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.

Obama Supports Mass Firing of R.I. Teachers

Obama Supports Mass Firing of R.I. Teachers

President Obama made a hair-raising teacher-bashing speech March 1 when he supported the mass firing of all 93 teachers and staff at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, and said he’d like it to happen around the country. The Rhode Island teachers were fired by the trustees who said the school was failing, and blamed the teachers. 

If teachers are being scapegoated for the failures of a system, no educator’s job is safe.

Central Falls, Rhode Island is the poorest, run-down and most densely populated city (1.3 square miles) in the state, with the highest percentage of immigrants. It’s run by an Anglo mafia who stay in office because many of the residents can’t vote.

It’s an old factory town, whose factories have closed down. Now it’s a one industry town – a for-profit prison for immigrants lured by the same city fathers who are firing all the teachers. The prison gained notoriety in 2008 when the death of an inmate threw a harsh light on terrible conditions in the facility.

In his remarks, Obama said school districts could get federal grant money to turn around schools but they’d have to agree to 1) fire the principal and at least half the staff, or 2) turn the school into a charter or 3) shut it down altogether.

He spoke before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that voice of American capitalism. On the platform with him was Colin Powell, who carried out Desert Slaughter for Bush I in 1991 and who told the world for Bush II in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Now Powell and his wife have an education foundation and we are supposed to believe his recommendations are in the interest of kids.

In the aftermath of Obama’s “fire ’em all” speech, Newsweek (March 15) ran a cover story, “The Key to Saving American Education,” in which the cover showed a blackboard filled with the sentence: “We must fire bad teachers.”

Many people are in denial: they think the president is the victim of bad advisors. But you can’t blame this one on Arne Duncan.  This has been Obama’s program since before he was elected. Charter schools, privatization, merit pay – the whole nine yards. The program of corporatization of public education is shared by both the Democrats and the Republicans. (Ditto for bailing out Wall Street banks and making war on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and others.)

So now, Randi Weingarten, as head of the AFT, finally criticized Obama for his speech. A little late. In reality, she’s an enabler for corporate school “reform.”

How can anybody still believe that the Democrats are “friends of labor”?

In the last delegate assembly, there was a brief back-and-forth (to the extent that Unity allows) on the question of our union endorsing a Democratic Party politician. In this case it was just a state office post in Albany, that bastion of incorruptible upstanding political leadership. But it’s not a question of any one individual. We in Class Struggle Education Workers say that you can’t defeat the corporate school “reform” agenda without addressing the whole system of racism and class oppression.

The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

Debbie Almontaser at October 2007 City Hall rally  to demand her job back.

(Photo: Arnie Tritt for the New York Times)

On March 11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in favor of Debbie Almontaser over her outrageous ouster by the NYC Department of Education. Almontaser was the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran academy, the city’s only Arabic-English bilingual public school, who was run out in a xenophobic frenzy stoked by sensationalist media and reactionary politics in 2007.  The EEOC ruled that, by forcing her resignation and then refusing to rehire her, the Department was “guilty of bias and discrimination on account of race, religion and national origin.” So it’s official – the DOE acted in a racist, bigoted and chauvinist manner.

Debbie is a longtime educator and a Muslim, who courageously advocated for immigrant rights amid the anti-Arab hysteria in the wake of  9/11.  Some of us first got to know Debbie when we participated in the weekly protests to free the detainees at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention center after the racist roundups of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men at that time.

In 2007, Debbie was forced out as principal after a concerted Zionist conspiracy to slander her as a “jihadist” and “9/11 denier.” The witchhunt was spear-headed by CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld who set up a “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” and whipped up a trash campaign in the New York Post. Major Zionist politicians got involved like Dov Hikind in Brooklyn, where the school was located.

The UFT should have denounced the witchhunt. Instead, Randi Weingarten piled on. She wrote to the Post saying she “agreed wholeheardly” with their disgusting editorial. She also said, “maybe [Almontaser] should not be a principal” because she did not condemn the word “intifada” on T-shirts that had been found in an office where she shared office space with another community group. 

This was an atrocity. Many teachers have been defending Debbie Almontaser since the outset. Courageously, Rabbi Michael Paley at United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York called the campaign against her a “high-tech lynching.”

