Public education under attack

“A people without knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” — Marcus Garvey

“What an educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” — Paulo Freire

Public education in America is under attack. This is not a new development in the American education system, but one that has escalated in recent years, and now, with the advent of the second Trump administration, has become an assault that has emerged from a multitude of different sources all at once—a coordinated “shock and awe” campaign. This strategy aims to disorient and disarm educators, parents and advocates, too confused and exhausted to fight back, in order to ruthlessly chip away at America’s public education system piece by piece.

As a New York City public school teacher, I have been closely following what effect this attack has had on educators, students and learning across the country. I have thought a lot about educators outside my home state, and wondered about their experiences teaching in Trump’s America. In this article, I will lay out tactics of the opponents of America’s public schools and share the experiences of four educators living and working in different states where the onslaught has been intense. I asked these educators—in Oklahoma, Kansas, Florida, and Iowa—how the recent changes in public education policy has affected them and their students, how they have coped through budget cuts and the curbing of free speech, and what they want educators in other states to know about what is occurring where they are.

It’s not new to find teachers on the front line of struggles in education. It’s long been taken for granted that educators are undercompensated for the multitude of roles beside teaching that they are required to play on a daily basis. It’s expected that educators be fully present as they witness the pain and trauma that emerges from students as they navigate the endless societal ills that affect their ability to learn. Teachers need to be active members of their unions (if they have one) to fight the unfair and even dangerous working conditions that are faced every day as they enter a school building. Teachers also act as scaffolds for their colleagues, to support one another through the emotional and physical drain that has become par for the course in the profession. The constantly revolving duties of administrator, librarian, legal expert, advocate, counselor, social worker, and parent at times takes precedence over the teaching. Chronically underfunded schools do not have the resources to fulfill these needs, but the needs must be met. So, in the end, teachers must step in, or else learning would not be possible.

What we have been facing

For thirty years, the neoliberal education reform project has brought together corporations and private donors to chip away at the egalitarian potential of America’s public schools. “Education reform” of this type has been presented to parents and lawmakers as a guarantee of better outcomes for public school students, a boost to the economy, as well as providing a “high quality” free education to low income families in communities where educational choices are limited. The reality of this educational reform is quite different: Reliant on high-stakes testing, standardized curricula, and plagued by high turnover of teachers and the weakening of teachers’ unions, public schools in the United States have been left increasingly segregated and inequitable, especially in communities of color.

Are we asking for too much from our public education system? After all, the idea of an equitable public education under capitalism is a myth. Schools were developed to produce workers, not critical thinkers. From the day they enter kindergarten, until they leave the school system, students are pressured to perform in order to pave a way to economic success; since the pressure comes from schools, parents and society in general, this way of teaching and learning seems to be a consensus. Public school is merely preparing students to live in “the real world,” in other words, teaching students to conform and fall in line with the accepted capitalist values of the establishment.

This is in direct contradiction with the reason teachers become teachers in the first place, what the neoliberals unironically call your why. Most teachers I know understand and revere the value of a public education as a stronghold in the fight to develop critical thinkers. When I look out at my students in the classroom, I don’t see students as potential workers or unquestioning cogs in the machine. I see the potential of students to grow into adults who can question authority and evaluate what they think for themselves.

As a NYC public school teacher, I understand that my experience in the classroom might be different than other educators around the country, especially those who may be teaching in so-called “red states” where right-wing education reform has been doing the most damage to public schools. I was curious to know how teachers in these places were coping with restrictions on free speech, the diminishing of civil rights, and the vilification of teachers. To this end, I spoke with four educators located in Oklahoma, Kansas, Florida and Iowa.

• Sandra Valentine is an Oklahoma educator with 15 years of teaching experience. She currently teaches third grade in a private school where the majority of students have a disability. She has witnessed the attack on that state’s schools and educators up close when she took on Oklahoma’s schools’ Superintendent Ryan Walters, a union-busting, rightwing, Christian Nationalist.
• Emily has taught high school English for 12 years in a rural suburban district just outside Des Moines. During the pandemic, she saw challenges by Moms For Liberty to equity standards developed through a humanities program in her district. Since 2021, she has been teaching under House File 802, a law which prohibits educators in K-12 schools or institutions of higher education from teaching, advocating, or promoting specific concepts regarding sexism and racism.
• Michael Rebne teaches physics in a high school in Kansas City. His urban school district is chronically underfunded, and most teachers have overcrowded classes. About 70 percent of his students are Latinx. Although some educators at his school fear speaking out, they have been able to develop a large, pro-immigrant contingent of staff who are organizing in defense of their students and colleagues.
• Hanna has taught social studies to middle and high school students for the last three years in a small public magnet school in downtown Miami. She has witnessed the recent approval by state legislators of new academic standards requiring the teaching of “the consequences of communism” in schools.

