Sunday, May 12, 2013

Test Your Common Core Savvy

The “Common Core” standards are now being imposed on schools around the country. This regimen is the latest phase of the corporate assault on public education, orchestrated by multibillionaires like Bill Gates, imposed by the Obama White House and carried out by a handful of “educational” monopolies (Pearson, McGraw Hill, College Board). On April 6, Class Struggle Education Workers in New York held a workshop in New York City on “Common Core: Privatization and Regimentation of Public Education.” The lead speaker, Charles Brover, gave a “test" illustrating what the Common Core is all about. The test was inspired by and adapted from “Test Your Public Ed Savvy,” by Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, The Progressive (magazine), January 26, 2013.* Take the test below, click on the answers (with explanatory notes) and raise your Common Core Savvy.

TEST YOUR COMMON CORE SAVVY

Multiple-choice test. Choose an answer and click on it.
  1. According to the Common Core mission statement, with implementation of the Standards “our communities will be best positioned”
    1. to provide greater educational equity.
    2. to provide greater educational access.
    3. to compete successfully in the global economy.
    4. to expand and activate civic participation.
    5. to enhance students’ intellectual development.
  2. Common Core Standards were developed because
    1. parents worry that U.S. children score far below other countries on international tests.
    2. teachers lack the skills to craft adequate curriculum and wanted help.
    3. state departments of education asked for them.
    4. of grass-roots concern that children need special tools to compete in the Global Economy.
    5. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for them.
  3. Who said, “people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
    1. Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy
    2. Donald Trump, real estate mogul, TV star
    3. Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City
    4. Don Rickles, insult comedian
    5. David Coleman, architect of the Common Core Standards
  4. What makes Common Core Standards different from all other educational standards?
    1. All other standards fail to provide guidance for teachers and curriculum developers.
    2. All other standards are a hodge-podge without evidence-based assessment.
    3. All other standards lack sufficient academic rigor.
    4. All other standards are not enforced by a national testing regime.
    5. All other standards overvalue non-informational texts.
  5. U.S. international test scores aren't at the top of the world because
    1. we lack common standards and valid tests.
    2. many teachers are not doing their job.
    3. nearly 25% of American children live in poverty.
    4. American children are not interested in hard study.
    5. parents don't take an interest in children's education.
  6. The new online feature of Common Core testing
    1. will reduce administration costs.
    2. will streamline student evaluation.
    3. offers new opportunities for creativity.
    4. will lead to more individualized learning.
    5. means students will be tested many more times each year.
  7. After taking the most recent New York State tests aligned to the Common Core Standards, an upstate 8th grader, Sophia, created her own test with items based on her letter, titled, “Dear New York State:” In her letter she writes:
    1. Thank you so much for the state test. How else could I know how I am doing in school? This multiple choice test really gives me a chance to exhibit deep learning and critical thinking.
    2. When I take a state test, I feel I am at my best. I am so focused. I welcome the pressure and stress; so do my teachers and family. Some additional neuro-enhancing drugs can also help.
    3. When I take a state test, I am not myself. I feel as if I need to do everything the way the state thinks it should be. There is only one way to do these tests: your way.
    4. When I take a state test, I feel really confident and happy because I know that there is always one right answer to every question. In this crazy, mixed up world, it’s good to know that someone is in charge. I love your state!
    5. We need tougher standards, and a better way to excel on the tests based on them. When I take a state test, I always think that my teacher didn’t prepare me for this or that question. You can’t trust teachers or schools. Let’s have the test-makers educate us directly. BTW I own a computer and a smart phone. This can work!
  8. Who said Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans. That education system was a disaster."
    1. Rush Limbaugh
    2. Pat Robertson
    3. Editor at The Onion
    4. Bill O'Reilly
    5. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
  9. While extolling the benefits of standardized testing, Obama and the billionaire reformers send their own children to private schools not dominated by testing because
    1. they don’t really like their own children and only want what’s best for others.
    2. they are not interested in knowing about the intellectual development of their children.
    3. they don’t care about the effectiveness of their children’s teachers.
    4. they think the tests will detract from the excellence of their children’s education.
    5. at these prices, they don’t need tests to know the schools are damn good.
  10. “Decompose numbers less than or equal to 10 into pairs in more than one way, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each decomposition by a drawing or equation” This is a Common Core Mathematics Standard for grade:
    1. K
    2. 1
    3. 2
    4. 3
    5. 4
  11. When Kentucky tried to pilot a Common Core aligned curriculum, proficiency rates
    1. went up 5%
    2. went down 30%
    3. went down 10%
    4. went up 10%
    5. stayed about the same
  12. What is the most likely effect of the Common Core Standards on student achievement?
    1. U.S. students will outperform students in Finland and Singapore on international math tests.
    2. The racial achievement gap will be narrowed, finally.
    3. No effect other than massive cheating, increased tears, family stress, and perhaps with regard to the math tests, some prayer in public schools.
    4. Students will achieve competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
    5. More students will be college and career ready.
  13. Who among the following educators does NOT support the Common Core Standards?
    1. Linda Darling Hammond
    2. Howard Gardner
    3. Jeffrey Wilhelm
    4. E.D. Hirsch
    5. Randi Weingarten
  14. Children who live in poverty in the U.S.
    1. are protected by a comprehensive social welfare safety net.
    2. need a very structured curriculum.
    3. are more likely to attend a school with poorly supported libraries than are middle-class children.
    4. have the same chance for school success as other students-if their parents support education.
    5. need vouchers to attend better schools
  15. A notable feature of education in Finland, the country scoring highest on international tests, is:
    1. universal pre-school emphasizes an early start in skill development.
    2. children in grade school have a play break every 45 minutes.
    3. a system of annual national standardized tests informs teachers of every child's skill attainment.
    4. there are no teacher unions to cripple reform.
    5. corporate leaders have taken a leadership role in school policy.
STOP! DO NOT GO ON! DO NOT TAKE A PLAY BREAK!
CHECK YOUR ANSWERS ON THE “ANSWER SHEET” BELOW.
ANSWER SHEET
  1. C is correct. The final sentence of the mission statement of the Common Core Standards: “With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”

