Schools as sites of struggle

Two crises in this moment show Trump’s nearly-unchecked power: Brutal deportations of immigrants in Los Angeles and the sudden withdrawal of seven billion dollars in education funding passed by Congress for this coming school year. But when these policies are seen in the totality of Trump’s project, which is simultaneously ideological, political, social, economic, and cultural, they reveal education’s importance as a site of struggle, demonstrating that our location as education workers is uniquely important in building a powerful movement to overturn the Right’s agenda, being fueled by the wealthiest, most powerful elite in this country’s history.

The Moment

The carceral state, with its extensive detention and surveillance,  was started and expanded well before Trump’s recent victory. Yet even for many aware of the development of “Cop City,” seeing ICE and DHS agents in Los Angeles, protected by the local police, conducting deportations, kidnappings, and imprisoning immigrants in detention centers, brutalizing demonstrators who try to stop these actions is a horrifying acceleration and intensification of militarizing the police, endorsed by both parties. LA was the experiment, which Trump has announced he will take to other cities, and we should take him at his word. The massive funding Trump has won from Congress to expand deportations and internments is larger than most nations’ military budgets and is accompanied by expansion of the attack on civil liberties, to include cities’ self-rule. As creation of the internment camp, “Alligator Alcatraz,” in the Everglades and plans to deport more people to other countries show, we cannot count on the courts, lawsuits, or lobbying to stop Trump’s usurpation of the government apparatus to destroy democracy.

The other crisis comes with the Trump administration’s surprise announcement that the federal government is withdrawing seven billion dollars in appropriations approved by Congress for K-12 education,  due to be released on July 1 for this coming school year. Trump’s “strategic chaos” is being used to create havoc in education, throwing school districts into immediate disarray, pushing states to either compensate districts directly for this lost education funding or forcing districts to cover the financial loss themselves. While we might have had time to build broad coalitions to fight for state funding in response to money lost in the omnibus GOP legislation by reaching out to other public employee unions and constituencies that will suffer from the cuts, now education workers, our unions, and parent and community supporters face the extraordinary challenge of wheedling money from the states before school begins. Without this additional funding, most districts will be unable to stave off cuts in services to English language learners, children of migrant farmworkers, and after-school programs. Cuts in services generally translate into layoffs of school personnel, and how that scenario plays out will depend on hastily organized political struggles, appeals to governors and state legislatures, and lawsuits against Trump’s action. As of today, thirty-six states have already filed these suits.

Dismissing Trump, his backers, and his administration as “morons,” “lunatics,” “ignorant incompetents,” which I see often in posts on social media, obscures the purposes of the policies and the ideology driving them. The policies’ aims are certainly evil, but the decisions are politically calculated, carried out by those transparently furthering personal ambitions. Trump and his backers aim to sow fear, insecurity, confusion, and a sense of powerlessness, as do terrorists. The intent to create chaos in the schools to further the Right’s project of destroying social, political, and economic gains won since Reconstruction is clearly seen in Oklahoma, by two mandates issued by the state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, one right after the other. Overturning decades-long certification agreements among the states, Walter’s, a Trumpster with an appetite for power unrestrained by law or even GOP norms, announced Oklahoma will withhold certificates for teachers from “woke” states who do not pass a new ideology test developed by PragerU, which measures whether they are patriots. And in response to cuts in federal aid to schools for students’ meals, he ordered districts to submit new budgets to pay for all students’ school meals immediately. Though Walters’ mandate on districts’ funding meals was dismissed by the chair of the Oklahoma House Education Committee as unenforceable and unconstitutional, Walters’ argument repeated rhetoric and arguments Trump/Musk used in firing federal workers. Walters argued education funds “need to go from administrators and bureaucrats’ pockets to school lunches…We have got to get away from growing government, growing bureaucracy, growing administrators….We need less administrators and more of the taxpayer dollars to go to kids directly.” Walters’  actions are intended to make education workers feel isolated and defeated. He may have succeeded for now, but his crude pummeling of school administrators and school boards has the potential to create the kind of support that education workers tapped into during the Red State walkouts, so it’s worth noting that the chair of the House Education Committee, who called out Walters’ action, is a former teacher.

