Washington, DC – Americans want safe, welcoming, relevant and engaging schools in every community.
The route to the American dream goes through our public schools, where educators dedicate themselves to helping every student reach their unique potential. But public education is in peril—from devastating funding cuts and extremists stoking culture wars, to efforts to divert funding for students in public schools to private voucher programs. Attacks on public education are not new. The difference today is that the attacks are intended to destroy it. And President Donald Trump is trying to hasten its demise.
Trump and his allies aren’t just abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. They are laying waste to public education. They’re gutting funding for key personnel and programs so public schools cannot function properly.
Trump and his secretary of education, Linda McMahon, tried to pull federal funding—specifically for low-income students and students with disabilities—from schools where they thought there was a whiff of support for equity, diversity or inclusion. An AFT lawsuit stopped that. Trump and McMahon had illegally withheld more than $7 billion in K-12 education funds for this next school year—funding that Congress authorized and that schools obligated. But last week, they backed down. Our lobbying, our lawsuits and our advocacy for why these funds matter to kids worked.
But this month, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with mass firings at the Education Department, setting his plans to dismantle the department back in motion. And now Trump and his congressional majority have gone for the jugular: Their big, ugly budget bill includes a nationwide voucher program—an unprecedented and uncapped tax credit that will hurt students in public schools and could cost taxpayers more than $50 billion a year—nearly double what the federal government spends on helping poor kids and kids with disabilities. This administration has abandoned the nearly 90 percent of American students who attend public schools.
