Friends of LittleSis,

On a hot July day in Tampa at the 2022 Moms for Liberty Summit, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the crowd that the US Department of Education should be abolished – a threat that earned her a standing ovation from the Moms for Liberty members in the room. Now in 2025, DeVos’s extreme hostility towards public education has become a central part of President Trump’s agenda to dismantle the federal government. At the same time, the DeVoses, a family that shaped the school privatization movement in the United States, is being overshadowed by even wealthier billionaires that have taken up the cause of destroying public schools.

Billionaires like Pennsylvania’s Jeffrey Yass, Florida’s Ken Griffin, and other deep-pocketed idealogues have scaled up targeted political spending around the country to pass more and more extreme legislation that defunds our public education system and shifts public money to private and religious schools that align with their economic and ideological interests. The goal of these billionaires is not to improve the lives of students and educators, but rather to pass legislation that helps the ultra-rich avoid paying their fair share in taxes, weaken powerful teachers unions, and control what is being taught to tens of millions of students – often promoting a more conservative curriculum.

In Pennsylvania, TikTok investor and Wall Street trader Jeff Yass has spent more than $70 million on state election campaigns to prop up elected officials that want to pass school voucher legislation. In Texas, Yass and Betsy DeVos teamed up to spend over $12 million to successfully defeat rural Republican legislators who voted to protect public schools and eventually pass Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher bill. In Florida, billionaire Wall Street trader Ken Griffin aided Governor DeSantis in passing some of the most extreme attacks on public education in the country.

• In Pennsylvania, educators and students have called out Jeff Yass directly for his influence over the state budget and organized to win an increase in state public education funding for two years in a row. 
• In Texas, teachers are organizing to increase public education funding and educate Texas families on how out of state billionaires like Yass undermined the state’s democratic process in the voucher fight. 
• States like New York, Colorado, and Pennsylvania have active campaigns that are fighting to tax billionaires fairly and use the revenue to invest in students and public education.

Photo courtesy of the All Eyes on Yass Campaign

As President Trump attacks educators and students on a federal level, the battle between billionaires and public schools rages on in the states where educators are fighting back and winning. LittleSis provides critical research and training to the teachers unions, public school students, and parents that are on the front lines fighting back against the billionaire-backed school privatization efforts in states all over the country. We need your support to keep the fight going. It’s teachers, kids, and communities vs billionaires. Are you with us?

Onward,

LittleSis