We Can Stop the School Closings!

UFT, Students, Parents and Working People Have the Power

We Can Stop the School Closings!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

As he heads toward the door, New York City’s departing schools chancellor Joel Klein (aka “The Terminator”) is still at it. After announcing at the end of October a total of 46 schools it wanted to shut down, at the beginning of December the Department of Education issued a list of 25 public schools to be closed starting next fall. The hit list includes major high schools such as Columbus and John F. Kennedy in the Bronx, Norman Thomas in Manhattan, Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens and Paul Robeson in Brooklyn. Altogether 15 of the 19 schools Klein tried to shutter last year are back on the list, despite the court suit by the United Federation of Teachers, the NAACP and others which temporarily stayed the dead hand of the DOE.

The rich and powerful forces who are behind the “strategy” of “turning around” schools by closing them hope to wear down the opposition. Last January 26, thousands of parents, students and teachers came out to Brooklyn Tech to loudly voice their opposition to the last round of school closings. In a marathon meeting that went until 3 a.m., only one of the 300+ speakers supported Klein’s demolition plan. Then Bloomberg’s hand-picked majority on his puppet “Panel for Educational Policy” voted to close the schools anyway, without a word of explanation for why they were ignoring the clear voice of the largely black and Latino as well as white working-class and middle-class families who pay the price for the DOE’s crimes.

A couple of months later, a sympathetic judge ruled in favor of the UFT/NAACP court suit to hold off the closings because the DOE didn’t follow the state law on public notification. But that didn’t stop Klein. The very afternoon the court decision came down, the DOE sent out ninth-grade assignments excluding the affected schools. So the schools stayed open, but with tiny incoming freshman classes. And now they’re on the chopping block again. The billionaire mayor (the tenth richest man in the U.S.) and the well-heeled hedge fund moguls who bankroll the charter schools think they are the masters of the world and can do as they wish. They’re wrong. The fact is that we have the power to stop Bloomberg’s wrecking ball. But we have to use that power or lose it.

By now, the battle lines have been drawn and the arguments made. The claims by the advocates of wholesale school closings have been shown to be false. A study of schools that were closed during the five years of U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan’s tenure as CEO of the Chicago public schools showed that most students saw little or no benefit, even on the standardized tests that are now the holy grail of the educrats. “Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” said the report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research. Furthermore, there was a precipitous drop in reading scores in the six months after the closings were announced (New York Times, 29 October 2009).

In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg claimed last year that for the 91 schools that he has already closed since taking office in 2003, graduation rates in the new schools that replaced them went up 15 percent over the citywide average. This is lying with statistics, as the DOE does regularly, with their inflated scores on state tests, the unfathomable methodology behind the school report cards, etc. The charter “replacement” schools raise test scores and graduation rates by excluding English language learners and special ed students. And of displaced students, up to half from the last two classes at closing schools are forced to transfer to GED programs or disappear from school records. They are forced out to boost Bloomberg/Klein’s “metrics.”

Bloomberg has proclaimed his goal of closing another 10 percent of NYC’s 1,450 schools in the remaining three years of his term, while opening 100 new charter schools. Arne Duncan wants to close 1,000 schools a year nationwide in the next five years. This goal is accompanied by a bribe of $3 billion in “stimulus” money to be doled out as part of the “Race to the Top” to school districts that buy into this scheme. This is not about improving education. It is part of a wrecking operation against public education, in New York City and around the United States.

Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani famously vowed to “blow up” the NYC Board of Education, and that is exactly what his successor Bloomberg has been doing. There are various factors going into how they choose which schools to close. Real estate interests who want to grab some juicy properties are an element in Manhattan. Making room for hedge fund-backed charter schools run by mayoral favorites such as school space imperialist Eva Moskowitz is another. Shutting down big high schools has been a key goal of the corporate education “reformers” for years. Instead of having campuses offering a rich range of educational opportunities, they want to pare down secondary education to basic skills training, tracking and regimenting students in small schools.

This strategy has the special attraction, from the bosses’ standpoint, of targeting schools that are bastions of teacher union militancy. In New York, the big high schools have often been opposition strongholds in the UFT (possibly a reason why the bureaucracy has done so little to defend schools like Jamaica, Norman Thomas, etc.) The capitalist education “reformers” want to destroy the unions on the road to privatizing what they can of the public schools via charters and corporatizing what’s left, turning them into profit platforms for vendors and the like.