When we examine these crises, such as the one manufactured by Walters, as authoritarian strategy, they reveal the centrality of schools as sites of struggle in this moment and what education workers and our unions can do. Trump and his billionaire backers care very much about what occurs in schools. The Trump administration has not disclosed reasons for the timing of the ICE raids, but we do know the raids began at the very end of the school year, with just two days of instruction left in the calendar. We also know public schools have been central to the life of the Hispanic community in LA, and members of the LA teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), are widely known to be committed to protecting immigrant students and their families. For instance, UTLA won provisions about immigrant rights in their contract and protected students when ICE agents came to schools in the Spring. LA high school students have a long, proud history of organizing walkouts to protect their communities, including walkouts against deportations in February and forming a grassroots organization, Students Deserve, which has won significant reforms to defund policing in schools. Students Deserve has continued the struggles of Black Lives Matter, with support from UTLA in alliance with community organizations. While this background is not conclusive evidence that the timing of the raids was deliberate to avoid schools being used as staging areas for resistance, the information does demonstrate that public schools can be strategic sites for building resistance in the greater society.

Really? Education workers are a threat to Trump?

Why would education workers, taken as a group, from kindergarten teachers, to grad students,  from school bus drivers and classroom aides to full-time higher ed faculty, be of particular concern to Silicon Valley billionaires, asset managers that control Wall Street, and huge corporations like Walmart?

The ideas we hold as individuals can pose a serious challenge to the status quo, which is why universities are being attacked and curricula purged of anything suggesting ideas the Right wants suppressed. But in addition, acting collectively as workers, we are a danger, for reasons Erin explains in her first article for The Future of Our Schools Collective.  What many in education miss, a strength our unions have declined to tap, is that the combination of education’s function in our social system and the unique power workers possess when they organize and fight together, especially when they tap the power a militant, democratic union provides, makes us unique occupationally. Shared occupational interests can unite us if we see beyond geography and institutional silos. Work in the education sector gives us social connections and political power that workers in other sectors can’t tap so readily, though their position in the productive economy can give them power we lack.

Education’s role is ensuring a society secures its future. Education reproduces (or changes) its essential functions. Though teachers generally make sense of that responsibility in individual terms, helping students to learn, grow socially, and master disciplinary knowledge, our work is part of a far greater picture. K-12 teaching’s day-to-day work, accomplished in classrooms and schools that were, by design, insular, isolated from one another and separated from communities, often obscures that big picture from us. But those wielding concentrated power and wealth over our lives and those they employ to orchestrate public opinion and set policy think a lot about maintaining their position, expanding their power and money, and hence what schools can and should do to make that occur. Reforms they successfully impose on us reflect how they want society to look, just as our struggles to use teaching and schooling’s organization to create a more just, equal society contest their vision and plans. Often, when teachers organize to demand adequate preparation time, smaller classes, libraries in schools, and pay and pensions that allow us to make teaching a career, we’re not thinking about the ways the improvements we want in schools relate to the big political, economic, and social picture. But be assured, our enemies see it all. Still, what occurs in classrooms is not the only, nor arguably the most influential, site in which learning occurs. We’re flooded with information from social media and influencers. The cultural apparatus educates, but social movements do as well, exposing cultural and ideological assumptions.

The other site of education occurs at work, which, whether we like it or not,  is configured by conflict between workers and those who control our labor. That’s why workers form unions, which is another reason education workers are a threat.  What happens in “government schools,” as the far-right labels public education, what we teach and how, matters to powerful elites because we socialize and educate the workforce; we make their profits possible. Though this topic is one I can’t give the attention it merits in this article, education’s role in addressing economic contradictions and changes in working conditions is a significant factor now and relates to new reforms being pushed to vocationalize K-12 schools with an emphasis on information technology and work with AI.

A final factor that has motivated education reform and driven attacks on education workers organized collectively is that education remains the last and largest public service that has not yet been privatized. It is a massive source of profit, now more than ever, because of the money expected to be made in AI. Huge profits beckon investors in Trump’s plan to destroy public education as a system and completely privatize it-  as does the new neoliberal project, which is gaining popularity in both parties. The refurbished version of the neoliberal project will fund a system of public education looted internally, with technology.

In fact, this new neoliberal project has morphed from the old.  A blog in February 2020 proudly explained that the Progressive Policy Institute (which has ties to the Democratic Party, through its Center for American Politics), had formally sponsored a group called “The Neoliberal Project” since 2017. Colin Mortimer describes this in “A New Chapter: the Neoliberal Project Joins PPI.” Feb. 10, 2020.  Shortly after it was created, the Neoliberal Project boasted that it had 40 chapters around the world, a podcast listened to over 300,000 times, and a social media reach of over 15 million impressions a month. Will Marshall, PPI’s president, took to Reddit to explain The Neoliberal Project to this new audience.

