor wish list released in January.
While they bear DeSantis’ imprimatur, many of the bills’ specifics, both large and small, are lifted directly from the anti-union playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play operation in which state legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to write model legislation.
The bills also have the backing of billionaire-bankrolled conservative think tanks that anti-worker lawmakers often call on for support, including Charles Koch’s astroturf group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and State Policy Network (SPN) affiliates the James Madison Institute and the Freedom Foundation.
If passed, the bills would empower the state of Florida to decertify public sector unions, prohibit automatic deductions for union dues, mandate universal language on union membership cards, and impose considerable annual reporting requirements.
“Gov. DeSantis says he supports ‘teacher empowerment,’ but this bill does the exact opposite,” the president of the Florida Education Association, Andrew Spar, said in a statement. “It’s an attack, pure and simple, on educators’ basic freedoms and rights.”
Perhaps the most consequential provision of the proposed legislation is its introduction of a new membership threshold for union decertification. The bills would require public sector unions to report their membership numbers to the state annually, a process that would lead to the potential decertification of any unions in which membership drops below 60% of eligible workers.
Under current Florida law, a decertification vote can only be triggered if at least 30% of a bargaining unit’s eligible workers file a petition calling for the vote.
The exception is teachers unions. Since the passage of a 2018 law, Florida teachers are the only public sector union members who are required to report their membership numbers annually. If their membership falls below a minimum of 50% of eligible workers, the union is forced to hold a decertification election.
The new legislation would impose these annual reporting requirements and the 60% membership threshold on all public sector unions, with the exception of those of police, firefighters, and corrections officers.
ALEC has long advocated for increasing the membership threshold for unions. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has previously reported on ALEC’s model Union Recertification Act, which requires decertification of a union if membership drops below 50%, and also requires a secret ballot election every two years.
As a “right-to-work” state, Florida allows teachers and other public sector workers to avoid paying union dues while benefiting from the better pay and working conditions that the union negotiates, which undermines the ability of unions to build their membership.
A CMD analysis of information provided by Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC) demonstrates what’s at stake if the higher membership threshold in the proposed bills passes. In fiscal year 2021–22, there were 44 public teachers’ unions in the state with a membership density between 50 and 60%. Under the new legislation, the unions covering these workers—114,854 public school teachers, which amounts to 62% of the entire statewide unionized public teacher workforce—would be forced to petition PERC for recertification and hold time-consuming new elections, or else risk being decertified.
Although the Senate’s fiscal analysis considered the density of teachers’ unions, it appears that it did not take into account the density of other public sector unions.
The Senate bill would also prohibit the automatic deduction of union dues. This provision—which in ALEC’s articulation has taken the form of the Public Employer Payroll Deduction Policy Act and is continually recycled in other model bills, such as the Public Employee Freedom Act—would require public sector employees to grant permission every year to allow their dues to be deducted from their paychecks.
The proposed legislation would also mandate that each public sector union card include anti-union language acknowledging that Florida is a right-to-work state, that union membership and dues payment are voluntary, and that “no employee may be discriminated against” for not joining a union. This idea—along with most of the language in the bill—parrots ALEC’s model Public Employee Rights and Authorization Act.
Under current Florida law, the state does not stipulate that membership cards include any specific information or statements.
While ALEC’s model bill calls for this information to be “written in bold and in all caps” and printed in “a font that is equal to or larger than any other font found in the body of the form,” the Florida bill stipulates that it be printed in “14-point type.”
Last but not least, the bills include substantial annual reporting requirements. Each union will be required to provide an “annual audited financial report that includes a detailed breakdown of revenues and expenditures,” audited membership lists, all bylaws, officers’ salaries, and other information. This provision draws heavily from ALEC’s Union Financial Responsibility Act, a model bill that requires public sector unions to file extensive financial and operational reports every year.
All in all, the Florida House estimates that its bill will cost the state an additional $903,238 each year to enforce, according to its internal fiscal analysis.
The proposed legislation—which carves out exemptions for law enforcement officers, correctional officers, and fire fighters—has drawn intense criticism from workers’ rights advocates. An overwhelming majority of the public attending a House committee meeting on March 16—102 of the 112 non-legislators in the room—were opposed to the bill.
