Education is not a privilege or a nice-to-have. It is a right

We must protect the Department of Education and protect access to education — because it’s a fundamental right. Add your name if you agree.

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.

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.

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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