Thursday, February 5, 2009

No to Mayoral Dictatorship Over the Schools!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

This year the state law that established mayoral control of New York City schools is up for renewal. Bloomberg has launched an expensive PR campaign to continue his personal dictatorship, which allows him to ride roughshod over the objections of teachers and parents. The UFT has just come out with a report on school governance which would only slightly modify the present system, reducing the number of mayoral appointees on an educational policy council from eight to five. The mayor would still have control, the chancellor would serve at his whim. Teachers, students, parents and staff would have no say at all.

The Independent Community of Educators (ICE) has presented a minority report, which the bureaucracy’s Unity Caucus has tried to suppress, calling for more “checks and balances.” A central board would name the chancellor, with three mayoral appointees and one union appointee. Class Struggle Education Workers stands instead for a system in which policy is set and all school leadership and central administrators are named by councils of democratically elected delegates of teachers, students, parents and workers at the school, district and citywide level. Such delegates and councils would be subject to recall at any time. For teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools!

The UFT Must Say Loud and Clear:

NO LAYOFFS, NO GIVEBACKS!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

To download leaflet, click on image at right

On January 28, NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein testified before the New York State legislature saying that the slashing of $1.4 billion in funds for city schools could lead to the layoff of 15,000 teachers and “school-based personnel” – i.e., not the suits at Tweed. Some layoffs could even begin this school year, he insinuated. While complaining about the $700 million cut in Governor David Paterson’s budget he has said nothing against the $500 million cut in city funds ordered by his boss, Mayor Bloomberg. Two days later, the mayor presented his “doomsday” budget, threatening that if money isn’t forthcoming from Albany, the Department of Education would fire 14,000 educators, plus dropping another 1,400 positions as teachers retire or leave, along with laying off 8,000 other city employees.

Bloomberg and Klein are well aware that there would be hell to pay if they ordered layoffs on this scale, focusing on teachers. No doubt some of the bluster is scare tactics to get the attention of the governor and state legislature. According to all reports, $1.6 billion of the federal “stimulus” bill is earmarked for New York City schools. But city rulers are intent on using the “opportunity” of the economic crisis to go after the municipal unions, first and foremost the United Federation of Teachers. In presenting his NYC budget, the mayor called for city workers to pay 10 percent of health care premiums, and to require that new employees work longer and retire at a later age to be eligible for city pensions. The union cannot duck or sidestep this threat. The UFT must insist that there be no layoffs and no givebacks, period.

Using the announced budget cuts as an excuse, Klein is also trying to get out from under state mandates to use funds to relieve overcrowding in the jammed city schools and to make up for decades of deliberate neglect of schools in impoverished communities of color. He asked the legislature to give the DOE more “flexibility” to spend money for “core instructional services” (meaning that he could ignore requirements that state funds be used to reduce class size) and to let it “make school cuts more even” (so he could rip up stipulations that schools in impoverished districts be given extra resources). The chancellor also called for the elimination of the Board of Ed Retirement System. The Bloomberg/Klein wish list is part of the ongoing ruling-class assault on teachers and public education generally.

The Democratic governor and “independent” (ex-Democrat, ex-Republican) billionaire mayor have thrown down the gauntlet. UFT president Randi Weingarten rightly responded that every layoff of a teacher is cutting services to children. What she did not do was say straight-out that the threatened cutbacks and layoffs must be fought tooth and nail, and call on parents and working people generally to join the fight to defeat this attack on their children’s education. As usual Weingarten tried to sidestep the fight and pare down the cutbacks. At the December UFT Delegate Assembly she made a PowerPoint presentation repeatedly saying that “I cannot tell you that we can mitigate all of these cuts.” Delegates got the message: they should go back to the membership and prepare them to take a hit. This is dead wrong.

In her press conference responding to Bloomberg’s threat of 15,000 layoffs, the UFT president said, “We know times are tough and that everyone needs to share in making sacrifices, but this is shockingly disproportionate and unfair.” No, everyone doesn’t need to “share the sacrifice.” The Wall Street bankers still gave themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses, even after sinking the capitalist financial system in a sea of speculation and debt. Millions of workers, on the other hand, whose wages have relentlessly fallen for more than three decades, are losing their jobs and their homes. The union should say unambiguously: working people didn’t make this crisis, and we won’t pay for it.

