CLASS STRUGGLE EDUCATION WORKERS

Class Struggle Education Workers in Protests Against School Closings

2011-02-09T12:29:00.001-05:00

In January and February 2011, a number of protests were held at several of the 25 schools slated for closing by the New York Department of Education, as well as a city-wide demonstration against school closings on January 27 and a rally called by the United Federation of Teachers outside the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) meeting at Brooklyn Technical High School on February 3. The PEP is a puppet body with a large majority (8 out of 13 members) appointed by the mayor. Class Struggle Education Workers participated in these protests as well as speaking at the February 1 PEP meeting to denounce the mayoral dictatorship over the schools and the agenda of corporatization and privatization behind the DOE's wrecking operation against public education.

A short (6 minute) video showing the CSEW's intervention and the massive repudiation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his hand-picked schools chancellor Cathleen Black (who has already become notorious for her complete lack of educational experience and her arrogance toward the parents, teachers and students) is posted below.

Pop Quiz for Cathy Black

2011-02-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

Pop Quiz for Cathy Black:

(Turn off your Blackberry; no help from Deputy Chancellors)

Who was Paul Robeson?

After your experience on the Coca-Cola Board of Directors, can you tell us what death squads do?

Name two people you know personally whose children go to public school.

What was the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education?

Recent studies show that the following raise student test scores:

closing schools
small schools
charter schools
tying teachers’ pay to students test scores
all of the above
none of the above

What is the graduation rate of Jamaica High School students compared to the city average?

Where is The Bronx?

How much did IBM pay Joel Klein to give them the Paul Robeson HS building?

I took the job as school chancellor because of

The need for increased birth control
I was faced with Sophie’s Choice
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it
All my friends on the cocktail circuit were starting charter schools, so I decided to one-up them

10. Excluding blacks and Jews from the country club where you rode horses

was legal under:

a. The Dred Scott decision

b. Numerus Clausus of German universities adopted by Harvard and Columbia in the 1920s

c. A corollary of the “freedom of conscience” doctrine espoused by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas

d. Who cares? My country club buddies make the law

Easy extra credit question: How many players are there on a polo team?

We Can Stop the School Closings!

2010-12-15T22:12:00.001-05:00

UFT, Students, Parents and Working People Have the Power

We Can Stop the School Closings!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The DOE Goes After Teacher Tenure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the News Is Spun

A Manufactured Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the news you pay for.

Their Class Sizes and Ours

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

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

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

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

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

Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control

2010-11-16T23:47:00.002-05:00

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

Enough of Billionaire Mayor’s Control

For Teacher–Student–Parent–Worker Control of Schools

Defend the ATRs! Stop Racist School Closings!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobilize to Stop School Closings!

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

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

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

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

Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 2, October-December 2010

2010-09-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

To see the full Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter in pdf format, click on the image to the right.

“Waiting for Superman”: Union-Busting Privatizers Out to Gut Public Education

2010-09-24T19:07:00.017-04:00

Corporate Education Deformers and Democrat Obama Go After Teachers

“Waiting for Superman”: Union-Busting
Privatizers Out to Gut Public Education

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

On September 24, the film Waiting for Superman is opening with great fanfare in New York City and around the country. This is the kickoff for a slick marketing campaign to blame teachers, and teachers unions in particular, for everything that is wrong with public education in the United States. It features billionaire Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, and the unspeakable Michelle Rhee, whose claim to fame is firing hundreds of teachers as schools chief in Washington, D.C. Their answer is non-union, semi-privatized “charter schools,” many sponsored by the hedge-fund billionaires and Silicon Valley moguls who are behind this movie.

We need to send a strong message that educators will not be scapegoated in the interests of the privatizers, who look to make big profits out of gutting public schools. We must make clear that teacher-bashing and union-busting hurts kids. Just look at the results of the closing of more than 100 schools in New York City! And we need a leadership prepared to stand up to the corporate education “reformers” even, and especially, when we’re facing a united ruling-class offensive with Democratic Party liberals and not Republican conservatives leading the charge.

Waiting for Superman is not just a movie, it is a political operation. It began with a showing for the power brokers in Washington which drew Barack Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who called the film a “Rosa Parks moment” (referring to the legendary civil rights figure); Obama’s top political advisor, David Axelrod and Democratic senators (and Wall Street favorites) Chris Dodd and Frank Lautenberg. Oprah Winfrey hailed Rhee as “a warrior woman for our times,” and invited her to appear with Gates on Oprah this week.

The promoters of Waiting for Superman are billing the film as a “vital national conversation” and “clarion call” for “education reform.” It tells the story of five kids, mostly from poor inner-city oppressed communities, who face tremendous odds as they desperately try to get an education. The movie pulls out all the emotional stops to engage the audience. But the tear-jerking has a serious purpose: to demonize educators. Figures in the film say: “Unions are a menace and an impediment to reform.” “Teacher union contracts say you can't fire them.” “Teachers get tenure if they just breathe.”

Waiting for Supermanis directed by Davis Guggenheim, who hit the big time in Hollywood with An Inconvenient Truth, his movie about Democratic vice president Al Gore and global warming. He also did a bio of Obama’s mother that was shown at the Democratic National Convention. Living in the Los Angeles area, Guggenheim says he sends his kids to private school because in the local public school, “The biggest problem is a lot of families’ first language is Spanish” (New York Times, 19 September). This echoes the “white flight” to suburbia and the setting up of private segregated “academies” after the Supreme Court’s 1954 order for school desegregation.

The film was produced by Participant Productions, headed by Jeff Skol. Skol was the founder of eBay, the Internet auction site, and has used his personal fortune to provide several hundred thousand dollars to Teach for America, the anti-union outfit that recruits Ivy League college grads to spend two years in inner city schools in order to spruce up their résumés. Together with the charter invasion, this adds up to educational colonialism.

Waiting for Supermanpraises the semi-privatized charter schools, which are the battering ram being used to privatize public schools where possible, and to turn the rest into profit platforms as a host of educational vendors milk education budgets like “defense” contractors feed at the Pentagon trough. The film features Geoffrey Canada, head of the Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools, whose schools just got a $20 million grant from Goldman Sachs Gives. These Wall Street speculators gave us economic depression, now they speculate with our children’s education.

The leadership of the teachers unions (UFT/AFT and NEA) have been afraid to take on the capitalist education deformers directly. The unions endorsed Obama, and went all out to elect the Democrats. Even the bulk of teacher activist groups and various would-be socialist organizations in effect backed Obama, openly or tacitly, or refused to warn that the Democratic candidate’s education program was identical to the Republicans’, even as he vowed to continue the imperialist war in Afghanistan and occupation of Iraq. Reflecting the same outlook, union officials and some dissidents try to sidestep the union-busting program behind Waiting for Superman.

