Education under Trump: Understanding the billionaires' project in education- to defeat it.

As we near the end of this first year of Trump’s second administration, we face a new challenge: sustaining and building resistance that weakens the coalition that elected Trump and a new wave of neoliberalism.

My last article of 2025 for the FOS substack summarizes what’s occurred in education under Trump, what we identified correctly and what we missed. Since writing “This Moment for Education Workers” in June 2025, I’ve learned a great deal [i] in a process informed by posts of FOS collective members Chloe, Erin, Keith, Leah. Their work illuminates what we’ve faced, analyzing linkages between AI, racism, climate change, union reform, K-12 and higher ed, finding energy and spaces for resistance, and much more: https://futureschools.substack.com/archive?sort=new.

ACKNOWLEDGING RESISTANCE THE RIGHT DIDN’T EXPECT

Given the totalitarian onslaught we faced, the fact of any resistance inside classrooms and outside the school walls is remarkable. Despite anxiety about almost every aspect of life and many about work, significant numbers of school workers have shown up to protect students, schools, democracy, our professions. In countless communities they’ve taken the initiative or joined community groups to protect students and families threatened with imprisonment and deportation. They’ve participated as individuals in writing letters and making phone calls, signing petitions, joining and building massive rallies opposing destruction of democracy. They’ve organized to defeat Trump’s policies driven by White Christian nationalism and Trump’s billionaire backers, to subvert and eliminate political, economic, and social gains made since Reconstruction.

We’ve seen new resistance from higher education workers. Stunned by earlier attacks on academic freedom in regard to Palestine, more faculty and professional staff have been awakened to the need for collective voice and interventions. Their organizing has been supported by a new leadership of AAUP (American Association of University Professors), now merged with AFT. On dozens of campuses full-time faculty have followed the lead of graduate student workers and adjunct faculty, who long ago organized with unions eager to represent this new constituency of workers as well as expand their membership numbers beyond their traditional (diminished) base in blue collar work. The vitality of AAUP organizing is a bright spot for many reasons, including the possibility of developing alliances on campuses between all workers, what K-12 teacher activists in West Virginia’s 2018 “red state” walkouts called “wall-to-wall” organizing. Higher ed organizing can encourage alliances of K-12 and higher ed locals on the state and national levels. An