Evan Turiano is a doctoral candidate in history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Trump’s decision to rescind his directive targeting international students is an enormous win. But he wouldn’t have been able to use students as political pawns if states hadn’t imposed austerity and privatization on universities in the first place.
Bill Gates, Andrew Cuomo, and other corporate education reformers are trying to use this moment of crisis to push through free-market school reforms. Their agenda is the exact opposite of what we actually need: a fully funded public education system that attacks racial and class inequalities.