What is happening now

The attempt to destabilize and disinvest from K-12 public schools has also been an ongoing project of the far right and white Christian nationalists for decades. In the most recent years, organizations such as Moms For Liberty and Defending Education have campaigned across the country against inclusion and equity in schools. Employing tactics from legal challenges to blatant harassment of teachers and other education professionals, they have fought to censor curriculum and ban books. In addition, these organizations have created an atmosphere in which trans and gender non-comforming students are vilified and treated as outcasts in schools, influencing the introduction of at least one thousand anti-trans bills introduced across the country in 2025.

Religion has taken a front seat in the curriculum in conservative states. Texas and Oklahoma have injected civics, history and science with parables and stories from the Bible, with the rationale that the Bible is a central text to the understanding of these subjects. In June 2024, Louisiana lawmakers passed House Bill 71 which mandated schools to post a prominent display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Although the law was to be implemented on January 1, 2025, federal courts have blocked its enforcement, ruling it unconstitutional. This, in combination with state-level laws that have been passed since 2023 aimed to restrict DEI programs, has forced educational policy in these states to narrow its scope to a white, Christian narrative, alienating students of color, those who practice other religions, and those who are LGBTQ+. Although these cases have faced legal challenges, these examples are only a small fraction of the unending stream of violations of the principle of separation of church and state. On Easter Sunday of 2025, Trump promised to make the United States “more religious” than ever before.

Sandra Valentine was appalled at the extent of religious indoctrination in Oklahoma curriculum. “So every six years, we revise our standards in a different subject. Ryan Walters did implement new social study standards. I was actually on the case to sue him over those social studies standards. And the Oklahoma Supreme Court, they didn’t decide, but they did put those standards on pause. So, they’re not implemented this year. They were supposed to start this year, but there were (in the curriculum) more than sixty, seventy stories—Biblical Christian stories in there. Things that I didn’t want my child exposed to.”

“If you were a junior, you would take a U.S. civics exam and half of it was going to be based on his version of Christianity. And the other half was going to be on civics. But again, I mean, it was his version of Christianity. So starting in pre-K, we were going to teach kids that they do not … I don’t remember the exact wording, but it’s like, “you do not question authority.” So we’re starting in pre-K teaching that, you know, authority is authority, and you do not question authority. You do not question that the person in charge is the person in charge. And then in first grade, we started with the Ten Commandments and Moses. So and then it just went from there. Biblical story after Biblical story. Oh, yeah, there’s a lot to take in.”

As a high school English teacher, Emily has had to wrestle with how to respond to banned book legislation. “I would say it really started in the legislative season in Iowa where House File 802 was passed into law. This was one that banned ‘divisive concepts.’ This impacted the work I was doing because I was on my district’s equity committee. So we had just crafted equity standards based on Teaching Tolerance. Based on their social justice standards, we adapted them to fit what we needed. And because we’d done that work, Moms for Liberty was pretty active in our school board meetings already against us and against that. Where the interpretation of the law landed was that history and social studies teachers were protected. They could talk about racism and sexism because it was part of their curriculum, but just because they’re protected doesn’t mean they are. This is when I first became really aware of silent censorship. As an English teacher, I have just disregarded that because I’m not going to teach dishonestly and I’m not going to consciously choose to avoid texts because of that (law).”

“That’s when I learned I had to become a legal expert as a teacher. I worked with our equity director and our lawyer and learned how to read laws. I started to see other things coming down the pipeline. They took away common core standards, which was a super quiet thing. But by this point, I noticed, oh, that’s so they can write the standards for us, which is where we’re at now, a few years later. We recently had some state science standards redone and they force the creation theory to be taught, you have to use that theory when you teach evolution. The science instructional coach in my building was on the committee for those standards and when they came out and they were not the version the educators supported, she ended up leaving education. She went to open a yoga studio. She was done.”

“Then at my level at the HS was some book-banning language. So it was very descriptive to the point where the irony of it was, I couldn’t legally have my students read the law because it would violate the law. So the law was saying any book that has anything and then listed (sex acts), and the law would literally list them. Kids can’t have access to that.”

