By the League’s National Public Education Committee

Teachers, students and parents are understandably in shock over the MAGA election victory. Entire school populations are now actually on the verge of criminalization. This includes women, undocumented families, BIPOC families, LGBTQIA+ families, Muslim families, entire religions, and teachers and professors who dare to teach the truth about social justice.

Americans have two choices: to retreat into fear and despair, or to respond with righteous anger and mount a programmatic defense of public education itself. Trump has announced his intentions to attack public education, now everything depends on how educators, families and students respond. We face a battle for the soul of America’s schools.

Public education in the US, has been limited for decades by systemic inequities, so public schools have challenged racial segregation, gender inequalities and even the unequal impacts of increased climate disasters. Now, the so-called “culture wars” over racism and sexual orientation are being used as the political cover for privatizing education and prioritizing profits over students. Public schools have become a battleground for the ideological supremacy of those aiming for open corporate dictatorship.

Controlling Schools to Control the Future

Trump’s MAGA campaign threatened replacing real education with “patriotic education” that supports government-approved “rights” of White Christian nationalism, white supremacy and cis-gendered rights. This is based on weaponizing fear, branding calls for justice and equality as assaults on American identity. Fascism attacks science and history, because controlling history and the truth allows them to control the future.

Trump threatened abolish the Department of Education, whose budget runs over $200 billion a year. This money is directed to primarily assist low-income families, with funding for disabled and special ed students, k12 student aid, aid for college, and vocational grants. Trump plans to weaponize this money by denying it to any university or school district where an individual might teach the truth about genocide in Palestine, structural racism, or LGBTQIA+ rights. Faced with this massive budget crisis, institutions may choose to police themselves. At the university level, Trump’s Agenda 47 also calls for using the Department of Justice to sue their endowments and/or tax them.

All forms of privatization will metastasize as MAGA turns public education into a market place of privilege, replacing the public mandate of education as a human right with education as a commodity, best available to those who can pay for it. Fascism is always a business plan.

The MAGA political forces intend to replace teaching students to think creatively with indoctrination of “patriotic education” and Christian scripture favoring sects. Genocide in Palestine shows us only too well the result when one religion is privileged over all others.

Some advocates for bringing prayer into schools call for eliminating free school lunches. When Oklahoma’s MAGA state superintendent of schools demanded a Bible in every classroom, every single school district in the state defied him. Parents, teachers, ministers, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined in lawsuits against him, with Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition founder Erika Wright declaring “my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible.”

In the November election, Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska voted down vouchers, even though the last two also saw MAGA landslides. Voucher plans have been pushed in many states, where most voucher money goes to families who have never been in public schools, Many people understand that vouchers are designed to bankrupt public schools, especially already desperate rural schools. Tim Royers, union president of the Nebraska State Education Association, insists “vouchers just aren’t popular,” noting that a coalition including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans is opposing them.

Immigration Struggle at the School Door

Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented people on Day 1 is an immediate threat to every public school in the country. Historically, ICE has seldom invaded schools, churches, workplaces and shopping centers. That could now change in an instant. Border Vigil organizer Amerika Garcia Grewal told the Texas Observer. “As global migration increases, we are witnessing the beginning of an unprecedented movement of people… The future of humanity depends on our response.”

Every single public school in the country now is involved in a discussion about how to keep the children safe. What will schools, community colleges and universities do when students begin disappearing from classes? How do you tell 4th graders that their friends have been seized by the government?

Chicago and Los Angeles had already declared themselves to be sanctuary cities, where immigrants will be protected. But MAGA fascism will dramatically increase police powers, and what worked with Sanctuary Cities in 2016 may not succeed this time. The incoming regime says that they will cut the funding of states and cities who make themselves sanctuaries.

The best way to prevent people from using their political power is to convince them that they do not have any. But nothing can keep parents out of their child’s public school. This time around teachers, parents, students, school staff and everyone involved have the power to intervene at their school’s door to keep ICE out.

Likewise we have the power to demand that school districts and colleges defy MAGA, block ICE and refuse to divulge student information. These governing institutions will be under grave financial threats. They must not be permitted to bend.

Tactically, public education is on the defensive, but strategically we can take the offensive. The fascist educational goals of MAGA forces can be attacked as the corporate plans that they really are. Who gave corporations the right to own public education resources as private property?

The public faces a historical choice of momentous import. Either the globe and the economy will be healed by making resources and technologies public, or private property will destroy humanity.