Education under Trump: Understanding the billionaires' project in education- to defeat it.
Analyzing what we saw and what we missed are equally urgent
As we near the end of this first year of Trump’s second administration, we face a new challenge: sustaining and building resistance that weakens the coalition that elected Trump and a new wave of neoliberalism.
My last article of 2025 for the FOS substack summarizes what’s occurred in education under Trump, what we identified correctly and what we missed. Since writing “This Moment for Education Workers” in June 2025, I’ve learned a great deal [i] in a process informed by posts of FOS collective members Chloe, Erin, Keith, Leah. Their work illuminates what we’ve faced, analyzing linkages between AI, racism, climate change, union reform, K-12 and higher ed, finding energy and spaces for resistance, and much more: https://futureschools.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
ACKNOWLEDGING RESISTANCE THE RIGHT DIDN’T EXPECT
Given the totalitarian onslaught we faced, the fact of any resistance inside classrooms and outside the school walls is remarkable. Despite anxiety about almost every aspect of life and many about work, significant numbers of school workers have shown up to protect students, schools, democracy, our professions. In countless communities they’ve taken the initiative or joined community groups to protect students and families threatened with imprisonment and deportation. They’ve participated as individuals in writing letters and making phone calls, signing petitions, joining and building massive rallies opposing destruction of democracy. They’ve organized to defeat Trump’s policies driven by White Christian nationalism and Trump’s billionaire backers, to subvert and eliminate political, economic, and social gains made since Reconstruction.
We’ve seen new resistance from higher education workers. Stunned by earlier attacks on academic freedom in regard to Palestine, more faculty and professional staff have been awakened to the need for collective voice and interventions. Their organizing has been supported by a new leadership of AAUP (American Association of University Professors), now merged with AFT. On dozens of campuses full-time faculty have followed the lead of graduate student workers and adjunct faculty, who long ago organized with unions eager to represent this new constituency of workers as well as expand their membership numbers beyond their traditional (diminished) base in blue collar work. The vitality of AAUP organizing is a bright spot for many reasons, including the possibility of developing alliances on campuses between all workers, what K-12 teacher activists in West Virginia’s 2018 “red state” walkouts called “wall-to-wall” organizing. Higher ed organizing can encourage alliances of K-12 and higher ed locals on the state and national levels. An example of this occurred in the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), the AFT state affiliate, with a successful campaign to end the CFT’s support for AFT’s “partnership” with tech billionaires pushing AI in schools. Their victory gives us a model of how a relatively small group of union members can leverage their knowledge and build networks to democratize AFT and NEA, state affiliates as well as the national organizations. The CFT resolution outlines ideas and models language for us all to adapt/adopt: https://www.cft.org/resolution/education-technology-companies-and-aftcft.
TRUMP’S ORIGINAL BACKERS, THEIR EDUCATION POLICY, AND THE NEW BIPARTISAN COALITION FOR A NEW WAVE OF NEOLIBERAL POLICY
Trump’s 2024 election marked the victory of a far Right ideological, social, political, and economic project decades in the making, its education component outlined in Project 2025. Under the radar has been a significant change since Trump’s victory: A convergence of big money and politicians is advancing a powerful new wave of neoliberal education reform.
This alliance contains a segment of the billionaire class that supported Trump’s election, along with others that did not, including entrenched leaders of the Democratic Party that supported neoliberal reforms in education, from their first emergence in No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The money and power behind the new wave in neoliberal policy in education is separate from and in key regards antagonistic to the powerful coalition of Right wing money and power Trump rode and drove to be elected, but both the old and new are marked by the dominance of Silicon Valley.[ii] The billionaires behind Trump’s successful campaign differ among themselves ideologically in ways that can create spaces to defend democracy and public schools - if we’re clear about what they’re funding and why. For example, many of Trump’s far-Right backers want to destroy public education as a system, which they call “government schools,” replacing it with networks of schools that receive public money, configured by federal policies to root out dissent. Others argue for retaining some version of a public system that is driven by “choice” and some civil liberties for students and teachers. It’s a mighty though unstable ideological and economic coalition, and internal differences create openings for organizing about education policy, in “red” states especially. MAGA has shown itself both a willing partner and a wild card in this coalition. Bannon, formerly a harsh critic of AI, supported Trump’s presidential order expanding AI’s use and limiting regulation, reflecting how MAGA’s own project relies on Trump’s strength, which in turn depends on his being supported by tech companies. Many Trump supporters opposed the Common Core, as did left parent activists, the curriculum adopted wholesale by states as they raced to impose standardized testing and its use to assess learning.
