We must fight to protect our public schools from being destroyed

Due to the numerous anti-democratic executive orders and regressive actions that seek to undermine our children’s future and defund our neighborhood schools, we are asking folks to help protect our CB schools by understating the issues and attending School Board meetings more often.

The federal attack to end the promise of a democratic public education for ALL.

Here is how we see it unfolding:

1) Attacks on teaching honest history, diverse perspectives, and critical thinking:

CB has been here before and we know how unpopular and unsuccessful these attacks are. Most of us want our kids to learn how to think for themselves which requires learning the truth. Additionally, curriculum is not determined by the federal government, so these “orders” will likely be challenged in court. We believe they are intentionally being used as tactics to divide us and convince us we should abandon our neighborhood schools.

• The executive branch wants to control how schools teach about race and gender by threatening to strip federal money from schools that do not conform to the nationalist narrative, as laid out in “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” Only authoritarian countries take actions that suppress historical truths, erase people’s identity, strip educators of their autonomy, demand state sanctioned “patriotic education”, whitewash the study of history by ignoring and/or rewriting past atrocities, historical injustices and uncomfortable truths, and rid schools of critical thinking and open inquiry.

• Viewpoint censorship of books is happening in Department of Defense grade schools and high schools where the Trump administration has direct control. “Consider this a blueprint for what the executive branch would like to see nationwide. The policies being tested on the children of military families mirror the censorship regime already enacted in states like Florida, where book bans, gag orders on educators, and restrictions on library collections have become state policy. This action is a blueprint for national education policy.” (Every Library) Additionally, Pride Clubs and Women in Stem have also been shuttered.

Make no mistake: this is no longer about Democrats or Republicans or Left/Right theory of education, free speech, diverse perspectives, and what should or should not be taught in schools. This is a far-right, and yes, authoritarian attempt to erase our history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress. 

To the conservatives who feel their perspectives are unwelcome in their child’s classrooms, please learn the facts. Teachers bend over backwards to include ALL their students. If they can do better, we can offer them training on how. But ridding our history of uncomfortable truths in favor of exceptionalism is not the democratic and American way, and it’s certainly no way to ensure we continue to live in a free society.

We are not snowflakes. Our children are not snowflakes. We can handle the truth and we can learn from it. Lying is no way to educate.

2) Attacks on civil and human rights:

Education equals power, and the less educated a population is, the more likely they are to bend the knee to dictatorship and bully leaders who want to retain absolute power. One of the hallmarks of authoritarian education is to identify a group of people to call the “enemy,” to blame them for all our ills, and to humiliate them and exclude them by any means from public life. They are now using DEI as a euphemism for this fictional, straw-man enemy.

So far, our current administration has moved to:

• Halt more than 10,000 student civil rights complaints related to disability access and sexual and racial harassment. New public investigations are forbidden. Instead, the administration will only allow inquiries that conform to their ideological and discriminatory thinking: alleged yet unproven discrimination against white students and attacks on transgender students’ equal rights.

• Threaten to end funding for schools that support kids by calling them by the name and pronouns they request.

• Allow federal immigration agencies to make arrests at schools, churches and hospitals, ending a Sensitive Locations/ Protected Areas policy that had been in effect since 2011.

• Undermine equality in education by dismantling Title IX protections: Title IX has been rolled back to the language from 2020, so it no longer includes gender identity as a protected class. Even though this is federal law, we must still protect students from harassment or bullying even if gender identity is no longer covered by Title IX.

3) Billionaires gutting public education:

Their agenda is always about money and power. The oligarchs see public education as a vast source of income and a limitless lane of access to the values of our children. If they can seize control of public education, they can seize control of the future. But our children’s futures, their minds, their souls are not for sale. We must retain the power to make decisions and set policy in the best interests of our children, not of the bottom line nor of a tiny number of very rich men.

Where vouchers have been tried, they are unpopular and create a massive shift of public money, that is, our tax money, into the pockets of families who can already afford private schools.

What they call “school choice” is really school privatization. This will radically reduce the amount of choice parents have. With publicly funded schools, every parent has a say. They can speak at public comment at school board meetings, they can call up their child’s principal (who works for them) to register their thoughts, and they can run for school board. The community runs the school.

In the case of privatized schools, if you don’t like it, they can tell you to leave. If they don’t, they can tell your child to leave. Even better, if your child does not fit the bill, the school can exclude them and continue to profit off of taxpayer money. You have no voice in their decision-making. And if they find they can’t make as much profit as they want, they can close, without notice. Now you not only have no choice, you have no school.

From New Orleans:

“But more than a decade since the statewide voucher program began, after Louisiana has spent half a billion taxpayer dollars to send thousands of students to private schools, data show the state’s lofty promise has not panned out. On average, voucher students at private schools fare worse on state tests than their public-school peers, according to scores examined by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. In 2023, just 14% of voucher students in grades 3-8 met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students at public schools.”

In order to effect their dystopian, privatized agenda, the unelected oligarchs have announced plans to:

• Gut the DOE, putting at risk many critical programs and/or shifting functions to other agencies, resulting in potential loss and/or disruption of services.

• Terminate more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools. Schools and districts across the country rely on research to guide best practices in classrooms.

• Defund and privatize public education, as laid out in “Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families” Vouchers, whose benefits flow almost exclusively to rich families, will destroy public education as a democratizing public good. Our community schools are one of the last remaining democratic institutions capable of fostering critical thought, historical memory, community engagement and belonging, and civic responsibility. We should not sell our nation’s future and our community out to corporate interests. The freedom and success of our country depend on public schools educating informed and critically engaged citizens.

• Enact the so-called Education Choice for Children Act, which will divert taxpayer dollars from public schools to pay some portion of private school tuition to private schools.

We oppose these actions and ask that our school district uphold best practices in education, honest, rigorous, and comprehensive curriculum, and ALL students’ right to an equal education under the law.