But the UFT tops won’t say this, because they are beholden to the Democratic Party and American capitalism, of which it is a mainstay. Randi Weingarten and the UFT leadership endorsed Paterson when he ran for lieutenant governor together with the ignominiously departed Elliot Spitzer. Weingarten supported Bloomberg’s bid for mayoral control of the schools, and in fact came out for that back in May 2001, under the rabid labor-hating mayor Giuliani! Last year, as the new president of American Federation of Teachers as well as the UFT, she backed Barack Obama for president.

We have noted the important social shift represented by the election of a black president in this country founded on slavery, although American schools are as segregated today as they were half a century ago. But unlike virtually every sector of the education “community” – from school chancellors to union leaders and union opposition groups – as well as the vast majority of the left, Class Struggle Education Workers did not support Democrat Obama for president. Instead, we warned against illusions in this capitalist politician who stood for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the program of corporate education “reform.”

Currently, Weingarten and Bloomberg are looking to the $100 billion in money for education in Obama’s stimulus bill in order to pressure Paterson to bail out New York City schools. But as the UFT bureaucracy pulls out the stops to get the “economic recovery” bill through Congress, they don’t mention that the House version contains $200 million for a “Teacher Incentive Fund” for “merit pay” schemes, $25 million for charter schools and $250 million for state data systems. According to House Education Committee chairman George Miller, these items were inserted at the request of the Obama administration and are likely to be in the final bill.

So in Albany it is Democratic governor Paterson who is calling for cutting $700 million from the NYC schools budget. In Washington, it is Democratic president Obama and the Democratic Congress who are pushing “performance pay” and charter schools. As usual, the teachers unions leaders argue “it could have been worse.” Going down this path they have already given up or whittled down quite a number of union gains, and are preparing to do so again. Last November 16, shortly after Obama’s election, Randi Weingarten declared at the National Press Club in Washington that “as a pledge of shared responsibility,” with the exception of vouchers, “no issue should be off the table.” And in the looming battle over D.C. schools, according to the Washington Post (1 February) the AFT president said she is willing to “modify tenure” to allow removal of “underperforming” teachers in “humane, fast and fair ways.”

It is a total myth that poor teachers are responsible for poor education in run-down inner city schools. It is the deliberate, massive, racist underfunding of urban education by capitalist rulers who are deeply hostile to public education, seeking wherever possible to privatize it and elsewhere to bend it to the needs of corporations. They seek to create a two-tier system in which high quality education is available only to a select minority, and to bust the unions which stand as an obstacle in their path. This program is shared by both the Republican and Democratic parties, and rather than fight it head-on, the labor bureaucracies at most try to slow down the erosion of gains won through labor struggle. In seeking to have “a seat at the table,” they feed the union-busters’ lies and pave the way for the gutting and ultimate destruction of their own unions.

To resist this offensive, the UFT should seek a fighting alliance of labor including municipal workers unions and the powerhouse of NYC labor, Transport Workers Union Local 100. It must be prepared to use labor’s most powerful weapon, the strike, which means confronting the state Taylor Law which outlaws this fundamental right for government workers. This would require a mobilization of all city labor. In its 2005 strike, the TWU demonstrated that it had the power to tie up the city, the center of international finance capital. That fight was over the precise issue that Mayor Bloomberg is now posing for all city workers: forcing workers to pay for health care and attacking pension rights. But the transit workers were undercut by their own leadership, which never wanted the walkout, and by backstabbing from Randi Weingarten, who refused to publicly support the strike and instead told TWU leader it would be disastrous to continue.

Facing the threat of mass firings, the United Federation of Teachers should declare that it will not tolerate any layoffs, that it will not consent to givebacks of health care and pensions that are some of the few benefits for overworked and underpaid educators. It should defend tenure to the hilt, pointing this does not mean the right to a job for life but only that after three to five years in the system, teachers cannot be fired without cause. Those who want to do away with tenure want precisely to establish a management dictatorship in the schools in which they can throw out any teacher they don’t want, for whatever reason. In Washington and New York it is likely that the unions will be offered a “deal”: weaken tenure (i.e., the already tenuous job security) in exchange for limiting layoffs. The unions’ answer must be a resounding NO!

As in every class struggle, this is fundamentally a political fight. So long as the unions are chained to the Democratic Party of Obama and Paterson, you will see your job protections, health care, pensions and other union gains steadily whittled away until there is virtually nothing left. Already many younger teachers see the UFT as nothing but a health insurance provider, and now that is threatened. To win we need to throw off the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, break the stranglehold of the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party.