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public education
The Promise of Radical Municipalism in New York City
What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy.
May 15, 2026
It is an inspiring time to be a New Yorker. Over the last year, thousands have been mobilized by a vision for a more just city, where the interests of the people, not the 1%, are at the center of social and economic policies. Driving this vision is a city that is affordable, one where public infrastructures are not indicative of neglect, exclusion or harm, but are life-affirming institutions grounded in principles of participatory democracy: where everyday residents have a direct say over the public policies that govern their lives.
It is a beautiful vision, especially in a city that has long been plagued by corporate and private interests, and one that draws from models of what is termed new or radical municipalism and experiments with mass and co-governance in cities including Barcelona, Jackson, and Porto Alegre, among others.
Distinguishing New York City’s municipalist moment is its political geography: It is a global city, a center of global finance; a metropole in the Global North, at the center of the imperialist core, and the home of Wall Street; and it is an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity. The city with the highest concentration of wealth in the world runs on a workforce where only 33% of workers have “good jobs” (qualified by living wage pay, full-time, and year-round employment, employer sponsored health insurance, and safe working conditions). Over one-quarter of New Yorkers struggle with poverty, and nearly two-thirds are economically precarious. Adding to this context is intensified fascism, integral to which has been the bipartisan project of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the anti-state state: The structured expansion of corporate interests and privatization schemes coupled with the shrinkage of the public infrastructures, entitlements, and services alongside the increased entanglement of policing, surveillance, and punishment into nearly every vestige of the public that remains.
Transforming Public and Civic Infrastructures
On one hand, the renewed interest in public infrastructures grounding radical municipalism signals an important turn from neoliberal consumer citizenship, exemplified recently by former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina’s description of parents as the Department of Education’s “clients.” On the other hand, New York’s wealth, part and parcel of its long-standing and structured class- and race-based inequity, presents a real challenge to the reinvigoration of civic and public life, to what kind of power, what kind of public, will be built and transformed—and to what ends. How do we ensure that the promise of a more just city is truly and actively guided (not just informed) by New Yorkers whose experience of the public has long been shaped by histories of organized abandonment (or the intentional divestment of state and private capital that shape particular places), by the harm, exclusion, and violence of the anti-state state?
Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.
The promise of radical municipalism to enliven deliberative spaces that build capacity for protagonism and expand practices of citizenship needs to be guided by what Celina Su understands as epistemic justice, “actively questioning what bodies of knowledge are counted as expert, rational, and valuable.” More than an advisory role, epistemic justice must actively structure deliberative spaces. In its absence, Su notes, deliberative spaces run the risk of perpetuating already existing inequities. The urgency of this approach is captured by the now infamous New York City District 3 CEC (Community Education Council) meeting, when City University of New York Professor Allyson Friedman’s racist remarks, in response to an eighth grade student who was speaking out against their school being closed, were captured by an open mic. As many recognize, Friedman’s remarks are not a unique case, but emblematic of the changing same in the district.
The district, among the most segregated and unequal in the city, is where I have worked with others to build power, organizing, and leadership among low-income families of color for just and equitable public schools. There have been countless occasions in which “concerned parents” broadcast their racism sometimes in official testimony, sometimes in unofficial remarks. Most often, these remarks have not captured headlines. And in that mix (which included CEC, district, Community Board, and school-site meetings) poor and working class families of color were regularly told that they didn’t “understand” or might be “confused” by their own experiences—their own stories—and dismissed. Friedman’s comments implied the same: that the student speaking out against their school being closed simply did not understand (and, according to Friedman’s racist analysis, could not understand) their own circumstances or the value of their school community. Yet students, teachers, parents, and school workers have long recognized and resisted school closures as a mechanism of dispossession, racist violence, encroachment, and displacement. Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.
In our municipalist moment, deliberative spaces need to be reinvigorated and also reassessed. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sumathy Kumar, and Celina Su write that New York City has an extensive infrastructure for civic participation (which includes CECs, community boards, the Civic Engagement Commission, and more). However, they assess, “much of it is shallow, uncoordinated, fragmented, and symbolic. New Yorkers are rightly skeptical of consultations that go nowhere.” They note the need for an audit of such structures with a goal of repurposing and revitalization, guided by the knowledge and experience of community organizers and organizations. As such, the question raised by the winter meeting that went viral is not only if such remarks should be tolerated, but rather, how to intentionally transform the CEC and other infrastructures that are supposed to enliven participatory democracy from places that too often confirm and perpetuate inequity into places where the long-standing violence enacted by austerity and mechanized through school closures is interrupted. To do so, the voices, experiences, and analyses of those who have experienced such violence need to be active, understood as credible, and prioritized.
