I started this post in October, and I have been waiting for the right time to post it. After meeting this week with a couple of Vice Chancellors who stated they believe that the BOR can cut whatever program they like whenever they want, and that then becomes a bona fide program cut, now seems as good a time as any to draw attention to the decades-long, concerted attacks on public education that have culminated in the current federal administration attacking higher education and P-12 education alike.
As I was sitting in that meeting, having repeated for the 4,096th time that UNL’s EDAD department graduates half the CEHS master’s students and some 10% of all doctoral students in the university, it really dawned on me. These cuts do not strengthen other programs in CEHS. They are leaving the College of Education and Human Sciences in a much weaker position. I do not believe that is in any way incidental or accidental. I believe it is deliberate and goes hand in hand with the State Board of Education’s efforts last spring to make teacher and school leader education programs irrelevant by reducing certification standards. It also goes hand in hand with our elected officials racing to sign onto the federal administration’s school voucher/ tax credit program, despite the people voting down the same thing at the state level in November of 2024.
Now is the time to stand up for public education from Head Start to P-12 to Post-Secondary. If public education goes away, it is not coming back. And with it goes our hopes of the American Experiment of democracy. And so I hope that I am no longer just screaming into the void.
Cassandra
I want to share some thoughts I have had over the past three years while serving in faculty leadership roles, while studying public school tax credit/neo-voucher policies, something I very much hoped to escape when I came to Nebraska.
For the past few years, I have felt like Cassandra. Fated to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In my time of Senate Faculty Executive committee, I spoke repeatedly about the nationwide political movement to kill public education, from public P-12 schools to higher education. I was told repeatedly that we just need to be nicer, be more civil (read: quieter), and not rock the boat, and the legislature would stop picking on us.
But that approach has not restored adequate state aid to the University. Being nicer is not a bargaining chip when people are on a mission to dismantle your institution. We have seen now with our own eyes what happens when you roll over and play dead.
School Choice or Death by a Thousand Cuts
I breathed a sigh of relief when I signed my contract with the Educational Administration department at UNL. As one of the few states without a charter law, I would not have to teach school choice. At least when I finished my Ph.D. in 2016, school choice was still being taught in a neutral to positive light. I had seen the damage of school choice firsthand as a teacher in Washington, DC. From that experience, I tended to agree with scholar Richard Elmore that school choice would leave public schools like public hospitals, serving the most vulnerable with the fewest resources. I was more than happy to leave school choice behind on the East Coast.
In 2017, private school voucher policies came to the Nebraska Unicameral. And it came back again and again and again. Even after the people of Nebraska made it clear they did not want vouchers, putting it on the ballot in 2023 and again in 2024. In 2024, 56% of voters indicated their desire to repeal the voucher measure passed during the previous spring legislative session. Recently, Governor Pillen signed onto the federal private school tax credit, neo-voucher program.
Current research on vouchers demonstrates that academically, they are not great, and that most of the financial benefit accrues to children already enrolled in private schools, i.e., those in wealthy families. The net result of expanding vouchers, or tax credit policies, is the defunding of public education.
Just like Ronald Reagan’s call to drown government in the bathtub, politicians of a certain political persuasion have been trying to shrink public education until it can be drowned. And what better approach to dismantle the government than destroying the level of it that most people interact with most regularly: your local public schools and their elected school board. It has become clearer to me that the project to dismantle public education is also directly related to the important role education plays in a functional democracy.
The War on Higher Education
It turned out that when I moved to Nebraska, I never realized I was trading support of public education for attacks on higher education. From the TPUSA incident that saw a friend removed from her graduate teaching to tirades from Senators during hearings about how we don’t teach Chaucey anymore, I was not expecting the amount of hate from elected state leaders aimed at its flagship university. Coming from the SUNY System ( a much beloved but underfunded collection of 64 universities, colleges, med schools, and community colleges), I was not prepared to have the thing I study politically attacked, AND the place from which I study it. I was also not prepared, even seeing faculty furloughs and salary freezes at SUNY in the wake of the Great Recession for budget cuts on this magnitude: nearly a quarter of the UNL budget cut since 2017-18! Ev
The story of the number of administrators expanding and their skyrocketing pay only partially explains these cuts. The centralization at Varner Hall explains some more. Underfunding by the state explains some more. None of these things alone explains it all. Which is why we had the University finances independently audited. And gasp, yes, money is being shunted away from the flagship university. Nearly $28 million in funds exist in the Varner Hall budget with 0 FTEs attached, very nearly the amount UNL was told it needed to cut this year. This is highly suggestive of a manufactured crisis.