The handful of attendees who were proponents largely represented conservative think tanks. Among those speaking in favor of the legislation at the House committee meeting were Sal Nuzzo, a vice president at the Madison Institute and chair of an ALEC task force, and Christopher Stranburg, AFP’s state legislative affairs director in Florida.
Representative Spencer Roach (R-79), who voted in favor of the House bill in committee, is ALEC’s Florida state chair, and a handful of other legislators who have moved the bill out of committee have ties to ALEC.
Registered lobbyists for the Senate bill include AFP, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, Jeb Bush’s pro-charter school 501c4. Lobbyists for the House bill include representatives from the Opportunity Solutions Project, the action-arm of right-wing think tank Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA); the Washington-based Freedom Foundation; the Center for Worker Progress Action (related to the Mackinac Center in Michigan); and additional lobbyists from NFIB and AFP.
FGA, the Freedom Foundation, and the Mackinac Center are state affiliates of SPN, the web of right-wing think tanks and tax-exempt organizations pushing far-right policy agendas throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. AFP and NFIB are associate members.
An internal SPN document provided by CMD to The Guardian in 2017 revealed SPN’s plan to work to “defund and defang” public sector unions. As articulated by SPN’s President and CEO Tracie Sharp, the goal is “permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle.”
State Senator Blaise Ingoglia (R-11) and State Representative Dean Black (R-15) sponsored the bills, and committee votes in both chambers have been almost entirely along party lines. A single Republican state senator, Corey Simon (R-3), voted against the Senate bill.
The Senate bill was debated as a high-priority “special order calendar” item on Thursday, and will be taken up again when the Senate returns on March 29. The House bill is being reviewed by the State Affairs committee. Given the Republican’s supermajority in the legislature, the bills are expected to become law.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, defended the egalitarian legacy and aspirations of public education on Monday after former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused her of being "the most dangerous person in the world."
In an interview with Semafor, Pompeo said: "I tell the story often--I get asked, 'Who's the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?' The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten."
"It's not a close call," Pompeo, who worked in the Trump administration and is considered a potential Republican presidential candidate, continued. "If you ask, 'Who's the most likely to take this republic down?' It would be the teachers' unions, and the filth that they're teaching our kids, and the fact that they don't know math and reading or writing."
While the news outlet failed to push back on Pompeo's absurd claims, Weingarten took to Twitter to defend her union and the institution of public education.
Admitting that she wasn't sure whether to characterize Pompeo's remarks "as ridiculous or dangerous," Weingarten noted that he defended tyrants in various parts of the world during his tenure with the State Department.
Pompeo "was more focused on pleasing Trump than fighting for freedom, national security, and democracy," said Weingarten.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), by contrast, fights "for freedom, democracy, and an economy that works for all," Weingarten continued. "We fight for what kids and communities need: Strong public schools that are safe and welcoming, where kids learn how to think and work with others."
"And we fight against this kind of rhetoric and hate," she added. "Maybe spend a minute in one of the classrooms with my members and their students and you will get a real lesson in the promise and potential of America."
Pompeo's attack on teachers' unions and inclusive curriculum comes amid an ongoing right-wing censorship campaign and broader assault on public school students and employees.
A recent analysis by PEN America detailed how 138 school districts across 32 states have prohibited more than 1,600 titles in classrooms and libraries since July 2021. The vast majority of banned books deal with LGBTQ+ themes, address racism, contain sexual content, or are related to activism.
In addition, according to PEN America, Republican lawmakers in 42 states have introduced more than 190 bills since January 2021 that seek to limit the ability of educators and students to discuss gender, racial inequality, and other topics--including a growing number of proposals to establish so-called "tip lines" that would empower parents to discipline teachers. Nearly two dozen educational gag orders have been enacted in more than a dozen states.
In an opinion piece published before far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state's infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argued that the GOP's tidal wave of repressive education legislation has "an obvious purpose: to make teachers feel perpetually on thin ice, so they shy away from difficult discussions about our national past rather than risk breaking laws in ways they cannot themselves anticipate."
"But there's another, more pernicious goal driving these bills that might well succeed politically precisely because it remains largely unstated," Sargent continued. "The darker underlying premise here is that these bills are needed in the first place, because subversive elements lurk around every corner in schools, looking to pervert, indoctrinate, or psychologically torture your kids."