Trump’s supporters, along with politicians, foundations, and moguls advocating policies of the new neoliberal wave, share the desire for massively increased profits, mainly through tech, and capital’s political control of education, in particular synchronizing it with the economy to prepare a work force in ways the billionaires dictate. While I can’t summarize the entire history of neoliberal policy in education, I’ll review it briefly to contextualize the new wave because many education workers began their careers after the first neoliberal project altered teachers’ work and curriculum.
The new bipartisan neoliberal wave reinforces damage from reforms now taken for granted, including use of standardized testing to measure student learning (and control curriculum); proliferation of charter schools; fast-track programs to diminish university-based teacher and administrative certification and allow untrained people to teach; downsizing public higher education; an array of policies to marketize education, all of them masked with the rhetoric of improving educational opportunity for historically marginalized groups, especially low-income students of color. This new wave intensifies and accelerates privatization and business control over education, using public/private partnerships, more edtech in software and platforms with private companies’ scripted programs (deemed “scientific” according to research based on test scores); linking education more closely to the economy with Career and Technical Education (CTE) that business controls, policies accelerated by use of AI, edtech, and online learning, transforming how education is “delivered.”
“America’s public school students are drowning… Following the example of Presidents Clinton and Obama, Democrats should support the growth of high-quality charter schools, innovation schools, and other variations on public school choice. "
Politicians, government officials, foundations, and billionaires, from the Heritage Foundation through Sanders, have endorsed standardized testing, accepting the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to measure achievement, though (or in some cases, because) its indicators include “data by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English language proficiency, disability, and sex.” [iii] In sharp contrast to Trump and his far-Right/libertarian backers, the old guard neoliberals in the Democratic Party and their new adherents mostly defend democratic rights and argue for DEI principles. While they may support DEI in good faith, we do not share their desired outcome: They want to maintain the regulatory framework of a public system of education under a federal umbrella that protects some of these rights but privatize the system as does the Right, with charters, public/private partnerships, and edtech, including AI.
Most advocates of the new neoliberal wave retain the rhetoric of schooling’s meritocratic purposes and advocate for legal protections that address inequality - for which we fight too. Still, while expressing support for these political ideals, they advance policies deepening privatization and marketizing schools, which sabotage educational equality and contradict their professed goals of making schools just and equalizing outcomes.[iv] The new wave includes Democrats who defended the first neoliberal policies (often identified as “centrists,” the Clinton/Obama wing), who are being challenged in the party by Jorge Elorza, who is rebuilding Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and has pivoted to the Right. The new “end game” of Elorza Democrats is identical to a 2017 memorandum to Trump and DeVos from the secretive “right-wing umbrella group for US Christian autocracy,” Council for National Policy. Their program? “Abandon public education in favor of ‘free-market private schools, church schools and home schools.’”[v]
One linchpin of the new wave of neoliberal reforms is a revised form of Career and Technical Education (CTE), hailed as a long-needed corrective to discredited vocational education programs. The legislation creating CTE has been endorsed by almost the entire political spectrum, the Democratic Party, neocons who opposed Trump, the GOP, Bernie Sanders, longtime liberal foe of charter schools, Diane Ravitch, and AFT President Randi Weingarten, who placed op/ed pieces in news outlets throughout the country, insisting we must “Stop trying to make everyone go to college.”[vi] NEA supports CTE with arguments about career readiness and helping students to thrive in school while also noting that federal funding for these programs is one of the largest sources of money for high schools and community colleges.
