Fighting fascism – Day twenty-eight – Education

Before entering the subject of this blog, which is education, I want to share something particularly outrageous that I recently heard about – the proposal of congresswomen Claudia Tenney to turn Flag Day (June 14) into Donald Trump day – an official federal holiday. Does this make you angry enough to fight fascism every day, if not every hour?

The US education system is under attack by the new administration along several dimensions: prohibition of “illegal” (not clear what that means) Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs, changes to Title IX in order to bar any protections of non-binary or transgender students, fighting antisemitism at universities (a thinly veiled attack on those who protested the war in Gaza), a hysterical call to make education more patriotic and less “ideological” (i.e., less learning about respecting gender and race), and  the promotion of school choice and charter schools (without an explicit program as to how this is supposed to happen). A particularly harmful element I learned recently about is cuts to the budget for education research (it appears that the Institute of Education Science will lose 900 million dollars).

There is talk of things to come, such closing down the Department of Education (hopefully the Democrats in Congress will fight savagely against this one), getting rid of tenure, ending Head Start, and defunding student aid. There is also the American Compass agenda, which, if I understand correctly, wants to dumb down higher educational opportunities for youth and orient resources towards vocational and technical education; however, that is the perspective of that organization, not necessarily the administration.

That’s the thing. What the actual education “vision” of the administration consists of is more difficult to ascertain. I took a look the “Fact Sheet: Donald J. Trump Expands Educational Opportunities for American Families” published on January 30 to try to get an inkling: it mostly focuses on “choice” and charter schools (with explicit references to faith based schools), with the implicit claim (unsupported) that more of these two actions will reverse poor learning trends. Other than that (and please correct me if I am wrong), I haven’t seen any white paper for the overall education sector – early, basic, special, secondary, technical or university.

For all the talk of handing back schools to the states and/or parents and purging the curriculum of ideology (i.e., history), the US has a pretty decentralized system all in all with many mechanisms already in place for parental and community participation. This gets me to what can be done about this jumbled attack on the education system. I think that the future of resistance across the board, not just education, lies at the local level. It will need to consolidate at the state level (irony of course, considering all the blabbering about states rights), but things happen at the school and school board level. Make sure that the right people (maybe you) are elected to school boards and PTAs. Attend local townhall meetings and demand to know how the disabled, other disadvantaged groups, children of undocumented workers and others are going to get a good education; challenge attempts to silence teachers, ban books, allow ICE agents into schools, or post the ten commandments; and just generally be irritatingly vocal about protecting children and education at the local level. Network with those in other school districts and other schools. Here is a list of organizations that are fighting the good fight, from what I understand.

1. American Federation of Teachers (AFT): aft.org
2. National Education Association (NEA) : nea.org
3. Education Law Center (ELC) : edlawcenter.org
4. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – Learning for Justice: learningforjustice.org
5. Public Education Network (PEN) : publiceducation.org
6. Network for Public Education (NPE): networkforpubliceducation.org
7. Parents Together : parentstogether.org