Instead they want to “join the conversation” on education reform. This just buys into the charade. What “conversation”? What “reform”? The rulers’ idea of a conversation was seen last January 26 when over 2,000 parents, teachers and students attended a hearing in Brooklyn and almost every one of 300-plus speakers denounced the NYC Department of Education’s plans to close 19 more schools. So the DOE went ahead and ordered them closed. Their idea of “reform” is a system where educrats (who generally know nothing of education) can fire any teacher deemed “ineffective” (or who talks back).

What’s posed here is a fight to defeat the forces seeking to destroy public education. In order to win the battle it must be part of an effort to break with all the ruling class parties and politicians and build a class-struggle workers party. For what we need is an education revolution, in which teachers, students, parents and workers control the schools. And it will take a workers government to bring that about.

Obama, Democrats Spearhead Teacher-Bashing, Union-Busting Corporate Education "Reform"

2010-06-16T12:26:00.010-04:00

Organize to Defeat the Capitalist Assault on Public Education!

Obama, Democrats Spearhead Teacher-Bashing,
Union-Busting Corporate Education "Reform"

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

President Barack Obama is congratulated by his education czar Arne Duncan (left) after speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce approving the mass firing of the entire teaching staff of Central Falls, Rhode Island High School. Right: Colin ("Iraq has WMD") Powell.
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Break with the Democrats, Oust the Bureaucrats–
Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Public schools, teachers and teacher unions are under attack across the country. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Eli Broad want to tie teacher pay to student test scores. State legislatures take aim at teacher tenure and seniority. Hedge fund operators fund semi-privatized “charter schools.” Corporate lobbies like the Business Roundtable and the National Center on Education and the Economy call to end high school at the tenth grade. University students are hit with huge tuition hikes. Schools are closed in minority areas, teachers are threatened with mass layoffs and pay freezes.

We’re facing a full-scale capitalist assault on public education. It’s not just here in New York, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein are not the only enemies. The war on public education is taking place across the country, and the bottom line is: Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are leading the charge. Until educators and labor militants are prepared to take on these teacher-bashers and union-busters politically, to break with the Democrats and oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats with a class-struggle leadership, every remaining job protection is at risk.

It was liberal Democrats, not just right-wing Republicans who handed over trillions of dollars to bail out the Wall Street bankers. Now they’re claiming there’s no money left for schools, unless teachers agree to give up every union gain they have ever won. It’s Obama and the Democratic Congress, not George Bush and Dick Cheney, who are running the imperialist war in the Middle East, which has taken close to a million lives over the last nine years. Now they’ve suddenly “discovered” precious metals in the Afghan hills along with the oil in Iraq, confirming that the U.S. plans to run those countries indefinitely.

Meanwhile, look at what’s happening on the education front: Last February, the school board in Central Falls, Rhode Island decided to fire the entire faculty and staff over lack of progress in student test scores. Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with his education czar (and basketball buddy) Arne Duncan on stage, President Obama approved this union-busting attack. Forget that Central Falls is the poorest city in the state with the highest percentage of immigrants: just label the school and its students failures and blame the teachers. Even American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten let out a yelp. She thought she had a deal with Obama to do education “reform” together with, not against the unions. Surprise.

Then Obama announced he was rewriting the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind” law to require states to evaluate teachers based on student scores on annual tests, and to subject some 10,000 schools nationwide to “vigorous state intervention” – i.e., closing. If this passes, the deliberate “dumbing down” of education, the elimination of science and enrichment (music, art, foreign language) classes will continue. “Teaching to the test” will become universal. As always, schools in black ghettos, Latino barrios, immigrant communities and working-class areas will be left behind.

Meanwhile, we have the Obama administration’s Race to the Top scheme to bribe state legislatures into passing laws requiring “merit pay” linking teacher salaries to student test scores, ditto for teacher tenure, sharply increasing the number of non-union charter schools and eliminating seniority job protection.

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg tries to blackmail teachers into a pay freeze by threatening thousands of layoffs. Meanwhile, they shell out half a million dollars on double-digit raises to DOE execs and increasing the number of deputy chancellors from two to eight, spend $5 million on teacher recruitment in the middle of a job freeze, and drop tens of millions onto their vaunted ARIS computer system whose main accomplishment so far has been to spawn a computer worm. Etc. But the worst is yet to come.

At issue is seniority. Under the New York State civil service code, any layoffs of public workers must be done by reverse seniority. A bill to eliminate that clause, for teachers only, has been bottled up in the legislature. At the end of May, Democratic attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced his candidacy for governor, picking as his running mate Rochester mayor Robert Duffy. His qualification? Duffy “tangled with public employee unions,” namely the teachers union. Cuomo went on: “Guess what? We’re going to be tangling with public employee unions.” Specifically, he’s talking about calling a constitutional convention (which could axe the seniority provisions).

So what is the union leadership doing about this. In the run-up to the election for United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president, Weingarten’s successor as head of the UFT Mike Mulgrew did a little tough talking. Mulgrew filed a court suit against the closing of 20+ schools on procedural grounds, which put that off a bit. (Klein just ignored the judge’s ruling and sent out notices to parents assigned affected students to other schools.) But since then he has been going for one “deal” after another with the DOE.

First there was the agreement to close the infamous “rubber rooms” (teacher reassignment centers) which had given both the union and the schools bad press. While it may let some victimized teachers back into the classroom earlier, it also makes it easier for the administration to take disciplinary action. Next was the agreement on teacher evaluation, with 40 percent of the score based on “student achievement,” both on state tests and local criteria. As usual, the UFT tops tried to pass this off as a victory, fending off calls for teacher evals based exclusively on state tests.

Then comes the bill to more than double the number of charter schools. Once again, Mulgrew & Co. try to peddle this sellout by saying that a ban on new for-profit schools and a requirement to include more English language learners and special education students will crimp the charter operators’ style. Both this law and the teacher evaluation system were rammed through the state legislature in order to qualify for Obama’s Race to the Top funds. Meanwhile, with the aid of Randi Weingarten, union-bashing Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee managed to push through a contract effectively eliminating seniority (teachers excessed by school closings can be fired if they don’t find a new position in two months). The Washington Post, New York Times and business interests cheered.

So what can be done? Around the country, union reform caucuses have sprung up in a number of AFT locals. In New York there is the Independence Community of Educators and Teachers for a Just Contract (ICE/TJC), which got 11 percent in the last presidential vote. While the bureaucracy’s “Unity” caucus has a stranglehold on the UFT, a reform caucus won control of the United Teachers of Los Angeles in 2005 and last week the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) won the top positions in the Chicago Teachers Union, ousting the deeply corrupt and fractured regime of Marilyn Stewart.