    Answers A, B, D and E are important purposes of education, but the Common Core initiative represents a chauvinist, competitive distortion of those purposes. For an even scarier, openly militaristic justification of support to the Common Core, see U.S. Education Reform and National Security (2012) by Murdoch exec and former NYC corporate educational reform raider, Joel Klein and “mushroom cloud” imperialist war monger, Condoleezza Rice (not such an odd couple, after all). Along with the Common Core Standards and testing, they also propose a periodic “National Security Audit” because public schools “constitute a very grave national security threat facing this nation.” It is not a giant step from thinking about our children as “human capital” (rather than human beings) and widgets to thinking about them as human drones.
  2. E is correct. See “Is the Gates Foundation Involved in bribery,” July 23, 2010.

    The Gates Foundation gave more than a hundred million dollars to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors association (“JoLLE Forum — Rotten to the (Common) Core,” Nov. 1, 2012) — the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting the Common Core. The Common Core Initiative is a key part of the “reformers’” market-based strategy to denigrate and close public schools, bust and marginalize unions and make way for charters, vouchers and privatization. Answer B is a false claim given as another rationale for the Common Core. “Reformers” undermine the professional expertise of teachers, particularly career teachers who have devoted their lives to the profession. The “reformers” instead idolize the Teach for America model where Ivy League hotshots teach for a couple years, enhance their resumés, and then go off to their real jobs, often — as in the case TFA graduate Michelle Rhee — to the lucrative education reform business. Answers A, C, and D are also untrue
  3. E is correct. David Coleman in a speech to New York State educators in Albany, April 2011 disparaging personal writing.

    He went on to say, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood’.” If we subject this statement to the “close reading” Coleman favors, we may notice his use of the word, “people.” The “people” who “don’t give a shit” turn out to be our bosses, and education is understood as making “Johnson” a useful, compliant worker. If we extend the critique beyond a close reading, we may want to ask about David Coleman’s problem with his childhood. Answers A, B, C and D are wrong although any of these figures could have said it on another occasion.
  4. D is correct. – (This is our Passover question.) It is all about the testing. The tests will be used for everything—to determine outcomes for students, funding for schools and districts, and to be a big part of teacher evaluation determining pay. Educators who try to divorce the Common Core Standards’ lofty language of pedagogical “practices” from the brute facts of the standardized testing are fooling themselves and/or others. CCS promoters say the standards direct “the what” but not “the how” of teaching. But the detailed descriptions of the CCS and the testing requirement for “coverage” imply a shallow curriculum and teacher-centered, direct instruction.