However, a close look at the premises and implementation of CTE shows the peril it poses. CTE is mentioned only once in Project 2025, as a program that should be transferred to the Department of Labor. Linda McMahon’s explanation that CTE is a “skills-based career preparation [that] is the backbone of the American economy and the path to the American Dream for every citizen... “[vii] reveals its aim: make education the handmaiden of business. A report from the National Governors Association, “Let’s Get Ready!” provides alarming detail about what can occur when education aligns more closely with workforce needs, as CTE’s backers want. A huge danger is having CEOs control what is taught, with new policies that have “future earnings and employer value” determine what is taught. Tightening the connection between education and the economy may well mean vocationalizing all of public education, pre-K through university, bringing deeper corporatizaton of higher education, diminished faculty voice, reduced democratic control of schools in school districts, and the subordination of children’s well-being to employers’ desires.[viii] Indeed, in the Texas plan for CTE, the only representative of education constituencies was the Texas Education Agency, a body appointed by the governor. [ix]
AFT and NEA endorsements of the new CTE don’t mention how its policies silence educator and parent voices, undercutting democratic control of curriculum and teaching. Their endorsing CTE repeats what occurred when the first neoliberal reforms in education were introduced, and many education workers were caught unaware, trusting our national union leadership. For example, teachers in many cities, urged by AFT and NEA, voted to change salary schedules in their contracts to allow for “merit pay” salary increases based on students’ test scores. Those who voted for these contractual changes didn’t realize the implications of ditching the salary schedule based on education and experience - they assumed they’d be the best rewarded - or thought the tests were a more objective way than supervisor evaluations and other district policies to assess teaching. Sometimes wealthy donors offered funding for the salary increases. The money dried up or didn’t appear, and as the testing mania grew to include firing teachers and closing schools based on students’ scores, union members realized merit pay and evaluations based on test scores hurt them, their schools, and their students. NEA and AFT not only accommodated to the neoliberal reforms, they advocated for them even when the harm was apparent. Parents and education activists first organized against the testing and then teachers joined them, demanding both unions end their support for evaluations of schools and teachers based on test scores. Still, we never defeated the use of the tests to assess learning or its control of curriculum.
THE RESISTANCE WE NEED
We are currently at a similar though far more fraught juncture as we were when testing was demanded in NCLB (No Child Left Behind). While we can’t predict the future, which can be contested, we can discern our opponents’ aims and see how reforms are being sold. This is all apparent in the74million, the popular outlet for neoliberal ideas in education. The website/newsletter has been recast as non-profit “independent media” supported by donations from readers. However its politics mirror those of its major backers and board of directors, ideas of billionaires and the foundations they have created, who advance the new neoliberal wave. The key in making use of the74million is assuming we are seeing propaganda of our opponents and interrogating the stories and links with that in mind.
It runs articles critical of Trump’s policies because these ideas are part of the range of views in the newly emerged bipartisan coalition of billionaires and politicians. Many in the GOP find Trump and his policies distasteful, though they seldom defy him and eventually give the nod to policies that will boost profits and the power of business. The74million also voices ideas of Democrats supporting the new wave of neoliberal education policy who may not endorse and or want to be identified with deportations, attacks on disability rights, and Trump’s anti-DEI mania. To satisfy this broad bipartisan coalition and persuade us the news site is a reliable, trustworthy outlet that prints all opinions, rather than being a “right wing rag” as one longtime activist described it, the74million runs stories that look approvingly at progressive campaigns, like union-supported state legislation raising taxes on millionaires. But occasional stories like these are greatly outnumbered by articles about how harm to schools, teachers, students, states and districts by Trump’s policies is successfully addressed by privatization, testing, AI, tech, and choice, as this article extolling Harvard’s neoliberal initiative in education explains. AI, charters, “choice,” curricula based on testing, all sources of profit and control for business, are the solutions to problems that are pushed by the Right as evidence our schools are failing. Teachers and unions are not - yet - blamed. But then again, we haven’t organized against this project - yet.
While NEA and AFT have named the need to combat authoritarianism under Trump, they have invited business control of our schools. NEA, as often occurs, has followed AFT’s lead. In addition to her using her office to campaign for the new CTE, Randi Weingarten, who heads the machine that determines AFT policy, has assembled a “partnership” with the most powerful tech companies to train teachers to use AI. Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, and the World Economic Forum are now creating lesson plans for what Weingarten, with no empirical evidence, promises will be “a curriculum that will lead to good jobs and solid careers in U.S. manufacturing.”[x] The NEA also accepted an “initial” $325,000 donation from Microsoft.
