[ [link removed] ]Ayanna Pressley for Congress

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|We must protect the Department of Education and protect access |
|to education — because it’s a fundamental right. [ [link removed] ]Add your |
|name if you agree. |
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Republicans
are working overtime to dismantle our education system and whitewash our
history — from defunding public schools, to banning books, to controlling
the words teachers can use in classrooms. Their next target is abolishing
the U.S. Department of Education itself.

Education is everything. It is not a privilege or a nice-to-have, it is a
fundamental right for every person in America.

I stand firmly on the side of our public school babies, and our educators
and families, today and always.

Why did we establish a federal Department of Education in the first place?
Let’s dive into its history for a second. In the early days of this
nation, education was left entirely to the states, and schools were run by
a patchwork of religious schools and one room schoolhouses, leaving many
children excluded based on their race, gender, or poverty.

Now, there's much I disagree with our Founding Fathers on, but they knew
that preserving democracy required an educated population — one that could
participate in civic life, understand social and political issues, vote,
and resist tyrants.

So in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the concept of free public education
began to take hold, but not for everyone. Black and Native American
families faced state-sponsored violence and systemic exclusion from
education.

In the 1830s, it was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a legislator
named Horace Mann that established the common school movement pushing to
extend free public education to poor and middle class children. Even so,
Black children across the nation were still barred from learning and faced
severe punishment and abuse, if they tried.

By the 1870s, Reconstruction in the south gave way to Jim Crow laws that
segregated public spaces, including and explicitly, our schools.
Additionally, child labor exploitation was rampant. Education for girls
lagged far behind, and children with disabilities were far too often
institutionalized and not educated at all.

A little more than 100 years later, our Department of Education in its
modern day form was championed by none other than the late great President
James Earl Carter. He knew that fully implementing the civil rights
legislation of the 1960s and fighting Jim Crow would require a
well-resourced federal role in education. This agency had existed for over
a century in many iterations, but Carter explicitly understood that at the
core of education was a vision of opportunity and access for every child
in America.

President Carter and Congress resourced the department accordingly, and
this department was tasked with implementing core tenants of the Civil
Rights Act and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. Federal
funding through the Department of Education became integral to addressing
disparities, hiring and training teachers, to building accessible school
facilities, enforcing civil rights protections, to heating and powering
those buildings and to, finally, to live up to our ideals of education as
a pathway to opportunity in America.

[ [link removed] ]We must affirm the role of public education in American democracy, and
we must do everything in our power to prevent Trump and Musk from
destroying the Department of Education. Add your name now to commit to
being with me in this fight.

SIGN NOW

Let's call this assault on our education system what it is: a move towards
resegregation, and a full scale attack on civil rights.

Dictating what can be taught; tearing books off the shelves of school
libraries; using the bully pulpit to attack our kids and taunt their race,
gender, or who they love is horrific. This is shameful.

The work of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the work of the American
Dream — the dream that tells every child they can grow up to be whoever
they want.

We all know the transformative power of a dedicated teacher. We’ve seen
how a classroom can be a safe harbor in a storm.

This is the work of democracy. Raising up our babies, teaching them our
history, empowering them with critical thinking skills, and entrusting
them with the education they need to build a more just and compassionate
nation. I vow to keep fighting for our schools and the futures of our
children.

Onward,

Ayanna





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