“We know that [banning books] is going to target stories of survival, stories of identity, even stories of war. I remember sitting in a staff meeting with our curriculum director, where she was talking about this law (House File 802). I went into this meeting, trusting her to make it make sense in a way that we could live with. That all the equity work had been done. The first thing she told us to do is to put aside our feelings, to leave our emotions out of it. And then she said, ‘we abide by the law,’ and that was sort of her thing. It was disorienting to say the least. Immediately I thought of fascism. And again, I don’t even think that was really the word being widely used at that point, a couple of years ago. As a person, as a human, I understand that there’s always an option C. You don’t have to just abide by the law without question.”

In Miami, curriculum censorship recently has had a very specific focus. “I moved down to Miami from Michigan right when the new ‘don’t say gay’ and ‘stop woke’ policies were being put into place,” said Hanna, “and also right when the controversy over the new African American history state standards in Florida was just starting to emerge. Now there’s a new set of fairly alarming state standards surrounding how we’re supposed to teach the history of communism. We have a huge Cuban diaspora population that tends to be very very stridently anti-communist. Which unfortunately for me as an active member of my teacher’s union, means there’s a lot of anti-union sentiment. But in this case, we have a bit of a kind of convergence of interests between politicians up in Tallahassee like Ron DeSantis, and his allies who are able to pander to the Cuban diaspora and put these anti-communist standards into place. What happens is this new set of standards says basically that we’re supposed to stop talking about McCarthyism like it’s such a bad thing.

“As in the case of African American history standards as in these new anti-communist standards, we were very very worried early on that it would be rigorously enforced. Then it became clear that it really depends on where you’re teaching and who you’re teaching. Ultimately, it’s teacher self-censorship that is the really big problem. I think you know if you’re in an especially rural white community, there was probably already a fair amount of backlash to truthful teaching about African American and Queer history. This is an open question how much things have really changed on a day-to-day basis. I know a lot of administrators have preemptively applied the restrictions, you know, they’ll come around and say hey, you know those flags that say like “in this house we believe in…”; if someone has one of those, [they will be] told to take that down. That’s the kind of thing where it depends on how much personal power you have in your particular context and whether you can kind of stand up to that.

“Administrators will have very limited information about what the real rules are. They’ll have some vague sense of there being a banned book list, which actually isn’t the case. I mean book challenges are on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis, obviously. But you know, you’ll have administrators come in and say, “No, that’s on the banned list and teachers have to know enough to say, “Actually, there isn’t a banned book list. I think it’s been very very tricky trying to understand exactly what the hard limits are as they evolve on what we can teach. I’ve been hearing that across the board everywhere. There’s no specific guidance. [They are] working on people’s fear that they might be breaking an unknown rule. It depends on how much power you have within your school? That’s why I think the most important thing is to establish networks of communication and support between teachers, so that if someone, especially a younger teacher is told you can’t say that or you can’t display your pride flag, and they feel very understandable panic, we will need to be able to talk to each other, share strategies and moral support.”

Project 2025, revealed during the 2024 election campaign, is the blueprint to the continued destruction of public education in the United States. The nine-hundred-page document revealed a plan set on dismantling the Federal Department of Education, stripping the most vulnerable students of their civil rights, eliminating protections for LGBTQ+ students, the acceleration of curricula censorship, and the federalization of the school voucher program.

From the day of his inauguration, Trump made good on his promises, beginning with naming former professional wrestling exec Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. Her lack of experience in the education sphere seems deliberate, since her sole objective is to oversee the dismantling of the federal Department of Education. Over the last year, the strategy for the elimination of the Department has become clear: the offloading of essential programs to other departments, such as Health and Human Services; slashing the federal budget for education, cuts and restrictions of Title I funding, and the right-wing overhaul of the Department’s Office of Civil Rights. Trump has weaponized federal school funding by threatening states that fight back against his right-wing agenda. States that refuse to comply with the government’s anti-trans, anti-DEI policies are told they will lose millions in federal dollars, an effect that hits already underfunded schools particularly hard.