When the two largest K-12 locals in California, representing education workers in Los Angeles and San Francisco, collaborated with AFT higher ed members to pass the resolution I mentioned before, they showed how to build successful resistance to Trump AND the new wave of neoliberal reform. The resolution’s substance and the collaboration of higher ed and K-12 locals model how education workers can democratize their state affiliates and put pressure on AFT and NEA to change their policies. In contrast, the more common strategy, declining to criticize the national unions to protect a local’s members and gain access to power and insider information, has clearly failed to make NEA and AFT the vehicles we need to defeat the Right. NEA’s rhetoric has become more militant and the union adopts resolutions in support of social justice, but its leaders show little desire or capacity to mobilize members or actively support officers and staff in state affiliates to do the same. Still, the NEA seems more porous organizationally, leadership - ideas and people - more contested, its culture more open to dissent than is AFT. Power in the AFT is even more concentrated in Randi Weingarten’s hands than it was a decade ago. The unwillingness of a single president of a progressive or social justice local on the AFT Executive Council to publicly challenge Weingarten’s policies shows her ability to paralyze opposition from leaders of locals accustomed to militant action - at home.
Declining to criticize leaders of the national unions so that we remain united in face of the greater peril of fascism, an argument I’ve heard and seen enacted, assumes that savvy elected officers can protect their own members and district’s schools from anything AFT and NEA do or decline to do, like using their resources to mobilize members. But what about education workers in locals and states that are more under the gun of the Right? A strategy of unity based on suppressing critique weakens us by undercutting the solidarity we need grow our movement, which relies on democratizing our locals and state affiliates. When the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) was formed in the Chicago Teachers Union, it received help from two other large teachers unions in how to organize, subsequently winning the election to become the CTU’s new leadership. That process resulted in the historic 2012 strike that electrified education workers and labor, energizing and informing development of a movement for social justice teachers unions. This past year reformers in NYC deserved similar support in their campaign to defeat the NYC teachers union undemocratic apparatus, on which Weingarten’s power rests. They received none. Finally, the unified front that gives uncritical support to AFT and NEA policies ignores how “partnership” with Silicon Valley is one step away from MAGA and Trump’s desire to build a global far Right movement, which he will lead. AFT’s “partner” OpenAI, which contributes to Democrats, also partners with Amazon, which funds and supports Trump; Microsoft, which donates to the Democrats, has infrastructure deals with BlackRock, which has given Trump and the GOP huge sums, racing to profit from Trump’s authoritarian and imperial aims. [xi]
Billionaires, the bosses, and the politicians they control are not our allies when they undercut our economic and political rights, on the job and in society. We can and should work with all who join us to defend our rights, as workers, educators, and human beings. Our “big tent” should include organizations and movements that support us on issues, like increasing taxes on millionaires - and billionaires, and fighting for social justice. At the same time, we need to combat politicians, organizations, and moneyed interests as they use public education as a profit center, destroying its democratic underpinnings and massively weakening parent, teacher, student, and public voice and power. Defeating fascism requires defeating Trump’s initial project and the new neoliberal wave of reforms.
Building and sustaining a culture and practice of union democracy is more essential to successful resistance than ever, and in some respects a more formidable challenge, because education workers are pulled in so many different ways. Yet an informed, mobilized membership working with our real allies is our best protection against Trump and the vast resources he commands. A new generation of activists, which I see asking questions and organizing, about AI, Palestine, Venezuela, climate change, , waging contract fights, fighting deportations, defending special needs kids rights and program funding, challenging scripted literacy curricula, and so much more, needs to be educated about the history of neoliberal reform and the principles that guided growth of the first movement for social justice teacher unions that challenged it, in face of AFT and NEA collusion.
We have no time to waste. I don’t underestimate the task education workers face in this moment and the year to come. For many, maybe most teachers, the past school year has been like none other, understandably because the society has been altered from what it was before Trump’s election. Still, the penalty we will pay for failing to live up to this historic responsibility to re-form our movement is almost unimaginable. In researching this article I was stunned at the increased overlap. in ideas and funding, of organizations and foundations previously considered bastions of liberalism and tech money that supports Trump. We are truly in for the fight of our lives.
