How We Got Here and How We Move Forward (With Our Heads Held High)

As someone who has spent their entire adult life studying the intersection of education reform, racism and anti-Blackness — and who as a child experienced how racist school policies harmed me and my community — I am not surprised by the current state of public education in the United States. However, it still hurts.

It hurts to know my country still believes that, after 400 years of Black people’s existence on these shores, we are not worthy of the same education afforded to white children; that we are educating all children of this country on Indigenous land, but Indigenous children have been killed, taken away from their families, and erased from public memory — what historian David Wallace Adams called an Education for Extinction. Latine and Hispanic people’s histories have also been erased, their children linguistically discriminated against. We live in a country in which non-Latine and non-Hispanic children are celebrated for learning Spanish, but if Spanish is your first language, your mother tongue, you are treated as less than and told this country is for English speakers only. Asian American and Pacific Islander students are all viewed through one singular lens of high achievement as if their educational lives are all the same. This country shows little hesitation in cutting funding for children with disabilities and those who are neurodivergent.

Children in the U.S. experiencing poverty, no matter their race or ethnicity, will be seriously harmed by the current administration’s fixation with gutting the Department of Education.  And finally, immigrant children are terrified to go to school because an immigration officer may be waiting to deport them and their loved ones.

A System of Intentional Harm

Our education system is not broken; it is deliberately harmful toward children, parents and communities of color, especially those living in low-income neighborhoods. You cannot fix something that is driven by your demise.

Education has always been, and continues to be, a contested space of political, moral and economical tensions. When anti-Blackness, racism and capitalism are at the foundations of a contested space, the policies put forth will ravage the lives of children of color even in the most democratic space, like in public education. In his book Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi said it best:

“Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. … Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.”

This is why we must understand that the right gutting public education, dismantling justice and equity initiatives in the public and private sector, and removing history that questions white exceptionalism from museums and classrooms are not new antidemocratic projects. The current administration is not creating the playbook; it is following one created by meticulous and determined individuals who want to control public education, and, therefore, the minds, bodies, movements and aspirations of children of color.

Decades in the Making: Conservative Efforts To Dismantle Public Education

The catalyst for the dismantling of public education was the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The unanimous decision enraged many white people in the U.S. In cities across the country, white communities violently protested school integration. While much of the resistance took place in the streets, a more enduring form of backlash emerged: the strategic construction of a political, social and media infrastructure designed to slowly and methodically dismantle public education. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, this infrastructure — comprising think tanks, media outlets, political pundits and philanthropic foundations — was fully aligned in its mission to undermine public education.

In 1980, the Heritage Foundation, an alt-right think tank that not only opposes affirmative action, expanding voting rights and racial equity programs, but also works as the clandestine policy arm of the conservative party and lawmakers to transform the U.S. government through conservative policies, and, ultimately, hollow out democracy — published a blueprint for the Reagan administration called The Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration. It is extremely important to note that the full title of Project 2025, which was heavily discussed during the 2024 presidential election, is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project. The only change was the subtitle.

The 1980 manifesto, which Reagan passed out at his first Cabinet meeting, called for sweeping changes to the federal government directed by conservative ideas, market-driven economics, expanded defense spending, and ending policies that advanced opportunities for women and people of color. The manifesto also took aim at public education, calling for the repeal of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provides federal dollars to support the education of students whose families have low incomes by funding schools in high-poverty districts; ending federal support initiatives that the foundation described as “vehicles for liberal-left social and political change”; and abolishing the Department of Education. Sound familiar?

The foundation’s book was released to the public in 1981; Reagan had a prepublication draft. The Washington Post described it as “an action plan for turning the government toward the right as fast as possible.” The book would release updated versions of Mandate for Leadership five times before the latest iteration, each version crueler and more destructive than the previous. The 2025 version would be the most dangerous of them all for democracy and public education, but also the version that would provide the foundation for the second Trump presidency.

The 2025 iteration of Mandate for Leadership demands and ensures that everyday people have less power and fewer human connections, which makes division, violence and hate not only possible but inevitable. This latest version calls for cutting social programs, mass deregulation, gutting public services, restricting abortion access, opposing same-sex marriage, blocking trans rights, and expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to raid schools, hospitals and religious institutions. It again calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, with no federal government oversight of the nation’s education system and massive cuts to public education programs that supported low-income students, bilingual students, and students with disabilities.

Reagan championed many policies in the book, but each president after him, regardless of political party, would pull from the foundation’s playbook. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have granted millions of dollars to expand charter schools, a permanent objective of the conservative “school choice” and voucher movement to undermine public schools.

The dismantling of public education has been on the conversative agenda for decades through federal, state and local governments, along with a network of philanthropic foundations, think tanks and media conglomerates. This is an orchestrated attack on public education; it is not haphazard or spontaneous, but a well-organized machine that is in full swing. We are not witnessing the beginning; we are experiencing policy leading up to the final act: the uber-rich, by way of the states, in control of public education.

How We Move Forward

So let’s be clear: If it took decades for those in power who have an endless stream of money, influence and will to advance their destructive agenda of weakening democracy in the U.S. through dismantling public education, it will take just as much will, money, organizing, protesting and long-term goal-setting not only to reset the pendulum of justice so it swings toward the sun again, but to build what comes next. We must be bold, imaginative, relentless in our pursuit of the truth, and resolute about ending harm and demanding justice.

The ideas put forth below for moving forward are pointless without community, feedback, and a love for the very people we say we want to be in solidarity with. These ideas are dead on arrival without love and a deep commitment to justice, dignity and power. Since we cannot fix a system intent on harm and our demise, we must reimagine and build together. We are not simply “saving” the current education system but attempting to build one that works for all of us, even if dismantling means losing the limited and unstable protections we currently have.

