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.

Weingarten – Another Nail in the Coffin of Teacher Tenure

Weingarten – Another Nail in the Coffin of Teacher Tenure

Randi Weingarten is slated to give a speech in Washington today, accompanied by Obama's education secretary Arne Duncan, where she will "unveil new approaches to teacher evaluation and labor-management relationships, and discuss a fresh approach to due process."

Meanwhile, a column by Bob Herbert in today's New York Times reports on an interview he had with the AFT president over the weekend in which she reportedly said "standardized test scores and other measures of student performance should be an integral part of the evaluation process." She also reportedly "is urging school administrators to observe teachers more closely and more frequently," and if teachers "did not measure up, they would be fired, whether tenured or not."

I don't usually comment on individuals, because the real problem with the labor movement is not this or that misleader but a union bureaucracy that is beholden to the Democratic Party and more generally to the interests of capital. But I'll say flat out, this is a crass betrayal of the teachers Weingarten claims to represent and an attack on the students we educate. Instead of fighting the teacher union bashers she is outrageously joining them.

Hooking teacher evals to student test scores is wrong -- for kids, for teachers, for everybody EXCEPT the privatizers, corporatizers and union-busters. This opens the door to massive victimization of teachers, as we are already seeing in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

We can't be surprised by this, since the union has had an experimental "voluntary" program on this for the past year, and since they tried to shove it down our throats with the so-called "bonus pay." I also expect this is one of Bloomberg's demands in the current contract bargaining that the union leadership is most likely to cave on. The UFT bureaucracy has been opening the sluice gates on this for some time, as with the introduction of school-based "merit pay."

How is linking teacher evaluation to student scores on standardized tests wrong? Let me count the ways:

1) Teachers are already pressured into doing endless "test prep" which is a different animal than teaching. Can you fill in the bubble sheet or can you think? Endless test prep is bad for kids -- stressful, repetitive, and what does it teach?

2) Teachers are not responsible for how kids come into the classroom, their past learning experiences, their personalities, their diverse and amazing lives. We are dedicated, tireless and do our best to teach every student, using multiple methods, reaching every child. However, we must not be scapegoated for how this translates on bubble sheets!

3) For example, English language learners and special needs students may learn at a different rate, taking longer to process the information. That's a good thing; they are learning.

4) Hooking teacher evals to test scores necessarily means the low performing students will be pushed out of schools. Why? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Even the most dedicated, tireless teachers will feel pressured to find positions in schools where kids get the highest scores --- it will be an economic reality if their jobs and raises depend on it.

5) Ergo --- the student dropout rate will increase, as it already is doing despite the attempts by the DOE to mask this by taking them off the rolls as "transfers." Public education for all will continue to be whittled away; we will go to a system of higher education for the "elite" and McJobs for everybody else.

6) Am I making this up? The National Center for Education and the Economy, a Clinton-era think tank which Mayor Bloomberg says inspired his education program, published a 2006 report (financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) that said that in order to meet the manpower needs of businesses, public education for all should only go up to the 10th grade.

7) This is racist, it is segregationist, and along with the push for charter schools it is "educational colonialism. " It is of a piece of the program to close 20 schools in our city to make room for the charters. Jonathan Kozol has written powerfully that our schools today (50 + years after Brown v. Board of Education) are "American Apartheid," more segregated than ever.

8) Corporatization, privatization, turning the schools into test prep academies; treating education like a business, not a process of teaching and learning. This program is designed to meet the needs of capitalism, not kids.

9) This program is coming from the top; not just Bloomberg/Klein, but Arne Duncan and Barack Obama. Thus, just to stand up for the democratic program of public education for all, integration of schools and "equal opportunity" we need a break from the Democrats and Republicans and a struggle for an independent class struggle workers party. It can't be done "piecemeal."

More information on this viewpoint can be read in "Class Struggle Education Workers." I invite you to check it out

--Marjorie Stamberg

UFT, Students and Parents – Act Now to Save our Schools

From Obama/Duncan to Bloomberg/Klein:
What’s Behind the School Closing Craze

UFT, Students and Parents –
Act Now to Save our Schools

No to Education Colonialism – Stop the Charter Invasion
For a Citywide Union-Led Mobilization to Stop School Closings

By Class Struggle Education Workers

The NYC Department of Education has gone berserk. Last week the DOE ordered the closing of W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical HS in East New York, as well as three other schools. The next day they announced the closure of four more schools, including Jamaica High, which has one of the most active union chapters in the city. On Monday they put nine more schools on the chopping block, including Beach Channel HS in Queens, Christopher Columbus HS in the Bronx and Norman Thomas HS in Manhattan. And today they added five to their hit list. Twenty-two schools in one week, on top of the 90 they have already closed. It’s a massacre.