Why these attacks on public education?
Public schools are inherently a place of local little d democracy. Locally elected school boards make decisions about education on behalf of the community. Public schools are also sites of little d democracy because they are where the promise of a more pluralistic society is enacted every day, along with the serving of mystery meat and tater tots. While this promise has yet to fully be seen, the nature of public schools as open to all means they remain a place where everyone is at least aspirationally included.
The project to dismantle public schools began just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, which legally, although not functionally, desegregated schools. Less than eight months after this landmark decision, economist Milton Friedman published his first work on private school choice, writing, “Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to” (as quoted in Cowen, 2024). Recent research suggests that adults who attended integrating and integrated schools in the South as children were more likely to support policies that support racial equity.
Higher education did not have a similar court ruling to Brown, but throughout the last 150 years, colleges and universities have expanded access beyond the young, wealthy white men who first attended Harvard University. And while the work remains undone of making college campuses a place where everyone feels seen and represented, higher education is also a site of the promise of a pluralistic democracy. Research shows that increased educational attainment, particularly that of traditional liberal arts subjects, has been associated with a reduction in authoritarian tendencies. Increasingly, education level also divides our electorate, as we saw in 2024.
By these State and Federal Powers Combined
The story of higher education funding since WWII has been one of declining state support. In P-12 education, state aid dipped during the Great Recession, and in some states, it has not returned. Others have sought to limit the amount of property tax increases that can be used to provide local funding to public schools, which remain in many places the largest portion of financial support. In Nebraska, the story goes that we have a property tax crisis, but in reality, the crisis is the limited state aid to public schools. In the current climate, I can understand why some don’t want increased state aid, which could come with increased state meddling, but in reality, a progressive income tax that provides funding to all schools is the only solution to the over reliance on regressive property taxes. But I digress…
These state-level efforts to defund public higher education and P-12 education have recently been joined by efforts from the Trump administration.
For higher education, this has included clawing back federal research dollars that keep the lights on at many large universities, reducing F&A payments, and engaging in what appears to be some sort of protection racket that some universities are finally resisting.
At the P-12 level, threats of defunding categorical programs reversed course, but the federal voucher scheme found in the Big Bad Bill takes the defunding of P-12 education federal, after years of chipping away at funding through state-level charter schools and voucher schemes. The hollowing out of the Department of Education leaves no one minding the store for their small but important portfolio.
Recently, one of the last offices standing, the Office of Special Education, has been reduced to rubble, leaving the status of the education of children with disabilities unclear. This move unwinds the progress made since EHA in 1975 and IDEA in 1990, two federal laws that mandated children with disabilities receive a Free and Appropriate Education in the Least Restrictive Environment. Meaning children with all kinds of disabilities may no longer have adequate services at their local school, leading to the pre-IDEA situation of children warehoused or excluded from education altogether. Other categorical programs, such as funding for low-income students (Title I) and English Language Learners (Title III) are being threatened, and EdWeek recently reported that school districts across the country expect fewer federal dollars next year. While that pot is usually small in any given school’s budget, it does make a difference, especially for positions like special education teachers and paraprofessionals, reading interventionists, EL teachers, and so on.
The thing that surprised me most about this administration is how hard and fast they came down on higher education. Yet, having watched the death by a 1,000 cuts in P-12 public education, I should not have been surprised.
The Canary in the Coal Mine
And now I find myself a canary in the coal mine. With my program, which studies education, in a public institution of higher education, eliminated.
Notably, in looking at our data with my colleagues, we could not find any legitimate reason. Recent independent financial analysis also suggests there is no real legitimate reason to cut any department. There doesn’t have to be a legitimate reason, because the project is to destroy public education and to restrict what is left once again to the wealthiest, whitest, and malest amongst us. I do not believe President Gold and the Board of Regents will stop with these program eliminations. While they may want to grow the university, they seem willfully ignorant about how college freshmen come into existence, i.e., largely through public P-12 education.