The "combination of... vagueness and punitive mechanisms such as rights of action and tip lines" is intentionally designed to promote self-censorship, wrote Sargent. "Precisely because teachers might fear that they can't anticipate how they might run afoul of the law--while also fearing punishment for such transgressions--they might skirt difficult subjects altogether."
He added that "calls for maximal parental choice and control in schools have been used by the right for decades as a smoke screen to sow fears and doubts about public education at its ideological foundations."
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), a former middle school principal, called Pompeo's comments about Weingarten "outrageous, dangerous, and asinine."
"Radical republicans hate education," he said, "because it cripples their lies and fear-mongering. I stand with Randi Weingarten and all teachers in the fight for our kids, our democracy, and our planet."
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) president Lee Saunders, meanwhile, said in a statement that "if Mike Pompeo really thinks Randi Weingarten is 'the most dangerous person in the world,' then he is the most clueless person in the world."
"More likely, though, this is just a stunt by a politician desperate to get attention for a longshot presidential run," said Saunders. "Either way, what a relief that a man who calls an educator a greater security threat than global dictators is no longer in charge of our diplomatic relations around the world. While Pompeo continues to bluster, Randi will keep working for safe, vibrant schools that enrich our children and strengthen our communities."
This article has been updated to include a statement from AFSCME president Lee Saunders.
In the fight for public education, the forces of standardization and privatization are running scared.
They've faced more pushback in the last few years - especially in the last few months - than in a decade.
The Opt Out movement increases exponentially every year. Teach for America is having trouble getting recruits. Pearson's stock is plummeting. The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have both come out strongly against increasing charter schools.
They want you to believe that the corporate vultures preying on our public schools are really just misunderstood philanthropists.
So what's a corporate education reformer to do?
Answer: Change the narrative.
They can't control the facts, so instead they try to control the story being told about the facts.
It's a classic propaganda technique. As Malcolm X put it:
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
Their story goes like this - yes, there is a battle going on over public education. But the two sides fighting aren't who you think they are.
The fight for public schools isn't between grassroots communities and well-funded AstroTurf organizations, they say. Despite the evidence of your eyes, the fight isn't between charter school sycophants and standardized test companies, on the one hand, and parents, students and teachers on the other.
No. It's actually between people who really care about children and those nasty, yucky unions.
It's nonsense, of course. Pure spin.
They want you to believe that the corporate vultures preying on our public schools are really just misunderstood philanthropists. And those demanding a fair shake for their own children and communities are really just paid shills from a monolithic and uncaring bureaucracy.
In essence, they want you to believe two things:
1) Despite profiting off the system and zero evidence supporting the efficacy of corporate school policies, they're motivated purely by empathy.
2) Unions are evil by definition and they pervert everything they touch.
Put simply, unions are not perfect, but they are not evil. In fact, they are essential to the health of public education.
I'm not going to bother with the first claim here. There is an inherent bias from those who wish to change the laws so they can more easily profit off of schools without actually helping students learn and in fact exist at the expense of that learning. If you can't see through the propaganda wing of the Walmart corporation, the Broad Foundation and Big Daddy Bill Gates, you probably won't be very receptive to anything else I have to say.
Instead I will focus on the second claim, because it is the more pernicious of the two.
Put simply, unions are not perfect, but they are not evil. In fact, they are essential to the health of public education.
Many progressives are upset with teachers unions because of the current Presidential election. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary election without what many would consider adequately polling rank and file members. For better or worse, the endorsements were top-down affairs reflecting the preference of union leaders.
That's not how unions are supposed to work. And it's having consequences for the way both members and non-members view teachers unions.
Critics infer from this that unions don't represent membership. They are de facto arms of the waiting Clinton administration and the neoliberal agenda.
There may be some truth to this, but it does not represent the whole picture. Not nearly.
Unions are like any other democratic organization. The larger the association, the further from the grassroots the decision making body.
In the mammoth national unions, decisions are made by representatives most removed from our schools. They probably were teachers or support staff at some point in the past, but that may be ancient history. Now they are professional leaders and therefore at a remove from the grassroots.
By contrast, in our local chapters, leaders are most often working classroom teachers. Decisions are made by those still meeting students' needs on a day-to-day basis. As such, they retain an authenticity and expertise that may be more cloudy in the large bureaucracies.