This is part of a whole program to privatize public education and destroy teachers unions. The day before Thanksgiving, New York’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg went to Washington to declare war on the United Federation of Teachers. Barack Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan was sitting there to show his support. They want to shut down schools, open private charter schools, and scapegoat teachers. This is a huge provocation. They are doing it all at once because they figure the UFT doesn't have the guts to respond. We have to prove them wrong. We can't just fight this school-by-school. We need united action, now.

The union cannot walk away from this. UFT leaders may think contract negotiations are going on, but the DOE is creating “facts on the ground.” Students across the city are having their futures ripped up. Parents of African American, Latino and Asian families in particular are seeing their kids sacrificed on the altar of corporate school “reform.” The union bastions of the high school division are the targets, the charters are the spearhead of the attack. Every closed-down school means almost half the staff thrown into the ATR pool. And now the DOE wants to fire them after a year. The future of the union and of public education in New York City is at stake.

We've Got to Play Hardball to Win

The union needs to take the lead and call a citywide mobilization to demand "Stop School Closings Now." Teachers, students, parents and all NYC labor – we have the power. Surround City Hall in protest. Hold lunchtime information meetings of staff and students at the schools. Expose the mayor’s phony “Panel on Education Policy” as a rubber stamp. Let them know: the schools won't function unless we work. Insist on no school closings unless teachers, parents, students and staff approve. And gear up to rip up the Taylor Law that tries to stop our right to strike!

The schools they are closing are not “failing,” it is the DOE that has deliberately failed to fix problems, many of which it has created. Maxwell VHS is a perfect example. One of the leading vocational schools in the city, it has a full academic program, including college prep classes. As a result of closing other schools in the area, 2,000 students have been jammed into a school designed for 900. The number of Special Ed students is 22 percent, double that of other high schools. Yet over the last three years Maxwell’s weighted diploma rate has gone from 45 percent to 72 percent. It’s raw score on the city’s school report cards went from 23 to 43. So why did it get a “D”? Because the bureaucrats at DOE headquarters arbitrarily changed their corrupt scoring system.

When the big high schools are closed, they are replaced by several small schools, each with its own bevy of administrators. Experience has shown that small schools do no better, and often worse on test scores than the comprehensive high schools. Many of the replacement schools are privately run “charter schools,” whose main attraction for the bosses is that they are overwhelmingly non-union. This means that teachers are subject to every whim of the managers, many of whom know little or nothing about education and are out to make a buck. Charters also do no better, and often worse than traditional public schools on tests. But that hasn’t stopped union-busting corporate education “reformers” from pushing them.

In New York City, Bloomberg and Klein treat the schools like prime real estate. They cook up phony statistics to justifying closing down public schools and give the space to charters. Or they push into the public schools, claiming that libraries or computer rooms, for instance, are “underutilized space.” Charters are lavishly funded with state and private money while the regular schools are starved. This has set off bitter protests by teachers, parents and students from Harlem to Brooklyn. In fact, the charters are focused on poor, black and Latino areas, because city authorities are wary of the blowback they would get from white middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods. This is educational colonialism, and it must be stopped.

What’s fueling the charter school invasion is millions of (tax deductible) dollars from billionaire hedge fund managers. The Success Charter Network run by the ambitious yuppie politician Eva Moskowitz, who sparked outrage at P.S. 123 in Harlem, was created by Gotham Capital. PAVE Academy, which tried to push P.S. 15 out of its building in Red Hook, is the creature of hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson. His wife runs the Girls Preparatory Charter that tried a hostile takeover of P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side. A recent exposé also revealed that “non-profit” front groups like “Democrats for Education Reform” are “financed by hedge fund heavies.... the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met” (New York Times, 6 December).

Unbridled speculation by these predators was a major factor in the collapse of the world capitalist financial system last year, touching off an economic crisis that has brought untold hardship and devastation to working people. Wall Street banks got trillions in bailout dollars, while NYC schools are forced to lay off school staff and factories like Stella D’oro are shut down. The U.S. government wages imperialist war and colonial occupation, raining death and destruction on the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It backs a dictatorship in Honduras that murders teachers. And now the rulers are out to destroy the public schools.

George W. Bush pushed the standardized high-stakes testing mania with his “No Child Left Behind” act that condemned millions of children to rote learning as educators are forced to “teach to the test.” Now Barack Obama has a “Race to the Top,” using billions in stimulus funds to force states to permit charter schools, eliminate teacher tenure and introduce “merit pay.” Their model is capitalist competition. For the past quarter century there has been a bi-partisan ruling-class consensus to try to milk profits from the public schools. The teachers unions are the biggest obstacle to this.