Though NEA and AFT are well-known, villainized on the Right for their political clout, which they exercise mainly through lobbying and electoral action, that power is constrained by their drive to control the union apparatus and with it the contours of struggle. Now is the time to realize our union and our movement’s potential power. That means going beyond the strategies the national and state affiliates have put forward, refusing to confine our actions to lobbying, court challenges, and participating in large mobilizations. While valuable these are insufficient, as education workers’ courageous resistance to ICE with community has shown. We need to look at and pursue options for mass civil disobedience, including walkouts, which are often started by a minority of workers and then grow to become a mass movement. This is how we won rights that are being washed away with breathtaking speed. Whether education workers can rise to this challenge, no one can predict. But so much depends on our doing so.
FOS will return in 2026. So will resistance, hopefully reinvigorated and re-imagined with a clearer understanding of what we face.
Lois
[i] This article is adapted from a forthcoming article in the Winter 2026 issue of New Politics. Both articles rely on evidence published since November 2024, about politics and the economy as well as education, in legacy media, independent news outlets, and academic journals. Other sources of information are progressive, neoliberal and Right wing think tanks, including but not limited to the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, American Enterprise Institute, and the Fordham Foundation, as well as edtech newsletters for investors and schools, exchanges with researchers about AI on social media, and press releases and social media of NEA and AFT and social justice teachers unions. One essential source of information is the74million, a neoliberal publication that has been recreated as an “independent” “non-profit” publication. Union activists also provide me with invaluable information and insights about their struggles, as do the online data bases about political contributions and political interlocks, OpenSecrets and LittleSis.
[ii] Derek Seidman, “Billionaire Ideologues and the 2024 Presidential Election,” Public Accountability Project, February 5, 2025: https://littlesis.org/news/billionaire-ideologues-and-the-2024-presidential-election/
[iii] Project 2025, Chapter 11, p. 338: https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. Most of the liberal analysis of Project 2025 and education ignored how “the conservative promise” of the Trump administration repeated the Right and neoliberal strategy of highjacking language of progressive pedagogy, like student-centered learning.
[iv] Full discussion of why the neoliberal project has resonated with elements of the public, including education researchers, is important in understanding the limitations of the liberal response to Trump. Unfortunately, it takes me well beyond what I can address in this article. An email from a research center that gets most of its funding from the AFT and NEA on New Orlean schools after Hurricane Katrina reflects the relucatance among liberals to take on privatization. The email publicizes the neoliberal assessment but also refutation Kristen Buras provides neoliberal myth-making about its success in New Orleans: https://www.icontact-archive.com/archive?c=1748247&f=3100&s=3172&m=397951&t=683ff6e55fceb8d669aa5ea6b8253ac84d14528c98c4873195440427f0ff88d5
[v] Maurice Cunningham, “Declining Dems for Education Reform (DFER) Seeks Salvation in MAGA Regime.”
June 2025. https://t.co/bTUAv1XqAx
[vi] Guest essay, New York Times, May 6, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/opinion/college-technical-vocational-education.html
[vii] “Linda E. McMahon, Secretary of Education.” US Department of Education, Office of Communications and Outreach (OCO). Page Last Reviewed: March 28, 2025
https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-organization/meet-secretary-of-education/linda-e-mcmahon
[viii] Ryan Pfleger, “ NEPC Review: Let’s Get Ready! Educating All Americans for Success (National Governors
Association, July 2025). October 2025.https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/reviews/NR%20Pfleger.pdf
[ix] Project 2025’s only mention of CTE is that programs for career and technical education should be moved from the Deptartment of Education to the Department of Labor. The page that hosted information about the Texas plan is under construction: https://cte.ed.gov/dataexplorer/build
[x] Trevor Griffey, “ American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Partnerships with Ed Tech Companies, 2022-25: What We Know So Far, August 6, 2025. https://campuslabor.blogspot.com/2025/08/AFT-EdTech-Partnerships.html. A Moment Like Never Before. Keynote Address by AFT President Randi Weingarten. AFT TEACH Conference. Washington, D.C.July 25, 2025: https://www.aft.org/press/speeches/moment-never
[xi] Peter Eavis an Maureen Farrell, “Trump Applies Pressure, Wall Street Giant Moves Into Panama,” The New York Times, March 4, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/business/blackrock-panama-canal-ports-hutchison.html