    Answers A, B, and C are wrong because there have been many standards documents that have engaged educators as aspirational guides to what students should be able to know and do. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (1989, 2000) of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) is a good example. It offers lots of guidance for instruction and formative assessments, but no associated standardized tests. (Sadly the NCTM along with most mainstream educational organizations is now drinking the Common Core Kool-Aid.) Answer E is wrong because teachers always try to balance and blend genres; the CCS impulse to teacher-proofing results in a pointless ratio of fictional to informational text.
  5. C is correct – See “Measuring Child Poverty,” UNICEF, May 2012.

    With increasing child poverty, soaring inequality and more visible downward mobility, educational “reformers” blame public schools, teachers and their unions, parents, anything and everything but the social and economic conditions that devastate the learning opportunities of so many of our school children. Even to mention such reality-based factors exposes the critic to charges of engaging in “the soft-core bigotry of low expectations.” When you disaggregate the data on international tests such as PISA, U.S. middle class students who attend well-funded schools achieve high scores on international tests, among the highest in the world. “PISA 2009 Reading Test Results: The US does quite well, controlling for SES. And maybe American scores are ‘just right.’”

    Answers B, D, and E are wrong because they are untrue, and A is a non-sequitur.
  6. E is correct. See “Common Core Assessments.” See also “How Much Testing” by Stephen Krashen, 25 July 2012.

    Online testing will also contribute to the spiraling costs that school districts cannot afford. See “Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences – Yes, it’s a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?” It is, however, a profitable dream come true for test makers and publishers who can now address a single national market mandated to test and test again.
  7. C is correct. See Sophia’s excellent letter and test. In the same reading passage Sophia quotes Einstein’s reprove that if you “judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” Sophia’s letter expresses how these tests represent a powerful authoritarian reading lesson, a frontal attack on children’s creativity and identities as learners. Answers A and B are untrue, D is insane, and E may be the right answer for Pearson Vue publishers, but 8th graders know better.
  8. E is correct. “Duncan: ‘Katrina was the best thing for New Orleans school system,’” Jan. 29, 2010. Answers A, B and D are wrong, but any of these figures could have said it, and doubtless “reformers” of every stripe cheered on the racist dismantling of the New Orleans school system. C might have said it as a parody of A, B, and D, but it was actually said by the U.S. Secretary of Education. Despite heralding the New Orleans catastrophe as an “opportunity” to usher in wholesale market-based approaches, New Orleans remains among the lowest performing districts in the low-performing state of Louisiana. Its charter schools have such a high rate of exclusion, the system has been sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
  9. D is correct. Of course, we don’t really know what’s in their heads, but Obama sends his children to Sidwell Friends; Rahm Emanuel sends his to the Dewey-inspired Lab School that is explicitly opposed to these tests. While “reformer” politicians balk at “throwing money” at the public schools, they have no trouble throwing money in the direction of their own kids. They also claim (in face of robust evidence to the contrary) that class size doesn’t matter. Sidwell Friends costs about $32,000 per year. And the NYC private schools cost even more. Corporate school reformers and for-profit entrepreneurs Benno Schmidt and Chris Whittle, for instance, run the Avenues school in Chelsea. Teacher student ratio: 9 : 1. Cost $43,000 a year (New York Times, 10 July 2011). As part of education austerity and teacher speed-up, the Gates Foundation suggests stuffing even more students into public school classrooms. Answers A, B and C are probably not true, and answer E, well…
  10. A is correct. While it is possible to develop an appropriate lesson from this K standard, it is precisely its inappropriate formal character that is most likely to find its way into the kindergarten classroom—administratively imposed because of the Standards testing regime. Answers B, C, D, and E are wrong, but lessons based on this standard—particularly the formal representation of equalities—could also be suitable as lessons for students in grades beyond kindergarten. Good teachers will find ways to work around the CCS.
  11. B is correct. See http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/. For those who believe in the “vast right wing conspiracy,” it makes one wonder if the high failure rate presumed by Common Core promoters isn’t designed to further malign the public schools and marginalize teachers unions. The reformers have been disappointed by the reluctance of middle-class, suburban parents to chuck in their public schools in favor of the reformers’ voucher and charter privatization schemes. Maybe reformers believe that if a bunch of their kids start failing, the parents will come around.
  12. C is correct. Recent research by the Brookings Institute studied the effects of the state standards on student achievement and found no effect except for a slight increase in 4th grade. See The 2012 Brown Center Report: How Well Are American Students Learning? The research report concluded: “The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its schools.” Answers A, B, and D are untrue. E is the continuation of the false promise made for NCLB under which the achievement gap widened. The CCS is likely to do the same.
  13. B is correct. Howard Gardner is a signer of the “Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative” expressing “grave concern” about the effects of the Standards on young children, pleading for a suspension of the Standards for K – 3. Statement issued by the Alliance for Childhood, March 2, 2010. Answers A and C are untrue and indicate the extent to which liberal educators have bought the propaganda of the CCS when it comes to advancing careers and selling materials. D is wrong and to be expected of the godfather of such projects. E is wrong and dangerous because it opens up teachers’ unions to union-bashing when the CCS goes the way of NCLB but worse. Wedded as they are to the Democratic Party, neither the AFT or NEA bureaucracies are in a position to stand up to the educational “reform” policies of Obama and Duncan. Race to the Top and the CCS are a continuation and intensification of Bush-era NCLB.
  14. C is correct. See Di Loreto, C., and Tse, L. 1999. “Seeing is believing: Disparity in books in two Los Angeles area public libraries”. School Library Quarterly 17(3): 31-36; Duke, N. 2000. For the rich it’s richer: “Print experiences and environments offered to children in very low and very high-socioeconomic status first-grade classrooms”. American Educational Research Journal 37(2): 441-478; Neuman, S.B. and Celano, D. 2001. “Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods”. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26. Answers A, B, D, and E are untrue.
  15. B is correct. See “Finland Schools Flourish in Freedom and Flexibility,” The Guardian [London], 5 December 2010. Answers A, C, D and E are incorrect. “Reformers” point to high performing school systems in other countries to bash U.S. public schools, unions and teachers but fail to mention that Finnish schools, for instance, are fully public and unionized; they pay teachers better and provide more professional autonomy and development; they do not torture children with continuous standardized tests, and they do not turn over their educational system to corporate market-based “reformers.”
Score analysis:
  • 14 – 15 correct: You already know too much about this subject and are probably some kind of troublemaker. (Call us.)
  • 9 - 13 correct: You have not spent too much time reading about the Common Core Standards that won’t affect student achievement in any case.
  • 0 - 8 correct: Needs improvement. Perhaps some “value added” evaluation is in order.
*Questions 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, and 15 were taken from Ohanian and Krashen. The rest is of this test was created by the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW).

