It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived.
Thompson had come highly recommended by Robert Borosage when I approached him about springing for the $1,000 it would cost to hire a videographer—this was in 2011. Borosage was a co-director of Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), a progressive policy think tank on K Street that let me blog on its site for free. “Think about it,” I said, as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat and glanced at the floor. “Thousands of pissed-off teachers showing up for a demonstration in Washington, D.C.”
At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.
I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.
Borosage had agreed to support my project even though he often seemed unsure what it was about. “What I think we need to do about schools,” he’d say, “is to focus on the basics.” I’d reply that not everyone agreed on what “the basics” were and that conservatives had made a “back to basics” slogan into a campaign to cut school curricula to bare bones.
“Education is also about values,” I’d say, “and relationships are key.” Then Borosage’s eyes would glaze over, and I’d realize I’d lost the conversation.
“People don’t know what to say about education,” Roger Hickey, the other CAF co-director, told me when I asked why Democratic candidates would have deep, articulate campaign platforms on complicated issues like health care, Wall Street, and the Middle East and then offer only vague bromides about teachers being “heroes” and every child being “career or college ready.”
To fill the void, policy leaders in the Democratic Party came up with technocratic ideas such as the now-defunct No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, NCLB mandated states test every student in grades three through eight and once in high school and use the scores to sanction schools that didn’t make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), a vague target defined by bureaucrats.
All of this was for the purpose of ensuring that by 2014 every student would score “proficient”—a virtual impossibility because proficient, as defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is top-tier, A- or B-level performance. President Barack Obama’s administration ratcheted up the strong-arming imposed by NCLB by rolling out Race to the Top (RTTT), which incentivized states to extend the test-based sanctioning to individual teachers.
Teachers and parents were understandably incensed at the idea of using a test score to label students, fire teachers, and stigmatize neighborhood schools. They sensed the scores would be used to justify defunding public schools and privatizing the system. (RTTT also incentivized states to expand charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, often by large regional and national chains.)
Perhaps it was an awareness of that anger that convinced Borosage to come up with the money for the videographer. So there was Thompson, wielding her hefty camera like a toy, directing where we should set up, and tutoring me on how I should approach interviewees.
“Just so I know,” she asked, “what are we talking about?”
Then buses full of teachers started pulling up.
For a strictly grassroots operation, organized by volunteers without much money—“something over $100,000,” education historian Diane Ravitch reported in Education Week—the turnout was impressive. The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks.
“It was a historic weekend,” wrote Ravitch in 2011. “I know of no other time in our history when thousands of teachers and parents massed on the Mall in Washington to protest misguided federal policies and to demand changes that will truly improve education and help children learn.”
Rick Reinhard
Several thousand educators, activists, and supporters gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Save Our Schools march on July 30, 2011.
The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.
What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”
“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.
“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”
A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”
“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.
Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?
“Reflecting back on this event, I think it shows the impact a protest can have in catalyzing a social movement,” Cody says. “Activists gathered, were inspired, and connected with others who shared their passionate opposition to standardized tests and privatization.”
“The event set the stage for a new phase of education activism and organizing,” Cody adds, pointing to various progressive advocacy groups that continue to raise awareness of the issues that drove the dissent.
One such group Cody points to is the Network for Public Education (NPE), which he co-founded with Ravitch in 2013. “NPE has proved to be a durable and effective organization,” he says, “holding more than half a dozen national conferences around the country, and publishing dozens of reports on critical issues in education. It has developed links with many legislators in Congress and has been effective in connecting and supporting grassroots advocacy groups from all over.”
But have the politics of education changed?
My Starving America’s Schools report has since been swept into obscure corners on the Internet, and the brilliant work Thompson did that day has been lost. CAF essentially folded in 2016 when it merged with People’s Action, an organization with little interest in education politics. An independent website started by Roger Hickey took the CAF name and issued a “pledge to fight for the solidarity agenda” that inexplicably merges education policy with advocacy for Medicare.
The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.
For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.
Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.
“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.
A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.
In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027.
As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.
“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.
As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.
As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”
Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.
“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”
But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”
“It was one of the most emotionally charged experiences I’ve ever reported on,” I recall telling my wife as I unpacked from my trip.
She couldn’t help noticing the hat, with its crown of national monuments and fireworks. “Don’t tell me you wore that while you were on camera interviewing people,” she said.
“It was the cheapest one I could find,” I replied.
“Well,” she said, “it’s going to the thrift store.”