In October 2021, the Campaign for our Shared Future was launched by two education advocates who recognized that politicians were waging war on public education and public educators for political gain. The campaign was designed as a nonpartisan, time-bound effort to defend and promote high-quality public education addressing the needs of all children and promising an accurate telling of United States history.
As the campaign’s director, I led a small team of staff alongside our founders from July 2022 through the presidential election of 2024. We believed that if we challenged misinformation and created more common ground to address problems facing public schools, we could beat back these attacks.
We put the campaign to bed at the end of 2024 after three years, but the lessons we learned are more important than ever as we see politicians at the highest levels continue to sow divisiveness and pursue false claims that educators intend harm.
We learned, first and foremost, that families are the most important starting place for addressing the needs of students, and the relationship between educators and parents is thus critical for the success of schools.
The campaign started with a focus on providing educators, families, and students with simple, common-ground language to remind folks that schools reflect shared values. The K-12 sector loves its jargon, but teaching perseverance, team building, and kindness doesn’t necessarily need a fancy moniker like “social-emotional learning.”
Surveys confirmed that parents actually supported many of the school policies under attack. Moreover, parents and citizens overall want educators, in consultation with families and others, to make key decisions about school policies. They trust their teachers and value transparency and educational expertise. They don’t want politicians to make the decisions nor schools to be the cultural battlegrounds they have sometimes become.
As we developed effective messages for schools and created partnerships across the K-12 sector, we also launched a policy arm to work with other organizations to monitor what we saw as anti-equity, anti-inclusion policies. From there, we expanded into on-the-ground organizing. Efforts included educating community members about existing curriculum, school board agendas, and state law to help them address real problems being amplified and distorted by national political strategists.
The relationship between educators and parents is ... critical for the success of schools.
Organizers held house meetings, brought people together to share their experiences, and supported folks to provide public testimony. We focused on states like Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, where dollars flowed into local districts to tarnish the efforts of sitting school board members. We also partnered with local districts that were targets of national efforts to flip their boards.
Again and again, we saw Americans are not in favor of banning books or censoring curriculum. They want schools and teachers to teach the entirety of history—warts and all—and they enjoy cultural celebrations such as Black History Month. Moreover, they want local communities to grapple with hard issues without the interference of politicians trying to raise their profiles.
In 2023, we saw over 80 percent of the 23 school board candidates we endorsed in the three states where we were active that year win their races. We also saw media take note of the disparagement and even termination of individual educators who had done nothing wrong. Local and state elections in 2024 provided more evidence that voters want educators to work with them to ensure that students are learning, including Black and Latino students, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities, to name a few groups currently protected by federal legislation.
The campaign’s organizing allowed folks who didn’t want to align with racially discriminatory and anti-LGTBQ+ messages to connect with other folks they had previously assumed didn’t share common cause. We were able to facilitate real conversations that cut through ideology to find solutions to problems communities were facing. We organized public events like panel discussions and we shared model resolutions with school board members around the country. We saw results because we embraced the grassroots.
That’s the lesson we need to heed now. Over the past two decades, education advocates learned the considerable power of top-down policy reforms such as more rigorous curricular standards and measures of impact and accountability. These reforms were often expedient because they did not require full community buy-in, which left the burden of building buy-in to district and school leaders, who then bore the brunt of attacks. Many of us in K-12 education reform became accustomed to taking this route. Unfortunately.
Meanwhile, those attacking public schools seem to have learned to use a both/and approach. Political operatives crafted policy and sample legislation for elected leaders while also organizing citizens. Working at the grassroots, they leveraged real concerns that families experience to create a sense that there are bad actors in our schools.
What I take away from our campaign’s work is that organizing students and families to focus on solutions for their public schools has to be the centerpiece of our next chapter. Anything less is a shortcut that does not measure up to our democratic ideals. Moreover, anything less is not likely to be effective in the long run because it does not build the support that public schools need.
One of our most useful messages in lowering the temperature of conflict was the importance of collaboration between educators and families, and holding to that understanding is even more important as we move forward. Political polarization is not going away. Schools remain at the center of many political fights.
We must support citizens in raising their voices and experiences above the political fray. Otherwise, we will find ourselves fighting for the very existence of public schools and the shared, inclusive education that powerfully contributes to our democracy.
