No to Educational Apartheid Stop the “Charter” Invasion of Harlem’s Public Schools!
For Teacher-Student-Parent-Workers Control of the Schools!
By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT
As schools reopened for the fall, a battle has been joined over the invasion of Harlem public schools by “charter schools.” In particular, PS 123 (located at West 141st Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard) has become a focal point of this struggle to defend public education.
Protest at school opening at PS 123 on September 9.
The expansion of charter schools has been a key part of Mayor Bloomberg and School Chancellor Klein’s program for semi-privatization of the public schools. Even more importantly, it is central to the agenda of Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan. Because the Democrats support it, the UFT has conciliated and caved on fighting the charters. Several years ago, the UFT launched a forthright and successful battle against the attempts of the Edison Schools to get a foothold in New York. No longer.
There will be 100 charter schools in New York City this year. Most of them are “union-free” (we know what that means), and as we also know, “Separate is Not Equal.” The charter schools are NOT open to all students. Charters in Harlem serve only one third as many special needs students and English Language Learners (i.e., immigrants’ families) as the regular schools. This helps the charters bump up their scores on the high-stakes tests that are now used to judge educational quality. But numerous studies show that charters do no better and often worse than public schools serving similar populations.
Classroom space is in short supply in New York City, where real estate is the name of the game. So in Harlem, as in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, the Board of Ed is taking space away from the public schools and giving it to the charters. PS 123 was forced to give up classrooms, which are now going to the “Harlem Success Academy II.” This charter is one of a chain run by Eva Moskowitz, former city councilwoman and corporate union-basher who pays herself a salary of $371,000 a year and has ambitions to be mayor some day soon. The New York Times calls her the “Charter School Queen.”
At PS 123, the kids have special ed classes quadrupled-up in the library. In the same building, the charter school parents pay $500 a year for school uniforms and supplies; there are “smart boards” in every classroom, indoor-outdoor carpeting, air-conditioning, high-tech computer access – and a school budget with lots of private foundation money way in excess of the money going to PS 123. This really is educational apartheid.
At the beginning of July, teachers and parents blocked private movers who showed up to remove the contents of PS 123 classrooms and put in furniture for the charter school. They demonstrated repeatedly in July and organized all summer. There have also been protests at a number of other affected schools in the Harlem area, the Bronx and Brooklyn. PS 241 was scheduled for closing, but they fought back and won. However, now the Board of Ed is bringing in a branch of Moskowitz’ HSA. At PS 197, a small school, seven classrooms were seized by a charter ironically named “Democracy Prep.”
The United Federation of Teachers has been notably absent from the protests against the charter invasion, although UFT oppositionists have been active, including the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), formed by the Independent Community of Educators (ICE), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and others. The community opposition to the charter invasion has even attracted some bourgeois politicians. A Coalition for Public Education held a founding convention August 29 with a host of elected officials, including State Senator Bill Perkins, City Councilman Charles Barron and others. It has roots going back to the “community control” struggles of the 1960s.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) has emphasized the need to mobilize the full power of the UFT in the effort to stop the encroachment of charter schools. Particularly urgent, we MUST have solidarity of teachers, students, parents and working people in the community in this fight, as we struggle to heal the split which drove apart New York City’s teacher unionists and the black population in 1968. And we need to take on the role of the Democratic Party in leading the assault on public schools through the charters.
This is a national issue. The Los Angeles Unified School District just voted overwhelmingly to open up 250 schools to charters. With the White House pushing hard for this program, including offering the bribe of billions in aid to school systems that accept charters and “merit pay,” the failure of the teachers unions and most of the left to forthrightly oppose this is glaring. In several articles on charter schools in New York and L.A., the ISO for example makes no mention of the role of Obama, Duncan or the Democrats in spearheading the drive for charters.
This is a hard battle to defend public education, and it must be waged politically. We in the CSEW pointed out before the election that Democrat Obama’s education program was basically the same as Republican McCain’s – they even said so in the debates. We call for a class-struggle workers party to lead the fight for high quality, integrated, education for all. Instead of the dictatorship of mayoral control, we stand for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. And serious resistance in Harlem to the educational colonialism represented by the charter school invasion could be a major stumbling block for the drive to privatize and corporatize the schools.