It is rare these days for the EEOC to rule in favor of the victim (usually they’re more likely to join in the fray). But this case is so blatantly discriminatory, that the EEOC has ruled in her favor.

However, the EEOC has no power.  Bloomberg/Klein have dug in their heels and say they will fight this to the end in the courts, with a little help from their Zionist teacher-bashing friends at the New York Post.

The UFT stand up and demand that Debbie Almontaser be rehired.

UFT Elections – We Need a Class-Struggle Opposition!

UFT Elections – We Need a Class-Struggle Opposition!

The campaign is well underway for the triennial election of officers and executive board members of the United Federation of Teachers. Mailed ballots will be counted on April 7. The instrument of the UFT misleaders, the Unity Caucus, has a well-oiled machine and will surely carry the day. You’ve never truly experienced a pro-capitalist union bureaucracy in all its glory until you’ve seen 600 hands go up in unison at a UFT Delegate Assembly on some obscure issue that no one in the assembly has a clue about. Historically, Unity is derived from the right-wing anti-Communist Al Shanker, whose political outfit, “Social Democrats U.S.A.” provided top staffers for the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan. Shanker supported charter schools, viewed the public school system as akin to “the communist economy” and helped Washington export counterrevolution around the world. From Shanker’s heir Sandra Feldman to Randi Weingarten to Michael Mulgrew, the Unity leadership has grown less overtly political, but no less wedded to the capitalist system.

Particularly under Weingarten, who ran the shop from 1999 to 2009, Unity has sacrificed one union gain after another, usually buying off opposition in the ranks with a wage hike. The disastrous 2005 contract gave up seniority transfers and granted principals the sole right to hire. This set the stage for the on-going crisis of the Absent Teacher Reserve, in which over 1,000 experienced teachers who have been excessed through no fault of their own are denied the right to teach because no principal will hire them, both because they are “too expensive” and because they actually know something about education and will defend their rights. Ever since, the DOE has been on the warpath to fire ATRs and eliminate seniority altogether. Weingarten introduced “school-based” bonuses, opening the door to “merit pay” that would allow administrators to reward their pets and penalize the rest. Unity’s M.O. is to grant the school bosses two-thirds of the givebacks they are demanding, then claim a “victory” for not giving it all up. By failing to fight the attacks on teachers head-on, it is gutting union power piecemeal.

Mike Mulgrew replaced Weingarten last summer when she moved to Washington to head the AFT. To build up his authority, the first issue of the UFT’s New York Teacher ran two dozen photos of Mulgrew. A Unity flier touting his leadership quotes a charter school advocate describing the UFT chief as “a bare-knuckled trench fighter – a throwback to the muscle-flexing union leaders of the distant past.” In your dreams. In reality, Mulgrew’s policies are identical to Weingarten’s. Under Mulgrew, the UFT endorsed using student test scores in teacher evaluation, which the DOE is now using as a criterion for tenure. In last fall’s mayoral election, Mulgrew adopted a posture of pro-Bloomberg neutrality. Has he brought out tens of thousands of teachers to stop school closings? No. Has he opposed mayoral control of the schools? No. His response to the DOE’s giveback demands in the current contract bargaining was to call on the state’ Public Employee Relations Board to rule. This is the body that enforces the no-strike Taylor Law.

The one-time opposition of the New Action Caucus has been bought off by Unity with executive board slots and staff positions, and is now a cog in the UFT machine. Running in opposition to Unity in this election is a joint slate of Teachers for a Just Contract (TJC) and the Independent Community of Educators (ICE). The standard-bearer for the TJC/ICE slate is James Eterno, chapter leader at Jamaica HS, one of the schools slated for closing. Among the TJC/ICE activists and candidates there are many dedicated activists who oppose school closings, merit pay, abolition of tenure, militarization of the schools, etc. But politically they are not qualitatively different from the “Unity team.”

Last year, ICE put out a position paper on mayoral control that just asked for a few more “checks and balances” than Unity wanted, rather than demanding that the capitalist pols get their hands off and calling for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. Instead of opposing both Democratic and Republican parties of big business, an ICE statement (22 October 2009) on the mayoral elections called to “vote against Bloomberg,” which amounted to backhanded support for the Democrat Bill Thompson. To show his subservience to capital, Thompson declared that he would not grant teachers a 4 percent wage such as other New York City workers had received.