The CSEW is a New York City-based group of teachers, educators and unionists committed to a Marxist understanding and active, working-class defense of public education internationally. Because capitalism generates poverty, inequality, and racism, we believe that educational issues must be faced as part of a wider struggle for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed by building a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government. You can contact us at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com, or edworkersunite.blogspot.com to comment on our test, write some new test items (please norm these with a cohort of radical teachers), or argue with us about our answers. (We have been known to change grades.)
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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Why We Don't Support Unity, New Action or MORE


Build a Class Struggle Opposition to the Sellout UFT Bureaucracy

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

Daniel De Leon called them "the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class." He was referring to the bureaucrats who sit atop the unions, selling out the workers' interests and bargaining away their rights in hopes of seeking favor with the bosses. If you want to see the labor bureaucracy at work today, just come on down to 52 Broadway to observe a Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers. (Sorry, you can't be in the room, you'll have to watch on CCTV from the 19th floor -- so that no groans can be heard from the "peanut gallery" as the UFT
tops pat themselves on the back while giving up another hard-won union gain.)

In the face of militant class battles, from the struggle for the eight-hour day by the anarchist Haymarket martyrs in 1886 to the 1912 Lawrence textile strike led by the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, the role of the labor bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor was to undercut and sabotage the struggle. If the employers were
trying to shove a toxic deal down the workers' throats, the "labor fakers," as the Wobblies derisively called them, were there to spoon feed the poison.

So it is today, only squared, because the stranglehold of the bureaucracy is so tight that there are few labor battles to sell out. Usually, the bigwigs of the AFL-CIO give in and give up without a fight. Occasionally they call a strike that they have no strategy to win, in order to let the ranks blow off steam. When things get really bad, at most they do some grandstanding, like in Wisconsin in 2011, then call it off at the crucial moment in favor of voting for the Democrats, who like the Republicans are assaulting workers' rights -- they just want to preserve the unions themselves so they can get campaign donations and phone-banking at election time.