Everywhere I have been this semester, colleagues from across the country expressed shock and disbelief that an Educational Administration department at a major R1 university was proposed for elimination (and then actually eliminated).
At a conference on the preparation of educators and educational leaders, I was sitting in a session titled “When DEI is a Four-Letter Word” on how to fulfill the mission of our professional organizations without getting fired in places that have passed gag laws, like North Carolina. As I sat there, I couldn’t help but think about the inevitability of the move to kill EDAD. It isn’t a shocking out-of-the-blue move; it is the logical and predictable result of 70 years of backlash against the racial integration of public education and efforts to make post-secondary education accessible to students of color and women.
For optimal irony, the previous week, EDAD’s department website was stripped of the words diversity, equity, and inclusion, leaving us teaching a mysterious course simply titled Educational Organizations. Our mission statements also disappeared. It is important, here, I think, to call out the fact that the Nebraska Legislature has not –and constitutionally cannot– make laws to limit academic freedom or kill tenure. Nor have the Regents passed anything like the failed anti-CRT measure brought by then Regent and gubernatorial candidate, Jim Pillen. If tenure is dead at UNL without any changes in state law or university policy, so is academic freedom, killed not from outside, but from within the University.
I’m not alone in my assessment that in addition to external attacks, the call is coming from inside the house. Christopher Newfield wrote this week that the split between faculty and university administrators is THE story in higher education this year. Nationally, and much closer to home, it is clear that the people selected to lead our public universities are not aligned with the values of faculty or the mission statements of the organizations they profess to lead. It’s a long post, but I encourage you to read it. And Newfield ends much the way I would, the value in public education is not in workforce development, and it is not in the return on investment; the value of public education is that it supports democracy.
What You Can Do
What can you do about any of this? In the short term, you can:
- Become a national AAUP member and help strengthen our local chapter, continuing to fight for tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance. You can also join our local chapter– shoot us an email at unl.aaup@gmail.com.
- Also check out Stand Together for Higher Ed.
- Connect with Stand for Schools and I Love Public Schools two of Nebraska’s public advocacy organizations for public schools. Also connect with NSEA, the Nebraska teachers’ union.
- Get involved with your local school board. Run for local school board. School boards remain one of the most important sites for small democracy. Run for the State Board of Education, run for the Board of Regents. These are elected offices, and they are important.
- Testify at the legislature. If Jim Scheer thinks we should all show up more, well, we certainly can show up and demand that public higher education be funded. And that public P-12 education be funded and protected. Perhaps while we are at it, democracy itself.
- Call your state senator and ask that the laws creating closed administrator searches be changed. This seems to be one way leaders who do not have our interests or students’ interests at heart are forced on us.
- Support candidates for federal, state, and local offices who support public education. Even if you don’t have kids, education benefits you in so many ways.
- Get educated, there’s a starter list below.
Reading List
Because I’m a professor, I obviously cannot leave you without some resources for additional learning. Like my advisor before me, sharing books and articles is my love language. Here are a few I recommend about the state of P-12 education, my area of specialization:
Schneider, J., & Berkshire, J. (2020). A wolf at the schoolhouse door: The dismantling of public education and the future of school. The New Press.
Berkshire, J. C., & Schneider, J. (2024). The education wars: A citizen’s guide and defense manual. The New Press.
Black, D. W. (2020). Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy. PublicAffairs.
Cowen, J. (2024). The privateers: How billionaires created a culture war and sold school vouchers. Harvard Education Press.
Cowen’s book is especially powerful, as he spent much of his career researching vouchers, and it is in part a personal story of following the evidence and changing your mind.
I would also recommend the podcast, “Have You Heard,” from educational historian Jack Schnieder and educational journalist Jennifer Berkshire. I’ve spent countless hours listening to them driving across Nebraska for fieldwork. This episode, featuring an economics professor from Indiana, was particularly insightful, and this episode on the voucher situation in Ohio.