But a key factor is that closing schools is part of a racist agenda to destroy public education. Just look at a map of where the schools on the closing lists are located and see what student populations they serve. The billionaires pushing this campaign, such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and real estate mogul Eli Broad, want to turn the black and Latino population against the unions, like the Ford Foundation did in the 1960s over community control. That’s why Bloomberg reportedly first offered the schools chancellorship to Geoffrey Canada, but the black capitalist education entrepreneur of the Harlem’s Children’s Zone turned him down.

This time, however, the cynical ploy is backfiring. Black parents have seen through the lies and realize it’s their kids’ education that is being ripped up. Voters dumped Mayor Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. and his broom-wielding schools chief Michelle Rhee is gone. From Harlem to Rhode Island, virtually every candidate supporting charter schools was defeated in elections this fall. In NYC black and Latino parents and education advocates have been in the forefront of the struggle against Bloomberg’s new chancellor, Cathy Black. Today there is a historic chance to unite the oppressed majority population of New York City with the unions in a labor/black struggle that can actually defeat the charterizers and school closers. 

The UFT Delegate Assembly will be voting on a resolution presented by the leadership calling to “build a grassroots movement of opposition to school closures.” While that is certainly needed, the resolution fails to demand that all school closings be stopped now (instead it has a mealy-mouthed call for a moratorium on closures where the DOE has not given the school adequate resources and support). It leaves each school on its own, instead of bringing teachers, parents and students of the threatened schools together. And while calling for the D.A. to march today to DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, and for a mass demonstration at the February PEP meeting, it does not call for a citywide mobilization well before the vote that could bring out the forces that can actually stop the closings.

The rhetoric in the resolution is tougher than the usual mushy fare from the UFT bureaucracy (aka the Unity Caucus and its hangers-on). Union militants and education activists should call on the UFT to actually lead a mass labor/black and immigrant-led struggle against the racist school closings and the “educational apartheid” of the charter schools. But what’s centrally needed is to build a class opposition the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which has given up vital rights such as seniority transfers, and let Bloomberg/Klein introduce “merit pay” (on a school basis), teacher evaluations using student test scores, and is now caving in on teacher tenure (see below).

Class Struggle Education Workers seeks to build such an opposition, to fight the privatizing education “reform” agenda. While teachers union leaders (both AFT and NEA) and many union oppositionists and education activists backed Obama in 2008, either openly or tacitly, the CSEW warned from the outset that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ education agendas (as well as their support for imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan) were identical. We say the assault on public education is coming straight from the top, from the Democrats in the White House and Congress, to Democrat Cuomo in the New York statehouse (elected with the votes of the UFT-backed Working Families Party).

In waging this struggle, we rely not on the courts (which enforce the bosses’ law and order, such as the anti-strike Taylor Law) or on capitalist politicians but on the power of the working people and the oppressed, building a workers party that fights for a workers government that can revolutionize education under teacher-student-parent-worker control.

The DOE Goes After Teacher Tenure

They’re on a tear: one day, it’s closing schools, the next day it’s trying to blast teachers names across the tabloid press. On Monday (December 13), the DOE announced new tenure “guidelines.” They are bad news. Among the new provisions are:

• Principals will use a four-point “effectiveness framework,” not just “S” (satisfactory) or “U” ratings as until now. This rating will be based, among other things, on student test scores. This is the wedge for bringing in their “value added” model, which they want to use to bust union wage scales and seniority job protection.

• New “expanded” data will be considered, like whether or not you are an ATR. This is victimization – teachers do not control when if their school is closed and they become ATRs.

• Instead of a check list, principals now have to write several paragraphs justifying granting tenure. It’s a transparent attempt to make it easier to deny, or delay than to grant tenure. And for some of these principals just out of the academy, we wonder if they can even write an essay.

• Most sinister is the financial incentive for denying tenure: if a principal denies a teacher tenure, they are permitted to hire a new teacher and ignore the hiring freeze. This will also be used to intimidate teachers – stay in line, work through lunch, do cafeteria duty etc., or we’ll get somebody who will.