The name of their game is class collaboration, cutting deals with the bosses, supporting their political parties, joining their "blue ribbon" commissions, etc. But class collaboration didn't build the unions, class struggle did. And it will take hard class struggle to save the unions from the bipartisan capitalist assault on labor and the working class that has been underway for over three decades. Facing the web of anti-labor laws that hamstring labor, the bureaucracy can only be fought by a class-struggle opposition that takes on the partner parties of capital and their state.

So here we are at election time in the United Federation of Teachers. The "Unity Caucus" is running Michael Mulgrew for reelection as UFT president on a platform of more of the same. So is the me-too "New Action" caucus, which once upon a time, long, long ago, was a semi-opposition that has since been bought off with a few seats on the executive board. Meanwhile, the Movement of Rank-and-file Educators (MORE) is running Julie Cavanagh on a program calling for "more" union democracy, "less top-down bureaucracy" and a laundry list of reforms. Let's look more closely to see where they stand. First up is Unity, which is not really a political caucus inside the union standing on a series of principles -- it's a bureaucratic machine, the instrument of the leadership to keep the UFT ranks in line. And it is a formidable machine. It's truly a sight to behold, 900 hands going up in unison at the D.A. to vote against whatever the opposition proposes when most Unity delegates don't even have a clue what the issue is. No matter, they've got their perks and they know their role: they're cogs in the machine. Advice for would-be bureaucrats: if you're looking to be a cog, Unity is the ticket for you.

Over the last three decades, the UFT and its parent, the American Federation of Teachers, have gone along with just about every attack on teaching and public education. AFT founder Albert Shanker signed on to the Reaganite "A Nation at Risk" report in 1983, allying with business leaders out to destroy teacher union power and milk public schools for profit. Faced with the onslaught of billionaire-financed charter schools, the AFT/UFT leaders announced charters were Shanker's idea. Instead of fighting to defeat them, their response was DYO: they negotiated contracts eliminating key job protections with Green Dot schools and set up UFT charters.

The 2005 UFT contract was a huge sellout of teachers' rights: in exchange for a raise, it agreed to scrap the seniority transfer system and create an "Open Market" for hiring. This notoriously discriminates against older and higher paid workers, teachers from city schools or anyone not meeting the Ivy League "Teach for America" profile. Soon black and Latino teachers were disappearing from the system.

The UFT tops also backed the now-discredited, Gates-financed "small schools movement" which broke up the comprehensive high schools, and the strong union structures within them. Instead they set up multiple resource-deprived "learning communities" competing for space, installed a whole new layer of highly paid principals, and deprived inner city kids of art, gym, sports and anything but low-level 3Rs rote learning.

The UFT leadership's concept of "struggle" is going toe-to-toe with the DOE with a million-dollar ad buy on TV. Their idea of fighting the onslaught of privatization, charter schools and gutting of public education is hobbing and nobbing with Democratic legislators (and the occasional Republican) in the state capitol. But now they have a huge problem facing an anti-union agenda being pushed by a unified capitalist class, from the Business Roundtable and billionaires like Bill Gates and NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to Democratic president Barack Obama, his schools "czar" Arne Duncan and Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo.

Mulgrew, like his mentor Randi Weingarten (now at the AFT helm in D.C.), has a methodology: split the difference and go along with the rulers' demands, trying to minimize the damage. They may be able to win the odd
court suit and play off the differences between the parties in Albany. They may be the object of smear jobs by Fox Television and in the union-hating tabloids. But here we are facing a united ruling-class offensive with the Democrats leading the charge, and in that situation the Unity gang is incapable of putting up even a semblance of
opposition. Foot-dragging and influence peddling only go so far.

So today Unity's role is to ram the new teacher evaluations, the Danielson framework, the Common Core "standards" -- all of which the AFT/UFT leadership helped develop -- down the throats of teachers. These teacher evals linked to student test scores scapegoat educators for the increasing poverty and ingrained racism in this racist capitalist society, as well as for failures of public education which are directly linked to the capitalists' attempts to destroy it, and to milk what's left for profits. Bush's No Child Left Behind has become "No Vendor Left
Behind" and Obama's Race to the Top has become a race to the bottom, with teachers and kids in last place.

Mulgrew & Co. claim they have built in all sorts of safeguards into the teacher evals, and the new system will be more "objective" than in the past when everything was up to the whim of the school principal. Nonsense. The system is being set up to go after "bad teachers," as if that were the problem facing education today. The new "standards" using the oh-so-scientific Danielson "rubric" are rigged to label 7% of all teachers, every year, as "needs improvement" (i.e., failing), which will mean firing thousands of experienced and dedicated teachers nationwide, destroying their careers and their lives. Look at the hundreds axed by Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C.