On a range of issues, the TJC/ICE opposition adopts a liberal/reformist position, instead of taking on the capitalist system itself. Rather than calling for cops out of the schools and out of the labor movement, it refers to the police as one of “us.” These professional strikebreakers are the enforcers of racist “law and order” who last year arbitrarily stopped and frisked half a million people, nine-tenths of them black and Latino. ICE supporters have defended taking the union into the bosses’ courts – a violation of elementary class principle. While occasionally criticizing the no-strike Taylor Law, the reformist opposition does not call upon the union to prepare to rip up this union-busting law. During the 2005 MTA strike, while Weingarten pressured TWU leader Roger Toussaint to settle, the opposition did not mobilize to back our brothers and sisters in transit. Class-struggle militants, on the other hand, called on the UFT and other teachers unions to demonstrate in support of the strikers. The bottom line is that the opposition is not prepared to wage a class opposition to the bipartisan war on teachers unions and public education, and thus if elected, it won’t be any more effective in opposing the union-busting onslaught than the Unity hacks.

In today’s world of cutbacks and givebacks, of imperialist war and wholesale destruction of union gains, there is no room for the reformist unionism of old – it is doomed to failure. This was amply demonstrated by the debacle in the TWU, where an opposition caucus (New Directions) was elected to kick out the old piecards, but then quickly fell apart. The “reform” union leader ended up betraying the strike he called under pressure from the militant ranks. To “vote for progressive change,” as TJC/ICE advocates, is no solution – we need a leadership with the program to wage the class struggle needed to win.

The only opposition that can actually defeat the teacher-bashers and union-busters is one that doesn’t play by the bosses’ rules, one that breaks with all the capitalist parties and politicians and seeks to build a workers party to fight for a workers government. A class-struggle opposition would not only defend seniority but oppose all layoffs, defending younger teachers and school staff. It would actively defend the most oppressed, allying with black and Latino students and parents, fighting to bring in many more educators of color, opposing the resegregation of education through elite schools and programs, and defending students against racist police attacks. As the reformist opposition does not present such a program, we cannot support the TJC/ICE slate. Class Struggle Education Workers is active in the UFT and the Professional Staff Congres (representing CUNY faculty and staff) seeking to build a hard-core opposition that would turn the unions into fighting instruments to defend the interests of workers and all the oppressed. We urge you to contact the CSEW (see below), examine our program and join our activities of study and struggle.

After January 26, What Now?

After January 26, What Now?

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

Audience protests Klein's Panel of Education Puppets at 26
January 2010 public hearing on school closings. Well over
2,000 came out. Their voices were ignored. (Internationalist photo)

Tuesday, January 26, was D-Day for the battle over the raft of school closings decreed by the New York City Department of Education last December. The outcome was never in doubt: no matter how much outcry there was, Mayor Michael Bloomberg would ram through his decision to shut down a score of schools, including some of the city’s largest high schools, that the DOE had labeled “failing.” After all, a majority of the members of the Panel for Educational Policy (8 out of 13) are mayoral appointees, and as Bloomberg showed before (over 3rd grade tests) he will simply discard any of his flunkeys who doesn’t toe the line. But there was an outcry, and it was loud, boisterous and big, with hundreds of parents, students and teachers, heavily minority. They were heard ... and ignored. The question now is: Where do we go from here? Is the battle over? Hardly, because the privatizers and corporatizers will keep up their attack until they destroy the teachers unions and gut public education – or are themselves defeated. So how do we fight against the implacable enemies of public education who are running the schools?

The public hearing by the PEP was required by law, otherwise schools chancellor Joel Klein would just have ordered the closings, as he has done to 91 schools in the past. Prior to the hearing the United Federation of Teachers called a demonstration outside, where the union tops offered a platform to Democratic Party politicians to spout off. But the big show was inside Brooklyn Technical High School where an angry crowd of well over 2,000 filled the auditorium. The audience frequently jumped to its feet, booed Klein and denounced the panel. Several schools on the hit list sent big delegations of students, notably from Paul Robeson, Columbus, Jamaica and Maxwell high schools. The meeting continued until after 3 a.m. as more than 350 people signed up to speak  But despite the fact that only a couple of speakers supported the closures (and were roundly booed), the PEP voted 9 to 4 to close 19 schools. The member from Staten Island (where no schools are slated to close) voted with the mayor’s appointees (who refused to speak in favor of the closures), while the reps of the borough presidents of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens voted against. Their toothless “opposition” meant nothing.

