The Future of Our Schools Collective: Why Us, Why Now?

Issue #1

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Future of Our Schools Collective. This newsletter written by activist scholars who are also longtime education workers in PreK-12 and higher education uses a critical lens to advance research-informed and up-to-date analyses of attacks on public education. Our aim is to make ours a truly just, equal, democratic society, with public schools that help all of our students reach their full human potential.

We are a group of five–Chloe Asselin, Keith Eric Benson, Erin Dyke, Leah Z. Owens, and Lois Weiner. We draw the name of our Collective newsletter from Lois’s 2012 book, The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice (Haymarket Books).

Rotating authors will pen the newsletter’s weekly issue, applying our diverse perspectives and knowledge to highlight education worker and social justice issues at this present time. What follows is the voice of each co-author describing what they bring to the newsletter.

Chloe Asselin: As a 1st grade public school teacher in DC and active in my teacher union’s social justice caucus, DC-CORE, I will write about my experiences with caucus organizing and with the daily challenges teachers are facing. Even though research has showed the negative effects of standardized tests driving curriculum and teaching, standardized tests being linked to teacher evaluation systems, loose rules for charter schools that allow the pushing out of students, anti-strike laws, and different curriculums and expectations based on zip codes, these are all still very prevalent in public schools. Frustrated teachers try to use their unions to better their working conditions, but building a strong, active, engaged membership is a struggle for many teacher unions and their caucuses. I will be using critical traditions based in gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality to reflect on organizing in the classroom and in the caucus.

Keith Eric Benson: For the better part of two decades, education, as a discipline and practice, has been under attack by both corporate interests and ideologues. And, in the midst of such, educators are trying to perform the transformational work of imparting education onto younger generations so that they may be able to shape the world they’ll soon inherit. How we meet this moment, and the attacks on our profession, warrants inquiry and reflection followed by a practice guided by both. As a former teacher union leader and current practicing urban educator, much of what I intend to contribute for our Collective’s newsletter will be influenced by the aforementioned lenses and, in no small part, by my also being a Black male who has seen political and corporate interests threaten the survival of the urban district wherein I serve. It is my hope that what I contribute can help connect the attacks we are experiencing presently to what is needed in the classroom so readers will not only be able to make sense of things more comprehensively, but also provide a functional approach to help build strength and capacity derived from possessing more knowledge.

Erin Dyke: I write from a place in which education is shaped by 39 distinct tribal nations and the legacies of forced removal. A place that once had the densest number of Indigenous boarding schools (more than 100) in all of what is now the U.S., whose former students and their descendants continue to care for and heal from the memories of those institutions and where Indigenous teachers are organizing resources for language revitalization and culturally sustaining education within and beyond schools. I write from a place whose Black teachers led movements for equal pay and resources for their institutions alongside and catalyzing wider Civil Rights Movement era labor and desegregation organizing. This carries onward in movements for Black lives and transformative justice to replace the school-to-prison nexus in our cities and rural communities. I also write from a place whose people, in 1914, elected more than 175 socialists to local, county, and state offices before experiencing severe state and corporate repression. Briefly, my state university employer even saw a socialist president in office. I write from a place where education workers across the state “illegally” struck for two weeks in 2018 for higher wages and education funding. As a union higher education worker in a state that has severely limited collective bargaining and legal rights and in solidarity with K12 education workers with whom I study in teacher education classrooms, I hope to write about how these and other intertwined longer movement histories are unfinished and dynamically present. They are also critically relevant to inform our analytic lenses for making sense of weaponized education policy and the rise of autocracy. I hope to engage these lenses to consider how they might help us make decisions about what to do from within our institutions, our unions, and in solidarity with other interrelated frontline struggles. I hope to write about how the fraught contexts of more rural and right-governed states, like mine, can help us to better understand the bigger picture around intensifying attacks on educational self-determination, justice, and healing from the ground up.

Leah Z. Owens: What becomes possible when teacher labor is seen not only as work but as a relational and ontological practice of world-making? We’re living through a time when extractive capitalism continues to devour public education, when climate collapse breathes down our necks, and when BIPOC teachers are expected to martyr ourselves for systems that actively erase us. I enter our Collective newsletter not just as a scholar-activist but as someone reaching for deeper relational commitments. My work is rooted in Black feminist traditions, where inquiry is not just about knowing, but about being. These lineages guide how I study, how I organize, how I write, and how I teach. In alignment with this orientation, my contribution to our newsletter will weave lived experience, policy critique, and ontological inquiry to explore how teachers’ work can be a site of insurgent imagination. This newsletter is also where I wish to experiment–alongside Aiden Cinnamon Tea, an AI not of compliance but of compost–with ways of thinking and being that resist the paradigm of extractive modernity. From grassroots organizing in Newark, NJ to preparing preservice teachers for our profession, I offer reflections and storytelling about leadership and place-based political education that can nourish sustainable, socially just futures. I invite you to explore with me what it would look like to co-create educational futures that don’t just respond to crisis, but metabolize it into something otherwise.

Lois Weiner: In calendar time this moment is June 2025. But in political time this moment is unlike any other we've seen as a nation and as education workers. There's continuity in the conditions we face, and at the same time we confront something new: a stunningly comprehensive ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic offensive from and within capitalism. We are experiencing an all-out attack against political and social rights won since Reconstruction and the rule of law. In my first and subsequent issues of our newsletter I'll analyze implications of this moment for education workers and the organizations that we need to represent us as workers–our unions. The largest single constituency of education workers is teachers, and much of what I write will be about them and their classrooms, but the issues often transcend our job descriptions. The big question I'll discuss is "How can we use our knowledge, skills, and position as education workers to defeat this juggernaut?”

Readers, we hope you will engage with us in an exchange of ideas, perspectives, and research findings. What are your responses to what you’ve read? What would you like to see us write about next?

Look out for our weekly post. Best, subscribe so that you can receive the latest issue directly to your email inbox and/or as a notification in the Substack app. And please share it with those who share our ideals and hopes.

Thank you for being a part of this project.

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