This isn't to say the national unions are by definition unconcerned with the needs of teachers and students. I'm sure that most of the NEA and AFT leadership who decided to endorse Clinton did it because they honestly believe doing so will help public education. And - who knows - they may be right. But what they forgot in this case was the democratic process they were tasked with preserving. As such, they may have to pay a price for their hubris when their terms are up.
In most cases, the leaders of national teachers unions are at too much of a remove to see what is best for our schools. And they usually know that. It is up to the rank and file to tell them what to do, and that's what happens every year at representative assemblies through various caucuses made up of work-a-day members. And if leaders overstep their authority it is members' duty to hold them accountable at election time.
So even though the national organizations are most likely to go astray, they often don't. Usually even these giants are trying to improve the situation in our public schools.
Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn't come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots.
However, it can't be denied that the most intense and passionate activism happens a bit closer to where the rubber hits the road. It's those local chapters that are there everyday and make the most difference. They are the heart and soul of unionism.
So when corporate education reformers sneeringly deprecate their opponents as mere unions, they're glossing over an important distinction. Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn't come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots. This is not a top down initiative. It is bottom up.
This is how it's always been. There is no political organization directing the fight to save public education. The Democrats certainly aren't overly concerned with reigning in charter schools. It was grassroots Democrats - some of whom are also union members - who worked to rewrite the party platform to do so. The Clinton campaign is not directing anyone to opt out of standardized testing. However, voters are demanding that Clinton be receptive to their needs - and some of them are union members.
There is no great union conspiracy to fight these policies. It's called public opinion, and it's changing.
That's what scares the standardizers and privatizers. They've had free run of the store for almost two decades and now the public is waking up.
They're desperately trying to paint this as a union movement when it's not. Unions are involved, but they aren't alone. And moreover, their involvement is not necessarily an impediment.
The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.
The needs of the community and the needs of teachers are the same.
Both want excellent public schools.
Both want the best for our students.
Both want academic policies that will help students learn - not help corporations cash in.
And both groups want good teachers in the classroom - not bad ones!
The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.
Unions fight to make sure teachers get due process, but they also fight to make sure bad teachers are shown the door.
In fact, in districts with strong unions, MORE bad teachers are fired - not less, according to a new study by economics Prof. Eunice Han from the University of Utah.
The study entitled The Myth of Unions' Overprotection of Bad Teachers concludes that when unions are strong and successfully bargain for higher salaries, they have an incentive to help ensure ineffective teachers don't receive tenure. In short, it costs too much to keep bad teachers on staff. It is in the interests of the collective bargaining unit to ensure those unfit to teach move along.
Moreover, Han also concludes that strong unions actually help reduce the dropout rate. It just makes sense. When you treat people like the professionals they are, when you give them autonomy and respect, they're free to concentrate more energy into their jobs than fighting to keep those jobs.
But unions stand in direct opposition to the efforts of corporate vultures trying to swoop in and profit off of public education. Teachers provide a valuable service to students. If your goal is to reduce the cost of that service no matter how much that reduces its value to students, you need a weak labor force. You need the ability to reduce salary so you can claim the savings as profit.
THAT'S why corporate education reformers hate teachers and their unions. We make it nearly impossible to swipe school budgets into their own pockets.
So do unions belong in the fight against corporate education reform?
Answer: Heck yeah! In fact, they are essential to it.
American political history is usually told as the story of what political elites say and do. The twists and turns, advances and setbacks, wars,
But this history can also be told as the story of the great protest movements that periodically well up from the bottom of American society and the impact these movements have on American institutions. There would be no founders to memorialize without the Revolutionary-era mobs who provided the foot soldiers to fight the British; no films about the quandaries of Abe Lincoln during the Civil War without the abolitionists and the thousands of runaway slaves; no Labor Day to celebrate without the sit-down strikers; no Martin Luther King to beatify without a movement of poor blacks who defied the Southern terror system.
When historians look back at the decades of the transition to the twenty-first century, I think they will see a distinctive era of tumult and protest, in the United States and across the globe. The perspective gained by the passage of time will show the broad similarities of these protests--both in their scale and in the societal upheavals they reflect and foretell--to the popular insurgencies of the nineteenth century that accompanied the spread of capitalist industrialization. In both periods, dramatic changes in the economy meant new hardships, broken compacts, and the uprooting of peoples from familiar places and accustomed ways of life. In the nineteenth century, some named the new system driving these developments "capitalism" or "industrialism." Now we name the monster machine propelling diverse local disasters "neoliberal globalization."