Supporters of Class Struggle Education Workers joined actively in the protest. We had called last December for a union-led citywide mobilization against the school closings. We attended protests at Maxwell, Robeson, Columbus and Norman Thomas HS, and spoke at several of the school hearings. On January 26 more than 500 copies of a special issue of The Internationalist newspaper were sold with a back page article reprinting a CSEW leaflet under the title “Stop Racist School Closings.” We distributed several dozen signs with the same appeal, and another saying: “Charter School Invasion = Educational Colonialism.” Inside, the PEP put a whole slew of elected officials and community school board members ahead of the public. After three hours or so, a supporter of the CSEW was able to speak, saying that the closings reflected a policy of “racism and classism.” Our spokesman noted that while in 1968 the rulers were able to divide black people and teachers, Bloomberg had brought us back together by attacking teachers and minority students and parents simultaneously. 

The racist character of the whole charade was underscored when the PEP chairman turned off the microphone on Annie Martin, president of the NYC chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There were a hundred or more cops inside the meeting, policing the aisles (and even the bathrooms). Even the “community affairs” police were ostentatiously armed, and as the meeting was drawing to a close the cops lined up in front of the stage to “serve and protect” the PEP, presumably against a “riot” by the mostly black parents and students. Scores of black, Latino and white students argued powerfully of their anger at being labeled “failing,” some staying late into the night to testify. Several spoke of the education they were receiving at the meeting of “democracy” in action. And then the panel of puppets cast their votes with the predicted result and the event was over.

But the fight goes on. Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News (27 January) wrote that “the tide is turning on the Bloomberg school reforms.” If so, it hasn’t yet stopped or even slowed down the mayor and his chancellor. In the last couple of weeks they have ordered tenure decisions to be linked to student test scores and are now publicly demanding layoffs according to “merit” (meaning whoever the principal likes), firing “excessed” teachers if after four months they haven’t gotten a new position, suspending without pay any teacher brought up on charges, and a host of other demands that taken together would spell the end of the union. Teachers would then have no protection against the arbitrary, capricious and corrupt actions of the masters of the city school system. 

Meanwhile, the capitalist education “reformers” are pushing their plans to privatize public education via “charter schools” funded by tax dollars, many of them for-profit businesses and quite a few controlled by hedge fund billionaires. What’s left is to be corporatized, with vendors milking the $750 billion education “industry” like a cash cow. The rulers would like to end secondary education for most students at the tenth grade, after which they would be shunted into stripped-down vocational programs or pushed out altogether, while a minority would be allowed to finish high school and enter college. This is the explicit program put forward by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, one of whose members is Joel Klein, sponsored by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a Clinton-era think tank. Who would be excluded? Just look at the figures and do the math. While three quarters of city school students are presently black or Latino, only 15 percent in the elite high schools are.

Ruling Class Ed “Reform” = Educational Colonialism and Union-Busting

Earlier this month, the Amsterdam News (4 February), New York’s premier black newspaper, headlined starkly: “EDUCATION WAR.” That is what’s posed, and not just in NYC. Locally the UFT, along with the NAACP, the Alliance for Quality Education, the Manhattan Borough president, several city councilmen and state legislators, parents and members of the community have filed a joint lawsuit against the school closings, charging that the DOE “studiously ignored” the school governance law requiring it to analyze the impact on the 13,000 students affected, on special needs students and on the already overcrowded nearby schools. It calls on the courts to overturn the ruling of the PEP which “unlawfully rubber-stamped” the closings. Councilman Robert Jackson (Democrat) said that “DOE did not play by the rules in this game.” When does it ever? In the off chance a judge agrees with the plaintiffs, it could perhaps gain a little time until Klein’s minions produce the required analysis. But remember that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity actually won a suit requiring the city to spend millions to lower class sizes in high needs schools, yet the DOE has simply ignored the law and used the money for other purposes while class sizes soar. The issue here is not technicalities or legalities but raw class power.