Epistemic Justice, The Presence of Abolition, and the Remaking of Social Relations
The transformation of our public and civic infrastructures requires both deep local knowledge and an understanding that such spaces are not static. Bonnie Honig reminds us that public things—libraries, schools, healthcare, and housing—as well as civic infrastructures through which they are governed, are “holding environments.” That is, they are simultaneously containers through which life is reproduced in the everyday (including making sure that all students have warm winter coats, that access to ultrasound mammograms is universal, and that lighting and heat work in public and subsidized housing) and spaces of contestation over what democracy, citizenship, and our social relations—not yet determined—might be.
These holding environments have been contradictory at best. More often, they have been vehicles through which the silencing, exclusion, and disenfranchisement that liberalism relies upon are administered, and where scarcity engenders social relations of competition and individuation, where it is assumed that one’s needs are only confirmed in opposition to the security of others.
Radical municipalism offers the promise to shift that configuration, and actualize Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insight that “abolition is not absence, it is presence.” This insight directs us to the need not just to dismantle, but to build practices, structures, institutions, and experiments that affirm life. The perspectives of structurally marginalized communities are essential to determining what kind of presence is necessary: to mapping not only how harm works, but also to what kinds of alternatives are needed and might be capable of transforming our social relations.
A good example of why this is true comes from Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) and the Public Science Project’s (CUNY) report, We Deserve to Be Safe. Rooted in Participatory Action-Research (PAR), the project’s leadership team included CPR member-led organizations in over-policed communities, was grounded in long-standing relationships and an understanding of the multi-layered harms of policing, and anchored by the shared principle that highly policed communities need to be at the center of how safety and harm are understood and re-imagined. As they note:
Our findings illuminate that people in highly policed New York neighborhoods often hold deeply complex beliefs, attitudes and proposals for community safety, supporting this report’s approach of presenting data about the multiple truths that communities hold. Notably, our findings suggest that while police officers have provided moments of successful intervention and important services for New Yorkers, for many respondents the police are also a constant threat to safety.
The perspectives and findings outlined by the report provide insight that, as the authors note, reach beyond an “overly simplistic duality of either decreased policing and lawlessness or increased policing and safety.” The stories and experiences outlined make painfully clear the violence of policing while also centering participants' complex personhood not simply as anecdote, but as analysis and insight to understanding what kinds of alternatives to policing—informed by place-based histories and realities—might actually be transformative. Bound up in the stories that the report documents is the sobering reality that understanding what “successful interventions and important services” have actually meant is integral to disentangling policing with the provision of social services.
Examples of radical municipalism in other cities show the meeting of our material and everyday needs is deeply connected to the transformation of our social relations, rooted in structures and practices that expand (rather than shrink) how we understand ourselves in relationship to one another, and how we value life, its reproduction, and sustainability. Drawing on her work with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Rebecca Tarlau terms this process contentious co-governance which “is not simply [about] more resources or policy changes but, rather, the prefiguration of alternative social and economic relations within… public institutions.” Importantly, in the case of the MST, Tarlau finds that prefiguration need not be outside of the state and that participation is not simply a means to an end, but rather invokes practices that expand and transform social relations through and within public and civic infrastructures, while also strengthening social movements.
New York City’s political geography—as a global city, as a metropole in the Global North and center of the imperialist core, and as an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity—matters to how we navigate our current conjuncture. Chaumtoli Haq reminds us that in the context of the global city, radical municipalism presents a “powerful strategy for change… [that] enables communities, given their proximity to local governance, to mobilize for changes in law and policy.”
The strength of this strategy has already been demonstrated by the historic campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Rooted in strong partnerships with grassroots organizations including CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and New York City Communities for Change, the material conditions of these organizations’ members shaped the policy platforms of the campaign. What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy and deliberative spaces that are grounded in epistemic justice and contentious cogovernance: whose knowledge, experience, and know-how actively shapes those processes; what kind of protagonism and popular shared analysis propels momentum and movement; and what kinds of social relations are enlivened to expand political horizons and protracted struggle.