New Yorker Magazine Takes Aim at the UFT
The August 31 New Yorker magazine has a major union-bashing, teacher-trashing article against the UFT, entitled “The Rubber Room—The Battle over New York City’s Worst Teachers,” It is no accident that it comes just as the DOE is negotiating our next contract. We’ll hear a lot more of this stuff, and need some strong responses.
The New Yorker article goes after teacher tenure, the union contract and the very concept of teaching as a profession. In the corporate schools model, teaching is transformed into a temp labor force of low-wage “teaching fellows” who spend a couple of years in the schools (much like a domestic Peace Corps) until they go on to “real life.”
This is part of a whole program to transform public education into a limited skills training program for poor and working people, while education for the sons and daughters of the upper middle class becomes increasingly privatized as it already is for the offspring of the rich. And to the extent they can, the public schools are semi-privatized (via “charter schools”) and turned into a “profit platform” for various contractors and vendors (“No Vendor Left Behind”).
What’s standing in the way of this model? The powerful UFT and the job protections in the union contract. The author denounces the “the U.F.T. contract, a hundred and sixty-six single-spaced pages ... [which] dictates every minute of the six hours, fifty-seven and a half minutes of a teacher’s work day, including a thirty-seven-and-a-half-minute tutorial/preparation session and a fifty-minute ‘duty free’ lunch period ... [and] inserts a union representative into every meaningful teacher-supervisor conversation....”
This sentence is key to understanding the so-called agenda of the education “reformers.” Most of the mushrooming charter schools are non-union where teachers do hours of unpaid work including lunch-room duty, long hours after school, and can be hired and fired at the principal’s will, with no recourse to due process.
Hence the broadside on the “Rubber Room.” Teachers call this place “Gitmo” – a holding pen where teachers can spend literally years waiting for their cases to come before a hearing, and sometimes even to learn their alleged infraction. The number of teachers in these pens is growing, not due to an escalation of “bad teachers” but to the ongoing campaign of harassment to drive senior teachers off the payroll. Teachers who question a principal’s orders or judgment are accused of insubordination; a “case” is built against them and they are thrown out of the classroom. It is scandalous that the UFT has allowed these rooms to exist at all.
Ditto the attacks on the “Absent Teacher Reserve,” which the article acknowledges will include some 1,100 teachers this fall and quite likely many more (the current count is 1,597). Again here, the standard corporate business practice of “restructuring” is used by Klein/Bloomberg: closing schools and reopening them under another name, with the staff cut in half, and a new director.
Since the UFT contract has a no-layoff clause, these “excessed” teachers are assigned to a growing “Absent Teacher Reserve” pool where they continue to get paid . In Chicago and L.A., the unions capitulated or were not strong enough to resist the city’s demand to fire teachers if they don’t get a new position. With the ATR pool growing, along with the economic crisis, a job-freeze was temporarily imposed so these teachers could find places in the classroom. But a New York Times (August 29) article makes it clear that many principals are so opposed to hiring experienced teachers that they are “allowing jobs to sit vacant ... despite the large number of vacancies and the thousands of candidates who could fill them.” This will not last very long, and that is why the UFT should raise as a key demand in the contract negotiations that all ATR teachers who want jobs be placed.
As for the “facts” in the New Yorker trash job, look at the people quoted as “experts.” Deputy Schools Chancellor Chris Cerf, who was a founder of the Edison Schools, one of the most notorious charter school privatizers who is currently on Klein’s staff. Cerf was exempted from conflict of interest regulations over $6.7 million in shares in Edison (a contractor to the NYC Department of Education) that he held until 24 hours before his NYCDOE appointment. And now he has switched to Bloomberg’s reelection campaign staff to drum up votes of charter school parents for the mayor.
Then there is the “New Teacher Project,” which was founded by Michelle Rhee, who was its CEO for a number of years and is now the union-busting head of the Washington, D.C. schools. The NTP has led the war on ATR teachers and to get rid of teacher tenure altogether. (Teacher tenure in the New York City schools is not a guarantee of a job for life; it simply means teachers cannot be fired without cause.) The charts and figures cited in their news releases and “studies” are so rigged that they would be demolished by any competent statistician.
