Obama, Democrats Spearhead Teacher-Bashing, Union-Busting Corporate Education "Reform"

Organize to Defeat the Capitalist Assault on Public Education!

Obama, Democrats Spearhead Teacher-Bashing,
Union-Busting Corporate Education "Reform"

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

President Barack Obama is congratulated by his education czar Arne Duncan (left) after speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approving the mass firing of the entire teaching staff of Central Falls, Rhode Island High School. Right: Colin ("Iraq has WMD") Powell.
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Break with the Democrats, Oust the Bureaucrats–
Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Public schools, teachers and teacher unions are under attack across the country. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad want to tie teacher pay to student test scores. State legislatures take aim at teacher tenure and seniority. Hedge fund operators fund semi-privatized “charter schools.” Corporate lobbies like the Business Roundtable and the National Center on Education and the Economy call to end high school at the tenth grade. University students are hit with huge tuition hikes. Schools are closed in minority areas, teachers are threatened with mass layoffs and pay freezes.

We’re facing a full-scale capitalist assault on public education. It’s not just here in New York, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein are not the only enemies. The war on public education is taking place across the country, and the bottom line is: Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are leading the charge. Until educators and labor militants are prepared to take on these teacher-bashers and union-busters politically, to break with the Democrats and oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats with a class-struggle leadership, every remaining job protection is at risk.

It was liberal Democrats, not just right-wing Republicans who handed over trillions of dollars to bail out the Wall Street bankers. Now they’re claiming there’s no money left for schools, unless teachers agree to give up every union gain they have ever won. It’s Obama and the Democratic Congress, not George Bush and Dick Cheney, who are running the imperialist war in the Middle East, which has taken close to a million lives over the last nine years. Now they’ve suddenly “discovered” precious metals in the Afghan hills along with the oil in Iraq, confirming that the U.S. plans to run those countries indefinitely.

Meanwhile, look at what’s happening on the education front: Last February, the school board in Central Falls, Rhode Island decided to fire the entire faculty and staff over lack of progress in student test scores. Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with his education czar (and basketball buddy) Arne Duncan on stage, President Obama approved this union-busting attack. Forget that Central Falls is the poorest city in the state with the highest percentage of immigrants: just label the school and its students failures and blame the teachers. Even American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten let out a yelp. She thought she had a deal with Obama to do education “reform” together with, not against the unions. Surprise.

Then Obama announced he was rewriting the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” law to require states to evaluate teachers based on student scores on annual tests, and to subject some 10,000 schools nationwide to “vigorous state intervention” – i.e., closing. If this passes, the deliberate “dumbing down” of education, the elimination of science and enrichment (music, art, foreign language) classes will continue. “Teaching to the test” will become universal. As always, schools in black ghettos, Latino barrios, immigrant communities and working-class areas will be left behind.

Meanwhile, we have the Obama administration’s Race to the Top scheme to bribe state legislatures into passing laws requiring “merit pay” linking teacher salaries to student test scores, ditto for teacher tenure, sharply increasing the number of non-union charter schools and eliminating seniority job protection.

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg tries to blackmail teachers into a pay freeze by threatening thousands of layoffs. Meanwhile, they shell out half a million dollars on double-digit raises to DOE execs and increasing the number of deputy chancellors from two to eight, spend $5 million on teacher recruitment in the middle of a job freeze, and drop tens of millions onto their vaunted ARIS computer system whose main accomplishment so far has been to spawn a computer worm. Etc. But the worst is yet to come.

At issue is seniority. Under the New York State civil service code, any layoffs of public workers must be done by reverse seniority. A bill to eliminate that clause, for teachers only, has been bottled up in the legislature. At the end of May, Democratic attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced his candidacy for governor, picking as his running mate Rochester mayor Robert Duffy. His qualification? Duffy “tangled with public employee unions,” namely the teachers union. Cuomo went on: “Guess what? We’re going to be tangling with public employee unions.” Specifically, he’s talking about calling a constitutional convention (which could axe the seniority provisions).

So what is the union leadership doing about this. In the run-up to the election for United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president, Weingarten’s successor as head of the UFT Mike Mulgrew did a little tough talking. Mulgrew filed a court suit against the closing of 20+ schools on procedural grounds, which put that off a bit. (Klein just ignored the judge’s ruling and sent out notices to parents assigned affected students to other schools.) But since then he has been going for one “deal” after another with the DOE.

