Schools as sites of struggle: What the ICE raids in LA and Trump's Defunding Schools Reveal

Education's strategic importance - and ours as education workers

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.

THIS 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. [i]

The other crisis comes with the Trump administration 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 and our unions with 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 farm workers, 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 with two mandates issued by the state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, one right after the other. Overturning decades-long certification agreements among the states, Ryan, a Trumpster with an appetite for power unrestrained by law or even GOP norms, announced Oklahoma will withhold certificates from teachers from "woke" states who do not pass a new ideology test developed by PragerU, which measures if 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 administrator 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 in 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 as 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 in having won provisions about immigrant rights in their contract and protecting 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 the 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 shows 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, investment banks, and huge corporations like Walmart? The ideas we hold as individual teachers and researchers 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 our collective. A potential power many in education miss, and a strength our unions have declined to use, 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 strength a militant, democratic union provides, make us unique occupationally. Shared occupational interests and our potential power can unite us if we see beyond geography and institutional silos. Work in education encourages building social networks, with students, parents, community, and through this political power workers in other sectors can't access so readily, though their position in the economy can give them a type of power we lack.

Education's role is ensuring a society secures its future. To do that education reproduces (or changes) the society. Though teachers generally make sense of that responsibility in individual terms, helping students to learn, grow socially, master disciplinary knowledge, our work is part of a far greater picture. K-12 teaching's intense 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 to control lives, orchestrating public opinion and setting policy, think a lot about maintaining their position, increasing 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 schools to create a more just, equal society contest their vision and plans. Often when teachers organize to press for improvements like 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 changes 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 that occurs. We're flooded with information from social media and influencers. The cultural apparatus educates - as do movements for social justice and equality, exposing cultural and ideological assumptions.

The other educational influence on us occurs on the job, 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, another reason education workers are a threat to wealthy elites. What happens in “government schools,” as the far-right labels public education, what we teach and how, matters because we socialize and educate the workforce that makes their profits possible. Though this topic is one I can't give the attention it merits, education's role in addressing economic contradictions and changes in work is a significant factor now and relates to reforms being pushed to vocationalize K-12 schools with information technology and alter our own work with AI. [ii]

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 planned 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 well as in the new neoliberal project gaining popularity in both parties. While Trump’s project is clear, the refurbished version of the neoliberal project is under the radar of most activists though it aims to fund a system of public education looted internally, with technology. As before, it exploits the rhetoric and often our campaigns for equality and social justice. [iii]

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's interview with the newly-elected reform president of the Washington DC local, the other pieces the collective has published in our first month, based on observations and discussions with activists, suggest the power we might claim is not what most education workers are thinking and feeling in this moment. Some are seeking relationships, 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 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 and expanding democracy in the society requires that we carve out space for struggle, even as 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 to 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 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 proposals reflected a reluctance to appear critical, negative, confront authority or rock the boat. Participants discussed the complex ways we resist and accommodate policies we think are wrong and agreed (as it appeared to me; 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 correctly cautioned this has to be done in ways that avoid 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 people 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 room, laughing about being "naughty." This anecdote suggests that what often appears to be spontaneous is 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 the Right, is what we can learn from the "Red State" walkouts, a source of knowledge curiously ignored by the media, the left, and our own 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, for other unions as well.

Just seven years ago education workers led the 2018 “Red State Revolt” a struggle that labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein chooses as one of four instances in which unions transformed themselves into "popular and consequential social movements." In these historic walkouts of education workers "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 Lichtenstein describes differ in many respects, they shared "something far more transcendent" than being a strike, which is itself a term Red State participants themselves may not have used to characterize their walkouts. 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, in some of the most conservative regions of this country, aided by radical ideas and activists. This movement, our movement of education workers, challenged repressive political authority directly, demanding democracy. And we learned with and from them that "when these social movements are at flood tide …multitudes of ordinary men and women glimpse a world transformed." [iv]

I am not proposing that the "Red State" walkouts are a template for organizing education workers because I do not think there is a single model or blueprint for what we need now - or at anytime for that matter. No one struggle provides us with a blueprint. Nor can individual union leaders, however courageous or wise, provide us with all the answers. But victories illuminate new ways to think and strategies. 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, while also educating and mobilizing 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, a walkout, 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 support grass-roots organizing. Still, they shirk from providing the leadership we need, in part because mobilizing members, encouraging them to think and act independently, having a robust democratic culture and organizational practices and policies that support it, creates challenges to their power and ideas about what's best - for us. 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 in considering new possibilities, maybe imagine what could happen if education workers in large cities, who are mostly affiliated with AFT reached out to colleagues, friends in districts nearby, locals in NEA state affiliates? Maybe the suburbs that surround the cities that have so many of the same challenges? Just asking!

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 and states, against harm coming from the national level, supported by our own unions and our dues. Another point of view I’ve heard is that we should not organize along "sectoral lines," as education workers per se. This strategy ignores our immediate responsibility as education workers to stop the harm that will be done to schools and students by AFT's stunning alliance with tech moguls who support Trump. Moreover it misses what education workers bring to the critical task of organizing the South, which the national unions have failed to tackle. Union activists, rank-and-file workers, 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 in our organizing, contesting powerful elites rather than trying to accommodate to them.

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, and we’ve overlooked 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 the AFT or NEA affiliate, together in a social movement supported by communities and often local school administration, throughout the state. Their courageous struggle 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.[v] 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 Virgina 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. And the 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 state union to represent education workers. Do we really have resources to support rival NEA and AFT 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 US education workers, is Organize2020, a caucus that set out 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 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. The new leadership has changed the culture and organizational practices of the state organization, reflected in its Summer Member Organizer program. They have 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, in this moment especially.

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.[vi]

The largest union in this country is the NEA, with about three million members. The AFT has about 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 the capacity we have to collaborate 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, beyond lobbying, lawsuits, and webinars that inspire and give us information but are too often used to substitute for organizing based on democratic decision-making. We need to generate strategies using the contract but going beyond contract unionism. Details? In future articles I'll explore what those might be. In the meantime, solidarity. Feel the power!

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[i] I'm addressing a great many issues and draw on a wide range of sources, most of which I do not cite because the material seems common knowledge. In an academic article I'd provide more substantiation. However, if you are interested in the sources, please reply on the substack page or email me your query.

[ii] I'll discuss this in a more comprehensive article about education, work, and the role of teachers unions, which will be published in late 2025. The FOS collective will take on AI and tech shortly.

[iii] The 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.

[iv] Nelson Lichtenstein, Why Unions Matter, Chapter VI, "Mass Strikes, General Strikes: Democratizing the State." Forthcoming from Yale University Press. Two of the labor struggles he describes were in Brazil and Poland, the third, in the US, was the 1934 San Francisco general strike.

[v] After losing the collective bargaining election in Hayward Unified School District, members of the Hayward Federation of Teachers, affiliated with the AFT and its state organization, the California Federation of Teachers, (CFT) voted to join the NEA affiliate to create a single union. The strategy of "merger from below" was widely discussed by teacher union activists who were frustrated at the energy and resources expended in rivalries between NEA and AFT. Lew Hedgecock, the president of the Hayward Federation of Teachers who endorsed the move to join the NEA affiliate and subsequently became its president, presented a paper about the decision at an American Educational Research Association panel with Bruce Markens. I was a member of the Hayward AFT local and subsequently organized the panel with Lew and Bruce, with whom I had worked as a teacher and union activist.

[vi] Op. Cit. Chapter V, "Subverting the Union Impulse."