Many dedicated union militants fed up with the sellouts of the AFT leadership have joined these reform groups. But now that they have taken the reins locally, they are up against the powerful forces pushing corporate education “reform” that Weingarten, Mulgrew, Stewart and the rest have capitulated to. The problem is, they have not prepared their ranks for the bitter battle that must be fought.

CORE, ICE, TJC and similar groupings in other union locals all have pretty much the same program. They basically oppose the leadership’s sellouts and want to go back to the trade-union reformism of the past. CORE’s election platform consisted of things like “get members on board with a common strategy,” “mobilize the union against budget cuts,” “develop a legal strategy,” “develop a political strategy,” and similar meaningless phrases. They’re going up against Arne Duncan’s hand-picked successor, in Barack Obama’s hometown. Is the CTU membership ready for the blast they are going to get accusing them of selfishly sacrificing kids’ education and other hogwash straight from the White House?

The fundamental fact is that in the present imperialist epoch, the reformist or even “social” trade unionism of the past is impossible. There is a bipartisan capitalist consensus to go after unions, rip up their gains and eliminate workers’ minimal job protections in the name of competitiveness. Obama & Co. are pushing a race to the bottom, and the labor fakers are doing their job by going along. A real opposition to the Weingartens and Mulgrews would point out that it’s not a matter of individual sellouts or corruption, they are a parasitic petty-bourgeois layer that seeks to discipline the workers for the bosses. They are, as Daniel De Leon said, the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.”

Reform caucuses that only fight for union militancy, democracy and the like, are doomed to fail once they come into office because they are incapable of battling an implacable foe. That’s what happened with New Directions in TWU Local 100 and the sellout of the 2005 New York City transit strike, and it’s been repeated over and over in the Teamsters, Steelworkers, Mine Workers and elsewhere. The bureaucracy must be defeated and driven out of the unions, replaced by a leadership with a program of hard class struggle if labor is to succeed against the concerted capitalist offensive.

What’s going on here is a one-sided class war. As billionaire investor Warren Buffet said awhile back, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” The reason it’s one-sided is that no one is seriously fighting back. A class-struggle opposition would not be limited to “bread-and-butter” issues. It would stress that the U.S. war and occupation “over there” in the Middle East and Central Asia are part of the same war being waged against working people, immigrants and minorities here. It would fight police-state measures like the PATRIOT U.S.A. Act, defend immigrants and oppose racist repression.

It would drive home that the capitalist politicians who pose as phony “friends of labor” at election time are actually enemies of the working class. The Democrats are in office in good part because the teacher union tops and most of the oppositions either openly or implicitly said to vote Democrat. But the Dems are no “lesser evil,” their program on education was identical to the Republicans’. What Obama and education czar Arne Duncan are doing to teachers now was entirely predictable and we predicted it (see “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama.” The Internationalist supplement, November 2008). That was not a popular position. Most self-proclaimed socialists opted to go with the flow and downplay any criticism of Obama. But now we face the consequences.

It’s necessary to break with the Democrats and begin building a workers party that can lead a broad class struggle against the bosses’ offensive, ousting the bureaucrats who are giving away everything we have fought for, threatening the very existence of the unions, the livelihoods of its members, and the education of our students.

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

2010-03-24T10:08:00.003-04:00

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

President Obama and the Congressional leaders say they’ve just passed a “historic” health care reform. It’s not.

It’s not historic, it’s not a reform, and it’s not even a step in the right direction. The health care “reform” is an attack on working families and a gift to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the private hospital corporations. It’s going to hurt our health care coverage in the UFT. It’s a setback in the struggle for universal health care coverage.

If people aren’t aware of that, they haven’t been reading the fine print. Just like many people didn’t pay attention when Obama said he had the same education program as John McCain, and when he said he wasn’t going to pull all the troops out of Iraq and he was going to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

First, it won’t mean anything like universal health coverage. Even by the most optimistic estimates 23 million people will remain uninsured, many of them immigrant workers in dangerous and low-paid jobs. Not only are undocumented immigrants not covered, the care they now receive in emergency rooms will be cut back because the government is slashing $40 billion out of funds to “disproportionate share hospitals” to cover the uninsured.

Probably many more will remain uninsured. Why? Because the insurance plans they will be required to buy are so expensive and provide such lousy coverage. In Massachusetts the basic plan costs $2,800 for an individual and has a $4,000 deductible, so people will pay almost $7,000 before they see a dime of benefits. As a result many people, especially younger people, may figure they’re better off paying a fine.

Second, this is the biggest government attack on women’s right to abortion since Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment in 1976. Yet “pro-Choice” Democrats in Congress knuckled under and women’s organizations like NOW and NARAL didn’t say boo. The ban on abortion will now apply to community health centers, and abortion coverage will be dropped from all insurance plans.

Third, this “reform” is a giant subsidy to the insurance companies, the drug companies and the for-profit hospitals. The insurance companies are supposed to pay $70 billion in taxes, but in return they are going to get subsidies of $450 billion and hundreds of billions more in new customers who are going to be forced to buy their defective products.

The right wing pretends that this is a government takeover of medical care. Wrong. It’s the consolidation of corporate control of medicine. Rather than socialized medicine, it’s going more towards the corporate state, just like all the corporate “education reform.”

Fourth, a main way this “reform” is going to be paid for is by taxing our insurance plans. The excise tax on so-called “Cadillac health plans” is the biggest source of additional funds to pay for the subsidies. Yet individual high cost health insurance plans like Wall Street execs have are exempt from this tax, it’s the union plans, they’re going after.

The Senate bill originally said the tax would bring in $140 billion by 2019. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO did some last minute horse-trading and reduced that to “only” $32 billion. He must be taking lessons from Weingarten: hand over two-thirds of the givebacks the bosses are demanding, then claim “victory” because you didn’t give away the whole store.

In any case, this is an illusion. The AFL-CIO tops just postponed the tax, so that it starts in 2018 instead of 2013. It’s still going to be a whopping tax and the main outside source of funding, and it will be taking an increasing bite out of our health plans as medical inflation increases.

Employers won’t agree to a 40 percent increase in cost, instead they’ll cut benefits to come in under the ceiling. Since dental and vision care were exempted, it will probably be cut from long-term hospitalization and major surgery. People don’t go into the hospital for a month or have a major operation frivolously. So now we will have to pay out of pocket or buying super-expensive additional private insurance.

What it comes down to is they are taking tens of billions of dollars from the pockets of working families and giving them to the capitalists of the medical industry. That’s the bottom line of this health insurance “reform.”

On top of that they plan to cut “hundreds of billions of dollars” out of Medicare payments.

And they’re not stopping there. Next up is “reform” of the Social Security system. The New York Times reported on March 23 that the administration plans to raise the retirement age and reduce benefits for Social Security, which is “the other big entitlement benefits program and one that Mr. Obama has suggested in the past that he is willing to tackle.”

