The conditions facing education workers have reached a breaking point. Across the country, those who keep schools running confront intensifying political and economic pressures, while the ruling class accelerates austerity and privatization. In such a moment, it falls to the most class‑conscious among us to unite, to fight back, and to put forward a program around which all education workers can mobilize. This is the mission of the Wildcat Education Movement.
The education sector is entering a structural labor crisis. Job openings outpace hires by tens of thousands each month, while separations (workers leaving their job site) remain high. This is a clear sign that education workers are not simply shifting positions but abandoning the field entirely. This six‑figure monthly deficit is not a temporary fluctuation; it is a symptom of a system collapsing under the weight of decades of worsening conditions.1
The Wildcat Education Movement is not just a nickname, it is a statement of our principles. Our name is inspired by the historic wildcat strikes teachers across the country carried out in 2018. This moment served as an inflection point when many education workers broke through the passivity enforced by state unionism and began to fight back against the systematic neglect of the entire education system.
Since 2018, conditions have only worsened. Minor wage increases have evaporated under inflation. Class sizes have continued to grow, and increasingly, corporations and their reactionary agents have tightened control over curriculum and pedagogy. Oppressed nations, continue to suffer inordinately in the US education system. This is evident in statistics noting higher drop-out rates among nationally oppressed groups, on average, leaving already super-exploited youth further vulnerable without a high-school diploma.2 The mass adoption of ed-tech in the early COVID-19 pandemic opened the door for tech monopolies to siphon public funds through bloated contracts. The Democrats and Republicans alike have accelerated privatization and charter expansion, deepening the crisis and making militant, independent class-conscious organizing an inevitable response to these conditions.
Wildcat Education Movement stands for the unity of all workers in education: teachers, bus drivers, custodial workers, secretaries, assistants, substitutes, and support staff. In this sense we are a movement for the whole industry, and do not confine ourselves to organizing teachers alone. We reject the trend of narrow professionalism that isolates teachers from the broader workforce. The lowest‑paid workers are leaving fastest; they are also the most deeply tied to working‑class communities. Any movement that fails to organize these groups cannot claim to represent the education workforce. Wildcat Education Movement exists to address this need for class conscious organizing.
Mission
Wildcat Education Movement is just that – a movement. To win our demands we understand that we must mobilize the entirety of the working classes connected to the education system. This is more than just educators. It includes the neighborhoods, families, and students whose lives are shaped by the conditions inside schools. The crisis inside schools is inseparable from the crisis facing working‑class communities. Funding shortages and deteriorating facilities are direct expressions of broader social austerity imposed by the ruling class. Organizing educators without organizing the communities they serve reproduces the same narrow professionalism that has historically weakened teacher struggles.
As part of the New Labor Organizing Committee and the broader Revolutionary Front – Frente Revolucionario (RF-FR), the Wildcat Education Movement works alongside the revolutionary mass organizations People’s Defense Committee and the Revolutionary Student Union to organize neighbors and students. We learn from them and lend our own knowledge to build the movement for a new, working class and scientific education system.
By working to organize each sector of the working class around their interests in the education system, we confront the divisions manufactured by the capitalist class. A divided working class is vulnerable to setbacks or capitulation to social-fascist state-union policy. A united working class has the strength to force demands into becoming concessions. The capitalist class has spent decades weaponizing school closures, gutting budgets, and manufacturing culture wars to pit families against educators. Only a movement that consciously unites education workers, students, and community members can overcome these divisions and build the power necessary to transform the education system.
Basis of Unity
Wildcat Education Movement has united around the NLOC’s six basic principles. These are class struggle, anti-opportunism, independence, democracy, anti-imperialism, and working-class unity. These basic principles guide our work and structure our movement.
Most importantly, we call for a New Popular Educational System. The American educational system as it is currently organized by the capitalist class does not serve the multinational working-class. It must be struggled against and replaced by an educational system in which the interests of the working-class and oppressed nations lead. A New Popular Educational System would place an emphasis on initiative and creative expression and develop knowledge in an all round way through developing the working peoples’ capacity to engage in production, scientific experimentation and the class struggle.
Regarding the classification of schooling: The public versus private versus charter issue is a secondary issue that concerns mainly sources of funding and how profits are distributed—all three systems can be and are operated in the interests of the bourgeoisie, who needs a cheap and obedient workforce. The task is not to defend one model over another, but to build a new system entirely, one led by the working class.
Critique of State Unionism in Education
It is important to note the condition of state unionism in the education sector. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Educators Association represent a pair of immense ball-and-chains on the legs of the working class. These unions have spent decades cultivating relationships with the Old State while abandoning the militant traditions that once made teacher struggles powerful.
The proof is in the financial records: tens of millions spent annually on lobbying and administrative overhead, while strike benefits receive virtually nothing. These unions invest heavily in political influence but almost nothing in worker power. They accept layoffs, closures, and anti‑strike laws because their institutional survival depends on maintaining relationships with the same Old State forces that administer austerity..3
State unionism encourages a narrow professionalism that isolates educators from the working‑class communities they serve. It defends the privileges of the highest‑paid minority of administrators and upper‑tier teachers at the expense of the broader workforce. This labor‑aristocratic orientation weakens class solidarity and undermines class struggle.
The unions’ refusal to confront the state directly is not a strategic mistake. It is a structural feature of state unionism. Wildcat Education Movement rejects this model entirely and fights for independent, militant, democratic, working‑class unionism in the education sector.
Closing
Nobody can save us but ourselves. We must build a new, class conscious, militant, and independent union of education workers. We will organize alongside students and communities to take the political struggle back to the capitalist class, win democratic control of our educational institutions, and to construct a New Popular Education System. Join Wildcat Education Movement today!
Citations
1. https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag61.htm