Last year the UFT and parents went to court to stop the closing of PS 241 and PS 194 in Harlem (to make room for Eva Moskowitz’ Harlem Success Academy charter) and PS 150 in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In the face of the court suit – and because teachers, students and parents mobilized – the DOE backed down. (Despite the claim they were “failing” schools, all three got an “A” rating on the rigged progress reports for 2009.) But Klein & Co. continued to phase out the middle school at 241, and left Moskowitz’ HSA inside PS 123, where this yuppie capitalist politician and edubusiness profiteer grabbed more space last summer. The on-going saga of the struggle by parents and teachers at PS 15 in Red Hook against the PAVE Academy funded by billionaire hedge fund scion Spencer Robertson is another case where the DOE keeps pushing. Fighting on a school-by-school basis cannot win in the ongoing space wars between public schools and private charters. 

Relying on the capitalist courts is no program – much less a strategy – to defeat the bourgeois education “reformers” who enjoy the bipartisan support of the partner parties of capital. But you can fight City Hall – with an independent citywide mobilization of union power, led by the UFT, together with the black, Latino and working-class white students and parents who are being victimized by the billionaire mayor’s school closing craze.

The hundreds of students, parents and teachers from the affected schools who attended the January 26 PEP meeting were eager to fight back. Yet the sellout leadership of the United Federation of Teachers, which reluctantly called a demo on January 26 and didn’t even call to stop school closings (saying only that they are “not the answer”), hasn’t lifted a finger since then to bring the overwhelming opposition to school closings in the NYC into the streets to shut down DOE headquarters at Boss Tweed Courthouse and to surround City Hall. Nor has the reformist opposition (ICE, TJC, GEM) done anything of the sort. After a successful protest outside Bloomberg’s Upper East Side mansion, it has at most joined in localized protests and instead is concentrating on the upcoming union election. There may be a showdown with Bloomberg/Klein’s pro-charter school rent-a-crowd at the PEP meeting February 24. But where is the effort to bring out hundreds from Jamaica, Maxwell, Columbus, Norman Thomas, Paul Robeson and other affected schools? The labor fakers and would-be militant opposition have let the energy shown on January 26 dissipate.

At bottom, the reason for this passivity is political. Listening to UFT officialdom and the official opposition, you would think that the push for charter schools and closing schools was all the handiwork of Bloomberg/Klein. Yet they all know, although they barely mention it as an aside, that this drive comes right from the top, from leading capitalists like Bill Gates, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and from Democratic president Barack Obama. Obama is the product of elite private schools, and as for his education secretary: “Arne Duncan was a favorite of the business elite during his seven-year tenure heading the Chicago Public Schools” (Chicago Tribune, 6 July 2009). This is the guy who outrageously says that “The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” (ABC News, 29 January), because it let them close public schools and replace them with charters.

The pro-capitalist union tops (both of the UFT’s American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association) went all out for Obama, and most teacher union oppositionists around the country either openly or tacitly supported the Democratic candidate against Republican John McCain. But while McCain used the unions as a punching bag and Obama posed as the teachers’ friend, they had virtually identical education programs: charter schools, school closings, high stakes testing, “merit pay,” getting rid of teacher tenure. Union leaders and dissidents all knew it, yet they went with the flow. The fact is, Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” scam is no less a capitalist attack on public education than the infamous “No Child Left Behind” law of George W. Bush (and liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy). But teachers unionists have trouble fighting it – because the attack is coming from “their guy” who was really Wall Street’s guy.

Class Struggle Education workers told the truth (see “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama,” The Internationalist special supplement, November 2009). While the election of a black president marked a significant social change in this country founded on chattel slavery, followed by three-quarters of a century of Jim Crow segregation, politically Obama was just an attempt to improve the image of U.S. imperialism. The CSEW called for opposition to both capitalist parties of imperialist war, who shoveled trillions into the Wall Street vaults to prop up the tottering banks and investment houses, and that are now claiming that they will “have no choice” but to lay off tens of thousands of teachers next school year (on top of the 60,000 fired this year). We called for a class-struggle workers party to fight the privatization drive – rather than corporate fake “reform,” the CSEW said what’s needed is an education revolution, carried out by a workers government. And today we say that the fight to defeat school closings can be won, by an independent class mobilization that doesn’t hesitate to take on the forces behind the war on public education, from the White House to the State House to City Hall.