It is not easy to fix the exact moment that this era of popular protest against neoliberalism began. Maybe it was with the rise of the indigenous Zapatista movement in the early 1990s. Peasants from the Lacandon jungle armed themselves with wooden rifles (as well as real guns) and proclaimed neoliberal globalization as the target of their protests. Remarkably, they found an eager worldwide audience, and their uprising helped to give energy and elan to the emerging global justice movement. Soon after, in the wake of the imposition of austerity policies by the IMF and international finance, popular insurgencies spread across Latin America, toppling governments and challenging American domination of the hemisphere, with consequences that are still unfolding. Other uprisings spread across North Africa, from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria. Meanwhile, youthful insurgents mounted protests against austerity policies across Europe. In England, groups like UK Uncut targeted austerity policies, which were also the backdrop for the huge street riots in 2011; in Spain, there were the Indignados; in France, the riots by young people from the banlieues; in Greece, anarchist youths mounted continuous street protests against the austerity measures imposed by the Greek government and European financial overlords; and students in Canada, the UK, Chile and elsewhere mobilized campaigns against higher fees and mounting student debts. In Quebec, a large and tenacious student movement even won its main demands.
This worldwide upheaval is also unfolding in the United States. True, there was an interregnum after the Battle of Seattle in 1999, when not much seemed to be happening, even as inequality soared, wages stagnated, and public programs were slashed. Then, in the face of growing anti-immigrant fervor, the immigrants' rights protests erupted, followed by the activism of immigrant youths over the Dream Act. New attacks on public-sector worker rights in states where Republicans made gains in 2010 led to huge and sustained protest rallies in Madison and elsewhere, and in Ohio the attack was beaten back. In Chicago, the teachers union took on Mayor Rahm Emanuel and together with mobilized parents won a contract fight that highlighted not only job security but educational quality. And in recent weeks, small-scale actions by Walmart warehouse and retail workers associated with OUR Walmart have raised hopes for a union breakthrough at the world's retail giant. And of course there is Occupy, the chameleon-like movement that is the master of the spectacle and the message.
In fact, it is spectacles and messages, parades and banners and exultant crowds, that usually come to mind when we think of movements. Those images do indeed convey part of what movements do: they use the drama of the street spectacle to raise issues that political elites paper over and to recruit new adherents to the movement. Sometimes movement drama and spectacle even succeed in dispelling some of the rhetorical fog and complexity that obscure what is actually happening in government.
But the great movements that changed the course of our history accomplished more than spectacle and communication: they actually exercised power. They forced elites to inaugurate reforms that they otherwise would have avoided, as when the writers of the Constitution bent to popular enthusiasm for direct democracy and ceded to voters the right to elect representatives to the lower house, or when the Thirteenth Amendment was passed during the Civil War ending chattel slavery. Or, later in the nineteenth century, when Congress responded to widespread agitation among farmers and workers with legislation to curb monopolies. Or in the 1930s, when the national government finally granted workers the right to organize and inaugurated the first government income-support programs. Or when the Southern apartheid system was struck down in response to the civil rights movement. Or when the antiwar movement helped to force the withdrawal of American forces from Southeast Asia.
None of these reforms were as far-reaching or complete as movement activists had hoped, but neither would any of them have occurred without those movements. So just what is it that movements do that sometimes gives them power, at least so long as the movement is surging?
The Chicago Teachers Union lost an important skirmish with Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year when the state legislature passed Emanuel-backed legislation requiring a 75 percent vote to authorize a strike - a high number seen as a blow for teachers unions in Illinois.
But the attack apparently helped energize and mobilize the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), as a whopping 89 percent of teachers voted on June 11 to authorize a strike come fall (actually late summer) as highly contentious contract negotiations stretch on. Chicago teachers last went on strike in 1987.
Emanuel acknowledged the overwhelming vote but tried to minimize its significance by asking the public and media to focus on other numbers - the increased hours he wants kids in school. Teachers have repeatedly said they are not against a longer school day or school year, but demand appropriate pay raises in return. Emanuel rescinded a contractually obligated 4 percent raise for teachers during his first year in office, and now his administration is proposing a contract with a 2 percent raise while lengthening the work day from seven hours to seven hours and 40 minutes.
