Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, M.S.P.H.

Trump’s pattern of behavior has spread across the nation among both Republicans and Democrats and, more importantly, has exposed existing forms of misogyny where women are being abused in the political arena. Moreover, he created a political zone for the denigration of women when they have the nerve to compete for political power and/or to demand respect as human beings.

This ongoing war against female wage earners in the public sector that is dominated by women needs to stop, and it will be up to teachers, other public workers, and their unions to stanch this misogynistic battering.

In its latest show of force, the Cartel had 160 of its African American grantees write a letter to the National NAACP demanding that it rescind its moratorium on the opening of new charter schools in any state in the nation.

For the next six weeks, the presidential race and two state races, North Carolina and New Jersey (whose gubernatorial race will be on the ballot in 2017) will be used as proxies for the privatization threats to public education.

In the current governor’s race in North Carolina and the upcoming 2017 gubernatorial election in New Jersey, there is a battle royal brewing between state-level Cartel representatives and public school teachers and their supporters.

The Cartel’s tentacles are long and deep and crisscross the nation as part of continuing attempts to replace public education with private-sector alternatives. New Jersey and North Carolina have been under intense Cartel legislative and legal assaults leading up to the November 2016 state and national elections.

Unless parents, teachers, unions, the clergy, and other activists for public education band together to aggressively push back against this rising tide of school privatization and the corporatization of the wider public sector, there will only be remnants of public institutions that have been the foundation of our democratic society, and our teachers and other public-sector workers will have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits.

Public education is at a crossroads whereby it will be under further siege if Donald Trump is elected and may be under siege by Hillary Clinton, depending on her VP choice and her own leanings toward public school privatization, especially charter schools, during the administration of her husband and her eight years in the U.S. Senate.