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.