In the darkest days of the Trump administration there were many of us who doubted the concept and reality of public education would survive.
Trump’s Secretary of Education advocated for its destruction.
The pandemic, as in all things, has made it worse.
It was good to read in the New York Times that the Biden administration wants to reverse course on Betsy DeVos.
But that is not enough.
Public schools remain on life-support.
Teachers on the front lines of the pandemic are exhausted. Thousands are leaving the profession.
Local funding – never sufficient, particularly in Black and Brown communities – has been diverted to the pandemic and is drying up.
Teacher pension systems – always underfunded – are further threatened.
Not only is it imperative to turn back the privatization plans of Trump and Betsy DeVos, we also must never return to the Race to the Top policies of Duncan and Obama.
No more test scores in exchange for federal dollars.
We need a Marshall Plan of massive proportions to save American Education.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted:
We need to echo that when it comes to saving our public schools.
Or is saving public education without returning to the pre-Trump days of testing for dollars socialism too?
Fred Klonsky 
How short is our memory. Being a CPS teacher for 41 years I think my memory might be a little better on this subject.Ms DeVos only held the shovel that picked up the ashes of my beloved school system, after Daley, Vallas, Emanuel destroyed the schools. Whatever she did was done in four years. The others hacked the system apart for almost thirty years, before she even got on the scene.
Nothing less than a type of Marshall Plan for public education could work.
Decades of the active dismantling of public education and the corporate commodifying destruction inflicted upon it have done indescribable harm to the common good.
I remember in the early and mid 1960s, some money was directed from military budgets to some local school districts. In a reaction to sputnik, schools could hire additional science, math, electronics, (possibly other subjects) and get reimbursed by some grant program that was counted as defense spending. Something like that program should be looked at to help schools upgrade their buildings, computers, and reimburse for additional teachers and support staff. The amount of money would be just a tiny drop in the large, large bucket of the military budget.