Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 2, October-December 2010

To see the full Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter in pdf format, click on the image to the right.  

“Waiting for Superman”: Union-Busting Privatizers Out to Gut Public Education

Corporate Education Deformers and Democrat Obama Go After Teachers

“Waiting for Superman”: Union-Busting
Privatizers Out to Gut Public Education

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

On September 24, the film Waiting for Superman is opening with great fanfare in New York City and around the country. This is the kickoff for a slick marketing campaign to blame teachers, and teachers unions in particular, for everything that is wrong with public education in the United States. It features billionaire Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, and the unspeakable Michelle Rhee, whose claim to fame is firing hundreds of teachers as schools chief in Washington, D.C. Their answer is non-union, semi-privatized “charter schools,” many sponsored by the hedge-fund billionaires and Silicon Valley moguls who are behind this movie.

We need to send a strong message that educators will not be scapegoated in the interests of the privatizers, who look to make big profits out of gutting public schools. We must make clear that teacher-bashing and union-busting hurts kids. Just look at the results of the closing of more than 100 schools in New York City! And we need a leadership prepared to stand up to the corporate education “reformers” even, and especially, when we’re facing a united ruling-class offensive with Democratic Party liberals and not Republican conservatives leading the charge.

Waiting for Superman is not just a movie, it is a political operation. It began with a showing for the power brokers in Washington which drew Barack Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who called the film a “Rosa Parks moment” (referring to the legendary civil rights figure); Obama’s top political advisor, David Axelrod and Democratic senators (and Wall Street favorites) Chris Dodd and Frank Lautenberg. Oprah Winfrey hailed Rhee as “a warrior woman for our times,” and invited her to appear with Gates on Oprah this week. 

The promoters of Waiting for Superman are billing the film as a “vital national conversation” and “clarion call” for “education reform.” It tells the story of five kids, mostly from poor inner-city oppressed communities, who face tremendous odds as they desperately try to get an education. The movie pulls out all the emotional stops to engage the audience. But the tear-jerking has a serious purpose: to demonize educators. Figures in the film say: “Unions are a menace and an impediment to reform.” “Teacher union contracts say you can't fire them.” “Teachers get tenure if they just breathe.” 

Waiting for Supermanis directed by Davis Guggenheim, who hit the big time in Hollywood with An Inconvenient Truth, his movie about Democratic vice president Al Gore and global warming. He also did a bio of Obama’s mother that was shown at the Democratic National Convention. Living in the Los Angeles area, Guggenheim says he sends his kids to private school because in the local public school, “The biggest problem is a lot of families’ first language is Spanish” (New York Times, 19 September). This echoes the “white flight” to suburbia and the setting up of private segregated “academies” after the Supreme Court’s 1954 order for school desegregation.

The film was produced by Participant Productions, headed by Jeff Skol. Skol was the founder of eBay, the Internet auction site, and has used his personal fortune to provide several hundred thousand dollars to Teach for America, the anti-union outfit that recruits Ivy League college grads to spend two years in inner city schools in order to spruce up their résumés. Together with the charter invasion, this adds up to educational colonialism.

Waiting for Supermanpraises the semi-privatized charter schools, which are the battering ram being used to privatize public schools where possible, and to turn the rest into profit platforms as a host of educational vendors milk education budgets like “defense” contractors feed at the Pentagon trough. The film features Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools, whose schools just got a $20 million grant from Goldman Sachs Gives. These Wall Street speculators gave us economic depression, now they speculate with our children’s education.

The leadership of the teachers unions (UFT/AFT and NEA) have been afraid to take on the capitalist education deformers directly. The unions endorsed Obama, and went all  out to elect the Democrats. Even the bulk of teacher activist groups and various would-be socialist organizations in effect backed Obama, openly or tacitly, or refused to warn that the Democratic candidate’s education program was identical to the Republicans’, even as he vowed to continue the imperialist war in Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq. Reflecting the same outlook, union officials and some dissidents try to sidestep the union-busting program behind Waiting for Superman.

Instead they want to “join the conversation” on education reform. This just buys into the charade. What “conversation”? What “reform”? The rulers’ idea of a conversation was seen last January 26 when over 2,000 parents, teachers and students attended a hearing in Brooklyn and almost every one of 300-plus speakers denounced the NYC Department of Education’s plans to close 19 more schools. So the DOE went ahead and ordered them closed. Their idea of “reform” is a system where educrats (who generally know nothing of education) can fire any teacher deemed “ineffective” (or who talks back). 

What’s posed here is a fight to defeat the forces seeking to destroy public education. In order to win the battle it must be part of an effort to break with all the ruling class parties and politicians and build a class-struggle workers party. For what we need is an education revolution, in which teachers, students, parents and workers control the schools. And it will take a workers government to bring that about.