“Well, definitely everybody’s scared right now with the closure of the Federal Department of Education,” said Sandra. “Especially for our students with disabilities. Oklahoma is not a state that takes care of its students anyway, much less our students with disabilities. So I would go to the state school board meetings where Ryan Walters was our state superintendent, and even over the last… a little more than a year and a half, his supporters were telling us things like, students with disabilities shouldn’t be in the classroom. They should be like the way it used to be and just kind of hidden away or they’re too expensive to take care of. They don’t belong in the classroom. They’re too much of a distraction, all of that stuff. And that was before Trump was even our president. So we knew coming down the pipeline that that’s where probably Ryan Walters was headed. And so now it’s even scarier that the Department of Education is almost completely gone.”

Voucher programs that divert public money into private schools benefit the wealthy, increase segregation and defund public education. Although some parents and state legislators argue that school choice is a civil right of all Americans, and claim that vouchers give more parents control over where their child attends school and what they learn, studies show that voucher programs often exclude the most marginalized students—those living in poverty, students of color and students with disabilities. In rural areas, private schools are too far away for students to take advantage of vouchers. For those parents, “school choice” becomes no choice at all. The diversion of money from rural public schools depletes resources, and as a result, leaves districts in crisis. With less teachers, less counselors, less materials, and no other choices in remote areas, students suffer. In urban areas, public schools can’t compete with the abundance of resources that are afforded to charter and private schools through the voucher program.

“A list of schools, basically a hit list of schools in Miami that are being targeted for co-location, was just released. I think there’s about ninety of them. Most of them are affiliated with the big corporate management companies like Academica. I was recently on a zoom with parents from New York who were telling us about what their experience has been with co-location and that it’s horrible, but that conversation has been just so incredibly important to me as I try to figure out how to how to organize around this issue and and how teachers and families can can fight back. They were telling us what the real effects of that program were, the things that are masked by the “how could you be against innovation?” kind of discourse. The stuff that they were telling us is so disturbing and it really makes me realize how much we all need to fight for public education, period.

“We have universal vouchers in Florida,” Hanna explained. “We have an incredibly aggressive state government that backs the expansion of charter schools. We have incredibly aggressive union busting measures coming from our state legislature.”

“The school voucher thing has been the big pushing on privatization here in Kansas,” explained Michael. “It comes up every year. Fortunately, our governor is Democrat enough to veto it every time that it comes up and then they’re not able to muster enough votes to override it. But the school voucher thing is huge. Then the way they try to frame it as ‘scholarships’ for neediest kids. It’s interesting the way that all of these really cruel methods and policies are painted as ‘justice’ and ‘help’ for the neediest students. I feel like that’s something that we really see a lot of.”

The false narrative around voucher programs includes lies that the failure of public education is to be blamed directly on schools and teachers themselves. But given the odds after years of sustained attacks and disinvestment, it’s clear that schools don’t have a fighting chance. Attention has been focused only on failing schools, and not on the underhanded and pervasive strategies that corporate entities, right-wing groups and legislatures have utilized to eliminate any chance for public education to succeed. In this climate, of course it would be easy for people to believe that it is indoctrinating teachers and “woke” curriculum that is causing the decay of public schools, but it’s just another lie sold to Americans in support of the government’s cruel austerity policies.

The mass mobilization of ICE in urban communities has also taken its toll on schools. In January of 2025, DHS issued a directive that removed restrictions that prevented ICE from conducting raids on “sensitive locations” such as schools, places of worship and hospitals. In Miami, Hanna has seen a direct correlation between this directive and school enrollment. “The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and unleashing of ICE into our schools and communities has had the effect, directly and indirectly, of a massive enrollment drop in my school district of about 14,000 kids,” she explained. “We didn’t realize we would have this until the school year had already started, so we’re in the middle of a budget crisis that is impacting contract negotiations, and also just making people very concerned about the families that we serve.”

“In the beginning it was uncertain whether ICE would be at our door at any given moment. The kids were just really scared about what that would mean and what that might mean for their families. We are a city with a very, very high immigrant population. A lot of families who were, until recently, protected by the TPS program, so I think that some of the fear has started to just be normalized. [Note: Temporary Protected Status (TPS) offers temporary work authorization and deportation protections for individuals in the U.S. who cannot safely return to their home countries due to armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary circumstances.] You know it’s not something that the kids talk about as much anymore, but they are very concerned. We hear all the time about families that are being affected or kids who are going to have to leave. You know, we hear from kids who have worked so incredibly hard to get to a point where they can go to a really good college and then, just not know if they’ll actually be able to stay in the country.”