Bottom line: the people in charge are ideological opponents of public education. Their kids go to elite private schools. As we wrote last spring:

“A class battle is going on over the nation’s schools. Big business has joined forces with both the Democratic and Republican parties in a push for corporate-designed education ‘reform.’ They want to bust teachers unions and impose test-driven rote learning on the public schools, particularly in impoverished inner city ghettos and barrios. Meanwhile, they privatize as much as they can through charter schools, many of them run by education-for-profit private companies. The aim of these phony “reformers” is not to improve education but to cut its cost, while turning the schools into lucrative cash cows for education entrepreneurs and corporate vendors. And they have the wholehearted backing of the Obama administration, which many education unions and teacher activists voted for. But they can be stopped. We can stop them, if we use our power.”

The response of the UFT tops to the latest attacks from City Hall is to ask the membership for more money to fund COPE. To go to Albany and try to influence some Democratic legislators? Forget it. The fact that the unions are chained to the bosses’ parties is one of the biggest roadblocks to effective labor action. Many teacher activists want to build a movement against privatization. But since they don’t challenge the capitalist framework, any gains of such movements can be easily reversed if the balance of power shifts (e.g., with the civil rights movement). We need to oust the pro-capitalist bureaucracy and a build a leadership that is prepared to use the unions’ power to wage class struggle.

Class Struggle Education Workers was formed by activists in two New York education unions, the UFT and Professional Staff Congress representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York. We are for free, quality public education from kindergarten through graduate school; stop education privatization; oppose resegregation of the schools – separate is never equal; no to mayoral control, for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools; keep the bosses courts’ out of the unions and fight anti-labor legislation like the no-strike Taylor Law; mobilize the power of labor together with minorities, immigrants and students; and break with the capitalist parties, for a workers party and a workers government. If you want to fight for public education that serves the working people, get in touch with the CSEW.

Bloomberg Declares War on the UFT

Enough Already, We Won’t Take It Anymore!

Bloomberg Declares War on the UFT

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

Having bought a third term as mayor of New York City for a cool $90 million from his personal fortune, and counting on the complacent neutrality of the United Federation of Teachers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg picked the day before Thanksgiving to declare all-out war on our union. He laid out a series of take-back demands in a speech in Washington, D.C. Ominously, Arne Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary, was sitting there giving his implicit approval. And significantly, the speech was delivered not at some conservative Republican venue but at the Center for American Progress, a think tank linked to the Democratic Party.

This underscores a key point that teacher union bureaucrats try to obscure: the assault on teachers unions is not just coming from corporate CEOs and right-wingers, it is now spearheaded by liberal Democrats, with Barack Obama behind them. Teacher unionists overwhelmingly backed Obama against teacher-basher McCain. If some activists thought the Democratic candidate was a “lesser evil,” they were so wrong: from Guantánamo to the war on Afghanistan and Iraq to the war on teachers unions here, Obama is carrying out the same program as his Republican “opponent.”

Except that since it’s the liberal Democrat doing the dirty work, there’s been virtually no protest.

The union contract with the NYC Department of Education expired on Halloween night, and even though formal “negotiations” have been underway for some time, this was Bloomberg’s opening salvo. The mayor is using the Obama-Duncan “Race to the Top” program to take aim at a series of key issues – if he wins, it could rip the guts out of the UFT. If he can’t get what he wants at the bargaining table, he is threatening to get the laws changed in Albany to make an end-run around the union. Bloomberg is calling to:

• Eliminate the cap on charter schools;
• Target “incentive pay” for individual teachers;
• Speed up procedures to fire teachers;
• Boot out teachers who have been “excessed” if they haven’t gotten a principal to take them on after a year;
• Get rid of seniority on layoffs so that school officials could fire whoever they want (“layoffs by merit”);
• Close 10 percent of the city schools.

So what was the response of the United Federation of Teachers? Mike Mulgrew was quoted by the New York Times (26 November) saying he was “‘very, very disappointed’ in the tone of the mayor’s speech.” The arrogant billionaire acting like schoolyard bully kicks you in the teeth, and the response is the UFT is “disappointed” in the mayor’s tone and wishes the mayor would make nice and stop “play[ing] political agenda and propaganda”? Hello? Earth to 52 Broadway, what universe are you living in? The boss declares war, the union has to fight back, or else.

Mulgrew’s formal statement was a bit stronger, saying the UFT “will not work with those who choose to scapegoat the people who have dedicated their lives to children.” He said that the DOE “created many of the personnel issues like the ATR pool and the rubber rooms.” OK. But what the UFT president didn’t say is that the union will fight the mayor and his union- busting agenda. In fact, he said the UFT would “work with anyone who wants to work constructively” on this.

Mulgrew’s message is if Bloomberg would just sit down and “work with” the union he can get a lot of what he wants. This has been the line of the UFT leadership for years, under Randi Weingarten, and before her Sandy Feldman. Al Shanker was so eager to “work with” the reactionary teacher-bashers that he hailed Ronald Reagan’s 1983 anti-union education manifesto A National At Risk as well as supporting “merit pay” and charter schools. For years, the leadership of the UFT and the American Federation of Teachers has worked with the U.S. government to undermine militant unions in other countries. Now it is ready to “work with” education “reformers” seeking to privatize public schools and destroy the unions here.