Many younger teachers don’t grasp the role of a union because they’ve never seen a real union struggle. Many tend to see the UFT as an agency for providing health insurance. Why? Because that’s how the union leadership acts. When Trumka goes to the White House to negotiate to postpone the tax, he’s just following the insurance company execs’ playbook.

A fighting union leadership would insist on national health insurance as a first step. And it would not only refuse to support Obama and the Democrats’ corporate health care “reform,” it would bring tens of thousands of union members out into the streets to oppose it. Instead, the union leaders leave opposition to the ultra-rightist Tea Party racists.

What we need is exactly what the right wing and the corporate interests and the Tea Partyers fear – real socialized medicine, so that universal health care is a right, not a commodity. And to do that, it’s necessary to break with the Democrats and build a class struggle workers party that fights for a society in which the working people rule, not the corporations.

So when you find your health insurance premiums going up and your coverage cut, when your Medicare benefits and Social Security payments are slashed, don’t be shocked. The UFT bureaucracy’s Unity caucus and the reformist ICE-TJC opposition don’t warn about this because neither is prepared to go up against the Democrats. They are blocking a real fight against corporate takeover of the schools and health care.

Whether it’s education “reform” or health care “reform,” it’s all an attack on working people. And it’s all coming straight from the top, from the White House and Wall Street. Until labor is ready and willing to fight those forces, it will just go from defeat to defeat, losing membership and sacrificing union gains piecemeal until the unions themselves are destroyed (or become an empty shell), as has happened with many already.

That’s one more reason why we need to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions.

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

Obama Supports Mass Firing of R.I. Teachers

2010-03-24T08:39:00.002-04:00

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

2010-03-24T08:09:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-02-24T21:33:00.000-05:00

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?

2010-02-24T20:25:00.012-05:00

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

2010-01-12T18:52:00.008-05:00

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

2009-12-09T18:01:00.005-05:00

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

2009-12-01T07:11:00.003-05:00

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.

Money Moguls Target ATRs

2009-11-18T21:00:00.007-05:00

Money Moguls Target ATRs

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

Last week, the Citizen’s Budget Commission issued a report on “How New Yorkers Should Judge Next Teachers’ Contract” (see below for exactly who these “concerned citizens” are). Their report was promptly hailed by the New York Post, which headlined: “Teachers must give - to take.” Their claim is that due to projected budget deficits NYC can’t afford 4 percent raises in line with other city workers, so teachers will have to agree to “value generating concessions.” And what might those be? They are pushing for “merit” pay instead of seniority raises, firing teachers in the ATR pool if they are not placed in a position after six months, and “streamlining” procedures to push out teachers in the “rubber rooms.”

It’s hardly surprising that the teacher-bashing Post is going after ATRs, again. This has been one of their hobby horses ever since the 2005 contract let principals choose teaching staffs. It’s all part of Bloomberg and Klein’s business model, centered on giving management dictatorial powers and replacing veteran teachers who actually know something about education. The billionaire mayor and his obedient schools chancellor back up their demands with a stream of supposedly “objective” flimflam from wholly owned subsidiaries. Reports from the “New Teacher Project,” paid for by the DOE; arbitrary “report cards” devised by the DOE; and now another report, recycling the previous reports, this time from a group of “citizens.”

Who Is the CBC?

The fact that the CBC is calling for more teacher givebacks is no shocker. This “blue ribbon” panel which bills itself as a “watchdog” for capital is made up of bankers, real estate moguls and million-dollar lawyers: board members and partners from Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan Securities, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, IBM, Verizon, Felix Rohatyn of the Rohatyn Group, Bloomberg LP, Vornado Realty Trust – you get the picture. Just your average “citizens” of the republic of big money. The chairman is the executive vice president of MetLife, formerly in charge of strategic planning and real estate operations. Like dumping the Stuyvesant Town apartment complex for a cool $5.4 billion, putting 25,000 middle-income residents at risk?

These are the same people who set off the bank-engineered fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s claiming that NYC was “living beyond its means,” resulting in the firing of tens of thousands of city workers and dangerous deterioration of the city’s infrastructure. Back then the CBC trustees were from Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, Salomon Brothers, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Henry Helmsley of Helmsley Spear, David Tishman of Tishman Reality, Sam Lefrak of the Lefrak Organization. Different cast, same play. Now the bankers who raked in trillions from the government bailout when their financial shell games crashed, and who are now giving themselves tens of billions in bonuses, say the city “can’t afford” to pay for public education.

But just because it is wholly predictable that the labor-haters and Treasury looters are going after ATRs and demanding “pay for performance” doesn’t mean we should let down our guard. Their purpose has nothing to do with a budget deficit or economic crisis. They want to crack teacher tenure in order to bust the union. They figure that if they can give management the right to arbitrarily decide who gets a raise, and if they can kick out troublesome teachers by putting them in holding pens on trumped up charges or “excessing” them by shutting down their schools, then soon they will have a workforce scared stiff of getting fired to do their bidding.

Arne Duncan’s Wrecking Job on the Chicago Schools

Since Bloomberg, Klein & Co. took over, they have announced the closing of 100 city schools. But they will really go to town if they can get rid of the no layoffs clause and fire ATRs, whether after six months or a year. They want to replicate what President Obama’s education chief Arne Duncan did as “CEO” of the Chicago schools. Saying “I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio,” this corporate education “reformer” has managed to get rid of 6,000 union teachers, most of them African-American (and most of them women). In April 2007, he fired 775 teachers on one day. Under his Renaissance 2010 program, Duncan carried out a racist purge, closing schools and firing the entire staff as part of a drive to gentrify poor black neighborhoods. This is the model of school “reform” that Obama is pushing.

Last year, Weingarten swore that the DOE would only ax ATRs “over my dead body.” When we raised the issue at the September D.A., Mulgrew repeated the mantra that the DOE created the problem and they need to solve it. New York City teachers must make it crystal clear to the DOE that any tampering with the no layoffs clause in the contract, any provision allowing the firing of ATRs, anything infringing on the rights of teachers thrown into the DOE’s Gitmo is absolutely unacceptable. The scandal of more than 1,500 teachers not teaching can be solved in a single day by simply instructing the principals to place them, period. And the “rubber rooms” should be shut down: teachers, like anyone else, must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. (In cases where there may be real issues, they can be given other assignments.) And we demand the rehiring of the 500 school aides who were just dismissed to save a paltry $10 million so that Goldman Sachs can shell out $23 billion to its top execs.

