To Combat Trump’s Attacks on Public Education, We Need Democracy in Our Unions

As May Day approaches, two grassroots organizations of education workers, one created in response to neoliberal reforms and the other emerging from the strike wave that swept several red states in 2018, are coalescing to organize a rank-and-file movement of education workers. At the same time, a coalition launched by the Chicago Teachers Union, under the banner of “bargaining for the common good,” bringing together labor and community groups, is supporting a National Day of Action on May 1, providing tool kits and online trainings for activists. This moment of action from both the independent rank-and-file movement of teachers and the National Day of Action network (MayDay Strong) is welcome as Trump’s unconstitutional dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has grabbed headlines and sparked widespread protest, putting education in the political spotlight.

The situation for schools and communities is dire and wide-ranging, including repercussions from the firings of thousands of employees, cuts and changes to student aid, school lunch programs and civil rights protections, loss of essential information about school enrollment and funding, and much more. The possibility the DOE will be shuttered has plunged hundreds of thousands of U.S. education workers into a tailspin of fear, confusion and rage. Their jobs are at risk, along with their ability to fulfill their ideals and responsibilities — to teach truth, to protect children from deportations and to protect schools from cuts in essential services.

Education workers have looked, often in vain, for leadership from their local school boards and administrations. Teachers with whom I have been in contact, members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), have told me they feel vulnerable, left on their own to protect students from deportations, unless they work for school systems in which boards of education have established policies for sanctuary schools. Many education workers feel vulnerable and powerless, without even the most rudimentary guidance about protecting their students and themselves. Because they feel unprotected, they spoke with me with the agreement their names will not be used.

NEA and AFT have taken some steps to fill this vacuum. AFT has provided legal advice in webinars and wording for safe-zone-resolutions, and NEA has given members model language for safe schools resolutions to raise with school boards. One seasoned NEA activist recently remarked to me that without support and resources from the state and national unions to organize, resolutions won’t be implemented. Educators are too overwhelmed with putting out fires to be able to act on their own. AFT also organized a “national day of action” and NEA a demonstration in Washington. Some activists have welcomed the NEA and AFT calls for days of action. Others have been looking for more militant direction, such as a general strike, and have expressed their frustration on social media, dismissing the days of action as “performative” theater for public relations.

Although AFT and NEA are endorsing the idea of rallies, and their own coalition, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), linked to the May 1 organizing group in an email, this explicit support for organizing is undercut by their own strategy, one that emphasizes lawsuits and Beltway lobbying. Several “red state” affiliates of NEA don’t mention Trump or his policies on their websites, reflecting the mindset that the Oklahoma Education Association adopted in the “red state” 2018 walkouts. AFT has filed lawsuits by itself about student loan forgiveness and with the American Sociological Association to oppose Trump’s anti-DEI policies. NEA in turn has filed its own lawsuit with the NAACP and other civil rights groups arguing that the staff cuts left the Department of Education unable to carry out many of its mandatory functions and put student civil rights in jeopardy.

The unions’ emphasis on lawsuits and lobbying doesn’t often make it into the public sphere for deliberation. Michael Mulgrew, AFT President Randi Weingarten’s most powerful lieutenant, who controls New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), though, recently boasted of the union’s use of the courts to push back against the Trump administration; meanwhile, a candidate running against Mulgrew in a coalition slate is calling for the union to put more emphasis on organizing. Legal challenges are an essential aspect of an overall strategy to stop Trump, but the cumbersome legal process and questions about whether Trump will obey the courts show that reliance solely on the courts, legal rallies and political friends cannot substitute for mobilizations of members, with allies, in mass action.

Democratizing the Unions — a Messy and Essential Task

Amid the political and economic changes accelerated by the Trump administration, NEA and AFT’s lack of leadership is profoundly dangerous for public education and democracy. Meanwhile, the unions are steering clear from the role of venture capital and private equity in privatizing education and of finance capital’s support for Trump’s political agenda. Silicon Valley identifies problems in public policy that it “solves” with edtech companies, reaping profits and more power. Another seismic shift is private equity’s control of corporate ownership, its concentration of wealth so massive it has become the most powerful force on Wall Street. Private equity firms are notorious for investing in corporations to bleed them dry, but they also make huge profits in surveillance and detention. Blackrock, by far the world’s largest asset manager, has purchased two ports in the Panama Canal, reflecting that the most powerful force in finance capital fully endorses Trump’s authoritarianism and imperial agenda, while basking in the “spoils.” Blackrock’s latest plan to profit from infrastructure investments includes a new alliance with Microsoft to fuel AI. Private equity and venture capital have joined a frenzy for huge new profits that Trump’s privatization and authoritarianism advance. And Democrats, many of whom endorse or waver on charter schools, also have close relationships with Silicon Valley, accepting funds from tech moguls as they make statements opposing Elon Musk. While a few may join us after we organize, they will not lead or save us.