Many parents have pushed for a compromise, with more time in school but not as much as Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard are demanding. Critics of the longer day cite oppressive heat in many non-air conditioned buildings, other demands on students' time and the inescapable fact that Chicago schools' problems go much deeper than the number of hours in class.
At five hours and 45 minutes, Chicago students have one of the nation's shortest days. But teachers say the actual amount of instruction in Chicago schools is on par with other schools nationwide. There is no easy fix for the systematic economic and social problems that impact Chicago students, but more resources and smaller class sizes would likely do more than extended days to improve student engagement and performance.
The union says the administration's contract proposal will result in larger class sizes. Jackson Potter blogged on the union website:
Like Republican candidate Mitt Romney, they make the argument that class size doesn't matter...The Board has reserved the right to change class size policy at any time and merely notify the union and it has eliminated any funding of positions to lower class size in the district; the previous contract committed $2.25 million to lower class sizes. These changes will concretely increase our class sizes throughout the district, even though many kindergarten and primary grade classrooms throughout the city have class sizes that approach 50 students in a room.
It turns out that Obama strategist David Axelrod's former public relations firm AKPD Media and Messaging is behind ads attacking the teachers unionThe union blasts the administration's proposal for increasing the focus on standardized test-based student performance in evaluating teachers, including an emphasis on "merit pay." Nationwide, teachers have long complained that evaluating their performance based heavily on standardized testing is unfair to dedicated teachers in under-funded, low-income and immigrant-heavy schools and curbs their ability to teach creatively.
Potter summarizes other reasons the union opposes the administration's proposal: eliminating teachers' ability to bank sick days, increasing health insurance costs and requiring teachers to work 10-hour-days during report card pickup.
In the wake of the strike vote Emanuel also touted the fact that 60.6 percent of Chicago Public Schools students who were freshmen four years ago graduated this year - the highest rate since at least 1999. But the insinuation that this improvement is because of measures pushed by his administration comes off as disingenuous when one considers that these measures have only been rolled out in recent months and not in all schools.
Emanuel said the strike vote does not affect ongoing contract negotiations with the teachers union, but the union has noted that taking the vote several months before they might strike was meant to provide leverage in the negotiations and allow 1,500 retiring teachers to vote. With more than 25,000 unionized teachers, CPS is the third-largest school district in the country and the CTU is the largest member of the American Federation of Teachers.
Emanuel has portrayed teachers as putting their interests before students' well-being, and professed his dedication to Chicago students - framing his battle with the teachers as a fight for opportunity and equality for low-income students. But many parents and students have spoken out in support of teachers, who often already put in many unpaid hours and often spent money out of their own pockets to buy supplies.
There has been much intrigue around efforts to generate community support (or the appearance of it) for the Emanuel administration's reform policies, including revelations last year that politically connected ministers had paid church members to show up at community meetings in support of administration proposals to close so-called failing schools. Around the strike vote, many parents received robocalls attacking the teachers' decision to hold an early strike vote. The calls and other efforts against the teachers have been linked to national astroturf "education reform" groups also active in California and other states where public sector unions have squared off with city and state officials.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Obama strategist David Axelrod's former public relations firm AKPD Media and Messaging is behind ads attacking the teachers union. Long-time progressive school reformer and small schools advocate Mike Klonsky noted in a blog post about this revelation that Emanuel "seems hell-bent on destroying the city's public employee unions." Klonsky also questioned the motivations of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten sharing the podium with Emanuel in support of his massive new infrastructure plan - with a heavy focus on privatization - just weeks after she marched with Chicago teachers calling for a strike vote. (The infrastructure plan's marketing is spearheaded by another of Axelrod's former outfits, ASGK Public Strategies.)
Chicago Sun-Times columnist - and former teacher - Carol Marin noted:
Teachers in this town have been demonized, demoralized, and disrespected. No profession is beyond criticism and no public school system is without significant problems. But taking a sledgehammer approach to CPS teachers and their union has backfired on the Emanuel administration and his schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard. And all the radio ads and robo calls funded by out of town, union-busting billionaires doesn't alter that fact.
While longer days and closing schools are the prominent issues in Emanuel's battle with union teachers, the conflict has much deeper significance in terms of ongoing battles for the future of public employees unions. And while Emanuel and others who figure into the administration's plans are considered far to the left of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the battle promises to continue nearly as polarized and hard-fought. Stay tuned.