There are nearly 50 million students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Public education is a cornerstone for a democratic society and the only viable education option for most working-class families. Federal and state cuts to public education are a direct attack on democracy that disproportionally punishes the working class.
The Department of Education, created by Congress in 1979, identified its purpose to be: “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual” by serving as a “supplement and complement [to] the efforts of States.” Within the first six months of his second presidential term, Donald Trump has signed numerous executive orders targeting public education institutions, from Head Start programs to public K-12 schools and higher education institutions.
These executive orders, which aim to dismantle the Department of Education, would limit access to education. Funding cuts to public education will not only exacerbate the already critical personnel shortage experienced in public schools, but continue to amplify the gap between publicly funded education and privatized education only accessible to the wealthy. Considering that between 10 and 15% of Americans under 18 live in poverty, this means they could lose the equal access to education the Department of Education was created to advance. The furtherance of this gap will disproportionately affect students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and non-citizen students and workers, as legislation continues to be introduced that deliberately targets them.
In a 2023 report from the Education Law Center, 36 states received a C or below grade for educational funding, with 13 receiving an F grade. Every year, the EdWeek Research Center surveys teachers and administrators about their confidence in their districts' financial health, and these educators are only becoming more pessimistic. Rising costs of supporting students and continued cuts to educational budgets at the federal and state levels result in an unsustainable situation. Students cannot be given the education that they deserve without the financial support of their communities. But as states continue to step back from the responsibility of educating the next generation, the Trump Administration openly plans to drastically cut support even further, decimating the opportunities of students nationwide, and increasing the burden placed on teachers. It is unacceptable for the Trump administration to continue to abandon the federal government’s responsibility to provide quality, accessible education to all, while 90 percent of teachers spend money out of their own, hard-earned paychecks, to ensure their students have a functional and productive classroom. This personal sacrifice on behalf of teachers is even though they make, on average, 23.5 percent less per week than their non-teacher, college-educated peers.
Shortages of teachers, custodians, bus drivers, food service workers, librarians, paraprofessionals, and other school support staff undermine school safety and the availability of educational services. The chaos of having fewer staff available is an ongoing problem, and effects on American society will be long-lasting. Teachers' ability to select relevant, appropriate curriculum and standards of classroom behavior is increasingly limited due to attacks that require teachers to focus on agendas rather than facts. Spreading misinformation and limiting diversity in curriculum will leave students further behind in their critical thinking, problem solving, and social-emotional skills such as empathy. It also makes it harder for students of marginalized identities to feel included in school and accepted by society, impacting their academic performance, their health, and their futures. When curricula are altered in such alarming, oppressive ways, it is important to remember that we are not only altering learning, we are altering the future of society.
Non-teaching staff are respected even less than teachers, dedicating their lives to the wellbeing of students while often receiving significantly below a living wage. At the bargaining table, support staff are patronizingly told that if they want a living wage, they should get a teaching degree—even though schools could not function without a variety of workers to support students and the learning environment. When paraprofessionals are not available or are assigned too many students, students with disabilities miss out on crucial services that are written into federally-required individual education plans. Building support staff are forced to complete the same amount of work with fewer coworkers, resulting in safety, hygiene, and maintenance problems. School food service workers must navigate and enforce arcane nutritional guidelines to make sure their program generates profit for their districts, and are sometimes forced to maintain free and reduced school lunch programs using highly processed, unappealing food produced by the same exploitative companies producing food for prisons. Bus drivers face longer routes with increasingly dangerous and disruptive student conduct, all while being responsible for their students' safety in a culture of increasing distracted driving and road rage. Despite collective bargaining agreements outlining responsibilities, staff often agree to fulfill additional responsibilities and stress for the welfare of students at their own expense. All workers in schools suffer from frustrating conditions that lead to burnout and further decrease the availability of qualified staff.
At public higher education institutions, years of corporate-style initiatives, privatization, and administrative bloat have hollowed out academic departments as university leaders and politicians seek to roll back tenure protections and undercut organized labor at every possible turn. This mismanagement has been accompanied by declining state investment, skyrocketing tuition, administrative bloat, increasing use of adjunct and contract faculty, and an overall collapse in trust in institutions of higher education. All of this has left public universities woefully underprepared for the ferocity of the federal assault over the past several months.
Although the Trump administration has focused much of its ire on private institutions such as Harvard and Columbia, public universities have not been spared, and Trump is trying to shake down UCLA for $1 billion. Attempts to slash federal research funding and eliminate indirect cost recovery will punch hundred-million-dollar holes in the budgets of every major research-focused institution, holes that will no doubt be used to justify further austerity and crackdowns by presidents and provosts who will continue to collect oversized paychecks as their students and staff face repression, surveillance, and uncertainty.
Across all public education, it is clear that both the persisting status quo prior to Trump’s attacks, and the current state of active hostility towards public education and critical thinking are utterly untenable in a future that prioritizes the working class.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79th UE CONVENTION:
- Demands Congress:
- Pass laws implementing free public higher education and student loan forgiveness for all;
- In the meantime, put a moratorium on all student loan defaults, introduce default forgiveness, implement measures so that loans can be repaid at no more than 10 percent of annual income, reduce student loan interest rates to the same rate available for banking entities, and ensure interest cannot accrue until after graduation;
- Maintain funding for Title II intended for professional development, mentoring programs, and class size reduction;
- Opposes the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education;
- Demands of the U.S. Department of Education:
- Recommit itself to its original mission of ensuring access to quality education for all;
- Bar the use of taxpayer-funded voucher programs that siphon public funds from public schools and funnel them to private and charter schools;
- Eliminate all high-stakes testing;
- Work with borrowers to seek loan forgiveness if schools have deceived them or committed fraud;
- Ensure curriculum is developed in a fashion that recognizes the existence of racism, sexism, classism, and other issues in the world and aims to develop students’ critical thinking on such topics;
- Fund school personnel programs to maintain appropriate student-to-staff ratios;
- Provide vocational training and job placement services for individuals transitioning into the workforce, including those who have advanced degrees but need further direction to reach the desired level of job placement;
- Demand that state legislatures:
- Fully fund public education;
- Preserve tenure systems;
- Address economic and racial segregation by disconnecting educational funding from property taxation;
- Advocate for the removal of police forces from schools;
- Establish and protect a curriculum that recognizes the existence of racism, sexism, classism, and other issues in the world and aims to develop students’ critical thinking on such topics;
- Urge membership and locals to:
- Engage in local school board elections through a variety of methods
- Actively lobby Congress and state legislatures on this program;
- Support all campaigns that advocate universal access to free education;
- Demands an end to book bans, censorship, and restrictions on curricula taught in libraries, school districts, and universities.