Thousands of California educators and support staff are expected to lose their jobs before the start of the 2025-2026 academic year, with more than 2,300 school employees having received pink slips last week. State law requires districts to send pink slips for the coming academic year by March 15, with final layoff notices given by May 15.

While some of the initial pink slips this year may be rescinded, it is likely that the majority or recipients will ultimately lose their jobs.

The layoffs are the direct product of schools being starved of funds at both the state and federal level, caused by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal education spending and by the Biden administration’s ending of pandemic relief funding last year. But this current state of affairs is also the product of a decades-long bipartisan attack on public education.

California governor Gavin Newsom, who is being primed for leadership of the national Democratic Party while courting outright fascists on his podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, has also played a significant role in these cuts. Newsom has included an $8.8 billion cut to statewide education funding in his last budget proposal.

Of California’s school districts, San Francisco Unified is one of the hardest hit, with 395 staff members being let go on top of early retirement buyouts offered to 300 veteran teachers. The San Francisco district has been struggling to close a $113 million deficit with preliminary layoff notices also sent to 164 teachers’ aides and 278 staff and administrators. The district is one of the largest in the state of California, serving 49,500 students.

The nearby Berkeley Unified School District sent notices to 180 employees that they could soon lose their jobs, while the Oakland Unified School District announced it will issue 97 pink slips to teachers and central office staff. The district is also expected to revisit a 2023 vote to close several schools, which it had been compelled to reverse after massive working class opposition.

Nearly 300 teachers are also likely to be let go in the Santa Ana Unified district of Orange County. The cuts in Santa Ana have led to massive protests by educators and working class parents and community members who see the cuts as part of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants in a district where an overwhelming number of students, parents and teachers are Spanish-speaking.

A primary aim of the Trump administration is to either sharply reduce or entirely eliminate from California secondary schools the estimated 300,000 undocumented students, and the nearly one million more with at least one undocumented parent. The inevitable declining enrollment numbers and consequent reduction in funding can be seized upon to make further cuts and layoffs while converting schools into nothing more than job training and political indoctrination centers.

Other cuts include 117 teachers at Pasadena Unified as a result of an announced $37 million budget deficit. Hundreds of these teachers and students were directly impacted by January’s Eaton Wildfire which destroyed the unincorporated community of Altadena, (population 42,486), one of the regions served by the district.

At a March 13 school board meeting, Sergio Lopez, a math teacher at the district’s John Muir High School spoke of the trauma of losing his home and now possibly losing his job as well. “My pain and frustration, I don’t think anybody here can understand it. All that I had left that I owned was in my classroom. And now that’s getting taken away from me.”

Francis Milness, a teacher at Octavia Butler Middle School who also lost her home in the fire, spoke of the cruelty of taking teachers away from children who lost their homes. “Teaching students is about content, yes,” she said, “but it’s also about building relations that continue from year to year to year. I hope and pray that those teachers will be there next year. Our kids need them.”

Other significant cuts include:

• 151 cuts in Santa Rosa Elementary in Sonoma County;

• 129 cuts in San Ramon Valley Unified in Contra Costa County;

• 68 cuts Santa Barbara Unified, and;

• An additional 13 districts have at least 20 teaching positions each scheduled to be eliminated

In response to the layoff announcements, California Teachers Association (CTA) President David Goldberg released a statement that wrote, “Layoffs are devastating and chaotic to our school communities like Pasadena, where educators and students lost their homes in the wildfires. Our union will not stand by. We will demand that every single on of these notices is rescinded in the coming weeks.”

However, such “demands”, are intended merely as a public relations campaign for the CTA and its affiliated unions, which back to the hilt the state Democratic Party establishment responsible for the cuts.

The CTA seeks to avoid strike action at all costs seeking to confine resistance instead to futile congressional letter writing campaigns and support groups.

Should union-sanctioned strike activity arise as a result of the growing anger of members, the bureaucracy will do everything it can to keep them short and isolated as the unions repeatedly did in the case of recent strikes of educators and staff.

Moreover, the unions intend to trample upon the free speech rights of their own members as was notoriously the case with the United Teachers of Los Angeles, when it prevented even the most tepid criticisms of its sellout agreement with the district from appearing on its social media pages during its 2023 contract negotiations.

In short, teachers and school workers will not be able to launch any meaningful fight against these attacks if the leadership of their struggles is left in the hands of the trade unions and the Democratic Party. In fact, many trade union leaders, such as the Teamsters most prominently, are finding common cause with the ultra nationalism of the Trump administration.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, for her part, has announced in relation to Trump’s new Education Secretary, World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, “I think [McMahon] is a good person. I mean, we disagree on many, many things, but she has often said she is just doing the bidding of Donald Trump.”

In other words, Weingarten, who makes more than half a million dollars a year, will be happy to collaborate with McMahon and her promises to privatize public schools and subject children to religious and patriotic indoctrination so long as it isn’t at the “bidding” of Donald Trump.

The urgent necessity of teachers and workers in general is to join the International Workers Alliance of Rank and File Committees and to take the struggle into their own hands. Such a struggle will not only serve to protect jobs and benefits but preserve and grow an educated, cultured populace which the Trump administration and its fascistic allies see as a roadblock to implement their program of mass impoverishment and war for the working class.