This Teacher Appreciation Week, Let's Fight for Educators
Project 2025's Attack on Public Education
Yesterday was National Teacher Appreciation Day, so as I ran errands, I swung through the drive thru to pick up coffee gift cards. I had my daughter (9) and son (12) fill out their teachers’ names. They wrote quick little notes about what they liked about them. I even included support staff — the lunch ladies, custodians, office workers, and paraprofessionals who do so much unseen heavy lifting, keeping our public schools organized and thriving.
All in all, this probably cost my family around $100 and about an hour of our time. Though I’m sure they are appreciated, there is SO much more we can do for our teachers than these small gestures.
As 2014 Texas Teacher of the Year Monica Washington said in her acceptance, words and tokens ring hollow to teachers who aren’t admitted to the decision-making table.
“We are often told that we are ‘valued professionals’ who ‘change the lives of our students every day.’ But we are also micromanaged to immobility, not trusted to make the simplest decisions that affect students’ learning and well-being.”
Add to that the unnecessary and even dangerous responsibilities we’ve layered onto teachers’ shoulders: They’re expected to be babysitters, social workers, counselors, nurses, and more. In the event of a school shooting, some teachers are even asked to be marksmen and be ready to point a gun at a child. Teachers are even expected to be brave enough take a bullet for their students since Republicans continue to cower to the NRA.
As a nation, we’ve seen an uptick in antagonism against teachers from Republican lawmakers, who insist that instead of educating kids about basic principles they will encounter in the real world, they’re grooming them. Couching their vitriol and distrust in feel-good phrases like “parental rights” and “school choice” conservatives have shown up at school board meetings, city council chambers, and state legislatures to basically re-enact the scene in Field of Dreams where Amy Madigan’s character calls them Nazis.
Book burning is still wrong in the year of our lord 2024.
Project 2025 follows this theme, promising to gut the Department of Education, eliminate all references to woke, anti-racism, and critical race theory, and throw teachers and librarians in prison for distributing pornography. I think we can all agree that students shouldn’t be able to access Only Fans from their school computer lab, but that’s not what they are talking about. They’re talking about books that discuss some element of human sexuality. Which is most books.
The Heritage Foundations Lindsey Burke wrote the chapter about education in Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership. Remember that this is the document that outlines what will happen under a conservative presidency — meaning if Trump is re-elected. Burke works at EdChoice, a “school choice” advocacy group that used to be named after Milton Friedman before a rebrand. Burke was also part of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team in 2021.
Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955, wherein education is publicly funded but education decisions are made by families.
The question is, which families? My progressive middle-class family? Betsy DeVos’ family, which has never seen the inside of a public school? Trump’s family?
We know the answer.
If Project 2025 succeeds, conservatives will weaponize our own community resources against us.
They’ll raise taxes on the middle-class, underfund our public schools, and give private school vouchers to rich families. They’ll eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ students, allowing teachers and admins to use dead names and the wrong pronouns for trans students. They’ll whitewash history, the way we’ve seen PragerU Kids do and more and more red states buy into. They’ll ban union activity, making it harder for career educators to fight for fair pay and employment protection.
I’ve gotta say, even though I can afford the $100 gift cards for my kids’ teachers, knowing we saved their careers by re-electing Joe Biden feels a lot more satisfying.
Onward Democracy Defenders!
Dismantling public education is diabolical
9 May 2024
Corporate right-wing extremists attack, undermine and defund America’s public education systems on levels unheard of in recent times.
What’s going in New Mexico is a shocking example:
In 1910, Congress mandated the Territory of New Mexico include in its state Constitution Article 12 EDUCATION, as a condition of granting statehood to the Territory in 1912.
Article 12 includes Sections 2 and 7, which establish and fund New Mexico’s Permanent School Fund (PSF).
Then, the 1910 Congress granted “vast amounts of federal land” to the Territory of New Mexico on the condition that financial proceeds from the state’s leasing of those lands were banked in the Permanent School Fund (PSF).
Then, the 1912 Congress granted Statehood to the Territory.
PSF money was constitutionally mandated to be used to pay for educating New Mexico’s people, 65 to 75-percent of whom were fluent in the Spanish language, but not English.
Today, the Permanent School Fund is valued at $30 billion.
State lawmakers — who took control of public education funding in 1980 — invest only 6% of PSF money in public schools, colleges and universities.
The remainder is loaned out annually to corporations and the private sector by the State Investment Council. Results?
Since 1980, NM’s national ranking in public education system performance has fallen.
Today, NM is last of the states in student performance, reading level abilities and graduation rates.
Nevertheless, we New Mexicans are still smart enough to know what the indicted former 45th President of these United States is.