This is a brutal time for education workers, and it’s understandable they may not feel the idea of potential power is a help when they’re facing vicious attacks on their integrity, ideals, and their jobs. With the exception of Chloe Asselin’s interview with the newly-elected reform president of the Washington DC local, long a bulwark of the national AFT machine, the other pieces the collective has published in our first month, based on observations and discussions with activists, suggest the power education workers might claim is far from what people in schools are thinking and feeling now.  Some are seeking relationships and community to sustain us while questioning long-held assumptions, but not coming up with answers.

The ferocious legislative and political attacks about what we teach and how, as well as the conditions of our labor, are felt most directly by education workers in school districts and states with a well-organized, aggressive Right wing. This sense of being embattled and isolated is prevalent in the South, especially outside of large cities, although education workers in communities under siege by right-wing activists in liberal states and communities can feel it too. While we need to acknowledge and respect these feelings, doing so doesn’t change the challenge:  Protecting democracy and expanding it requires that we carve out space for struggle, even when we question how to win the big battles.

Carving out and expanding space(s)

I suggest we flip the question from whether we can succeed to how we move towards creating and carving out spaces in which activists can imagine struggle in ways that encourage solidarity among education workers, supporting and protecting one another from victimization. It’s a process that needs to occur in schools, though it need not start there.

As food for thought, I’ll share an experience I had before Trump’s election, when I spoke about union democracy at a conference of the Oregon Education Association. I led a workshop intended to help members who were or wanted to be active in the union identify and use their power as rank-and-file workers in their schools, aided by staff when specific help was requested. Most participants taught in rural communities or small towns. We know from research in teacher education that unspoken cultural assumptions can configure how we deal with students, and in my experience working with union activists, this extends to the way we relate to authority as well–administration and school boards. Education workers, especially women (over 70% of teachers are women), especially those working with younger students, often feel they must be “nice” when they face conditions that undercut their work. As the entire workshop analyzed ideas shared by small groups, we saw some reflected reluctance to seem critical, negative, confront authority, or rock the boat. Participants discussed the complex ways we resist and accommodate policies we think are wrong and agreed (it seemed–we took no votes) that at times, to protect our students and the dignity of our labor, we must move from “nice” to another mode.

I suggested “naughty,” pushing the envelope on school practices and behavioral norms.  More seasoned activists cautioned that this has to be done in ways that keep individuals from being singled out and harmed. An energy filled the room as we discussed this mindset change, and although I do not know what follow-up occurred when they returned to their schools, when the workshop ended for a break before the next sessions began, several workshop participants decided they wouldn’t wait in the very long line for the women’s bathroom, claiming the right to use the empty men’s bathroom, laughing about being “naughty.”This anecdote suggests that what often appears to be spontaneous is often a result of a new idea. Building confidence and solidarity depends on more than attitudes. Knowledge counts too.

Another source of power for education workers in this country, from the most militant urban locals in “blue” states to the smallest communities in states dominated by the Right, is what we can learn from the “Red State” walkouts, curiously ignored by the media, the left, and our national unions. For complex reasons, including the fact that education involves social reproduction, that we do “care” work, as well as cultural and knowledge work, rather than manufacturing cars or delivering packages or lattes, many don’t see teachers as “real” workers. Yet we have blazed trails that contain vital lessons in building a resistance to Trump.

Just seven years ago, education workers led the  2018 “Red State Revolt,” a struggle that labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein discusses as one of four instances in which unions transformed themselves into “popular and consequential social movements” in his forthcoming book Why Unions Matter. In these historic walkouts,  “tens of thousands of public-school teachers conducted a set of entirely illegal strikes in GOP-dominated West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and other conservative states.” While the four examples differ in many respects, they shared “something far more transcendent” than being a labor struggle, a term, a way of thinking, Red State participants themselves may not have used to characterize their struggle. Regardless of their conception of what they were doing and why, their actions spoke for them. They launched a vast social movement, developing and bringing with them new allies–a movement in the most conservative regions of this country aided by radical ideas and activists. The movement, our movement of education workers, challenged repressive political authority directly, demanding democracy, creating a moment in history “when these social movements are at flood tide” and  “multitudes of ordinary men and women glimpse a world transformed.”

While I intend this to inspire, I am not proposing that the “Red State” walkouts are a template for organizing education workers at this moment because I do not think there is a single model or blueprint. What we do have are examples from which we can learn. The walkouts demonstrated our potential power, how a labor struggle can become a social movement, and how a struggle in one place can spark similar battles elsewhere, even when not coordinated. What’s to be learned from the walkouts?

Imagine how militant national unions could support education workers coming under the most severe attacks in states controlled by the GOP and also educate and help mobilize members in Democratic states about the destructive policies being hatched now for them? Imagine if our national unions helped coordinate actions for a national walkout, in alliance with social justice activists and community organizations? Imagine if they,  or we, coordinated a national day of protest, not a “Saturday march,” but a one-day national strike?