Michael Rebne in Kansas City has had a similar experience. “I know at least half of the students at my school speak a language other than English at home. So we have a significant number of immigrants. We have a number of undocumented, mixed status households. And so they’re obviously feeling the stress of this ramped up ICE raids and concern about who they’re after. Our social workers definitely report that a number of kids are really hurt, feeling hurt because their parents have been recently deported. That’s something that we feel every day. I don’t have a report or data that anybody has given me, of course. As far as the district goes, but I know our attendance has been down since Trump’s election.”

Disrespect for the teaching profession is yet another method by which the government is undermining public education. Teachers in the United States (who are predominantly women) work for lower pay than other professionals that are similarly educated. To add insult to injury, the Federal Government recently reclassified jobs that are considered “professional,” and teachers are not on the list. Educator preparation programs already require licensure, advanced coursework, and graduate-level study. Deprofessionalizing educators will restrict the amount of federal loans students receive, making schooling for teaching candidates unaffordable and unsustainable.

Disrespect for teachers also comes from states and school districts. Three years ago, Sandra made the decision to leave her public school to teach in private school after Walters called the teachers’ union a “terrorist organization” during his testimony to the House Appropriations and Budget Committee in 2023.

“He’s actually the reason why I went to private school, because the day that he showcased the video calling us terrorists at a state school board meeting, my daughter was with me. She was 12 at the time… And my 12-year-old daughter, that was a hard ride home. Her asking me, ‘Why is he calling you a terrorist? I know you’re not a terrorist. What is the comparison here between you being a teacher and him accusing you of being a terrorist?’ So that was really rough. And so that day, I called my superintendent and I said, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to go after Ryan Walters.”

Valentine is not the only Oklahoma teacher who has decided to leave the public school classroom. The disrespect for educators is causing droves of licensed teachers to abandon public education.

“We have more than 30,000 teachers who hold a valid Oklahoma teacher license but are not in the classroom. Yeah, they refuse to be in the classroom right now. And then we have over 5000 emergency certified teachers who do not have the qualifications to be traditionally certified, but are teaching our kids. So, along with that, we have what we call ‘adjuncts.’ So you could actually be 18 years old and be in a classroom right now.”

Valentine points out that the lack of respect is accompanied by a lack of a livable wage. “Yeah, it’s just no respect for teachers. And then the pay itself is horrible. I mean, you make like $40,000. I’ve been teaching for 15 years and I make $48,000. So it’s not much more. And then you max out at 25. So if you work more than 25 years, you’re getting the exact same pay. I mean, you can go anywhere else and make more money.”

Michael Rebne: “Oh yeah. We have a huge turnover in the district. I’m trying to think about the numbers. I mean, I would say we’re probably one of the lower numbers for high school. I would say that we probably turn over 30 percent of our staff regularly on a yearly basis. We had a teacher leave in the middle of the year last year because she was caught in a traffic jam. In the middle of a fight. Which I see is obviously a safety issue, but also the lack of appropriate responses, for safety and to community violence. She felt traumatized and she was physically injured as well. She got hit in the head and the district wasn’t responsive to, you know, what had happened to her. And yeah. I mean, when kids are in crisis, the schools are going to be less safe. So, I’ve seen that many times and it seems like it’s just a natural progression.”

What do these educators want people to know about what’s happening in their state? For Sandra, it was very simple. “Everything that Project 2025 is about, we were the template for,” she said, referring to Oklahoma. “So whatever you’re seeing on a national level, we have been through. As soon as Ryan Walters started, I mean, he did the exact same thing (as Trump). Fired a whole bunch of people. Did a hiring freeze. Just (kept) loyalists. I mean, he had people sign contracts saying that they were going to be loyal to him. And if you left, you had to sign an NDA. So everything that Trump did, he (Walters) already did to us three years ago.”

Hanna expressed the need for teachers to be connected to one another. “Teachers in red states need support from people all over the country, just because it can feel very isolating,” Hanna said. “We can feel isolated in our own schools and school districts because it’s really hard to say how any particular new law or policy is going to be enforced in your immediate context. But I think communicating with people all over the country in red states and blue states is really important because it gives us energy and hope for the future. Just to be a little bit cliché, but it’s true.”

This is an ongoing endeavor to speak with educators across the country to record and share their experiences in teaching today. If you are an educator interested in participating in this project and would like to be interviewed, please drop me a note at editors@tempestmag.org.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Marie; modified by Tempest.