As for the kids, the drop out rates will soar, and those who can stick it out will be fed a diet of rote learning and test prep where all knowledge is reduced to a multiple choice answer, fill in the bubble, and there will be no room to think and write creatively . . . or critically. Which is the point, as the aim of the so called "education reform" movement is to bust the unions and train an obedient workforce to keep U.S. capitalism "competitive."

Politically, the UFT leadership goes back to Al Shanker, a virulent anti-Communist and member of Max Shachtman's Social Democrats U.S.A., which supplied a number of top officials for the Reagan administration.
Shanker supported the bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s, the UFT was up to its neck in the AIFLD which aided the 1973 Pinochet coup that smashed unions in Chile, and it funneled CIA dollars to bankroll Polish Solidarnosc, spearheading counterrevolution in East Europe in the '80s. Today the AFT goes after historian Howard Zinn for opposing the wanton atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (see American Teacher, Winter 2013).

And, of course, the UFT/AFT supported Democrat Barack Obama for president even as Obama publicly stressed that he had no differences on education with Republican candidates John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney
in 2012. They are all teacher-bashers and would-be teacher union-busters, and they must be fought politically.

On New Action: not much to be said. The remnants of a caucus once strong in the high schools, NA was supported by the Communist Party, but after years on the outside it did a turnaround, chucked out the CP supporters, and hooked up with Unity. It supports Mulgrew for president in return for a seat at the UFT Executive Board table. (BTW, teachers may get crumbs from the bosses' tables, but the e-board serves up a sumptuous spread.) NA's election brochure says: "Vote New Action! Independent, Progressive, Influential." That's a laugh and a half. NA jumps when Unity tells it to, it hasn't done anything progressive in years, and its "influence" is nil. Anyone who's been at an e-board meeting knows Mulgrew treats New Action like a doormat.

That brings us to the Movement of Rank and File Educators. MORE is modeled on the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) which has led the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) since 2010. MORE has been put together
from a series of opposition and activist groups in and around the UFT, including ICE (Independent Community of Educators), GEM (Grassroots Education Movement), NYCORE (New York Collective of Radical Educators) and some remnants of TJC (Teachers for a Just Contract). MORE's idea is to build an all-purpose opposition caucus that would unite everyone, and therefore it stands for nothing in particular.

The entire recent activity of MORE is to get elected. With supporters of just about every would-be socialist and even ostensible communist reformist group in NYC, it ties itself into knots out of fear of red-baiting. Actually, we were struck by how MORE put a red-white-and-blue "Your Vote Counts" button on their web page. For any real red, this flag-waving symbolism calls up the images of torture prisons from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, of CIA "rendition" of prisoners, of Obama's killer drones, of U.S. imperialism seeking to enforce world domination. Politically MORE is straight liberal, as well as including the stray Republican. Radical it ain't.

MORE is essentially an election vehicle. In the biggest recent labor struggle in New York City involving education workers, the month-long school bus drivers, MORE was essentially MIA (see the CSEW leaflet, "Who Knifed NYC School Bus Drivers in the Back"). (So, too, was the UFT leadership, to no one's surprise.) As noted, it has a grab-bag platform with planks about "more" of good things (art, music, solidarity, rank and file leadership), and "less" of bad things (overpaid union leaders, backroom deals, charters, high-stakes testing). It talks of "social justice unionism," but it's mainly vague calls for "No inequity, discrimination and segregation."

MORE doesn't take hard positions. It talks of "no inequity," but how about equality and an end to elite "gifted and talented" programs and schools, and instead improving the quality of schools for all? It objects to criminalizing students but doesn't call for cops out of the schools (no accident, since some in MORE support cops in the schools). It says it wants "an explicit UFT policy against school closings, the proliferation of charter schools, and forced co-locations...." That's nice, but how does it propose to stop this? No answer. It calls for "restoring highly qualified veteran ATR teachers to permanent positions before hiring inexperienced lower-salaried teachers," rather than demanding full-time positions for all ATRs. And so on.

On charters, MORE and "Occupy the DOE" when it was around had a number of gimmicks at the mayor's puppet Panel on Educational Policy, with hand-puppets and songs, and mike check and skits, Superman capes at the Waiting for Superman movie where they called themselves the "real reformers." But this kind of theater will not stop the union-busting assault on public education we are facing today. For that it is necessary to mobilize real power in class struggle, to confront capitalism, the capitalist parties and the capitalist state. MORE does not and will not do that.