The UFT leadership isn’t preparing to fight against a mayor and a president who want to take back every vital union gain. Why not? Because it can’t. The union bureaucracy, i.e., Unity Caucus and the New Action Caucus, which was co-opted with a few exec board seats, is beholden to the Democratic Party and to the capitalist system (so they sometimes aid Republicans like Pataki or Republicrats like Bloomberg). Faced with a bipartisan ruling-class attack on public education, they go through the motions to minimize losses, giving up two-thirds of what is demanded for a paltry raise. When the going gets tough, they fold. And various union oppositions around the country joined the bureaucracy in backing Obama either enthusiastically or tacitly.

If we want to fight for the jobs of professional educators placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve through no fault of their own; to defend teachers unjustly thrown into the “rubber rooms” on trumped-up charges; to defend our job security; to defend public education and oppose the profiteers’ charter school invasion; if we want to bring back arts, music and science classes that have been sacrificed on the alter of standardized testing, to provide physical education, to teach youth to think instead of bowing to high-handed administrators under a mayoral dictatorship – then we need a union leadership that’s ready to rumble. This one sure isn’t.

Against the phony education “reformers” who want to use mayoral control to turn public education into a profit center and training system for the manpower needs of capital, Class Struggle Education Workers stands for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. We call for a workers party to fight for a workers government that can carry out a revolution in public education so that it truly serves the interests of working people and the emancipation of mankind.

Mayor Goes After Teachers and Kids With a Vengeance

Beat Back the Attack on Union Gains and Public Education

Mayor Bloomberg has thrown down the gauntlet with a series of demands that would gut any kind of job protection, while continuing to rip up what remains of public education. These issues are critical to the very existence of the UFT, to teachers, all school staff, parents and children in our community. We must draw a line in the sand to preserve hard-fought rights that are key providing quality education for all. In the current contract talks, this is our bottom line:

• Reduce Class Sizes, Now! Despite the court ruling on the Campaign for Fiscal Equality’s suit, class sizes are rising throughout the system. Reducing class size is the single most effective way to improve education, helping teachers teach, and students to receive more individual attention. Set up a union monitoring system to ensure court guidelines and present contractual class sizes are enforced.

• Defend the ATRs – Don’t Touch Teacher Tenure! The mayor wants to fire ATRs if they are not placed after one year. The answer is “no way.” The mayor and chancellor created the ATR mess by constantly closing schools, throwing students into crisis and “excessing” teachers. This can be easily solved (and overcrowded classes reduced) by instructing principles to immediately place all teachers who desire a position. Defend to the hilt the no layoff clause in the contract and the NY state law that tenured teachers cannot be fired except for cause.

• Stop Closing Schools! The mayor says he wants to close down 10 percent of the city’s “lowest performing schools.” If a school’s in trouble, we say fix it, don’t close it! Bloomberg and Klein are playing an ugly game at students’ expense, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods, in order to get rid of senior teachers and make way for more charter schools. No school closings without the express approval of teachers, students, staff and parents.

• No More Charters – Stop the Educational Apartheid! Separate is never equal: charters are lavishly funded while regular city schools are starved. Charters discriminate against English Language Learners, Special Education students and others they think could lower their dubious test scores. Even by their own phony math, studies show students in charter schools do no better, and often worse than kids in district schools. Stop back-door privatization of public schools.

• Defend Seniority! In the 2005 contract, the UFT agreed to axe seniority transfers, and give principals the sole right to place teachers. This gave rise to the ATR debacle. Now the mayor wants to give administrators the right to arbitrarily fire whoever they want, as recently occurred in Washington, D.C., instead of requiring that any layoffs be by inverse seniority. Anyone who speaks their mind at faculty meetings or stands up for teachers’ contractual rights would be at risk. Restore seniority transfers.

• No “Merit Pay” – No Linking Test Scores to Teacher Evaluations! City, state and federal education officials want to tie teachers’ pay to scores on standardized examinations. These are notorious for racial and ethnic bias, and the state tests are rigged so the mayor can brag about “progress” when federal exams show none. “Pay for performance” schemes allow school officials to reward favorites and penalize others. Tying pay or tenure to test scores will discriminate against students in poor neighborhoods.

• Gear Up to Fight the Taylor Law! City officials think they can intimidate teachers and other public employees because of the “no strike” provisions of New York’s Taylor Law. Together with transit workers and other city and state employees, we have the power to turn this anti-labor law into a dead letter. The UFT and other municipal workers unions must join forces against the union-busting offensive.

We will fight the mayor’s corrupt, elitist and racist scheme. We will not be scapegoated for the problems the DOE created.