Bloomberg Buys Another Election, Democrats No Alternative

The UFT’s “Smart” Politics: Dumb and Dumber

What We Need Is a Class-Struggle Workers Party

So Mayor Bloomberg bought another term as mayor of New York City, for a cool $90 million in campaign spending from his personal fortune ... and a helpful boost from the UFT tops under Mike Mulgrew, who abstained from their usual practice of endorsing the Democrat. The New York Times (30 October) noted that this policy of studied neutrality was “a boon” for the mayor, “who has been widely criticized among the rank and file.” That’s putting it mildly! The same article noted that “many observers” think that a 4 percent raise was agreed to by Randi Weingarten last spring in exchange for the union dropping its proposals to ever-so-slightly modify the mayor’s dictatorial control of the schools.

This was billed as “smart” politics. It was the same stance of pro-Bloomberg neutrality the UFT bureaucracy adopted in 2005, for which they credit themselves with getting a 14 percent raise – in exchange for huge concessions including giving up seniority transfer rights and agreeing to principals’ selection of staff, thereby giving rise to the present ATR crisis. This time around, the union leadership fell for the sucker bait churned out by Bloomberg’s PR machine. After months of claims that Bloomberg had a “double-digit” lead in the polls, he barely squeaked by with a 5 point margin. As the Times (5 November) put it: “He created an aura of gilded invincibility, which the media retailed. For labor unions like 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East and the United Federation of Teachers, whose leaders are acutely sensitive to power, it seemed wise to stay silent.”

So now we get “four more years” of Joel Klein’s monomaniacal offensive against teachers, arbitrarily closing schools and undermining kids’ education with endless testing ... in exchange for what? It turns out that the UFT’s vaunted political operation is not so smart – much less wise – even in its own terms of supporting whatever bourgeois politician it figures has the most “clout.” When supporters of Democratic candidate Bill Thompson tried to get an endorsement at the last Delegate Assembly, Mulgrew brought up the UFT’s legislative and political action director whose main argument was, why should we back “a loser”? But then the UFT backed Mark Green, Hillary Clinton and Elliot Spitzer, to name a few of the losers, while the “winners” it supported included Republican governor Pataki (it even gave him a John Dewey award!).

Class Struggle Education Workers opposes Bloomberg and Thompson and all capitalist parties and candidates, including the Greens (who act as a pressure group on the Democrats) and the “Working Families Party,” which is just another ballot line so that people can vote for the Democratic candidate while holding their noses, or for the odd “independent” who was nixed by the Democratic machine. The Independent Community of Educators (ICE), an opposition grouping in the UFT, issued an October 22 statement calling to “vote against Bloomberg.” Politically, what this means is backhanded support for Thompson, even though they admitted the Democrat “supports much of the underlying corporate agenda for education.” Not only that, Thompson came out against a 4 percent raise for teachers. Some “alternative” to Bloomberg/Klein!

The fact is, you can’t defend teachers or public education – particularly for poor and working people and the oppressed black, Latino, Asian and immigrant population – without opposing the Democrats. The fact is, corporate “reformers” bent on gutting of U.S. public schools are led not by right-wing reactionaries, but by the Democratic Party of Barack Obama, who was supported, openly or indirectly, by virtually every teachers union and almost every union opposition in the country. Obama is no representative of impoverished racial minorities, he is a product of elite private schools who was launched by big bucks from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. He backed the bank bailout, he supported imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Obama’s education program was virtually identical with Republican John McCain’s: semi-privatizing public education with charter schools; introducing “merit” pay; eliminating seniority protection and teacher tenure (which is not a “job for life” but simple protection against arbitrary firing).

We said so at the time (see “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama,” The Internationalist supplement, November 2008), when most of the left was sidling up to Obama or biting their tongues. When the Grassroots Education Movement held a rally last May, they said they wouldn’t have our spokeswoman explicitly because she would attack the popular president. Now, when the Democratic president is bombing Afghan and Pakistani villagers, keeping the Guantánamo concentration camp open, cutting deals with the drug and health insurance companies, and pushing charter schools with a vengeance – now we are hearing a few timid criticisms from the left. Yet the UFT, AFT and NEA keep on backing Obama/Duncan even as the administration uses the billion-dollar bribe of “stimulus” money and “Race to the Top” slush funds to ram through union-bashing measures.

Enough already. ¡Basta ya! We badly need a class-struggle workers party, one that defends public education against the capitalist education “reformers” while fighting for a workers government to carry out a revolution in education and the whole of society. So let’s get started.

Corporate Ed Reformers Flunk

From the right-wing zealots of the New York Post and Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Business Roundtable and the liberal Democrats who control the White House and both houses of Congress in Washington, there is a bipartisan capitalist consensus on education “reform.” They say teachers should be paid according to students’ grades, seniority and tenure should be abolished, large schools should be broken up into small schools, “failing schools” should be shut down and replaced by charters, and K-8 education should focus on reading and math, to be measured by continuous high stakes standardized tests. The ed reformers talk about “metrics” the way the Pentagon talks about the body count in Iraq. They want America’s schools to look like New Orleans after Katrina, where they gutted the public school system, dismissed the teachers, and handed the children over to charter operators profiting from the public till.

Interestingly, a series of studies have shown that every one of these “reforms” is a bust, even by their own measure.

Small schools: Last November 11, Bill Gates reported to his foundation, “In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments.” As far back as 2005, “a Gates-funded study by the American Institutes for Research showed that students in traditional, comprehensive high schools were learning more mathematics than those in the Gates' small schools” (this according to the magazine that calls itself the “capitalist tool,” Forbes, 28 November 2008).

Closing schools: Arne Duncan closed 44 schools during his tenure as chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools. A study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research released last month, When Schools Close, reported that: “Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak.” Overall it found “few effects, either positive or negative, of school closings on the achievement of displaced students,” but showed that both reading and math scores fell for students in schools slated for closing. Meanwhile, an article on “The Turnaround Fallacy” in Education Next (Winter 2009), a journal published by Harvard University, reviewing studies on school reorganizations, reported “overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.”

Charter Schools: This past July, the Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) published a massive study (Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States), covering test scores of “70 percent of the students in charter schools in the United States,” which reported: “Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.” Only 17 percent, less than one in five, provided superior education. Comparing students of similar backgrounds, the CREDO study stated: “For Blacks and Hispanics, their learning gains are significantly worse than that of their traditional school twins.”

In short, they are all frauds. But then, corporate education “reform” was never about better schools. It was about union-busting, privatizing, turning schools into profit platforms, cutting back government spending on education for the masses, and reshaping education to provide low-level vocational training for most while reserving quality education for a bourgeois and upper middle class elite.

2009-09-16T22:46:00.012-04:00

No to Educational Apartheid

Stop the “Charter” Invasion of Harlem’s Public Schools!

For Teacher-Student-Parent-Workers Control of the Schools!

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

As schools reopened for the fall, a battle has been joined over the invasion of Harlem public schools by “charter schools.” In particular, PS 123 (located at West 141st Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard) has become a focal point of this struggle to defend public education.

