by Susan Van Gelder

Educators are devastated by the nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the federal Department of Education. McMahon has led World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) professional wrestling, Trump’s Small Business Administration, and his transition team. She has no education degree and no experience in classrooms. Her sole qualification: she is an “anti-woke Trump loyalist,” champion of parental “rights,” school “choice,” and ardently supports completely destroying public education in the U.S., which she would replace with private schools funded by taxpayers’ dollars.

How can this possibly be the “new normal”? A look at history tells both what we must fight for and the forces of retrogression opposing us.

FORMERLY ENSLAVED AMERICANS ESTABLISHED FREE UNIVERSAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Though rarely acknowledged, during Reconstruction Southern state legislatures with formerly enslaved Black legislators enacted laws they needed as free citizens—especially access to education. Efforts to broaden the reach of education had intensified with the growth of Abolitionism prior to the Civil War. There was increasing defiance of Southern laws enacted to punish those who taught enslaved people to read and write. After the Civil War, the new Southern public schools enrolled thousands of young Black citizens. In the North public schools united diverse European and Asian immigrants into American culture, but especially functioned to create an obedient, compliant workforce for burgeoning industries.

After Reconstruction ended when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, public schools were quickly legally segregated; in the North, segregation was the unacknowledged way of life as well. The revolutionary vision and principles that established free public education have suffered thousands of wounds since. The blows continue to rain down externally, generated from racism and the Right. Under relentless disinvestment in rural and minority communities, public schools themselves manifest way too many social ills and malfunctions that undermine their purpose.

However, what that reactionary movement from the Right has not been able to hide or destroy is that, from the first, hundreds of thousands of educators, students, teachers and parents have struggled within public education for those early visions and values to be made real. Inclusion of all, relevance, critical thinking skills and skills necessary for a meaningful life and work and accurate renditions of science and history remain, to this day, non-negotiable principles.

SCHOOL DESEGREGATION AND FREEDOM SCHOOLS

That passion for education and the principles established by the Black movement for freedom and the twentieth century labor movements were invigorated by the end of slavery. They set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement focused on ending segregation. The 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Topeka, KS Board of Education blew up the myth of separate but equal education.

A fierce, protracted backlash immediately erupted over school integration: from 1957 when Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus ordered the state National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from integrating Central High School; to 1959 when Prince Edward County, VA, closed all its public schools and re-opened them as private institutions for white students; and to the bitter fights in the 1970s against busing children between Black and white neighborhoods for integration in Boston and Detroit.

Even when busing for integration did occur, it was negated in practice. One who was a student then in the fifth grade remembered: “We were bused across town to a white school. We were put in a separate classroom and we had different lunch and recess periods from the white children. I wondered why I couldn’t stay at my old school, a few blocks from my home. I still have friends from elementary school, but I never even learned the name of a single white child at the new school.”

The 1963 News and Letters Committees pamphlet American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard pointed out:

“The ignorant white mobs…who have been on the rampage ever since the 1954…decision to desegregate schools may not know it, but the free public education from which they want the Negroes excluded, was first instituted in the South by the Negro. The Negro and white legislatures of the post-Civil War period gave the South the only democracy it had ever known, and has since forgotten.”[1]

Freedom Summer, 1964, brought hundreds of students from southern as well as northern colleges to Mississippi to register Black sharecroppers to vote. The new voters asked the students to create Freedom Schools (Robert Moses’ Algebra Project is the best known) to combat the outrageous unequal education in the Black segregated schools. The college students tutored reading, writing and math. But—most importantly—pupils and their teachers had their eyes opened to the missing pages of Black history in the American story.

The Freedom Schools threatened the status quo then and now. Another example was in Florida, where “an educational initiative launched in 2023 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), a Black heritage academic club, [was] founded in 1915 by historian Carter G. Woodson. Known as a ‘freedom school,’ the class was formed in response to what critics call an assault on Black history in Florida public schools….Six ASALH branches and affiliated groups have launched schools in Florida, with additional schools in Dallas, Indianapolis and Urbana-Champaign.”

EDUCATIONAL REFORMS OR EDUCATIONAL RETROGRESSION?

In the past decade a growing Republican far Right has produced an onslaught of thousands of repressive local laws, policies and practices, disguised as protecting parental rights, states’ rights, and educational choice in order to destroy the gains made by freedom movements, especially the Civil Rights Movement. Two examples: 1. Florida’s 2022 “Parental Rights in Education” law aimed at purging all extra-curricular reading material and activities from elementary classrooms;[2] and 2. last year Texas passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms. (One method: make sure nobody understands anything, like the proposal to substitute “involuntary relocation” for the “controversial” term “slavery”— in the second-grade curriculum!)

PROJECT 2025: A NATIONAL ASSAULT ON EDUCATION AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE

Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint from The Heritage Foundation authored by Trump lackeys, calls for eliminating the federal Department of Education (DOE). Its website states: “giving more control back to state and local governments, and expanding school choice, would improve education outcomes for all Americans, especially underprivileged communities.” Right now we can only speculate on the inevitability of wide-ranging negative economic and social ramifications, because the Department funds universities, colleges and the student loan program, besides supporting K-12 schools.