For years the teacher-bashers, the chancellor, the mayor, the New Teacher Project, et al., have been screaming about tenure. New chancellor Cathleen Black says tenure is a “lifetime guarantee.” This is false. What tenure does is give teachers “due process” after three years probation. In order to fire a teacher, the DOE has to provide “cause” (which can include successive annual U-ratings, charges of “insubordination” and the like).

The DOE intends to keep teachers on lengthy probation, so they are free to fire at will. In response, UFT president Mike Mulgrew rushed to say that the UFT has no role in the process of granting tenure. While complaining about DOE “pontificating,” he ends up saying he hopes that the new procedure “can help solve the system’s real problems.” A fighting union leadership would point out how the new procedures can be used to victimize teachers. Instead the UFT’s leader washes his hands of a crucial decision determining a teacher’s future.

On one issue after another, the UFT bureaucrats bow to the initial step in the offensive on teachers’ rights, then complains they were “betrayed” when the assault keeps on coming. They accept linking teacher ratings to student test scores, on an “experimental” and “confidential” basis of course, then scream when the DOE wants to publish the teachers’ individual scores in the press and use them for tenure decisions. Administrators will go after teachers by pushing them down the “effectiveness scale” increments until they are pushed out the door.

The UFT must stand up to defend teacher tenure instead of how it didn’t defend seniority transfers. Already chancellor-designate Black is saying that she wants to lay off experienced teachers so she can get “younger, newer, fresher ideas” (Daily News, 6 December). The handwriting is on the wall.

How the News Is Spun

A Manufactured Crisis

A poll by the Associated Press and Stanford University on questions of education was released on December 14. The emphasis in the media coverage was summed up in the lead paragraph of the AP story: “An overwhelming majority of Americans are frustrated that it's too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, while most also believe that teachers aren't paid enough, a new poll shows.” That’s the spin. What is the reality?

The survey showed that 78 percent of those polled thought it should be easier for school administrators to fire teachers for poor performance. This mainly reflects the deafening din of propaganda in the media and from virtually all government officials blaming “bad teachers” for the “crisis” of the education system. But when you look closer, the survey shows that “the public” has a very different idea of what the real issues are.

Questioned about what are the major problems facing U.S. schools today, “too many bad teachers” is near the bottom of the list, with a little over a third (35%) considering this a serious or extremely serious issue. This is way below the concern over lack of student discipline (59%), “getting and keeping good teachers” (55 percent), overcrowding, low test scores, low expectations or even outdated text books.

Asked who was responsible for the problems of American education, teachers came in last in the list of culprits, with only 35% saying teachers were a great deal or a lot to blame. Next to last in the list were teachers unions at 45%. Far more thought parents were to blame (68%), followed by state education officials (65%) and federal education officials (59%). Take that, Arne Duncan.

Moreover, a substantial majority (57%) thought teachers are not paid enough, and more than half (51%) thought that teachers should be able to strike, which is illegal under New York’s anti-labor Taylor Law. And barely one in four (25%) said state tests were the best way to measure students’ achievement, as opposed to more than two-thirds (69%) who thought teachers’ grades based on classroom work and homework were best.

In fact, the whole public perception of the education system is at odds with the official discourse. Thus, 55% thought their children were receiving a better education than they did, and 76.% of parents of school children thought their kids were receiving a good or excellent education. Only a quarter of the respondents thought that the “No Child Left Behind” Act had made education better.

A decade and a half ago, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle published a book titled The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Addison-Wesley, 1995). Rather than “scapegoating educators” and pushing phony education “reforms,” they pointed to the real problems of American education, first and foremost the “savage inequalities,” as Jonathan Kozol termed them, between well endowed schools in rich, lily white suburbs and grievously underfunded schools for the black, Latino and immigrant population of impoverished inner city neighborhoods.

The “manufactured crisis” is still with us, as big business interests and capitalist politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike make teachers and teachers unions the target of their attack on public education. And just by the by, the AP/Stanford survey, which highlighted the issue of firing “bad teachers,” was “made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”

You get the news you pay for.