Protest at school opening at PS 123 on September 9.

The expansion of charter schools has been a key part of Mayor Bloomberg and School Chancellor Klein’s program for semi-privatization of the public schools. Even more importantly, it is central to the agenda of Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan. Because the Democrats support it, the UFT has conciliated and caved on fighting the charters. Several years ago, the UFT launched a forthright and successful battle against the attempts of the Edison Schools to get a foothold in New York. No longer.

There will be 100 charter schools in New York City this year. Most of them are “union-free” (we know what that means), and as we also know, “Separate is Not Equal.” The charter schools are NOT open to all students. Charters in Harlem serve only one third as many special needs students and English Language Learners (i.e., immigrants’ families) as the regular schools. This helps the charters bump up their scores on the high-stakes tests that are now used to judge educational quality. But numerous studies show that charters do no better and often worse than public schools serving similar populations.

Classroom space is in short supply in New York City, where real estate is the name of the game. So in Harlem, as in parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, the Board of Ed is taking space away from the public schools and giving it to the charters. PS 123 was forced to give up classrooms, which are now going to the “Harlem Success Academy II.” This charter is one of a chain run by Eva Moskowitz, former city councilwoman and corporate union-basher who pays herself a salary of $371,000 a year and has ambitions to be mayor some day soon. The New York Times calls her the “Charter School Queen.”

At PS 123, the kids have special ed classes quadrupled-up in the library. In the same building, the charter school parents pay $500 a year for school uniforms and supplies; there are “smart boards” in every classroom, indoor-outdoor carpeting, air-conditioning, high-tech computer access – and a school budget with lots of private foundation money way in excess of the money going to PS 123. This really is educational apartheid.

At the beginning of July, teachers and parents blocked private movers who showed up to remove the contents of PS 123 classrooms and put in furniture for the charter school. They demonstrated repeatedly in July and organized all summer. There have also been protests at a number of other affected schools in the Harlem area, the Bronx and Brooklyn. PS 241 was scheduled for closing, but they fought back and won. However, now the Board of Ed is bringing in a branch of Moskowitz’ HSA. At PS 197, a small school, seven classrooms were seized by a charter ironically named “Democracy Prep.”

The United Federation of Teachers has been notably absent from the protests against the charter invasion, although UFT oppositionists have been active, including the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), formed by the Independent Community of Educators (ICE), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and others. The community opposition to the charter invasion has even attracted some bourgeois politicians. A Coalition for Public Education held a founding convention August 29 with a host of elected officials, including State Senator Bill Perkins, City Councilman Charles Barron and others. It has roots going back to the “community control” struggles of the 1960s.

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) has emphasized the need to mobilize the full power of the UFT in the effort to stop the encroachment of charter schools. Particularly urgent, we MUST have solidarity of teachers, students, parents and working people in the community in this fight, as we struggle to heal the split which drove apart New York City’s teacher unionists and the black population in 1968. And we need to take on the role of the Democratic Party in leading the assault on public schools through the charters.

This is a national issue. The Los Angeles Unified School District just voted overwhelmingly to open up 250 schools to charters. With the White House pushing hard for this program, including offering the bribe of billions in aid to school systems that accept charters and “merit pay,” the failure of the teachers unions and most of the left to forthrightly oppose this is glaring. In several articles on charter schools in New York and L.A., the ISO for example makes no mention of the role of Obama, Duncan or the Democrats in spearheading the drive for charters.

This is a hard battle to defend public education, and it must be waged politically. We in the CSEW pointed out before the election that Democrat Obama’s education program was basically the same as Republican McCain’s – they even said so in the debates. We call for a class-struggle workers party to lead the fight for high quality, integrated, education for all. Instead of the dictatorship of mayoral control, we stand for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools. And serious resistance in Harlem to the educational colonialism represented by the charter school invasion could be a major stumbling block for the drive to privatize and corporatize the schools.

New Yorker Magazine Takes Aim at the UFT

The August 31 New Yorker magazine has a major union-bashing, teacher-trashing article against the UFT, entitled “The Rubber Room—The Battle over New York City’s Worst Teachers,” It is no accident that it comes just as the DOE is negotiating our next contract. We’ll hear a lot more of this stuff, and need some strong responses.

The New Yorker article goes after teacher tenure, the union contract and the very concept of teaching as a profession. In the corporate schools model, teaching is transformed into a temp labor force of low-wage “teaching fellows” who spend a couple of years in the schools (much like a domestic Peace Corps) until they go on to “real life.”

This is part of a whole program to transform public education into a limited skills training program for poor and working people, while education for the sons and daughters of the upper middle class becomes increasingly privatized as it already is for the offspring of the rich. And to the extent they can, the public schools are semi-privatized (via “charter schools”) and turned into a “profit platform” for various contractors and vendors (“No Vendor Left Behind”).

What’s standing in the way of this model? The powerful UFT and the job protections in the union contract. The author denounces the “the U.F.T. contract, a hundred and sixty-six single-spaced pages ... [which] dictates every minute of the six hours, fifty-seven and a half minutes of a teacher’s work day, including a thirty-seven-and-a-half-minute tutorial/preparation session and a fifty-minute ‘duty free’ lunch period ... [and] inserts a union representative into every meaningful teacher-supervisor conversation....”

This sentence is key to understanding the so-called agenda of the education “reformers.” Most of the mushrooming charter schools are non-union where teachers do hours of unpaid work including lunch-room duty, long hours after school, and can be hired and fired at the principal’s will, with no recourse to due process.

Hence the broadside on the “Rubber Room.” Teachers call this place “Gitmo” – a holding pen where teachers can spend literally years waiting for their cases to come before a hearing, and sometimes even to learn their alleged infraction. The number of teachers in these pens is growing, not due to an escalation of “bad teachers” but to the ongoing campaign of harassment to drive senior teachers off the payroll. Teachers who question a principal’s orders or judgment are accused of insubordination; a “case” is built against them and they are thrown out of the classroom. It is scandalous that the UFT has allowed these rooms to exist at all.

Ditto the attacks on the “Absent Teacher Reserve,” which the article acknowledges will include some 1,100 teachers this fall and quite likely many more (the current count is 1,597). Again here, the standard corporate business practice of “restructuring” is used by Klein/Bloomberg: closing schools and reopening them under another name, with the staff cut in half, and a new director.