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The Battle Over Public Education Is Loud; the Work of Teachers Is Louder
Even when faced with pressure and threats from almost all sides, the actual, individual people shaping the education of our children will not let themselves be cowed.
Dec 18, 2025
There is a looming threat to K-12 public education in America, but it is not only the substantial amount of laws restricting what can be taught in classrooms. The equally profound danger is that we are allowing a narrow political narrative to overshadow what is actually happening inside schools.
National pundits and scholars frame “the law” as a singular force indoctrinating students, obscuring the fact that we are dealing with a patchwork of rapidly evolving laws. While these legal shifts are detrimental, a more comprehensive understanding requires considering the lived experiences of educators, students, and the organizations that navigate them. The threat is not simply complacency to this “silent majority.” It is also the refusal to recognize that our schools are not homogeneous battlegrounds, but diverse communities experiencing these political pressures in very different ways.
The problem is not “the law,” it is the laws, plural, rushed through statehouses by politicians eager to score cultural points without any clarity on implementation or impact. Political influence on standards is nothing new, but recent controversies have reached a fever pitch as conservative lawmakers push divisive-concepts bills restricting topics such as race, gender, and LGBTQ+ rights.
In 2022, the South Carolina legislature debated bills banning The 1619 Project and any content feared to make white students “feel guilty.” Today, 35% of K-12 students attend school in states with anti-critical race theory laws. By 2023, 65% of history teachers reported limiting political discussions. As one Ohio teacher put it, “It’s tough for teachers to stick their neck out… you just see the attack on teachers increasing over and over again.”
While the legislators passing these laws attempt to rally popular support behind a narrative that they are the “silent majority,” we can’t let them obscure their genuine presence as simply a highly outspoken minority.
For example, New Hampshire is facing restrictive “divisive-concepts” laws, dwindling public school funding, and bounties on teachers that Moms for Liberty hopes to “catch.” As much as Moms for Liberty promotes its bounty as protection for children, the bounty serves one exclusive purpose. To instigate fear among educators, parents, and the broader public.
But this fear is largely baseless. Despite its efforts to intrude into the classroom and attack teachers, Moms for Liberty has remained unsuccessful. Even with a $500 cash prize on the line, not a single teacher was “caught” and fired for Moms for Liberty’s agenda. It’s as if, when investigated, teachers are not posing dangers to students. Rather, they are trained educators fighting for the strong democratic education of the nation's children.
While the legislators passing these laws attempt to rally popular support behind a narrative that they are the “silent majority,” we can’t let them obscure their genuine presence as simply a highly outspoken minority.
Legislative activity across the nation is also propagating fear among educators. But these bills are poorly crafted, vague, lacking expert input, and inconsistent with the First Amendment and academic freedom. While these threatening bills infiltrate news headlines, most of them have no real power. In 2024, 56 educational gag orders were filed, but only 8 were actually implemented. These are also new lows for proposed and implemented gag orders compared with the last few years.
Instead, we continue to see bipartisan opposition to politicized state lawmakers making choices about the content in K-12 schools. In 2024, we saw the first successful challenges to K-12 gag orders in court. Groups like Moms for Liberty remain unpopular among the public. Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project continue to suffer electoral losses, with their publicly endorsed candidates losing about 70% of their races nationwide in 2023.
Bearing this in mind, we must continue to hold strong against these loud (but little) groups. Although they’ve mastered the art of amplifying their voices and distracting us with frightening news headlines, we cannot succumb to their scare tactics and must continue to make informed decisions based on our own investigation.
Furthermore, beyond the failures of these scare tactics, perhaps one of the most profound places to look for hope is in the actions of individual teachers across the United States. Here, we will draw on the testimonies of three different teachers, whom we interviewed as part of an Amherst College course on the polarization of social studies education. Although they cannot single-handedly represent the entire nation, their words have been echoed throughout the sources and interviews we have examined in our class.
What these teachers can show us is that, even when faced with pressure and threats from almost all sides, the actual, individual people shaping the education of our children will not let themselves be cowed.
