The year 2025 has seen an unprecedented attack on the right to education and culture in the US, with tens of thousands of educators losing their jobs.

Upon taking office in January, Donald Trump announced the shutdown of the Department of Education, the opening salvo in a thorough-going assault on the population’s access to knowledge. As Democrats join with Republicans to divert $1 trillion to the military budget, schools are being starved of resources.

Determining the exact number of jobs cut in education is challenging. The US education system is fractured into 13,859 school districts run by local, state, county, charter and church authorities. Additionally, media reports on layoffs are inconsistent and incomplete. Most importantly, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have failed to organize a response against the nationwide assault on jobs. Teacher and school worker unions do not even keep a national count of job losses, only tracking dues income—showing the union bureaucracy’s real priorities.

Nonetheless, reports show that tens of thousands of education jobs have been axed. From August to December 2025, over 20,000 documented K-12 positions have been cut, according to AI-aggregated news sources. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that at least 33,000 jobs in public higher education were eliminated this year.

Additionally, 2,416 federal workers at the Department of Education lost their jobs, and tens of thousands of AmeriCorps in-school tutors and support staff have been laid off. Federal grant cancellations, now totaling $580 million, are adding thousands more layoffs. In the most recent grant termination on December 20, the Trump administration abruptly ended 19 five-year grants through the Community Schools program, affecting 11 states and the District of Columbia, resulting in the immediate layoff of 60 coordinators across 47 rural school sites in Idaho alone.

The most significant wave of K-12 school closures in over a decade is underway, with between 175 and 185 shutdowns planned. College majors are being cut at nearly every university, tutoring and special education are becoming harder to access, and class sizes everywhere are growing.

The defunding and destruction of public education is a deliberate policy, long advocated by financial interests aiming for mass privatization, with bipartisan support. The current crisis arises from decades of state-level underfunding, the corporatization of education under George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” the Biden-Harris administration’s decision to allow the expiration of $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds and the Trump administration’s freeze of $6.2-6.8 billion in K-12 federal funding, hundreds of millions in cuts to federal research grants and the destruction of the Department of Education.

Acting directly in the interests of the ruling oligarchy, Trump has dramatically escalated the attack. Education is no longer promoted as necessary for human improvement, but crudely identified by the rich as an unacceptable deduction from social resources that they could otherwise pocket. While enacting draconian budget cuts, these forces are hell-bent on turning education into a direct training ground for the military and for low-wage, dead-end jobs.

The fascistic Trump administration also has clear ideological concerns. It seeks nothing less than the elimination of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human reason and science—the driving force in the creation of public education—and its replacement with patriotic, religiously driven instruction. This is patterned after Hitler’s policy of “synchronization” (Gleichschaltung) of all aspects of society and culture with Nazi ideology.

The following examples give a sense of the fundamental assault being carried out:

K-12 education: Major urban districts hit hardest

Chicago Public Schools have carried out the single largest documented wave of K-12 job cuts, with 2,141 layoffs this calendar year.  The nation’s third-largest district announced 1,450 layoffs in July 2025, including 432 teachers, 311 paraprofessionals and 677 special education classroom assistants. This followed 161 layoffs in June and the layoff of 530 tutors earlier in the year.

Houston Independent School District (HISD), Texas’s largest district, laid off 160 uncertified teachers and 54 staff members, while reassigning 232 teachers to unfilled positions. In October, another 50 special education employees were terminated.

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second-largest district, stands at the precipice of historic cuts. Several hundred layoffs are expected to be announced in February 2026, with some schools facing cuts up to 15 percent. This would be the largest workforce reduction in the district since the 2008 financial crisis.

California experienced the most widespread layoffs of any state, with 1,246 certificated staff laid off across 92 districts before the 2025-26 school year began.

Florida’s Orange County issued non-reappointment letters to over 800 teachers for the 2025-26 school year.

Pennsylvania cyber charters anticipate 2,000 teacher and staff layoffs statewide.

Ohio slashed expected public education spending by approximately $3 billion over two years while simultaneously redirecting $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to private school vouchers. Over 600 school districts reported funding shortfalls, with Columbus City Schools announcing in December the reduction of 455 personnel. Columbus teachers have reported overcrowded classrooms, with up to 42 students, and have testified that the authorities are “bleeding our schools dry.”

These staffing cuts mean increased class sizes and bigger teacher workloads, reduced support to students with disabilities, the elimination of essential programming such as dual-language instruction and English as a second language instruction and cuts in school mental health and counseling services.

Specialized education and support staff devastated

Special education personnel are facing particularly severe cuts, despite rising student needs. For example, Chicago Public Schools eliminated 677 special education classroom assistants (SECAs)—nearly half of its total of 1,450 layoffs. Counselors, social workers and mental health staff were eliminated despite escalating student mental health crises. Paraprofessionals and support staff accounted for large portions of layoffs, particularly impacting the lowest-paid education workers.

School closings

School closings are being announced in districts coast to coast, with between 175 and 185 so far confirmed. The most severe cuts are in St Louis (the recommendation is to close 37 of out 68 schools in 2026-27); Fort Worth, Texas Independent School District (5 school closing in 2026-27, with 13 more in later phases); Atlanta (16 schools beginning in 2027); Norfolk, Virginia (more than 10 schools beginning in 2026-27); and Austin, Texas (10 schools by the end of 2025-26). School closures are being implemented in virtually every large district across the country.

Higher education

Seeking to undermine society’s access to science and knowledge, the Trump administration has singled out universities for ideologically motivated investigations and funding freezes. Northwestern, Columbia, Harvard and other institutions face fraudulent probes against “antisemitism,” with Columbia ultimately paying a $221 million settlement to restore funding. The Trump administration’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” further weaponized endowment taxes and grant terminations to punish institutions deemed to be insufficiently ruthless in cracking down on pro-Palestinian or anti-war protests.

Cuts have disproportionately impacted research personnel, administrative staff, and adjunct faculty—the most precarious positions in the academic hierarchy. Among the many examples:

University of Southern California (USC) provided the single largest higher education layoff count of the 2025-26 academic year, with 974 employees laid off by October 31, 2025.

Northwestern University in Illinois eliminated approximately 425 staff positions in July 2025. The university faced a $790 million federal funding freeze from the Trump administration.

Penn State University undertook the most dramatic institutional restructuring of 2025, with its Board of Trustees voting in May to close seven commonwealth campuses by the spring of 2027. The closures will affect more than 520 full-time employees.

Other major job cuts include those at Duke University (599), Michigan State University (182), Stanford University (363) and Washington University in St. Louis (514).  Additionally, the 2025-26 academic year has witnessed the closure of at least seven nonprofit institution, including Trinity Christian College (Palos Heights, Illinois), The King’s College (New York City), Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan), Sterling College (Vermont), Limestone University (South Carolina), St. Andrews University (North Carolina) and Northland College (Wisconsin).

Educators and students must oppose the class-war policy of sacrificing the right to education to serve the interests of Wall Street. We call for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every school, college and university to organize against budget cuts and connect education struggles with broader working class actions against layoffs, budget cuts and war. Only through independent, democratically controlled workers’ organizations and a political turn to socialist policies can the attack on public education be defeated.