Since the UFT contract has a no-layoff clause, these “excessed” teachers are assigned to a growing “Absent Teacher Reserve” pool where they continue to get paid . In Chicago and L.A., the unions capitulated or were not strong enough to resist the city’s demand to fire teachers if they don’t get a new position. With the ATR pool growing, along with the economic crisis, a job-freeze was temporarily imposed so these teachers could find places in the classroom. But a New York Times (August 29) article makes it clear that many principals are so opposed to hiring experienced teachers that they are “allowing jobs to sit vacant ... despite the large number of vacancies and the thousands of candidates who could fill them.” This will not last very long, and that is why the UFT should raise as a key demand in the contract negotiations that all ATR teachers who want jobs be placed.

As for the “facts” in the New Yorker trash job, look at the people quoted as “experts.” Deputy Schools Chancellor Chris Cerf, who was a founder of the Edison Schools, one of the most notorious charter school privatizers who is currently on Klein’s staff. Cerf was exempted from conflict of interest regulations over $6.7 million in shares in Edison (a contractor to the NYC Department of Education) that he held until 24 hours before his NYCDOE appointment. And now he has switched to Bloomberg’s reelection campaign staff to drum up votes of charter school parents for the mayor.

Then there is the “New Teacher Project,” which was founded by Michelle Rhee, who was its CEO for a number of years and is now the union-busting head of the Washington, D.C. schools. The NTP has led the war on ATR teachers and to get rid of teacher tenure altogether. (Teacher tenure in the New York City schools is not a guarantee of a job for life; it simply means teachers cannot be fired without cause.) The charts and figures cited in their news releases and “studies” are so rigged that they would be demolished by any competent statistician.

Most importantly for us, as we struggle for teachers’ and students’ rights, is the article’s final note on Obama and his education secretary Duncan. In a speech in June, Arne Duncan said that federal stimulus funds will only go to school systems that tie teacher salaries (and tenure) to kids’ test scores. The DOE has set up a Teacher Performance Office which secretly “correlates” teacher performance with students test scores. The UFT, after protesting this Gotcha Squad, opened the door to “merit pay” by accepting “bonus pay” on a school-by-school basis.

This attack on tenure and equal pay is a liberal program, not a product of the ultra-right. If instituted, it will enormously weaken the teachers’ unions around the country, AND IT IS VERY BAD FOR KIDS. If teachers’ salaries, and ultimately jobs, depend on students’ test scores, many teachers will look for a job in the elite schools rather than teach large numbers of special ed, ESL or other at risk students.

That, of course, is the point. That’s what high-stakes testing is all about. Education is to be privatized for those who can pay, and a second tier, “separate” (not equal) education will be given to those who can’t. That is what charterization and privatization are aiming at. The capitalists are doing what they can to get rid of public education, which they consider a socialist anomaly (as did long-time UFT leader Al Shanker, incidentally).

Our fight is to defend, extend and improve public education for all, and the biggest obstacle we face is the union leadership which has tied our unions to the Democratic Party. We need to take on Obama’s political program, including the so-called “education reform” which is a code word for union-busting, as well as other key issues such as mobilizing workers’ power to stop the continuing war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Greasing the Skids: UFT Participation in a Teacher Evaluation Study

Once again, like over “merit pay” only maybe worse, the UFT leadership and the DOE are working hand-in-glove to bring us a new teacher evaluation. This plan is supposed to be a better “alternative” to the education “reform” business model that links teacher pay to student test scores. Guess what -- this one does too, and in addition there’s a teacher test attached to it. There’s a lot of other bells and whistles in it, but that’s the bottom line. They’re trying to sell us this version of “teacher eval lite,” but buyer beware.

If you read the letter UFT president Mike Mulgrew and Schools chancellor Joel Klein sent to us, beyond a lot of pedagogical language it says the evaluation includes “information on student academic growth on specially administered standardized tests..” And it calls for a “brief test” to “assess teacher knowledge of content and pedagogy.” Videotaped classroom sessions will be used not to support the teacher but to grade them.

Any “teacher measurement project” funded by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation should start ringing alarm bells. What on earth is the UFT doing participating in this “study”?

The UFT’s “participation” reminds one of the “time-motion” study guy coming to the factory assembly line, and you’re asked to help him out as he measures arm movements and clocks your bathroom breaks so they can use it for speed-up. No way.

What makes an effective teacher? We do not accept the premise that individually evaluating teachers’ “techniques” is relevant to improving education. The whole emphasis on “teacher evaluation” tied to students’ test scores is part of the corporatization of American education.

The UFT Teachers Center is an excellent resource that works with teachers to be more effective in the classroom. They do some excellent PD, workshops, cooperative modeling and team-teaching. This is NOT what the Gates foundation study is about.

We need good professional development, and we are committed to teachers’ life-long learning, and use of the most modern technology and methodology in the classroom. But that is very different from what is going on here.

The education “business” aims to “cut costs” in the classroom. Beginning in the 1980s, nationwide the education budget as a percentage of the GNP was sharply reduced. These corporate chiefs wanted to get more bang for their buck. This means attacks on teacher tenure, getting rid of senior teachers to drive salaries down to the level of teaching fellows. It means, not “spending time” (time = money) in the classroom on enrichment activities, on general topics, history, discussion that goes anywhere except how to pass standardized tests so kids can be useful for the employers.

How do you “measure” a good science teacher? I’ve seen superb science teachers teaching high school kids in the Bronx without a science lab, without the most minimal equipment, standing up on a chair in the hallway and dropping a ball to demonstrate gravity! If you want to help kids learn, have decent equipment in every high school, smart boards in every classroom, give every student access to computers that don’t belong in a junkyards.

Coming from Mike Mulgrew, as with Randi, this is typical of the UFT leaders’ methodology of collaborating with management. “Instead of debating people about how they are wrong,” as Mulgrew put it in a cover letter to the members; instead of saying “no” to attacks on teacher tenure, they come up with a “least bad” alternative, and then tell us “it could have been worse.” Bit by bit they are giving up all the job protections that the union is supposed to be there for.

Instead of standing up for seniority transfers, in the disastrous 2005 contract they agreed to give the principals sole right to hire. Now we have 1,600 senior ATR teachers out of the classroom, plus more than 250 guidance counselors and 750 school aides without positions. Meanwhile classrooms are more crowded than ever. And the kids pay.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s previous shtick was “small schools.” This meant breaking high schools up, excessing hundreds of teachers, weakening the strong union structures in the high schools. And the result? In a speech to the Education Forum last November, even Bill Gates had to admit that the small schools were dismal failures.

Here’s what Gates said: “In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments. In one set of schools we supported, graduation rates were no better than the statewide average, and reading and math scores were consistently below the average.”

Thanks a bunch. But for Gates and the rest of the corporate education “reformers,” the purpose was not to improve education. They’re going after teachers unions, and in that they’re succeeding, with the help of our leaders who won’t, and probably don’t know how to, fight back.

