This Moment for Education Workers

We face a stunningly comprehensive ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic offensive

THIS MOMENT FOR EDUCATION WORKERS AND THE ORGANIZATIONS THAT REPRESENT US

In calendar time this moment is June 2025. But in political time this moment is unique, unlike any other we've seen as a nation and as education workers. While there's continuity in the conditions we face, at the same time we confront something new: a stunningly comprehensive ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic offensive, an all-out attack against political, economic and social rights won since Reconstruction in an autocratic usurpation of government. In this and subsequent newsletters 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 driving question in my newsletters is "How can we use our knowledge, skills, and position as education workers to defeat this juggernaut?" [i]

As I'll explain, we can't - and shouldn't try to - return to the previous status quo of bipartisan "corporate reform" of schools. Nor should we succumb to the nostalgia of a non-existent "golden age" in US history, usually identified as the post WW2 era, which was marked by gross inequality and injustice in the society and systemic educational inequalities. Our aim has to be to reimagine and participate in developing a truly just, equal, democratic society, with public schools that help all of our students reach their full human potential.

What distinguishes this moment? One huge difference is the GOP's all-out assault on gains made by social movements and labor in the past 150 years. Its Christian nationalist, White supremacist, nativist, patriarchal, homophobic prejudices aren't new in this country, but the scale and rapidity of the Right's campaign to destroy any trace of "Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion" (DEI) is new in its scope, fury, and strength, enabled by Trump's usurpation of power. Groups previously regarded as fringe have become mainstream under Trump, given an enlarged national audience and platform. For example, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice has become a "fellow" for parental rights at Heritage. The Moms for Liberty "think tank," M4L, is showing some signs of growth, hiring and broadcasting a weekly series, with links to papers produced by right wing think tanks. They also organized in Oklahoma for curriculum standards that sought to have high school students “identify ‘discrepancies’ in the 2020 election results,” threatening lawmakers who rejected the standards with primary challenges.[ii]

HOW WE GOT HERE

We are witnessing the culmination of a far Right ideological and economic project in education that has been years in the making. In 2022, when I first began research about these developments, I learned work and education had already been changed in ways most opponents of the neoliberal reforms in education, myself included, had missed. In a nutshell, venture capital and its political supporters in both political parties used the pandemic to accelerate and intensify extraordinary changes in education with technology, carrying out internal privatization of public education through contracting in public/private partnerships with tech companies, harvesting data with new software and platforms linked to standardized tests. In a pattern that was established decades ago, financial interests name a problem they address with privatization. Since 2016, Silicon Valley has identified problems in public policy that it “solves” with edtech companies, reaping profits and more power. The ominous political and ideological convergence of venture capital and the far Right, begun after Trump's election in 2016, was solidified in 2022, when billionaire Jeff Yass and Betsy DeVos, Trump's Education Secretary, joined ranks to fund campaigns in states for charter and private school voucher bills, efforts propelled by a model the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) created in 2016.

The huge shift in capital to Trump and the GOP underpins the change in capitalism that makes this moment new and perilous. Yet this re- alignment of capital has been missed by most opponents of charter schools and vouchers who understand and are fighting the political dangers in Trump's agenda and the new threats to education, struggling against what they still label as "corporate school reform." In contrast, those who work in and study finance accept the role of the individual corporation in driving political and economic has changed because of private equity’s control of corporate ownership, and its concentration of wealth. A group of Dutch researchers, CORPNET research project, (unfortunately now defunct), mapped the “active” control and ownership of the "Big Three" asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, which taken together had become the largest shareholder in 40% of all publicly listed firms in the United States. This rise of index funds entailed a "massive concentration of corporate ownership... with US$11 trillion in assets under management, more than all sovereign wealth funds combined and over three times the global hedge fund industry."

The powerful elites who dominate Silicon Valley (and private equity), including those who previously supported liberal democracy - insofar as it didn't hamper their profits - have converged in support of Trump and are willing to jettison democracy. BlackRock, by far the world’s largest asset manager and arguably the most powerful financial player in the world, controls significantly more assets than any bank or corporation. BlackRock demonstrated its political shift when it purchased two ports in the Panama Canal, and in doing so endorsed Trump’s authoritarianism and imperial agenda, "basking in the ‘spoils’” of the purchases, as the New York Times business section described the transaction.

Trump and the GOP offer the powerful elite that controls this country (we might call them the “billionaires" or "oligarchs" or the "ruling class") an opportunity they could only dream of before: The public sector, including public education, will be a massive “free” market. They see profits on a scale that two decades ago were thought unimaginable, funded by our taxes. Though the similarity may not be immediately recognized because of the intensified scale and speed, we in education have seen the foot path of Trump's agenda for privatization of the federal government already, in privatization for the past 25 years: outsourcing of school services to private companies and then in public/private partnerships; closure of neighborhood schools; creation of charters run by for-profit management companies. We have seen how governments impose budget cuts, rationalized as essential to make operations more efficient and eliminate fraud. Workers are axed. Public services viewed as needed (for profit and perhaps due to public outcry) are reconstructed as private entities, with far fewer employees, who do not have unions.

