Organizing for Education Justice

The Center for Popular Democracy's (CPD) Education Justice Campaigns team works with our affiliates, partners, and allies across the country to build grassroots power, win progressive campaigns and help to build a strong and sustainable movement for education and racial justice. 

Our work advances a vision for our society where access to education is understood as a public good and provided as a fundamental right. Our aim is to achieve a vibrant, community-centered, academically challenging, and culturally relevant public education system based on democratic principles, transparency, and public accountability. Our students and teachers deserve schools that are safe, supportive, and inclusive teaching and learning environments. Together, we are working to create an educational landscape where all children and youth have equitable opportunities to grow and the freedom to thrive. 

Our policy priorities include the following: 

• Adequate and equitable investment in transformative public schools: One of our primary goals is to improve the quality of, and equity in public education by expanding the sustainable community schools model as the most transformative vision for the public schools of the future. Realizing this vision requires adequate and equitable school funding, including progressive revenue generation (e.g. closing corporate tax loopholes and making billionaires and private sector actors pay their fair share) at the local, state, and federal level. Our work focuses on resisting the continued divestment from public schools while proactively promoting a visionary narrative around what a transformed public education system should look like. 

• Ending the privatization of education: We are committed to challenging the rampant privatization of education by working to curb and roll back the expansion of charter schools and voucher programs; highlighting and undermining the corporate capture of the education agenda (including the role of billionaire and private sector actors); resisting deregulation; defending against attacks on teacher’s unions; and protecting against the systematic undermining of community participation and democratic governance in schools and school districts. 

• Ending the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline: The school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline, along with other forms of systematic criminalization of Black and brown youth in schools, is intricately connected to broader systems of mass incarceration and over-policing, and is one of the most egregious manifestations of racial discrimination in our schooling system. Our work aims to secure divestment from the criminalization of youth of color and for investment in resources that provide for safe, supportive, and inclusive school environments.

Across the country, CPD affiliates are at the forefront of community-based organizing and campaigns that help drive these issues and secure progressive wins. CPD supports their local organizing and campaign-building efforts with technical and strategic policy, research, communications expertise, capacity-building, and leadership development training, and by building alignment with other affiliates and partners to help build powerful regional and national campaigns that advance education and racial justice. 

Additionally, CPD and our affiliate organizations work to connect issues of education justice to electoral races around the country, including school board, municipal, and state-wide elections.