Most importantly for us, as we struggle for teachers’ and students’ rights, is the article’s final note on Obama and his education secretary Duncan. In a speech in June, Arne Duncan said that federal stimulus funds will only go to school systems that tie teacher salaries (and tenure) to kids’ test scores. The DOE has set up a Teacher Performance Office which secretly “correlates” teacher performance with students test scores. The UFT, after protesting this Gotcha Squad, opened the door to “merit pay” by accepting “bonus pay” on a school-by-school basis.
This attack on tenure and equal pay is a liberal program, not a product of the ultra-right. If instituted, it will enormously weaken the teachers’ unions around the country, AND IT IS VERY BAD FOR KIDS. If teachers’ salaries, and ultimately jobs, depend on students’ test scores, many teachers will look for a job in the elite schools rather than teach large numbers of special ed, ESL or other at risk students.
That, of course, is the point. That’s what high-stakes testing is all about. Education is to be privatized for those who can pay, and a second tier, “separate” (not equal) education will be given to those who can’t. That is what charterization and privatization are aiming at. The capitalists are doing what they can to get rid of public education, which they consider a socialist anomaly (as did long-time UFT leader Al Shanker, incidentally).
Our fight is to defend, extend and improve public education for all, and the biggest obstacle we face is the union leadership which has tied our unions to the Democratic Party. We need to take on Obama’s political program, including the so-called “education reform” which is a code word for union-busting, as well as other key issues such as mobilizing workers’ power to stop the continuing war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Greasing the Skids: UFT Participation in a Teacher Evaluation Study
Once again, like over “merit pay” only maybe worse, the UFT leadership and the DOE are working hand-in-glove to bring us a new teacher evaluation. This plan is supposed to be a better “alternative” to the education “reform” business model that links teacher pay to student test scores. Guess what -- this one does too, and in addition there’s a teacher test attached to it. There’s a lot of other bells and whistles in it, but that’s the bottom line. They’re trying to sell us this version of “teacher eval lite,” but buyer beware.
If you read the letter UFT president Mike Mulgrew and Schools chancellor Joel Klein sent to us, beyond a lot of pedagogical language it says the evaluation includes “information on student academic growth on specially administered standardized tests..” And it calls for a “brief test” to “assess teacher knowledge of content and pedagogy.” Videotaped classroom sessions will be used not to support the teacher but to grade them.
Any “teacher measurement project” funded by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation should start ringing alarm bells. What on earth is the UFT doing participating in this “study”?
The UFT’s “participation” reminds one of the “time-motion” study guy coming to the factory assembly line, and you’re asked to help him out as he measures arm movements and clocks your bathroom breaks so they can use it for speed-up. No way.
What makes an effective teacher? We do not accept the premise that individually evaluating teachers’ “techniques” is relevant to improving education. The whole emphasis on “teacher evaluation” tied to students’ test scores is part of the corporatization of American education.
The UFT Teachers Center is an excellent resource that works with teachers to be more effective in the classroom. They do some excellent PD, workshops, cooperative modeling and team-teaching. This is NOT what the Gates foundation study is about.
We need good professional development, and we are committed to teachers’ life-long learning, and use of the most modern technology and methodology in the classroom. But that is very different from what is going on here.
The education “business” aims to “cut costs” in the classroom. Beginning in the 1980s, nationwide the education budget as a percentage of the GNP was sharply reduced. These corporate chiefs wanted to get more bang for their buck. This means attacks on teacher tenure, getting rid of senior teachers to drive salaries down to the level of teaching fellows. It means, not “spending time” (time = money) in the classroom on enrichment activities, on general topics, history, discussion that goes anywhere except how to pass standardized tests so kids can be useful for the employers.
How do you “measure” a good science teacher? I’ve seen superb science teachers teaching high school kids in the Bronx without a science lab, without the most minimal equipment, standing up on a chair in the hallway and dropping a ball to demonstrate gravity! If you want to help kids learn, have decent equipment in every high school, smart boards in every classroom, give every student access to computers that don’t belong in a junkyards.