Even as some parents threaten the livelihoods and lives of teachers, a teacher in Florida makes the effort to reach out to the parents of the children he teaches, creating a parent-teacher relationship based on trust and respect, not hatred and anger. Even as legislators try to write teachers out of their laws, a teacher from Ohio continues to demand that his voice be heard and has ensured that, over the past six years, not a single bill has been passed that was not approved by the coalition of Ohio teachers. Even as the politicians in Washington squabble like children, a teacher in Arkansas crafts a classroom where the children she teaches learn to engage in civil debate and learn to disagree on a topic while still remaining friends.
All three of these teachers—and thousands more across the country—continue, quietly, to educate the nation's children with kindness and nuance, even as the politicians in the Capitol do their best to sabotage the fundamental educational structures of the United States.
So don’t give up, don’t let them win. Don’t let them write a story that places teachers as the villains.
Don’t let them make you forget how hope endures and that the strength of the educational system lies maybe not in the laws that politicians apply to it, but instead in the individuals who dedicate their lives to ensuring children can learn and play and will grow to shape the future of this country.
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Finding Each Other and the Stakes of Public Education
If a return to an imagined “normal” is actually only a mirror of the present horrors, just at a different scale, what does that mean for how we struggle for–or through—schools?
Aug 20, 2025
“If they close the school, how will we find each other?”
This question was posed by a New York City high school student in 2010, as their school was being “phased out”—one of many caught up in the sweeps of school closings that characterized the violent austerity measures of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. The pedagogy of the question compels us to consider what is lost when a school is closed or phased out, and what public infrastructures, like education, have to do with “finding one another.”
The question becomes ever more urgent in our current context of the Trump administration’s austerity measures and the broader dismantling of public education. Far from perfect, for many, public schools have been quotidian diaries of state divestment, policing, and criminalization. Yet they have also—unromantically and consistently—been places of survivance: where everyday people have cared for and found each other and sometimes, come together for common cause. In recent months we have also seen the power of schools as sites of resistance, where the abolitionist principle of “we keep us safe” has countered fascist violence, criminalization, and disposability with fierce solidarities, community defense, and the praxis of sanctuary.
A recent New York Times article, however, highlights the right’s growing critique of praxes such as these—which it has labeled broadly as “empathy.” According to the critique, empathy encourages a sort of lawlessness, where the recognition of shared humanity becomes the driving force for action—instead of rigid and narrow conceptions of legality and rights. In other words, according to its critics, it is empathy that emboldened educational workers to unite and refuse the entry of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to public school buildings. It is empathy that inspired Jaime C., a Los Angeles Metro Bus driver who refused to let ICE agents onto his bus, noting, “Part of our job is to make sure everyone is safe… I’m not going to open my doors, regardless if there’s retaliation or not. I’m going to do what is right...” According to the critics of empathy, these brave, bold, and solidaristic actions—which for many of us have provided moments of inspiration during the dark year that has been 2025—are marked by confusion rather than clear thinking, due to lack of an understanding of the need for “order.”
The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other.
In her book, The Capital Order, Clara Mattei reminds us that the fascist order accelerated through the Trump administration’s austerity measures is an entirely old one, that needs to be understood as essential to capitalism. As many have noted, the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2025, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill [OBBB], accounts for the largest one-time upward redistribution of wealth. It also needs to be understood as a weapon that is meant to protect capitalism by targeting public infrastructures and by making us even more reliant on the market. As the remaining vestiges of the welfare state that guarantee some form of social provision for the reproduction of daily life and also present the possibility of finding each other are hollowed out—we become even further alienated and separated from one another: consumer-citizens entrenched in self-interest and perpetual competition against one another.
What austerity also makes clear, Mattei argues, is the entrenched relationship between liberalism, fascism, and imperialism. In the case of education, this alignment confirms, on one hand, what Black and Indigenous organizers have been saying for some time: that public schools are a site of confinement, violence, control, and harm—making clear, for example, that it is not about transitioning from school to prison, but rather, historical and contemporary nexus between the two. It also affirms what students and educational workers in solidarity with Palestinian liberation—exposing how schools run not only on exclusion and disposession “at home” but also on extraction and genocide globally—have likewise clarified about the limits of liberalism, demonstrating that democratic rights and institutional safety only exist for those who dare not question the terms of the capital order.
