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.”
The mayor’s budget has forced many school staff members onto the chopping block, for a total of over thirty layoffs in two years. Eliminating essential roles like paraeducators and interventionists will hamstring school operations — which, in turn, will push more privileged families to remove their children (and their children’s per-pupil state aid) from Northampton Public Schools altogether, concentrating higher levels of need in an under-resourced district whose student population is already disproportionately low-income. Worse, by depriving schools of the manpower to duly accommodate children with special developmental needs, Northampton could be setting young people up for a lifetime of adverse consequences.
Quaverly Rothenberg is one city council member who has fought hard to prevent the cuts. Mom to three Northampton public elementary students, Rothenberg told Jacobin the town’s K-12 funding showdown has prompted “a huge resurgence in civic participation at the local level, with many protests” — including a student walkout and occupation of the mayor’s office — “and also a citizen-led investigation of our financial policies” (which revealed, in Madeloni’s words, “the small group of neoliberal technocrats underfunding our schools”). Max Page and Deb McCarthy, president and vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, told Jacobin that the backdrop for all of this is a statewide uptick in funding-related educator and community organizing, with numerous districts voting to boost school budgets by raising property taxes — a move Northampton voters have made three times since 2010.
From blue Massachusetts to blood-red Texas, US public schools are grappling with various forms of fiscal crisis, as the sunsetting of federal pandemic aid throws into stark relief chronic conditions that shortchange America’s students — inadequate and inequitable federal, state, and local support for public education, combined with school choice policies that spur enrollment declines and drain public coffers.
Heading into this election season, candidates seeking to build broad coalitions would be foolish not to tap into the considerable energy around fights for fair school funding. After all, functional public schools are indispensable if we’re to maintain the democracy that Democratic fundraising missives constantly warn us is in existential jeopardy.
“People are agitated,” observed David Backer, a school finance expert and organizer with the Debt Collective, who uses his Substack to help school stakeholders contextualize and reframe funding disputes. “They’re feeling pressure and anxiety due to the removal of the federal funds and also larger trends that most likely started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and sharpened during the pandemic.”
Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, authors of the new book The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual, have argued that in GOP-controlled states that passed universal voucher plans along with massive tax cuts, the K-12 fiscal crisis is “by design,” with right-wing activists hoping to shock the public into permanently lowering our expectations for what schools can be.
But on the contrary, it’s possible that the grim realities we face might actually be shocking us into fighting for the schools we all deserve.
K-12 Finance Needs an Overhaul
When COVID-19 threw the country into a state of prolonged instability, Congress made the wise decision to ensure that families could count on one simple thing: free school meals. By authorizing the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to waive standard means-testing requirements, lawmakers enabled American public schools to serve all students federally reimbursable breakfasts and lunches, free of charge.
Because the burdens of welfare shame and paperwork make it much harder for hungry kids to claim the meals they need, Congress’s suspension of means-testing enabled school breakfast and lunch participation to rise dramatically. No longer segregated into stigmatizing free, reduced-price, and “paid” meal categories, American students could relax and break bread together.
By the time Congress ended the USDA flexibility in 2022, food justice coalitions across the United States had already mobilized to pass state-level universal school meals laws. So far, eight states have enacted these policies, with legislative efforts underway in many others. As Crystal FitzSimons, director of child nutrition programs at the Food Research and Action Center, told Jacobin back in 2023: “There is a feeling that we can’t go back.” The pandemic waivers had proved once and for all that it’s both possible and profoundly helpful to universalize school meals.
Likewise, the COVID-era influx of federal cash for schools proved that the US government is capable of making a much more meaningful investment in K-12 education. “It’s the closest in my lifetime the United States has come to expanding commonsense social welfare policies,” explained Stein, who ran for school committee during the pandemic. “Now, like Medicaid expansion, cash supplemental payments, and access to vaccines, ESSER is ending, and schools across the country will no longer receive any significant federal aid to operate.”
On average, contributions from federal agencies make up only about 8 percent of public school operating budgets. A 2022 report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) uses data to make the case for a school funding overhaul, arguing that Congress should be investing significantly more to ensure that US school districts are adequately and equitably resourced.
“Every community should recognize that the federal government can and should provide more local school funding,” Stein told Jacobin:
We need to push back against those who sell cuts by blaming workers, students with disabilities, or alleged irresponsibility of school districts. The fact is that most of our schools are under-resourced and the consequences fall disproportionately on the most marginalized.
The EPI report notes that Congress could put countercyclical mechanisms in place to automatically expand federal aid during economic downturns, when states are known to slash school spending. The Education Law Center’s latest school funding report shows that many states responded to pandemic-era fiscal uncertainty by shrinking their K-12 budgets.
While the temporary federal money — intended to help cover COVID-related costs, not to replace state aid — allowed schools to limp along through the last few years, those state-level reductions have undoubtedly heightened the fiscal cliff that US districts are now facing. Highlighting the incredibly high stakes of all of this, researchers at Brown University just published a study showing that increased K-12 spending reduces child mortality.
A Wake-Up Call
“Budget issues are so hard to understand,” Alex Ames, founder of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, told Jacobin. “It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Oh, the problem is this teacher or that school board. But often it’s more a product of state-level decisions.” She explained that her organization’s work in Georgia has involved helping bipartisan families connect the dots between service problems in individual districts and state disinvestment.
Ames, twenty-two, now works with the Partnership for Equity and Educational Rights, helping students across the United States organize campaigns for fair K-12 funding. Since the pandemic, she believes there’s been an explosion in community-level organizing around school budget issues. While activists and legislators on the Right have aggressively pushed a culture wars narrative — vilifying, for example, specific books in school libraries — Ames told Jacobin that school funding advocates have sought to recenter discussions around the fact that many schools lack the resources, for example, to maintain any library at all.
Backer agrees that the upheaval of the past four years, and now the ESSER fiscal cliff, have provided “a great opportunity to do some new organizing — getting people together to talk about what’s happening, analyze the specific situation, and make a campaign.” But he told Jacobin that in places without strong teachers’ unions or other groups that have “the bandwidth to do some budget and policy analysis, generate demands, and bring those demands in a way that gets a hearing,” frustration about K-12 underfunding can flare up fruitlessly, leading to nothing more than angry Facebook posts.
For the public school advocates in Northampton, however, Facebook posts have been anything but fruitless. A Support our Schools (SOS) group created to connect school stakeholders during the latest budget season has blossomed into a veritable clearinghouse of local, regional, and state-level organizing opportunities for anyone concerned about the future of public education.
At a special school committee meeting on July 24, Stein, an active member of the SOS group, voiced grave concerns about proposals to lay off an English teacher and social worker from the high school I attended — filling the gaps, respectively, with underpaid adjunct instructors and outside service providers (city officials have since “found” money to restore the social worker). It’s “just unacceptable,” Stein told the committee, for elected leaders to “start solving our problems by outsourcing core functions of our schools.” If Northampton continues on its path of normalized austerity, he said, “we’re looking at endless layoffs. And what needs to happen is that the budgeting practices of our city need to change.”
“This has been a wake-up call for sleepy voters in our peaceful town,” Rothenberg explained. “It appears that in 2025, Northampton is going to vote in new leaders who will prioritize community values so that we can take care of each other while the state and national governments get sorted out.”
“The organizing,” Madeloni assured Jacobin, “is just getting started.”