Their Class Sizes and Ours

The remarks by Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan representative on Bloomberg/Klein’s Panel of Education Puppets, at a December 2 rally protesting the naming of Cathleen Black as schools chief, have been widely quoted: “The worst of all this is the people who control our schools, the people who run our schools, the Mayor, the Chancellor, the Regents, they don't send their own kids to these schools. They have one idea of education for our kids and an entirely different one for their own.” This can be very concrete.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters and NYC Public School Parents points out (Huffington Post, 13 December) that Mayor Bloomberg’s daughters were enrolled in Spence, a private school with class sizes averaging 14 students. Chancellor Joel Klein’s stepdaughter went to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, where there are an average of 11 students per class. And the new chancellor, Cathleen Black, sent her children to another Connecticut boarding school, Kent, which boasts of having just 12 students per class, so that children will get the individualized attention they need.

In contrast, Beach Channel HS, on the DOE’s hit list of schools to be closed, had a target of reducing class size from 27 in school year 2007-08 to 24.9 in 2010-11. This was agreed to as a condition for the DOE receiving $2 million of Contract for Excellence funds from the state, as a result of the court suit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity against the underfunding of New York City schools. Instead, the opposite happened, and class sizes rose to 29.6, and now Beach Channel is slated for the executioner. Two weights, two measures.

The Department of Education took the CFE money, but used it for other purposes than reducing class sizes, turning it into one more slush fund. How did Bloomberg, Klein & Co. get away with it, you might ask? The answer is they got a secret letter authorizing them to ignore the targets – i.e., to violate the court order. And who sent that letter? None other than David Steiner, the same state education commissioner who just granted a waiver to Cathleen Black to be the new NYC schools chancellor despite her total lack of education experience (see Juan Gonzalez column in the Daily News, 22 September).

P.S. We asked last month (in the CSEW leaflet, “Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control,” November 16), “Has Cathleen Black ever been inside a public school?” before being named head of the 1.1 million student NYC school system. It’s now official: “Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, acknowledged Monday that she had never set foot in one. She and her children attended private schools” (see “Chancellor From Different World Visits Classrooms,” New York Times, 7 December). The millionaire Upper East Side socialite also used to ride horses at a Chicago country club that excluded blacks and Jews.

Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control

Klein’s Out, Cathleen Black is Bloomberg’s New Puppet

 

Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control

For Teacher–Student–Parent–Worker Control of Schools

Defend the ATRs! Stop Racist School Closings!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

The sheer arrogance of it is staggering. Mayor Michael Bloomberg names a new schools chancellor with absolutely zero experience in education. Went to private schools, sent her kids to a ritzy Connecticut boarding school. Has Cathleen Black ever been inside a public school? Not clear, although she sits on the board of a charter school headed by Rupert Murdoch, that towering giant of pedagogy. As CEO of the magazine division of the Hearst media empire, “limos, private dining rooms, designer labels and corporate jets were the trope of her publishing life,” the New York Times (11 November) reported. 

How did the mayor come to choose Ms. Black? He says he conducted a public search. It’s news to everyone, including Ms. Black, who said he asked her out of the blue, no interview. “In what has become a Bloomberg hallmark, the mayor relied on someone he knew through business and social networks, someone squarely in his comfort zone of wealthy and socially prominent Upper East Side residents, someone with whom he has shared many friends and colleagues, dinners and drinks” (the Times again). Cronyism, anyone? 

But who would expect anything else from the mogul mayor who runs a one-man dictatorship of the New York City schools? Bloomberg consulted the public, namely himself, and it voted unanimously for Ms. Black. He has also refused to let reporters (except for the New York Post) talk with Ms. Black before her appointment is confirmed. We’re reminded of railroad robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt’s remark when a reporter had the temerity to say that the public wanted to know how he financed his railroads. To which the tycoon famously replied, “The public be damned.”

Black’s appointment has crystallized the vast reservoir of anger over the eight-year tenure at the Department of Education of Joel Klein, another corporate import. And for now, Bloomberg has a little problem. State law requires that school district chiefs have a background in education, or a special waiver must be approved for individuals of exceptional abilities. A host of educators and parents, as well as city councilmen, state legislators and even a member of Bloomberg’s kept Panel on Education Policy have asked that a waiver be denied or delayed. And certainly someone ignorant of education should not be running a school system.

The protests are not just coming from the usual suspects, as a Bloomberg spokesman charged. You know, people who know and care about how public education is being destroyed by the privatizers. This time, some major players in ruling-class circles are questioning the mayor’s choice of Black as CEO of the DOE. The Daily News front-page reaction to the pick was a big “Huh?” The Times has been on a tear. It staked out her apartment at 5:15 a.m., trying to interview her (which failed, in a “starlet-worthy, question-dodging, cab-to-curb handoff of the woman poised to become New York City’s next schools chancellor”). It put a team of reporters to work trying to dig up anyone but Black (“a complete outsider to the world of education”) that Bloomberg had interviewed. Result: negative. 