Coming from Mike Mulgrew, as with Randi, this is typical of the UFT leaders’ methodology of collaborating with management. “Instead of debating people about how they are wrong,” as Mulgrew put it in a cover letter to the members; instead of saying “no” to attacks on teacher tenure, they come up with a “least bad” alternative, and then tell us “it could have been worse.” Bit by bit they are giving up all the job protections that the union is supposed to be there for.
Instead of standing up for seniority transfers, in the disastrous 2005 contract they agreed to give the principals sole right to hire. Now we have 1,600 senior ATR teachers out of the classroom, plus more than 250 guidance counselors and 750 school aides without positions. Meanwhile classrooms are more crowded than ever. And the kids pay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s previous shtick was “small schools.” This meant breaking high schools up, excessing hundreds of teachers, weakening the strong union structures in the high schools. And the result? In a speech to the Education Forum last November, even Bill Gates had to admit that the small schools were dismal failures.
Here’s what Gates said: “In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments. In one set of schools we supported, graduation rates were no better than the statewide average, and reading and math scores were consistently below the average.”
Thanks a bunch. But for Gates and the rest of the corporate education “reformers,” the purpose was not to improve education. They’re going after teachers unions, and in that they’re succeeding, with the help of our leaders who won’t, and probably don’t know how to, fight back.
The answer is a union leadership that demands massive new investment in school facilities, training, and resources. Can’t do it because of the economic crisis? Wrong, this is exactly when they ought to be investing. They find trillions to “rescue” the banks. Right now, a quarter of NYC schools don’t have gyms, and 70 percent don’t meet state requirements for hours of physical education’ Of all schools in the Bronx, 22 percent don’t have outdoor physical education activities at all.
And where are the art and music teachers? In the ATR pool or on the unemployment line.
–Marjorie Stamberg
Oppose Obama/Duncan Corporate Education “Reform” Build a Class-Struggle Opposition
The entire program of the UFT leadership is class collaboration. This is expressed politically, as the UFT invests big bucks and membership hours in electing Democrats (and sometimes maintaining a benevolent neutrality for Republicrats like Bloomberg, not to mention the John Dewey award they gave Republican governor Pataki). Often this strategy is a total flop, but even when they “win” – as with the election of Barack Obama as president – the result is that the hand of anti-union education “reformers” is strengthened. The election of an African American as president represents an important social change in this country founded on chattel slavery, where racist violence against blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants continues to this day. But Barack Obama is a friend of the big corporations and military, not a champion of the ghetto poor.
Class Struggle Education Workers did not support the election of Obama-Biden and warned that Democrats’ education agenda was almost identical to that of the right-wing Republican McCain-Palin ticket – as Obama himself said in the debates. The struggle against racism in the schools must be a struggle against the capitalist system that fosters it. Formal educational segregation in the U.S. continued until the 1950s and schools are now as segregated as ever. And Obama supports this with his talk of school choice and opposition to “forced” busing. The Democratic president is using the economic “stimulus” funds to push charter schools and “pay for performance” plans (quintupling the amount of federal money to finance “merit pay” schemes, now up to half a billion dollars).
The CSEW has built and participated in united-front actions bringing together different groups, even as we have important differences with them. A genuine opposition in the UFT must be based on a program of class struggle against the class collaboration of the union leadership. Centrally, we oppose support for any capitalist party or politician, calling to build a workers party to struggle for a workers government. It will take a revolution in education to make the schools into centers of learning and emancipation for all.
There is a war going on against the unions, and you can’t defeat it by endlessly retreating. The sellouts by the UFT leadership have soured many teachers on the union. Many younger teachers, pressured by all-powerful principals and subjected to a barrage of anti-labor propaganda, have no experience of a union the actually fights for the membership, instead of giving back bit by bit. All this could be changed by a union leadership that actually seeks to mobilize the membership, and to place the union in the forefront of struggle on behalf of the working people, oppressed minorities and immigrants who form the vast majority of New York City’s population. We need to start building that leadership now.