When AFT welcomes a partnership with Microsoft to help “empower” teachers to use AI, it’s implicitly throwing its weight behind Blackrock’s and Microsoft’s economic and political agenda — privatization of education and government. NEA has not pursued relationships with edtech companies, but its policy toward AI says nothing about Silicon Valley’s explicit aim to privatize education with edtech, despite members’ explicit concerns about AI, nor does it discuss how it will counter the problems it does identify. According to a union activist in the Pacific Northwest representing his college at NEA’s 2025 Higher Ed Conference, attendees heard from leaders that AI is a neutral “advancement of human knowledge” — the few delegates who critiqued its use were dismissed as “fearful” and “afraid.”

Those welcoming collaborations with edtech companies in using AI are wearing ideological blinders shared by prominent liberal opponents of charter schools and vouchers. They have missed the re-alignment of swaths of venture capital and private equity to make public education one huge “free” market funded by the government, capital’s dream come true. Toward that end Trump is creating new forms of privatization that will dwarf the damage of 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. While ESAs that Trump is pushing are not currently tied to standardized testing, the model policy for ESAs described by the far right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) requires testing, a model Alabama has already implemented. The data the right demands is rooted in ubiquitous, omnipotent standardized testing, used to control schools and teaching, on the bogus claim they measure learning fairly and well.

A growing number of AFT and NEA members are restive, feeling their union leadership is insulated from members’ needs, voices and ideas. These rank-and-file leaders are organizing both within and outside of the union structure. For example, after NEA announced the National Walk-in Day on March 19, the re-emerging network of rank-and-file education workers held a “Walk-in 101,” providing training with a quick toolkit to help members newer to organizing spaces.

The need to democratize local, state and national unions is rejected by some activists as a diversion from the “united front” we need at this moment. But ignoring AFT and NEA allows them to collaborate with the corporations allied with Trump’s push to privatize education, as the national unions did when neoliberal reforms pushed testing into our schools. Vibrant union democracy increases our capacity to build a movement of activists in both NEA and AFT, a united force of education workers that could even push state affiliates of NEA and AFT to become unified, democratic organizations, as occurred in West Virginia after its walkouts. Robust union democracy in teachers unions also opens the door to respectful and mutually beneficial collaboration with allies in social movements because it frees up the power of education workers to develop a resilient connective tissue between life in schools and beyond their walls, which a union bureaucracy cannot accomplish from its office buildings.

In the NEA that means building a rank and file movement, which also entails challenging the ideas of members as well as long-time national and state staff, who don’t necessarily share the political ideas of reformers. In AFT, democratization requires defeating a powerful national machine, one that has thwarted organizing to push the union to divest from Israel, as well as democratizing union conventions. Democratizing the union is the door to drawing on the union’s greatest strength, the collective power of an informed, mobilized membership.

Leveraging Our Strengths

Our strength lies in the reasons the right has intensified its assault on public schools. Despite their weaknesses, U.S. teachers unions are a threat because they have a presence in every state and almost every community. Unlike most U.S. unions, NEA and AFT have relatively high density of union membership (percentages of workers who are union members), which the right intends to change by creating teacher organizations to replace unions and orchestrating new anti-teacher union campaigns. Another reason the right has aimed at education is because schools powerfully influence existing social inequalities, and education workers have the potential power to threaten an unjust status quo. Even if teachers don’t identify as “idea workers,” the independence of thought encouraged in most disciplines (and in teacher education done well) and the occupation’s ideals about helping students mean teachers pose a danger to authoritarian regimes. As an overwhelmingly female profession, teachers and their unions are a threat to Trump, as is evident from what one teacher-activist whom I collaborate with describes as “Project 2025’s exaltation of the White, heterosexual, cis-gender male.” She added that while teachers have not consistently defended struggles for social equality, today teachers and their unions often endorse movements and curricula within and outside of schools that support Black and Brown, immigrant, queer, trans, dis/abled, non-Christian, poor and multilingual students and their families.

The NEA and AFT lawsuits and rallies to save the Department of Education (DOE) illuminated our strengths and our mistakes. We have been able to focus public attention on the illegality of the closure and harm that is being done. Yet, we forfeited strategic and political advantages with the broad slogan of saving the DOE’s role in the cabinet rather than seeing more precisely what functions it serves we need to protect, and perhaps where else in the government bureaucracy those laws might be better protected, as well as what functions of the DOE we should reject.