There is not a mention in MORE platform of capitalism (only the current euphemism, "corporate"), nothing about the Democratic Party, nothing about the no-strike Taylor Law, much less about defying it. Of course not, because attacking the Democrats would scare off potential voters and striking would be "illegal." (In fact, there is no mention of the dreaded "s-word" in the MORE platform, nor did MORE supporters raise this when contract demands were discussed at the Delegate Assembly.) At MORE rallies there are chants against Republican Bloomberg, but nothing against the Democrat Obama who is spearheading the war on public education.

MORE, CORE and groups like them may get some votes, may even win here and there, but they cannot lead the class struggle that's needed. Moreover, once in office, such reform caucuses are no qualitative  improvement over the business union bureaucrats who preceded them. Sometimes, as with the deeply corrupt regime of Marilyn Stewart in the Chicago Teachers Union, the reformers led by Karen Lewis can clean things up. But CORE in power has gone along with the anti-union policies of the Democrats just as Stewart did (and Weingarten does in the AFT and Mulgrew in the UFT).

Yes, the CTU led by CORE called a strike, which was heroic. But then when they were facing the threat of a court injunction, they called off the strike and rammed a contract down the throats of the CTU delegates who had earlier rejected it. Then they endorsed Obama. CORE in power in Chicago is as much part of the labor bureaucracy as Unity is in New York. And neither have a program that can win lasting gains, or even defend existing ones, much less defeat the labor haters in power.

Class Struggle Education Workers stands for a very different program. The CSEW not only opposes corporate education "reform," we say forthrightly that this entire program is not about reforming or improving education it's about union-busting (another word not to be found in the MORE platform). The CSEW denounces the racist school closings and the "educational colonialism" and apartheid of the charter schools. We call for union action and programs to recruit black, Latino and Asian teachers to stop the DOE's deliberate "whitening" of the teaching force. But MORE doesn't want to touch the question of race, for fear that it is "divisive."

The CSEW has called to occupy closing schools, not symbolically like the liberal/populist Occupy Wall Street movement but literally, with the support of the entire city labor movement and oppressed populations, to stop the forces who would declare our schools, teachers and students to be failures in order to carry out their wrecking operation. Instead of calls to modify mayoral control (Unity's position, after having been instrumental in bringing it about) or vague calls to replace it with more local control (MORE), the CSEW calls for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools to rip them out of the hands of the Department of Education and its capitalist masters.

Class Struggle Education Workers not only calls to for an end to "Stop and Frisk," we marched in Brooklyn in the face of the police occupation after the murder of Kimani Gray calling for "Cops Out of East Flatbush, Cops Out of the Schools!" During the recent school bus strike, the CSEW was repeatedly present on the picket lines from day one while a CSEW supporter went to the UFT e-board and put forward a motion at the Delegate Assembly (defeated by Unity) to invite a speaker from striking ATU Local 1181 and to organize a solidarity mobilization of all NYC
workers unions.

In the past when we put forward motions to occupy closing schools or to prepare for strike action, the Unity gang simply ruled this out of order. The CSEW calls to oust the bureaucrats and break with the Democrats, to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. Yet when a CSEW supporter rose in the UFT D.A. to oppose
endorsement of any Democratic or Republican or capitalist candidate, not only did Mulgrew denounce this, there was no support from MORE. The bottom line is that such reform caucuses which don't challenge capitalism cannot prepare the membership for the struggles we face.

We need to build a class-struggle opposition in the UFT and all unions.

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Monday, March 25, 2013

CSEW Workshop on Common Core


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Friday, February 22, 2013

Who Knifed NYC School Bus Strikers in the Back?