1.  We need legislation that will rewrite how we fund schools in the U.S.

School finance experts Preston C. Green III, Bruce D. Baker and Joseph O. Oluwole have argued that school finance reform should be a part of a reparations program for Black Americans. They also explain that the way schools are currently funded through property taxes and insufficient general state aid leads to “stealth inequalities” and contains “features of state aid formulas wherein the state itself had designed a system of allocating aid to make disparities worse, not better.”

In 2019, CNN reported that predominantly white school districts get $23 billion more in funding than nonwhite districts. The researchers lay out a reparations framework for legislatures to provide restitution to schools and taxpayers harmed by state policies that created Black-white racial funding disparities, while showing how the federal government could take the lead in a school finance reparations program. A justice school funding model must be at the forefront of justice-led school policies.

2.  A national teacher recruitment pipeline is desperately needed.

Cities across the U.S. are not only facing a teacher shortage, but are also in need of highly trained and qualified teachers. Projections show that we will be short nearly 200,000 teachers by 2026, with the greatest shortage in low-income and rural school districts and in specialized fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), special education, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL).

For example, while Florida lawmakers are banning books and removing teachers’ academic freedom, the state is facing a persistent teacher and staff shortage. In January 2025, halfway through the school year, the Florida Education Association reported 3,197 teacher vacancies, with the state in 50thplace in teacher pay. On average, teacher pay in the U.S. has failed to keep pace with other college-graduate professions. Data indicates that over the past two decades, “the weekly wages and total compensation of public school teachers have fallen further and further behind.” On top of these compounded issues, many students who need experienced and well-trained teachers are being taught by novice, inexperienced teachers. One of the strongest indicators of student achievement is teacher experience.  On average, “students placed with first-year teachers  start their year academically behind their peers placed with experienced teachers.”

We need the federal government to create a national recruitment campaign to recruit new teachers, train novice teachers and raise the pay of teachers across the country; no teacher should make below $100,000 a year. These are policy issues that contribute directly to student achievement, quality of life for teachers and students, and civic engagement. If legislation can create inequality, it can create equality.

3.  Math proficiency holds the equation to justice.

In 2001, Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr. published Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to The Algebra Project. In the book, they argued that math literacy education is key to economic and civic equality. As we watch jobs that used to be done by humans now completed by artificial intelligence, we need a workforce that is technologically competent, and one way is to ensure every student in the country can pass math courses like Algebra 1 and 2. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2022, only 26% of all eighth grade students scored at or above proficient level in math.

Without math proficiency, we cannot even start a long-term strategy for improving computing pathways for a technical workforce that is inclusive of Black and Brown students. To create justice-oriented policies, we need computational skills and quantitative reasoning. The road to justice is paved with math.

4.  Making Black History mandatory.

The gutting of Black history by the current administration is also an old racist strategy. Before the word “woke” was used to label Black history a “divisive, race-centered ideology,” white segregationists declared books that highlighted Black people’s contributions and influence on the U.S. as “antiklan.” Education historian Jarvis R. Givens, in a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, stated: “A century ago, white segregationists were banning anti-racist books and ‘Negro studies,’ as well as punishing and threatening anti-racist educators all over Jim Crow America.”

Today’s attack on Black history — which is very much American history — is a relic of the past, but still effective. If the administration erases the United States’ history of slavery, cruelty and the violence that capitalism necessitates, then you never have to atone for harm and can instead tell a story of white exceptionalism to all children attending our public schools.

When these miscarriages of justice are overturned, we must ensure that Black history becomes mandatory in our nation’s public schools.

We can draw on the work of New York City. In 2024, the city introduced a Black studies curriculum in all its public schools, from pre-kindergarten through grade 12. Sonya Douglass, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who was instrumental in creating the curriculum, told ABC News: “This is not a curriculum about a particular racial group, necessarily, but about the history of inequality and stratification hierarchy in the United States.”

Beautiful and powerful educational interventions like this — interventions that disrupt the pervasiveness of racism and anti-Blackness — are crucial to our freedom struggle. Freedom starts in the mind. My hope is that other groups will build their own curricula so one day we can integrate them to tell a fuller story of our history.

5.  We need educational reparations.

Countless reparation proposals were presented before the Civil War and after the federal government reneged on its promise to give freed Black people 40 acres of land. Organizations and Black nationalists like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, who elevated the concept of reparations for descendants of Africans in the U.S. after World War II, thought deeply about how reparations could uplift and empower the Black community. As Nikole Hannah-Jones succinctly puts it: “Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against Black Americans doing the same.”

I am advocating for reparations from damages caused by education reform over the past 40 years. Public education’s divestments and policies document our nation’s commitment to anti-Blackness, providing a clear and concise road map to understanding how Black children — unlike their white peers — have been under-resourced, over-policed, over-tested and deprived of educational opportunities with lifelong earning effects.

As a nation, we must commit to moving public education toward healing, transformation and repair. Educational reparations are the essence of democracy. In their fullness, reparations include the processes of accountability, truth-telling, repair, cessation of harm, compensation, healing and transformation. Educational reparations would fundamentally move this nation beyond buzzwords that signal justice without action. They would put us in the process of atonement for generations of harm.

Nothing that I am proposing is new. My ancestors have always put forth proposals, ideas, legislation and freedom dreams for a new world for all. Our inability to hear them, nourish their ideas and build a world on Black genius has harmed us all. Lastly, what I am proposing requires government support — something that feels out of reach right now. But impossibility has never stopped us before. When our dreams and imaginations shrink to match our conditions, those in power will try to convince us that crumbs of justice are enough to satisfy our pain. The more boldly we dream, demand and organize, the more expansive and inclusive our vision of justice becomes. As the quote attributed to Nelson Mandela says, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”