"Trump 2 - the worst sequel ever" (as a homemade sign at a March demonstration labeled Trump's reign of terror), marks a qualitative change from his first term in office, in danger and challenge. For example, dismantling the federal government workforce while imposing massive cuts in federal funding will put enormous pressures on state and local budgets, making financial demands few governments will be able to manage, even if they want to do so. Public employees face competition for a shrunken pie. If state and local layoffs occur, capital will have shrunk the sector of the economy that is by far most highly unionized - public employees, and it simultaneously will have worsened life for those already oppressed by systemic economic inequalities and social injustice, low-income communities of color, the disabled, and those most vulnerable to social dislocation. This is an attack on the economic well-being and dignity of historically oppressed groups, one that is not incidental to Trump's economic agenda. Redefining who is human, who deserves rights, is an ideological underpinning of this new era.

As others have explained, new forms of privatization explicit in Project 2025 dwarf the scale of privatization and profit in neoliberalism’s push for charter schools and vouchers. A new type of voucher, called Education Savings Accounts, (ESAs) allows federal funding to be used for home schooling and private schools. The 2016 model policy for ESAs of the far-Right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) requires standardized testing. The requirement for standardized testing relies on the same unsubstantiated claim Democrats and Republicans used to impose standardized testing under No Child Left Behind (NCLB): the tests measure learning individuals and the nation need to compete in a global economy. We should note the role of standardized testing seems disputed within the Right in its plan for a wholly privatized school system. Inconsistencies are apparent in Dept. of Ed Secretary McMahon's statements in favor of using the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), which are contradicted by Trump's cuts in funding of tech in the Department of Education. Trump's coalition of the willing-to-make-huge-new- profits is also divided on how to use AI, with both Steve Bannon, representing Trump's MAGA base, and Obama pointing to dangers of AI in eliminating jobs.

While neoliberal reforms in education have been eclipsed by the far Right's new agenda, individual Democrats still have close relationships with donors in Silicon Valley. In addition, the party itself is accepting funds from tech moguls as they make statements opposing Musk. Still, there is a rift between elements of capital who aren't (yet) willing to dump a public education system regulated by government and those firmly in Trump's camp. The rift is visible in the National Alliance for Public School Charters challenge in the SCOTUS case about religious charter schools in Oklahoma. Reed Hastings, a donor to the Democratic party, is a primary funder of charter schools in CA and the National Alliance for Public School Charters. Hastings and the tech/neoliberal wing of capital want a (privatized) system of public education, which Trump and his supporters do not. Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, a libertarian, “free market” think tank funded by Koch and others, explains the dilemma, logic, and solution as well in this court case: If money “follows kids to truly private schools that families choose, the government has no role at all in the decision and is therefore truly neutral.”

Is neoliberal money on our side in this struggle to save public education, as might be suggested in this legal battle and by criticisms of Trump by Democrats who were prominent in pursuing neoliberal education reforms? The evidence suggests not. Hastings himself called for elimination of local boards of education, and charters damage public schools, draining money from local school districts. Charters are intensify racial and social class segregation. We can conclude that neoliberal reform will strangle public education through internal privatization, much of it with testing and edtech, and by expanding charter schools within the public system, masking its goals with the rhetoric of making schools more equitable. On the other hand, Trump and the capital supporting him are using the guillotine, killing public education in one fall of the privatization blade, justifying its death with the anti-DEI narrative, and giving capital faster, far greater profits, also through edtech, especially AI. Is either a solution or victory for us? I think not.

LEARNING FROM OUR HISTORY TO MAKE SENSE OF THIS MOMENT - AND ACT ON WHAT WE KNOW

A significant core of critical scholars in education saw how the bipartisan "excellence" reforms and the "standards movement" at the end of the last century were predicated on business assuming a far greater role in education policy, "marketizing" schools, noting how these reforms diminished attention to making conditions in school more equitable and curriculum more culturally responsive. Still, those who opposed the reforms struggled for language that captured the shift marked by NCLB's mandates for testing, the expansion of charter schools, use of merit pay, deprofessionalization of educators’ work with creation of fast-track programs to certify teachers and school administrators, and making school systems “markets.” Liberal activists outside the academy publicized the harm in charters and privatization to a larger audience, describing what was happening as "corporate ed reform." Their leadership in opposing the reforms is especially noteworthy given that both national teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA), continued to support NCLB, including mandatory standardized testing to evaluate students and teachers. Eventually the national unions were forced to alter their stance, by pressure from union members being fired or given unsatisfactory ratings or saw their schools threatened with closure as “failing” because of test results.

Still, for the most part, the movement against "corporate school reform" could not refute a powerful draw of the reforms - its rhetoric about ameliorating educational inequality. At times the liberal case for saving public education ignored the historic inequalities in public education, implying the solution was to return to an earlier time. The Chicago Teachers Union 2012 strike, which fused the fight against the neoliberal project in the name of racial justice with the struggle for the dignity of teachers' work, was key in exposing the real agenda of the bipartisan education reforms and showing it could be defeated.

