When We Fight For Public Schools, We Fight For Democracy 🗽
Truthdig, March 20, 2026. Education 🎡
'When We Fight for Public Schools, We Fight for Democracy.' - A “non-permission slip” is the 1st step in a new nationwide campaign training thousands of local organizers to defend public education. - [Photo: Activists rally to protest layoffs and proposed deep budget cuts at the Dept. of Educ., March 14, 2025, in Wash. D.C.].
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Every morning across the nation, in red states and blue states, in urban and rural communities, we watch children walk through the doors of our neighborhood public schools, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lunch bags in hand. These are ordinary moments that contain an extraordinary promise: that education belongs to every child. But that promise — simple, powerful and profoundly democratic — is now under attack in ways we haven’t seen in generations.
Asked what percentage of children she imagines should be in public schools going forward, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice — now with the Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025 — told ProPublica: “I hope zero. I hope to get to zero.”
Public schools, like so many pieces of our social fabric, have emerged from the last year battered. The Trump administration, in close partnership with state and local allies and billionaire co-conspirators, is enacting, play by play, Project 2025’s education provisions and broader authoritarian agenda under three pillars: vouchers, patriotism and prayer. And schools across the country — in blue states and red states alike — are facing existential threats we have never seen before.
These attacks on public schools are attacks on democracy itself.
The classroom is where kids learn to listen to different perspectives, to collaborate, to understand that rules apply to everyone. These aren’t abstract lessons — they’re the daily work of becoming people who can sustain a democratic society. Schools are also perhaps the strongest example of public policy and public dollars being deployed to build our shared commitment to one another, regardless of wealth or creed. They’re the core of a social compact in which we each have a stake in the success of families and communities everywhere.
That’s why education and democracy advocates like myself have launched a mass base-building campaign with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools in order to unite people across political party and geographical lines in defense of public education. 📢 Called FREE THE FUTURE, the campaign is organizing parents, educators and other community members to explicitly refuse consent to policies that undermine our children’s education and our democratic values. The key idea: Create channels for people to speak out, attend trainings and then flow into escalating resistance, starting with a simple statement of refusal and building toward coordinated public action... - Read More,
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/when-we-fight-for-public-schools-we-fight-for-democracy/