The first sign that things were not as we had expected was the surprised look we got from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s staffer. It was the day before the nomination of Betsy DeVos as education secretary was initially slated to be voted on by a Senate subcommittee. We were a group of public school parents with more than 1,000 letters from parents all over New York City urging our senators to oppose DeVos’s appointment.

We were confident that our blue-state senators would vote the right way, if only to capitalize on the ferocious anti-Trump sentiment among Democrats. Our letter-writing campaign was something they could point to as a reason to take an even stronger stand against DeVos.

We were not allowed to go into either senator’s office, so we stood in the lobby, our arms weighted down. A staffer from each office came down and talked to us for a few minutes. First came the bombshell – neither senator had decided whether or not to oppose DeVos. At this point her record as an extremist crusader for privatization, and her many statements deriding the very notion of public school had been widely reported.



What had begun as one parent standing outside one Brooklyn schoolyard collecting signatures at morning drop-off had expanded with exponential speed into a multi-school, multi-borough grassroots coordinated action. And yet neither Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, nor Gillibrand, an outspoken advocate for children and educators, knew enough about her to take a position.

Then came the staffer’s question: “What group are you representing?” And it was our turn to shock them. Nobody had organized us. We were just parents, connected by our love for our children and our reliance on the public school system to give them the education that is their constitutional right.

We were doing what public school parents do all the time – stepping up to do what needs to be done for our schools. It’s what we do when our school runs out of paper and we organize a paper drive with every parent who can sending a ream (or two) in their child’s overstuffed backpack. Or when budget cuts mean there’s not enough money for lunch and recess aides, so parents volunteer and ensure that their kids still get to play outside, and the teachers still get time for planning and preparation.

For public school parents, this is normal, this is every day. But for Senator Gillibrand’s regional assistant, it was a revelation. And seeing his eyes widen, opened ours.

By the time the floor vote happened, we’d formed a parent activist network called Public School Watchdogs and had held two large rallies of parents and children demanding that our senators do everything they could to block DeVos’s appointment. We had collected and delivered more than 4,000 letters from parents and children from 25 traditional and charter public schools throughout New York City explaining how urgent protecting public education is.

Our middle and high school children had joined the effort, writing their own letters and holding their own letter drives during school lunch. We were far from alone, as similar networks and groups went to work all over the country in opposition to DeVos. Eventually, both of our New York senators and the entire Democratic caucus tried as hard as they could to defeat DeVos, treating public education as the priority we had always understood it to be.

Politicians and the media were surprised at the uprising against DeVos, but they shouldn’t be. An overwhelming 87% of American children attend traditional public schools. And over 60% of their parents are happy with these schools, although most feel their schools are badly underfunded.

For public school parents – even those who aren’t completely satisfied with their school – the broad attack on public schools coming from Washington is an emergency. We know vouchers will take money from our children’s schools and give it to parents who can already afford private school.

We know the secretary of education believes public schools should be replaced with online schools, for-profit charter schools and home-schooling. We know she destroyed the Detroit public school system.

We know what we have to do. We have to rally our strength as organized school communities to save and strengthen public school as a cornerstone of American life and democracy. Each school is a network of people with common interests, who see each other face-to-face maybe every day, or at least a few times a year.

This means we can organize and lobby our elected representatives together. And with such a radical and extreme threat, we need to come together across the divisions that have been used to segregate and divide parents and children at different schools.

Parents from wealthier districts need to advocate for more equal distribution of resources. Parents need to respect and look beyond their different educational philosophies to the common ideal of quality free public education for all children. All public schools are threatened, and we can only save them by uniting. Think of it as the bake sale to save the future.