To justify his choice of Cathleen Black for the job, Bloomberg argued that “you can always find someone to do the technical stuff,” as he told Joe Noguera, a business columnist at the Times. Black herself said the same, that she would have so many talented people around her she didn’t need to know anything. What a defense – maybe some teachers could use it the next time they get U-rated by one of those principals just out of the principals academy who have never taught either. But then the top brass at the DOE started resigning. So much for that defense.

Bloomberg’s idea of education is summed up in his comment that Black’s job would be serving 1.1 million “consumers” – as if students going to school are buying a muffin from Dunkin Donuts. It’s like in the Waiting for Superman teacher-bashing movie where they have an illustration of a teacher pouring knowledge into a student’s flip-top head. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist (Joel Klein’s phrase) to know that is not educating. So why do the Wall Streeters do this? Bloomberg isn’t stupid. First of all, they oppose the very concept that education is a right of every person. And secondly, all they want is for the masses to be taught certain basic skills. So teachers don’t have to learn how to teach, which takes years of experience, but only how to drill students in endless test prep in the three Rs. 

What the corporate ed “reformers” are after is regimentation of the teachers, destruction of teacher unions, privatization where possible, but also a radical dumbing down of mass education. Requiring that a schools chief should have some background in education reflected an earlier view of U.S. capitalists, that they needed an educated workforce. But the law is still there. If Kathleen Black is to be exempted from this because of her “exceptional abilities,” what might those abilities be? Her only known accomplishments are (1) ruthlessly shutting down Talk, a now defunct magazine in the Hearst media empire, and (2) overseeing the firing of most of the staff of Cosmopolitan. “If the stockroom has to be cleaned out and there’s no one to do it, Cathie will roll up her sleeves and do it,” said the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, another Hearst title.

So what does Bloomberg expect Black to do at the DOE? The Daily News lists “reforming the Absent Teacher Reserve” as tops on its list of “challenges.” Are the 1,800 teachers who have been ATRed the “stockroom” that Black is supposed to “clean out”? These career educators, many of them quite accomplished, have been thrown out of their classrooms for no fault of their own, but as part of the corporate restructuring and frenzy of closing schools in the interest of charter “co-locations.” The union must defend ATRs to the hilt, demanding that they be given teaching positions. While the big business press says they are “costing the city $130 million a year,” we say: let teachers teach.

We don’t have any illusions that Bloomberg can’t find somebody with the requisite education credentials to do his dirty work. Michelle Rhee, the union-buster-with-a broom who turned Washington, D.C. schools into a horror show (and is now out of a job after the voters revolted), for example. We would oppose them, too. Still, we would like to see Rhee’s teacher evals on the couple of years she actually spent in the classroom, as part of Teach for America in Baltimore. She claims to have moved 90 percent of her students to the 90th percentile on national tests, but couldn’t produce a shred of evidence. Maybe someone can do an FOIA request on that.

For Bloomberg, mayoral control is about his control, of everything. But the Times and others who fancy themselves spokesmen for the interest of the bourgeoisie as a whole are aware that they’ve sold corporate education “reform” on the claim that they’re actually trying to improve the schools. Not true, of course, but when you put someone in charge who has absolutely no qualifications, it exposes the lie. 

Interestingly, it seems the only figure in New York City who has not criticized the choice of Cathleen Black over her lack of ed credentials is United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew. The UFT chief tells NY1 he will “teach her about unions.” Don’t count on it. Maybe he also harbors the delusion, spread by Michael Goodwin in the Post (16 November), that by dumping Klein, Bloomberg “wants to make peace” with the UFT. But it’s more than that: the UFT tops were instrumental in helping Bloomberg get mayoral control in the first place, and to keep it last year, while giving away one hard-won union gain after another. 

With all the uproar, it may be possible to squelch a waiver for Cathleen Black. But there still is mayoral control by this Wall Street billionaire. If one Bloomberg nominee is knocked out, he will surely come back with somebody else just as bad. And don't forget that the program to corporatize and privatize public education comes straight from the top, from Democrat Barack Obama in the White House and his education czar Arne Duncan, who said before the midterm elections that a Republican victory would help the administration move forward on reauthorizing George W. Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind act.

