Writing for Jacobin, Nora De La Cour takes an extensive look at what is behind a new wave of pro-public education activism.
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.”
Read the full article here.