First there was the agreement to close the infamous “rubber rooms” (teacher reassignment centers) which had given both the union and the schools bad press. While it may let some victimized teachers back into the classroom earlier, it also makes it easier for the administration to take disciplinary action. Next was the agreement on teacher evaluation, with 40 percent of the score based on “student achievement,” both on state tests and local criteria. As usual, the UFT tops tried to pass this off as a victory, fending off calls for teacher evals based exclusively on state tests.

Then comes the bill to more than double the number of charter schools. Once again, Mulgrew & Co. try to peddle this sellout by saying that a ban on new for-profit schools and a requirement to include more English language learners and special education students will crimp the charter operators’ style. Both this law and the teacher evaluation system were rammed through the state legislature in order to qualify for Obama’s Race to the Top funds. Meanwhile, with the aid of Randi Weingarten, union-bashing Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee managed to push through a contract effectively eliminating seniority (teachers excessed by school closings can be fired if they don’t find a new position in two months). The Washington Post, New York Times and business interests cheered.

So what can be done? Around the country, union reform caucuses have sprung up in a number of AFT locals. In New York there is the Independence Community of Educators and Teachers for a Just Contract (ICE/TJC), which got 11 percent in the last presidential vote. While the bureaucracy’s “Unity” caucus has a stranglehold on the UFT, a reform caucus won control of the United Teachers of Los Angeles in 2005 and last week the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) won the top positions in the Chicago Teachers Union, ousting the deeply corrupt and fractured regime of Marilyn Stewart.

Many dedicated union militants fed up with the sellouts of the AFT leadership have joined these reform groups. But now that they have taken the reins locally, they are up against the powerful forces pushing corporate education “reform” that Weingarten, Mulgrew, Stewart and the rest have capitulated to. The problem is, they have not prepared their ranks for the bitter battle that must be fought.

CORE, ICE, TJC and similar groupings in other union locals all have pretty much the same program. They basically oppose the leadership’s sellouts and want to go back to the trade-union reformism of the past. CORE’s election platform consisted of things like “get members on board with a common strategy,” “mobilize the union against budget cuts,” “develop a legal strategy,” “develop a political strategy,” and similar meaningless phrases. They’re going up against Arne Duncan’s hand-picked successor, in Barack Obama’s hometown. Is the CTU membership ready for the blast they are going to get accusing them of selfishly sacrificing kids’ education and other hogwash straight from the White House?

The fundamental fact is that in the present imperialist epoch, the reformist or even “social” trade unionism of the past is impossible. There is a bipartisan capitalist consensus to go after unions, rip up their gains and eliminate workers’ minimal job protections in the name of competitiveness. Obama & Co. are pushing a race to the bottom, and the labor fakers are doing their job by going along. A real opposition to the Weingartens and Mulgrews would point out that it’s not a matter of individual sellouts or corruption, they are a parasitic petty-bourgeois layer that seeks to discipline the workers for the bosses. They are, as Daniel De Leon said, the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.”

Reform caucuses that only fight for union militancy, democracy and the like, are doomed to fail once they come into office because they are incapable of battling an implacable foe. That’s what happened with New Directions in TWU Local 100 and the sellout of the 2005 New York City transit strike, and it’s been repeated over and over in the Teamsters, Steelworkers, Mine Workers and elsewhere. The bureaucracy must be defeated and driven out of the unions, replaced by a leadership with a program of hard class struggle if labor is to succeed against the concerted capitalist offensive.

What’s going on here is a one-sided class war. As billionaire investor Warren Buffet said awhile back, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” The reason it’s one-sided is that no one is seriously fighting back. A class-struggle opposition would not be limited to “bread-and-butter” issues. It would stress that the U.S. war and occupation “over there” in the Middle East and Central Asia are part of the same war being waged against working people, immigrants and minorities here. It would fight police-state measures like the PATRIOT U.S.A. Act, defend immigrants and oppose racist repression.

It would drive home that the capitalist politicians who pose as phony  “friends of labor” at election time are actually enemies of the working class. The Democrats are in office in good part because the teacher union tops and most of the oppositions either openly or implicitly said to vote Democrat. But the Dems are no “lesser evil,” their program on education was identical to the Republicans’. What Obama and education czar Arne Duncan are doing to teachers now was entirely predictable and we predicted it (see “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama.” The Internationalist supplement, November 2008). That was not a popular position. Most self-proclaimed socialists opted to go with the flow and downplay any criticism of Obama. But now we face the consequences.

It’s necessary to break with the Democrats and begin building a workers party that can lead a broad class struggle against the bosses’ offensive, ousting the bureaucrats who are giving away everything we have fought for, threatening the very existence of the unions, the livelihoods of its members, and the education of our students.