A New Wave of Pro-Public-School Organizing
Right-wing efforts to undermine public schools are designed to shock the public into permanently lowering our expectations for what public schools can be. Those efforts may be backfiring.
School funding advocacy in Northampton, Massachusetts, led to a public reevaluation of the city’s finances. (Courtesy of Akil Vicks)
On the tree-lined streets of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I grew up, you can see the evidence of a school funding battle that has raged all spring and summer. Fund our schools, our kids, our future, lawn signs demand — an indictment of city officials’ reluctance to use the affluent town’s cash reserves to maintain level K-12 staffing and services despite the imminent expiration of federal pandemic relief funds.
City leaders are blaming Northampton’s K-12 budget shortfall on the loss of the temporary federal (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund; ESSER) money. But Michael Stein, a public school dad, political science professor, and Northampton School Committee member, told Jacobin the town’s school funding problems predate the pandemic. Northampton’s mayor is using ESSER’s expiration, he argued, “as an excuse for terrible austerity.”
“We have the resources to fund our schools,” agreed Barbara Madeloni, a Northampton resident and organizer at Labor Notes who once led the state’s most powerful teachers union. “But the mayor has squirreled them away in various reserves that the city council now refuses to open up.”
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