In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, many educators are among those worried about the future of the Black children they teach and protect, and many educators who supported Vice President Kamala Harris have decided to take her concession speech message — “Sometimes the fight takes awhile” — very seriously.
“We need an uprising,” Zinn Education Project organizer Jesse Hagopian told Word In Black. “We need a mass multiracial uprising to challenge those in power. Nobody’s coming to save us.”
Frederick Ingram, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, has spent his career fighting the good fight for equitable education, fair treatment of teachers, and essential funding. He knows the work to stand up to policies that will hurt children is just beginning.
“I’m certainly disappointed in the outcome,” Ingram said. “We have to accept the results of what’s going on, and Vice President Kamala Harris reminded us that we have to continue to fight.”
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), doubled down on the fact that teacher’s unions like the NEA, as well as families and elected officials, need to show up for kids “now more than ever.”
“Our students deserve safe and welcoming public schools,” Pringle said in a statement. “Tomorrow, they will need us to stop his attempts to defund our schools, pass vouchers, ban books, and separate children from their parents.”
Will Trump close the DOE?
Donald Trump has repeatedly said he plans to shutter the Department of Education (DOE) and dismantling it is central to Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. His proposals can inflict plenty of other damage on schools and students, too. Shifts to larger class sizes due to budget cuts and bans against teaching accurate U.S. history could be on deck.
“We should be nervous about the way that — speaking from a Black person’s perspective — curriculum has rarely, if ever, actually been culturally responsive toward us,” said Jose Vilson, director of the national education nonprofit EduColor.
The continued erasure of the separation of church and state in schools and limiting the rights of LGBTQ+ students are also possibilities under Trump’s administration.
Of course, many critics of public education say it has failed one too many students and needs to be dismantled. Conservative politicians and policymakers are likely to continue promoting controversial school choice options as the solution to boosting student achievement. But nearly 50 million children, from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, are enrolled in public schools, so school choice simply isn’t the universal solution its supporters make it out to be.
“From a shared convenience, there’s no system that’s going to be able to hold our children and educate them for six to eight hours a day while we’re trying to work,” Hagopian said.
Personal and professional worries
Some educators don’t think Trump has the power to demolish the DOE or Office for Civil Rights (OCR)without massive pushback from communities and organizations, but Vilson said the DOE would become easier to obliterate once targets like the OCR are weakened and no longer an ally for those filing complaints for disability, race-based issues, gender issues, and more.
Vilson also shared his personal disappointment in the amount of Trump support from the Latino community despite Trump’s racist and stereotype-laden comments about their homelands, families, and more.
“I’m disappointed in Latino men, but I think that needs more breakdown,” Vilson said. “Those of us who aspire toward Blackness definitely voted for Harris, whereas those who aspire white … well, you already know.”
Hagopian, a veteran Seattle Public Schools high school teacher and co-editor of the books “Teaching for Black Lives” and “Black Lives Matter at School,” worries both professionally and as the father of a son who attends public schools.
“It’s scary to have somebody who has embraced fascist ideology be elected president,” Hapogian said. “Putting my 11-year-old son to bed last night was really hard because he was worried about what a Trump victory will mean for him, for our family, for his friends — his very multiracial group of friends.”
Organize like you’re taking down Jim Crow
Hagopian said that regardless of what the rich and powerful have planned, building community and continuing to protect one another is necessary if the Black community wants to safeguard Black children and their schools.
“Four students who went into a drugstore and sat down at the lunch counter broke the segregation law and refused to move — that sparked a struggle throughout the South,” Hagopian said. “You see an injustice, you name it, and then you act against it. You can change the world, and I think that building community is the most important thing right now — getting together with people who want to resist Trump’s overt fascism, his overt racism, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny.”
Vilson said the best way to move forward is to continue rallying people behind the cause by ensuring they understand the importance of pushing back against right-wing ideologies in schools. Folks, he said, need to be ready to protect students’ lives by paying attention to what happens where decisions are made: local school site meetings and school board meetings.
“I’m going to try to continue to help organize students across this country to build the same kind of youth uprising that brought down Jim Crow,” Vilson said. “We’re going to be getting teachers and mentors together across the country to bring youth and educators together to strategize about how we build that uprising.”
Larger entities like the AFT have long fought attacks on public education, with its 1.8 million members rallying for equitable school funding, safe school facilities, higher teacher pay, and adequate school staffing.
“We’ve been fighting a blueprint for Project 2025 in Florida for a couple of years now,” Ingram said. “They’re trying to do an all-out assault on public education, defund our public schools, ban books, close libraries, make it difficult for teachers to teach honest and true history.” Concerns include oversized classrooms and “an inundation of testing about your program that seeks to take students out of the public sector into private schools, parochial schools, and charter schools.”
He said the courage of district-level leaders, state superintendents of education, and state governments to push back against policies that will destroy public schools is crucial. “We’re going to have to fight back if they are not good for kids, if they’re not good for teaching and the teaching profession,” Ingram said.