So it’s not one capitalist manager over another. As opposed to the dictatorship of mayor control, we need to fight  for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. This is a simple democratic demand, but it will take a revolution in education and society to achieve it. Teaching and learning are inherently collaborative, cooperative and collective endeavors, requiring the active participation in decision-making of all of those involved. We need schools not to supply the next generation of wage slaves, but to lay the basis for a society in which “the free development of each is the free development of all,” as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, one of the very first documents to call for universal, free public education.

Mobilize to Stop School Closings!

At the end of October the city announced it was planning to close not just the 19 schools that it tried to shut down lat year, but an additional 27 that were on its persistently lowest achieving list. As always, the majority of these schools serve black, Latino and immigrant students and communities. The DOE claims it will have four meetings at each of the schools to talk to parents, administrators and teachers (how about asking the students involved?). But that won’t stop them. On January 26 well over 2,000 parents, educators and students showed up at Brooklyn Tech for a meeting of the Panel on Education Policy,  where they voiced their outrage. Virtually every one of the more than 300 speakers opposed the closings – after which the PEP dutifully voted, like the puppets they are, to close them all.

The UFT filed a suit, not on the substance, but on procedure, namely that the DOE had ignored the requirements that had been written into law concerning disclosure and consideration of the effect on the neighboring community if their school is closed down. So maybe this time around they will go through the motions of following the law. But the whole process is utterly arbitrary and has no relation to providing quality education for anybody. In fact several of the schools that are slated for closure got sharply improved grades on the city’s “school report cards” released in September, but Bloomberg/Klein want to close them anyway. And the state tests on which these grades are heavily based have now been junked as utterly unreliable.  

The DOE and its PEP and the rest of the City Hall bureaucracy will not listen to reason, or to the voices of the teachers, students, parents and staff, let alone the working people of New York City who are vitally interested in education. Every single one of the education “reforms” touted by Bloomberg and Klein, as well as Obama and Duncan, and billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, has been proven – even by their own standards – not to improve education. Small schools, charter schools, closing schools, “merit” pay, you name it. They’re all frauds, because the real story is that the people who run the public schools are ideologically opposed to public education in the first place. 

They want schools to serve the needs of capital, we need schools to serve the interests of working people. So we must mobilize, in the schools and in the streets, to defeat their wrecking operation. To wage this fight we need to build a class-struggle leadership to sweep away a union bureaucracy that systematically holds back and undermines our struggle. The UFT/AFT leaders, as well as the rest of labor officialdom, act as a transmission belt for the bosses, including supporting the capitalist parties. The latest “achievement” touted by the UFT was to elect some Democrats in Albany on November 2. What they don’t mention is that the “Working Families Party,” a shill for the Democrats that is heavily supported by the UFT, also endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who has vowed to “confront” public sector unions. To defeat the attacks on teachers and students, we need a workers party that fights for a workers government.  

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.

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.