The term "corporate school reform" was and may still be more palatable to a larger audience than describing the reforms as "neoliberal" or relating them to capitalism. Still, some liberals now warn about danger of fascism, and they may be ready to consider describing the assault as coming from capital and capitalism, (which much of the labor movement, with a few notable exceptions, still recoils from doing.) We are faced with the problem that any narrative we craft has to be based on analysis that captures this moment, which "corporate school reform" does not. I want to make the case for using “capitalism” and suggest the long-time theory that capitalism is a "social system" (lost when the term "neoliberalism" was adopted to describe capitalism), deserves reconsideration. The "social system" analysis explains the comprehensiveness of the assault we are experiencing, the simultaneity of the political, economic, social, cultural, and ideological offensive. Understanding capitalism as far more than a way to organize the economy opens discussion of what we face to economic drivers, political power, legal structures, culture, and ideology. The "social system" framework suggests that social oppression in all its forms, including racism, patriarchy, nativism, hetero-normativity, and ableism aren't extraneous "add-ons." They are baked into the social system's functioning and evolve with it, though modes of oppression may change in a specific period.

Another conceptual advantage of analyzing capitalism as a social system is that we see that the economic system isn't necessarily tied to a particular political formation. We assume in this country that liberal democracy (what our political system is often called) and our (capitalist) economic system must go hand-in-hand. Yet historical and contemporary examples show capitalism as an economic system exists without liberal democracy in fascist and authoritarian regimes. Powerful elites can and do choose profits over democracy, ditching the political system and the social contract that many assume is guaranteed under capitalism.

Elizabeth Cohen, a brilliant researcher committed to making instruction more equitable, often quoted Kurt Lewin’s idea that nothing is more practical than a good theory - when the theory is applied. I’ll end by applying the theory I’ve proposed about what this moment is and how capitalism has changed.

First, this project has so many elements because that's what capitalism is all about - it's a social system that configures every facet of our life. The Right "gets" this power of controlling a social system, which is why it has gone after everything we have won in one fell swoop. All of the assaults we see are rooted in changes in the capitalist order and it is that order we must oppose as education workers, joining together what seem disparate struggles, currently waged by individual constituencies.

Second, in part because we've been slow to understand this moment, we've not pushed our unions, especially our state and national unions, to act beyond lobbying and filing lawsuits. We cannot trust politicians or the courts to save us. This means while the necessary legal challenges to Trump's illegal edicts wind their way through the judicial systems, we are likely to face cuts and repression on a scale we have not seen before. We need to think strategically about how we will energize the unions, from within and without, developing respectful alliances with our natural partners - those who are and will be feeling the brunt of Trump’s project.

Third, the longstanding project to privatize schools has been developing for decades, normalizing business control over education. The reforms initiated by NCLB though obscured with rhetoric about increasing educational opportunity contained attacks on democracy itself, often felt most brutally by low income communities of color in school closings and in state takeovers of school districts. We have been living with the results of those reforms in the daily life of teaching and learning, taking for granted disempowering conditions that have become an unchallenged status quo, in particular the control of standardized tests and testing over what is taught and how we measure educational achievement of schools and students. Our reality pre-Trump2 is the basis of the new project. We cannot defeat the new project without tackling the harmful status-quo to which we have become accustomed.

Finally, the alliance of capital under Trump is united only insofar as their common goal - huge profits - is realized. The predators also compete with one another because competition and profit, not only individual greed, drive the economic system. As we are seeing in the political struggles in Washington and state capitols there is considerable division and disarray on the far-Right and within the GOP, about how best to achieve their twin goals of political power and profit alongside their competition for current and future spoils. Though we are not (yet) unified, neither are they. And so we should scrutinize how to exploit their divisions for our advantage while we try to unite our disparate struggles and constituencies. A primary task is one of political education, about why solidarity isn't an ideal, it's arguably our most powerful strategy.

Where do we go from here? In my next newsletters I'll tackle specifics of why education workers need to organize as a constituency, representing our occupational interests and professional ideals. I'll look at what this means for developing essential alliances with social justice organizations and the movements they build. I'll also examine what this moment suggests for our work in our unions, making them more democratic, shifting them to more militant strategies, and pushing on AFT and NEA to wage the fight we need on a national level.

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[i] Much of the research for these first newsletters has already been published for two chapters of a book I intended to publish serially. See "Education reforms and capitalism's changes to work: Lesson for the Left.” Also "Capitalism and the changing classroom. Education "reforms" through the neo-liberal lens. My earlier work is complemented and extended by Chloe Asselin, Erin Dyke, Keith Eric Benson, and Leah Z. Owens in our chapter on teachers' work and unions for the American Educational Research Handbook on Education Policy. The draft version is available here . The final version is now in print, unfortunately in a book that is prohibitively expensive for individuals to purchase. However, copyright law permits me to send an individual copy to a reader who does not share it.

[ii] Thanks to Maurice Cunningham for this update on Moms for Liberty, grounded in research in his book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.