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT
The following was written by a teacher who has been active in fighting for broad union support for the school bus workers strike.
FEBRUARY 16 – The school bus strike has been called off and the drivers and matrons forced back to work. Mayor Bloomberg is crowing, and lambasting “special interests.” You mean like Wall Street bankers who destroy workers’ jobs while living the high life?
But the onus is not just on the lying billionaire would-be dictator. The Democrats and the New York City labor bureaucracy beholden to them greased the skids.
A statement from ATU Local 1181 leadership says they “suspended” the strike in the face of the mayor’s “intransigence” and will try again next year when the Democrats are in at City Hall.  Hello? By then, it’s too late. Over a month on the picket line, and drivers and matrons forced back with nothing to show for it, and the union far worse off – because the scab contracts will be in place.
The Democrats pledged to “revisit” the issue if they get elected. WTF? That's not even one of their empty promises.
The New York Times headlined, “School Bus Drivers End Strike, in Win for New York Mayor.” It’s a big loss for the experienced and responsible bus workers and for the kids and parents who depend on them. Now their safety will be in the hands of the lowest bidder.
What’s wrong with the premise that says one man’s intransigence can sink the unions?
School bus drivers and matrons did far more than their part. Building mass picket lines in the freezing cold, braving snow and sleet and rain for nearly five weeks, coming out for rallies and demonstrations, willing to go anywhere, speak to any group who wanted to hear their cause.
It would have taken the combined determination of the whole NYC labor movement to break Bloomberg’s union-busting. But labor leaders didn’t “walk the walk,” they barely mumbled the talk.
Weeks into the strike, the UFT (the teachers union, the powerhouse most closely linked to the bus workers) belatedly sent some officials and their minions out on a couple of picket lines, and, finally invited 1181 president Cordiello to speak for five minutes at the UFT delegate assembly.
Unity Caucus (UFT president Mulgrew’s machine) handed out flyers about “Union Unity” and promised to walk the Brooklyn Bridge in a support rally for the bus workers.
On a Sunday – what’s that supposed to mean? A real march that occupies Wall Street, or ties up the bridge at rush hour on a weekday, could do what was needed – shut the city down! But far from bringing out the membership last Sunday, there was a skeleton crew. Did they even have 50 people? This out of a working  membership of 80,000 teachers alone, to say nothing of the scads of Unity-paid retirees they pack our Delegate Assemblies with.
Ditto for the TWU, sad to say. Transit workers showed the way in a massive strike in 2005 when ALMOST NOTHING moved. But they left open a way for a trickle of traffic -- in fear of the Taft-Hartley law’s secondary boycott ban, they didn’t picket out Metro North and the LIRR.
Now the union bureaucrats hide behind the no-strike Taylor Law, fearing anything that suggests mass action, let alone the spectre of the dreaded “S-word.”
That’s why the Taylor Law is the labor bureaucrats’ favorite weapon – to paralyze the membership and keep them in thrall to “respectability” and impotence.
How does this play out? Look at what happened at the UFT Delegate Assembly January 23rd when I put up a motion to support ATU with a mass city labor rally! The Unity-loyal delegates (majority) went ballistic, shuddering and screeching: Eek! A rally – no way!
When they finally called a rally, it was to showcase Democratic mayoral hopefuls, and prepare to end the strike. These are the same fakers who were singing the praises of the late unlamented racist mayor Koch, who closed hospitals in Harlem and stood on the Brooklyn Bridge egging on yuppies to come to work during the 1980 TWU strike.
So what about Friday’s joint statement of all the Democratic party candidates telling the workers to go back to work, end the strike and pledging that any Democrat who beat Bloomberg next year would “revisit the issue”? It gave the 1181 leadership, also chained to the capitalist parties, the cover to call off the strike.
On a smaller scale, this is a replay of what happened in Wisconsin, where a militant labor struggle was abandoned on the altar of support to the Democrats.
That’s how it works these days. That’s what the Democrats are there for. That’s what the labor bureaucrats are there for. It’s the system, not individual bad guys. The Democrats are no “friends of labor.”  Obama and Cuomo are leading the attack on teachers unions.


Click on image to the right for PDF of leaflet
By the way, where was UFT’s M.O.R.E. “opposition” caucus in all of this? A few of its more dedicated members came out on the picket lines. The caucus itself, not so much – you could say they were pretty much MIA. Supporting a strike might “alienate” its base. There’s no way to overcome the labor bureaucracy with “more democracy” as long as oppositionists duck the issues of class and racial oppression.
From Day One, Class Struggle Education Workers was out on the picket lines. We organized a forum to support our sisters and brothers of ATU Local 1181. We said their strike is our fight, too. CSEW connected the strike to the “educational colonialism” of charter schools, closing schools and to the war on working people from Wisconsin to the West Coast docks.
Any strategy to put the muscle back into labor MUST be a fight to throw off the chains that keep labor bound to the capitalist parties, and to oust the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.” We urgently need a class struggle leadership in the workers movement.

–Marjorie Stamberg
Class Struggle Education Workers, 
UFT delegate, District 79
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