First, most regulations and services we want to save were created because of direct action by the civil rights movement for equal educational opportunity, including school integration. Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation, a response to civil unrest, ushered in massive funding and with it a new federal involvement in K-12 education, including passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and Head Start. AFT, NEA and organized labor supported this new federal role though keeping at arm’s length — or actively opposing — social movements trying to extend equal opportunity to women, immigrants and disabled people. The unions’ stance changed when these movements succeeded in winning laws that funded programs in schools. Another lesson in this history is how civil rights protections and federal funding were changed as a conservative restoration turned back those Great Society reforms, shortly after they were passed.

The Carter administration’s creation of the DOE in 1977 as a cabinet position, which moved its functions from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was hotly contested for reasons of narrow self-interest among education’s constituent organizations, who vied for federal money and power. NEA supported having a DOE immediately because it had a political advantage; the AFT, fearing the NEA’s influence, opposed it, as did the AFL-CIO, following Albert Shanker’s lead. The Catholic Church didn’t want a cabinet level department that might fund public schools with more money than it could raise; and higher education worried a new education department, championed by the NEA, would shift more funding toward K-12 education.

The third historical turn in education policy that should inform our strategy is the bipartisan neoliberalization of the DOE, when “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) replaced The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 2002. Both NEA and AFT initially embraced NCLB’s premises and federal aid tied to testing. Eventually they were forced by parents and teachers to criticize testing mandates when results were used to evaluate and fire teachers. Though the unions finally spoke out against test results being used for teacher evaluation and school closings, NCLB’s legacy of education controlled by standardized tests remained and has grown with increased use of software and platforms. Campaigns to stop Trump from closing the DOE failed to make a distinction between beneficial functions of the agency and the harm done by NCLB and the federal programs and policies created under its ideological premises, especially standardized testing, expanded exponentially, enshrined as the only acceptable (“scientific”) measure of academic achievement for federal aid, research and curricula.

The “Great Society” programs reveal what regulations we should protect and restore and how much ground we have lost to the right in defense of civil rights and in school funding. We should question whether the unions were right to adopt a blanket approach to saving the DOE without regard to defending specific programs and policies. A more targeted strategy would have allowed us to hone in on the key responsibilities of the DOE, especially “reductions or changes to the federal funding the DOE administers” on which states and local districts depend to fund services to students and teachers’ jobs, as well as the hard-won and vital safeguards in the Office of Civil Rights.

Further, education and teachers unions need to consider the ways in which a cabinet agency has sometimes insulated and isolated them from social movements demanding gender equality, disability rights and immigration rights. Working with these allies whose interests include but are not limited to education might have strategic advantages, encouraging unions and education workers to create alliances to win broader support for education funding and curricula that speak truth to power about economic inequality and Trump’s suppression of human rights.

Is it realistic to hope for and try to build a national rank-and-file movement, one that challenges the leadership directly in demands for democracy and with independent organization and struggle? It’s a challenge. Educators are a diverse group in all respects. They don’t all share the same values and beliefs, a reality often used to discourage activism and pursue more moderate policies — often without debate by members. Although NEA or AFT have not released results from polls about how members voted in 2024, 20 percent of AFT members voted for Trump in 2016, as did a third of NEA members. Education Week’s poll of 1135 educators identified as a representative sample (with 731 teachers) found 35 percent planned on voting for Trump. Unions rely on dues from educators who support Trump (and his agenda) as well as members who desire more progressive values. The answer to navigating that reality is in robust union democracy, opening the union’s structures and publications to members’ voices on issues. Suppressing differences and debate fails to win over conservative members, as a neoliberal news outlet reporting on education noted. Exercising power in the name of members whose voices are excluded encourages alienation and primes members for the right’s arguments about its alternative to unions being run by bosses.

While the movement will decide its program, recognizing that communities, locals and states differ in their political situation and consciousness, three broad demands might guide its work:

1. Full public funding for public schools, pre-K through college, for the common good, including defense of the rights of students, educators and communities to collectively determine their educational tools and curricula free from the whims and interests of billionaires and profit-seekers.
2. Protection and affirmation of human rights for students, parents and caregivers, and educators in their schools and in society.
3. Protection and expansion of the political and economic rights for all working people to organize collectively in their unions to demand and defend our dignity in the workplace and the world beyond, with our allies.

There was never a better time for AFT and NEA members to build on the rallies and actions being held on May 1 to start to organize for a national walkout to protect our schools, our students, and our work as educators, taking the lead when union leadership won’t. Making our unions into organizations that fight for our interests ultimately requires their democratization.

These campaigns in our local, state and national organizations, in alliance with allies for social justice and democratic schools, must fight for what billionaires and the far right are stealing: our taxes, our rights, control of our schools, and our children’s future.

This article was written with assistance from Leah Z. Owens, Erin Dyke, Chloe Asselin, and Keith Eric Benson.