School performance, measured by student scores on state tests, is highly correlated to the economic status of the school population. Sadly, there are no metrics for the human effort that makes a school valuable: cafeteria staff who distribute extra lunches to hungry children; teachers who purchase hygiene supplies; custodians who listen to that boy who doesn’t talk to anyone else; a principal who brings in dozens of parent volunteers.

ENTER CHARTER SCHOOLS

Parent frustration was fertile ground for the explosion of charter schools in the 1990s, promising educational choice, flexibility and “quality education.” Parents struggling to improve their schools have been thwarted by bureaucracy, sexism and lack of funds. (“Hold a bake sale, honey!”)

Charter schools receive the same per-pupil state funding as the public schools, but the chartering agency—a university, a non-profit, or a for-profit—uses the funds to run the school and pay its administrators. They operate with little oversight and non-union teachers, some of whom have no college degree, let alone an education major! For every charter student, approximately $8,000 per year in state funding is drained from the public system in the area. When charters are clustered in Black and poor neighborhoods, the loss to public systems is drastic, and communities lose generational history and school pride. In Detroit, charters enroll 50% of the resident school-age children.

Even if President-elect Trump does not eliminate the entire Department of Education, Project 2025 envisions a voucher for school choice for every K-12 student. One method converts Title I federal funds—by law for “low-performing” public schools—into vouchers for each student to “choose a better” school, while their school would be “phased out altogether.”

In high-poverty areas, a realistic choice would be among private schools and publicly funded charter schools, since most parents want their children as close to home as possible. Public accountability on funding sources, school discipline policies or curriculum would be non-existent. Without unions, teachers have no support if disciplined or fired. Parents and guardians with no education training would have to choose schools in a bewildering educational marketplace, similar to the nightmare of shopping for health insurance.

BLOWS FROM WITHIN

Schools themselves have eroded quality education. Emphasis on standardized tests to rate schools hampers teachers’ creativity with too much time spent “teaching to the test.” Bilingual teacher Dr. Erica Rae spoke often of her constant battles for time to actually TEACH. Her kindergarteners’ progress was hampered by frequent interruptions for standardized tests.

Twenty-first-century universal education faces a dilemma: fewer and fewer jobs await students. The global economy increasingly relies on automation, which eliminates jobs for human workers, let alone employment with good pay and benefits. The disconnect between education and employment has never been greater. Students’ and teachers’ chronic absenteeism reflects this.

Solutions like solving the teacher shortage by relying on computers for learning are no substitute for human instructors. One of the greatest challenges to empowering true educational reform lies in the fragmented nature of education struggles. All too rare are teachers’ unions which fight for their own support staff like custodians and cafeteria workers. However, the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike in 2012 insisted on including support staff, and inspired several statewide teachers’ strikes throughout the country.

MARX ON EDUCATION IS RELEVANT TODAY

Karl Marx welcomed the education clauses in the British Factory Acts of 1833. Factory workers had demanded compulsory education for their laboring children. He noted: “The success of those clauses proved for the first time that the possibility of combining education and gymnastics[3] with manual labor….The factory inspectors soon found out…that the factory children, although they received only one half the education of the regular day students, yet learnt quite as much and often more…the germ of the education of the future will…combine productive labor with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully-developed human beings.” (Emphasis added.)

GOING FORWARD

Marx’s whole philosophy fought against the alienation of separating mental from manual labor, separating thinking from doing. He envisioned a society where labor (in the full sense of the word) would have evolved from “a mere means of life to the prime necessity of life.” This way of thinking would have to infuse education from the beginning.

People who actually work with children know that human interaction is vital for them to fully develop their human powers. Human interaction does not mean no computers. It does mean that children can learn very well from adults and other children with or without computers. During the pandemic, children learning remotely who had an adult actively engaged in their progress did relatively well. All too many of the others pointed their cameras at the ceiling or simply did not attend class.

Project 2025 must become a catalyst for opposition. It needs to be stopped from further dumbing down the power and freedom of teachers and from siphoning funds from communities in its rush to privatize education.

Public education is not alone for families with children; it determines the very nature of society. Recognizing the implications of destroying public education should guide our struggles in whatever arena—or classroom—they reside. The power of critical thinking has never been more important to the battles to save quality education!

Ultimately, the goals of free public education—inclusion of all, relevance, critical thinking skills and skills necessary for meaningful life and work and accurate renditions of science and history—remain to this day non-negotiable principles. They depend on a society which will support them—a revolutionary non-capitalist economy and philosophy. In such a world, “fully-developed human beings” will be the rule, not the exception.

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[1] American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, by Raya Dunayevskaya, 2003 (fifth edition in honor of the 40th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington), p. 39. The first edition was written to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and quickly became a textbook in the Freedom Schools at that time. “Negro” was the name Black people preferred to be called at that time in U.S. history when ACOT was written.

[2] “War on teachers is a war on students,” Sept.-Oct. 2022 News & Letters, p. 3.

[3] Physical education.