NEA and AFT have made important shifts in their rhetoric and appear more hospitable to members mobilizing. Still, they shirk from providing the leadership we need, in part because mobilizing members, supporting them to think and act independently, having a robust democratic culture and organizational practices that support it, creates challenges to their power and ideas about what’s best. So, how might we put pressure on the national unions to lead as they should? I’ll address that challenge in another article, but for now, let me propose that we be naughty.

I’ve heard arguments from teacher union activists that now is not a time to criticize the national unions. Instead, we need a “united front.” However, AFT’s deal with OpenAI and Microsoft to push AI in classrooms is a glaring example of how their strategy disarms us, forcing us to struggle defensively, in locals or maybe states, against harm being done on the national level, by our own unions, supported by our dues.

Some also contend we should not organize along “sectoral lines,” that is, as education workers per se. This strategy not only ignores the harm done to all of labor by AFT’s stunning alliance with tech moguls who support Trump, but it also misses what education workers bring to the critical task of organizing the South. We have won the most important battles not because we have followed the wishes of the national unions but because we have set out an independent path, fighting for democratic unions that integrate social justice ideals and ideas into our organizing, fighting the powerful elites rather than trying to accommodate them.

I’ve been concerned about how much discussion about labor’s future in general and teachers’ unions in particular focuses on the more liberal political environments in which collective bargaining is (still) legal. The focus has encouraged people to miss an important victory that followed the aftermath of the West Virginia walkouts. Education workers organized “wall to wall” in a struggle that brought radical activists, union members, and education workers who belonged to neither AFT nor NEA affiliates, together in a social movement supported by communities and often local school administration, throughout the state. They created the conditions and pressure for ” a merger-from-below” in which both the AFT and NEA state affiliates combined in one state union of education workers.

Education workers in West Virginia are now unified organizationally, not just wall-to-wall in their own districts but throughout the state. What occurred in West Virginia is a sharp contrast to bureaucratic fusion of the NEA affiliate in New York and the New York City AFT machine, which produced  New York State United Teachers. This West Virginia experience suggests that rank-and-file members of AFT and NEA in all the states that have separate state affiliates might consider their own “merger-from-below,” demanding a single, democratic organization to represent education workers in the state. Do we really have resources for the rivalries between separate state affiliates?

The third accomplishment of education workers in the South, in North Carolina, a “purple” state,  that provides ideas as well as hope for U.S. education workers, is Organize2020, a caucus that intended to democratize its sclerotic, bureaucratic NEA state affiliate, NCAE, North Carolina Association of Educators by building a grass roots movement of education workers committed to racial justice. The caucus started out as a small group of people meeting in someone’s kitchen and grew its network based on its vision, organizing in the locals in the “Triangle” as well as rural areas. Their goal was to win leadership in a revitalized union by 2020, which they did. It has changed the culture and organizational practices of the state organization, reflected in its Summer Member Organizer program. Organize2020 has grown the program from 45 members in 5 counties when they took office to 150 members in 45 counties, with more than two dozen members playing lead roles. Before writing this article, I talked with one of the first Organize2020 members, who is the current NCAE president, about the vision guiding their work. I was struck by how his brief answer captured Nelson Lichtenstein’s more expansive description of what unions can and should do:

Trade unions advance democracy, nowhere more clearly than in those times and places where an oligarchic or authoritarian government holds sway. To do so, however, the unions have to transcend themselves. They move from being organizations that represent just a well-defined sector of the working-class to social movements that engender a vast new set of energies and aspirations. They open political and moral opportunities never before thought possible for ordinary men and women.  And that is a large part of the reason that when dictators and reactionaries come to power, in the United States as well as distant lands, they invariably attack the unions, either by destroying them outright or transforming these organizations into but an apparatus of the state.1Op. Cit. Chapter V, “Subverting the Union Impulse.”

The largest union in this country is the NEA, with about three million members. The AFT has 1.8 million members. Our numbers, education’s location in the society, our existence in almost every community in this country, and the conditions of our work, in particular our relationships with parents and students, make us uniquely situated to claim our power in fighting the billionaires who aim to destroy our livelihood and the role of schools in improving our society. To do that, we have to recognize our power, take ownership of the unions,  and think of new possibilities, going beyond lobbying, lawsuits, webinars in which we’re given information,  using the contract but going beyond contract unionism. Details?  In future articles, I’ll explore what those possibilities might be. In the meantime, solidarity!