It’s been just over a year since West Virginia teachers began their historic strike, kicking off a new era of education organizing. And educators across the country have spent the last several months building on the public support for protesting teachers and highlighting how dire their working conditions have become without adequate funding.
Striking teachers have shown that they’re concerned about far more than pay and benefits. The #RedForEd movement has brought issues of social justice to the bargaining table, placing their labor fight in the broader struggle for equity in their communities.
Teachers and their unions are expanding the fight for more just communities beyond contract negotiations. A recent two-part report from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) exposes how public pensions are intertwined with some of the most harmful institutions out there — immigration detention centers and private prisons.
AFT released the first report, which identified managers that invested in immigration detention centers in August, shortly after the Trump administration adopted its family separation policy across the border. The second part, released last month, examined the companies and asset managers that profit off private prisons and mass incarceration. In both reports, the union urges trustees to divest from companies that fuel both industries — whether that be companies like General Dynamics, CoreCivic and GEO Group, which directly own and operate detention centers and private prisons, or the hedge funds and private equity firms that find other ways to profit off incarceration.
Both reports make the human rights case for divesting from prison profiteers. Private prisons and immigrant detention centers both primarily affect communities of color. And both have long been accused of human rights violations. Why should pension funds make their way to industries solely designed to lock humans up?
Those human rights issues affect how teachers work, too. Striking teachers have raised the issue of racial equity in the classroom — immigration and incarceration issues are at the top of the list of problems. AFT cites research from the Economic Policy Institute that shows the intimate connection between criminal policy and education policy. As the AFT report explains, children with incarcerated parents are more likely to develop learning disabilities and drop out of school.
“Children’s cognitive and noncognitive problems, to which parental incarceration contributes, and the concentration of children of incarcerated parents in low-income minority neighborhoods and in segregated schools, create challenges for teachers and schools that are difficult to overcome,” the EPI report says, calling for an end to the war on drugs and the mass incarceration it fuels. “How educators can add their voices to demands for an end to this war is a challenge that we should all begin to confront, if our other educational reform efforts are not to be frustrated by unjustifiable criminal justice policy and practice.”
As the movement for justice in education grows, divesting from prison profiteers is one of the concrete ways educators can join the call to end mass incarceration. A handful of cities and states, including New York, New Jersey, and California, are already leading the way.
“As a parent and the spouse of an educator in New Jersey,” said Byheijja R. Sabree, a member of the Journey for Justice Alliance, which supported the report, in a statement from AFT. “I was surprised to find out that part of my husband’s pension money was being used to fund the prisons we are desperately trying to keep our children out of. The pension fund in our state just voted to get out of these risky investments, and I know other states are following suit. Pension funds can play a powerful role in holding private prison companies accountable.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.