We have finished our annual celebration of the national holiday honoring the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by liberals, conservatives, and Vice President Mike Pence, alike, who claimed that Dr. King “… inspired us to change through the legislative process to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do.”

After watching him make those remarks during his interview on CBS’s Face the Nation news show last Sunday, I reflected on Dr. King’s likely positions regarding the ongoing attempts to underfund and privatize K-12 public education. But rather than projecting my own opinions on his education stands, I reviewed his writings and thoughts on education issues during his life as a civil rights leader. Dr. King was committed to quality public education for all Americans. He viewed education as the glue that would secure the rights of both minority and majority Americans.

He believed that: “Schools have to be infused with a mission if they are to be successful. The mission is clear: the rapid improvement of the school performance of Negroes and other poor children. If this does not happen, America will suffer for decades to come.” He attached a special significance to education as a liberating and essential force for African Americans. But the essence of Dr. King, those values by which he lived, and the beliefs and actions which led to his assassination, are the criteria by which educators, and all of us, will be judged in the future.

The activities and energies of those within the field of education would benefit from a commitment to achieve the goals for which Dr. King stood. He believed that: white children and all children of color, irrespective of social and economic class, should attend schools together in harmony and a spirit of brother and sister hood; that all of them should be given an equal chance to reach their maximum academic potential; and that there is a dream for America and all its citizens not as it is, but for what it could become. Dr. King saw education as a liberating force, the very cornerstone of freedom, saying that “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.”

He also noted that, “Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions.” If he were alive today, he would surely have backed the recently settled teachers’ strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) as he did with the strike by the Memphis sanitation workers in 1968. Dr. King always stood with workers and their unions in his efforts to help us develop a more perfect union.

He would likely have been pleased that Los Angeles’ Democratic Mayor, Eric Garcetti, brokered a deal to end the week long strike of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) against the pro-charter and pro-privatization LAUSD School Board which resulted in a six percent pay raise for teachers. But even more revealing was that “… union leaders said that what was perhaps more important to them was that the strike had provided an alternate narrative to the school choice movement that grew up around the idea that traditional public schools were factories of failure that needed to be broken up and rethought.”

In addition to the salary increase, the UTLA secured a cap on class size, full-time nurses for every school, and librarians for middle and high schools by the fall of 2020. The union also got a commitment from the district to establish a process for reducing the number of standardized assessments and the board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to limit the number of charter schools. The aforementioned were the key rationales behind the strike in the first place. These compromises are strikingly similar to the ones won by Memphis’s sanitation workers in 1968 after Dr. King joined their movement.

The outcomes in Los Angeles are consistent with his vision for public education. He believed that “Where a missionary zeal has been demonstrated by school administrators and teachers, and when this dedication has been backed by competence, funds and a desire to involve parents, much has been accomplished.” Dr. King was committed to building a beloved society. He wanted public education to be dedicated to nurturing and transmitting basic human values as well as knowledge. He recognized that local school systems had often become large and complex organizations and that they had negative as well as positive impacts, especially on low-income children and minorities who faced a variety of social and economic challenges in their community and neighborhood environments.

If we are to build a new world to reach the dream so often envisioned by Dr. King, then it is essential that K-12 public education be one of the solutions. It must instill a respect for the dignity all citizens, and it must develop an obligation to such basic values as justice, equity, and order. He understood that, irrespective of the diversity of our communities, we are all Americans. Our society is in grave danger of being torn asunder by divisive forces that are emboldened on a daily basis by our white nationalist President Donald J. Trump.