If a return to an imagined “normal” is then, actually only a mirror of the present horrors, just at a different scale, what does that mean for how we struggle for–or through—schools?
The question becomes ever more urgent with the passage of the OBBB which, alongside other measures enacted by the Trump administration, seeks to restructure education as we know it. One key piece of the “how” of the restructuring is the establishment of a national voucher program. While conservative efforts to publicly fund religious schools have been consistently blocked by the courts, the voucher program provides a work-around through what we might understand as a federal not-for-profit-industrial complex. The new federal program provides a 100% tax credit (a $1:$1 return) to anyone who contributes to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO). The nongovernmental entity of the SGO can then redistribute funds that can be used to pay for religious, private, home, or segregated schools—allowing, as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos envisioned, funding to directly follow students instead of school systems or buildings. Any family earning up to 300% the area median income would be eligible to apply for funds.
Two provisions—a state opt-in requirement and a cap of $1,700 annual tax credit per individual—establish some guardrails for the immediate growth of vouchers. However, with the establishment of an infrastructure for the voucher program alongside the gutting of the Department of Education (McMahon v. New York) and the Trump administration’s Russian roulette of withholding (and then releasing) billions of dollars for public education, it is not hard to imagine how—with a push for increased devolution to states—that the program might soon grow (the cap for federal payouts for 2026 is $10 billion, with 5% increases annually). Moreover, the combined impact of the OBBB’s violent Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid cuts disproportionately impact families who rely on public schools as well as critical infrastructure for special needs students and food safety and mental and physical health services for students more generally—while the bill also exponentially expands federal dollars for surveillance, detention, deportation, and ICE. These provisions, along with the OBBB’s broader shrinkage of public benefits—or Health and Human Services’ reinterpretation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, which, among other aspects, bans undocumented families from accessing Head Start programs)—are not meant to “save money.” In 2024, for example, public education only accounted for 3.9% of federal outlays.
In the context of such assaults, the question is not if we fight to defend the public, but it is urgent to keep at the forefront what kind of public we are fighting for. The austerity measures enacted during the Great Recession provide some lessons. For instance, in New York City, some public schools sought to mitigate budget cuts by increasing individual and private foundation donations. Not only did this strategy (often enacted through the expansion of school choice programs and policies) intensify inequity and segregation, but it also ceded ground to the market, fortifying a sense of consumer citizenship and a version of the public that is not antagonistic to the capital order, or the relations it seeks to police. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore call “creative aggression” is helpful in thinking about what might be done differently. As they note, creative aggression clarifies that the violence of austerity need not always lead us to the trap of affirming the violence we are used to. Instead, its accompanying contradictions can help clarify opportunities to “[use] whatever weapons are available—which sometimes can be things like constitutional provisions, using lawfare to fight—to support that creative aggression reworking social reality to make abolition geography.”
If a return to “normal” is only an affirmation of violence, then key to fighting for the public in the context of austerity and fascism is the reworking of social reality to make abolition geography. The fight against austerity, to meet our material needs, and redistribute wealth in the Belly of the Beast, must be rooted in an ever expanded understanding of what it means to find each other. As Robin D.G. Kelley reminds us, we cannot have socialism without anticolonialism; finding each other must be rooted in internationalism.
It is this clarity, coupled with creative aggression, that informed for example, the National Education Association’s (NEA) 7,000 Member Representative Assembly recent vote. In a stand of solidarity with Palestinian liberation and the advancement of worker, civil, and human rights, the NEA decided to cut ties—including contracts—with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Likewise, the Profession Staff Congress’ (PSC, CUNY) vote earlier this year to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds and (as part of a joint campaign with the MORE Caucus of the United Federation of Teachers) recommend that their pension system—Teachers Retirement System (TRS)—also divest $100 million from the same. Such organizing mobilizes the public as a space to widen the terrain, and terms, of struggle and is not only powerful, but also considered dangerous to the capital order: Both votes were challenged and eventually overturned.
Examples such as these are a reminder that in the struggle for public education—the schools and institutions we have—while not an end, does present a critical site through which to enact creative aggression and practice collective governance that builds capacity for protracted struggle, while rooting spaces where we can find each other to expand our political horizons and grow fierce, loving, and dangerous solidarities toward collective liberation.
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