Health Care “Reform” Law: Bonanza for Wall Street, an Attack on Working People

Health Care “Reform” Law: Bonanza for
Wall Street, an Attack on Working People

• President Obama and the Congressional leaders say they’ve just passed a “historic” health care reform. It’s not.
• It’s not historic, it’s not a reform, and it’s not even a step in the right direction. The health care “reform” is an attack on working families and a gift to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the private hospital corporations. It’s going to hurt our health care coverage in the UFT. It’s a setback in the struggle for universal health care coverage.
• If people aren’t aware of that, they haven’t been reading the fine print. Just like many people didn’t pay attention when Obama said he had the same education program as John McCain, and when he said he wasn’t going to pull all the troops out of Iraq and he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
• First, it won’t mean anything like universal health coverage. Even by the most optimistic estimates 23 million people will remain uninsured, many of them immigrant workers in dangerous and low-paid jobs. Not only are undocumented immigrants not covered, the care they now receive in emergency rooms will be cut back because the government is slashing $40 billion out of funds to “disproportionate share hospitals” to cover the uninsured.
• Probably many more will remain uninsured. Why? Because the insurance plans they will be required to buy are so expensive and provide such lousy coverage. In Massachusetts the basic plan costs $2,800 for an individual and has a $4,000 deductible, so people will pay almost $7,000 before they see a dime of benefits. As a result many people, especially younger people, may figure they’re better off paying a fine.
• Second, this is the biggest government attack on women’s right to abortion since Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment in 1976. Yet “pro-Choice” Democrats in Congress knuckled under and women’s organizations like NOW and NARAL didn’t say boo. The ban on abortion will now apply to community health centers, and abortion coverage will be dropped from all insurance plans.
• Third, this “reform” is a giant subsidy to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the for-profit hospitals. The insurance companies are supposed to pay $70 billion in taxes, but in return they are going to get subsidies of $450 billion and hundreds of billions more in new customers who are going to be forced to buy their defective products.
• The right wing pretends that this is a government takeover of medical care. Wrong. It’s the consolidation of corporate control of medicine. Rather than socialized medicine, it’s going more towards the corporate state, just like all the corporate “education reform.”
• Fourth, a main way this “reform” is going to be paid for is by taxing our insurance plans. The excise tax on so-called “Cadillac health plans” is the biggest source of additional funds to pay for the subsidies. Yet individual high cost health insurance plans like Wall Street execs have are exempt from this tax, it’s the union plans, they’re going after.
• The Senate bill originally said the tax would bring in $140 billion by 2019. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO did some last minute horse-trading and reduced that to “only” $32 billion. He must be taking lessons from Weingarten: hand over two-thirds of the givebacks the bosses are demanding, then claim “victory” because you didn’t give away the whole store.
• In any case, this is an illusion. The AFL-CIO tops just postponed the tax, so that it starts in 2018 instead of 2013. It’s still going to be a whopping tax and the main outside source of funding, and it will be taking an increasing bite out of our health plans as medical inflation increases.
• Employers won’t agree to a 40 percent increase in cost, instead they’ll cut benefits to come in under the ceiling. Since dental and vision care were exempted, it will probably be cut from long-term hospitalization and major surgery. People don’t go into the hospital for a month or have a major operation frivolously. So now we will have to pay out of pocket or buying super-expensive additional private insurance.
• What it comes down to is they are taking tens of billions of dollars from the pockets of working families and giving them to the capitalists of the medical industry. That’s the bottom line of this health insurance “reform.”
• On top of that they plan to cut “hundreds of billions of dollars” out of Medicare payments.
• And they’re not stopping there. Next up is “reform” of the Social Security system. The New York Times reported on March 23 that the administration plans to raise the retirement age and reduce benefits for Social Security, which is “the other big entitlement benefits program and one that Mr. Obama has suggested in the past that he is willing to tackle.”
• Many younger teachers don’t grasp the role of a union because they’ve never seen a real union struggle. Many tend to see the UFT as an agency for providing health insurance. Why? Because that’s how the union leadership acts. When Trumka goes to the White House to negotiate to postpone the tax, he’s just following the insurance company execs’ playbook.
• A fighting union leadership would insist on national health insurance as a first step. And it would not only refuse to support Obama and the Democrats’ corporate health care “reform,” it would bring tens of thousands of union members out into the streets to oppose it. Instead, the union leaders leave opposition to the ultra-rightist Tea Party racists.
• What we need is exactly what the right wing and the corporate interests and the Tea Partyers fear – real socialized medicine, so that universal health care is a right, not a commodity. And to do that, it’s necessary to break with the Democrats and build a class struggle workers party that fights for a society in which the working people rule, not the corporations.
• So when you find your health insurance premiums going up and your coverage cut, when your Medicare benefits and Social Security payments are slashed, don’t be shocked. The UFT bureaucracy’s Unity caucus and the reformist ICE-TJC opposition don’t warn about this because neither is prepared to go up against the Democrats. They are blocking a real fight against corporate takeover of the schools and health care.
• Whether it’s education “reform” or health care “reform,” it’s all an attack on working people. And it’s all coming straight from the top, from the White House and Wall Street. Until labor is ready and willing to fight those forces, it will just go from defeat to defeat, losing membership and sacrificing union gains piecemeal until the unions themselves are destroyed (or become an empty shell), as has happened with many already.
• That’s one more reason why we need to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions. 

See the Class Struggle Education Workers statement, "On the Health Care Crisis" (September 16, 2009) for further discussion.