The answer is a union leadership that demands massive new investment in school facilities, training, and resources. Can’t do it because of the economic crisis? Wrong, this is exactly when they ought to be investing. They find trillions to “rescue” the banks. Right now, a quarter of NYC schools don’t have gyms, and 70 percent don’t meet state requirements for hours of physical education’ Of all schools in the Bronx, 22 percent don’t have outdoor physical education activities at all.

And where are the art and music teachers? In the ATR pool or on the unemployment line.

–Marjorie Stamberg

Oppose Obama/Duncan Corporate Education “Reform”

Build a Class-Struggle Opposition

The entire program of the UFT leadership is class collaboration. This is expressed politically, as the UFT invests big bucks and membership hours in electing Democrats (and sometimes maintaining a benevolent neutrality for Republicrats like Bloomberg, not to mention the John Dewey award they gave Republican governor Pataki). Often this strategy is a total flop, but even when they “win” – as with the election of Barack Obama as president – the result is that the hand of anti-union education “reformers” is strengthened. The election of an African American as president represents an important social change in this country founded on chattel slavery, where racist violence against blacks, Latinos, Asians and immigrants continues to this day. But Barack Obama is a friend of the big corporations and military, not a champion of the ghetto poor.

Class Struggle Education Workers did not support the election of Obama-Biden and warned that Democrats’ education agenda was almost identical to that of the right-wing Republican McCain-Palin ticket – as Obama himself said in the debates. The struggle against racism in the schools must be a struggle against the capitalist system that fosters it. Formal educational segregation in the U.S. continued until the 1950s and schools are now as segregated as ever. And Obama supports this with his talk of school choice and opposition to “forced” busing. The Democratic president is using the economic “stimulus” funds to push charter schools and “pay for performance” plans (quintupling the amount of federal money to finance “merit pay” schemes, now up to half a billion dollars).

The CSEW has built and participated in united-front actions bringing together different groups, even as we have important differences with them. A genuine opposition in the UFT must be based on a program of class struggle against the class collaboration of the union leadership. Centrally, we oppose support for any capitalist party or politician, calling to build a workers party to struggle for a workers government. It will take a revolution in education to make the schools into centers of learning and emancipation for all.

There is a war going on against the unions, and you can’t defeat it by endlessly retreating. The sellouts by the UFT leadership have soured many teachers on the union. Many younger teachers, pressured by all-powerful principals and subjected to a barrage of anti-labor propaganda, have no experience of a union the actually fights for the membership, instead of giving back bit by bit. All this could be changed by a union leadership that actually seeks to mobilize the membership, and to place the union in the forefront of struggle on behalf of the working people, oppressed minorities and immigrants who form the vast majority of New York City’s population. We need to start building that leadership now.

On the Healthcare Crisis

2009-09-16T10:30:00.014-04:00

On the Health Care Crisis

16 September 2009

1. A burning issue in class struggles in the United States is the crisis of health care, with an estimated seventy million people uninsured or underinsured, untold numbers pushed into bankruptcy by medical costs, and millions more bound to unsatisfactory jobs for fear of losing their costly and insufficient healthcare. With its grotesque class and race inequalities, denial of medical care to millions of poor and working people, and domination by outright criminal insurance and pharmaceutical monopolies, the “health care system” is a dramatic condemnation of American capitalism. We call for full socialized medicine, while recognizing that only through a socialist revolution in the U.S., and in the most powerful capitalist countries throughout the world, can full access to high-quality comprehensive healthcare be provided for all.

2. The current spectacle in Washington underscores the need for class-struggle militants to oppose the attacks of Obama’s health care plan on immigrants, unionized workers and Medicare benefits. Clearly, the Democratic administration’s objective is not to see that health care is available to all, but to respond to major capitalist forces concerned about rising health-care costs at the same time as it seeks the favor of the insurance and pharmaceutical giants, who were major contributors to Obama’s election campaign and who stand to rake in billions from the extension of insurance under his plan.

3. The reactionary nature of the “debate” between the capitalist parties is illustrated by Obama pledging that “illegal” immigrants would not be covered, only to be interrupted by a frenzied Republican congressman screaming “You lie!” As bourgeois politicians compete over who is the most effective enemy of the oppressed, it has never been more urgent to fight for labor to break from all wings of the ruling class. Having worked overtime to spread illusions in Obama, the unions’ bureaucratic leadership preaches submission, passivity and collaboration in the face of escalating attacks on the working people. Key to defending the most basic rights and conquests of the workers and oppressed is the building of a class-struggle opposition in the unions, committed to the struggle for a workers party and workers government.

4. The demand for a “national single-payer health care system” has been put forward as a call for providing comprehensive healthcare, including to undocumented immigrants, within the present U.S. capitalist system. Although it leaves the providing of health care in private hands, if actually carried through, such national health insurance would substantially benefit millions of working people, and would also represent a political defeat for the enormously wealthy private health insurance industry that profits from death and disease. Thus, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) gives critical support to this demand. While rejecting “popular-front” strategies which would tie this struggle to the Democratic Party, we will participate where appropriate in united-front actions and protests around this issue. At the same time, we recognize that were the single-payer plan to be implemented, the capitalist system would continue to place profit-seeking pressure on it such that, even on its own terms, the call for comprehensive coverage would be distorted. Access to healthcare is further impacted by systems of oppression that are manifested in the allocation of both power and resources within a given society: for example, housing, education, the criminal injustice system, and the limitations on democratic rights inherent in capitalism.

5. Although every other advanced capitalist country has such a system, given the sway of “free market” ideology in the U.S., even national health insurance, let alone socialized medicine, would likely not be won short of a mass upheaval threatening the bourgeoisie with the spectre of socialist revolution. Having long since become a brake on human progress, capitalism rips up past gains of the working class and proves incompatible even with lasting reforms. This fundamental aspect of capitalism in the “imperialist epoch” has been demonstrated with particular force since the 1970s – a striking example being the case of open admissions at CUNY, a significant gain which the rulers of New York City began to dismantle almost as soon as it was won. When the bourgeoisie is forced to “give” concessions with one hand, it seeks to take them away with the other. Thus, while supporting every real, even partial gain, we link this always and everywhere to the question of power, that is, for the working class to take power into its own hands in alliance with all the oppressed.

PSC elections: Start Building a Class-Struggle Leadership

2009-04-12T13:42:00.003-04:00

Class Struggle Education Workers Statement on the Elections in the Professional Staff Congress

We Need to Start Building a Class-Struggle Leadership

This month, elections for union office are being held in the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York. They take place in the context of the capitalist economic crisis and ruling-class attacks against workers, students and public education itself, while under Barack Obama the U.S. government continues its wars of imperial occupation and bails out the banks. As layoffs of adjuncts and other “contingent” workers mount, the Democrat-controlled state legislature has – at the request of the CUNY Board of Trustees! – imposed tuition hikes as part of its package of draconian cuts and hikes.

In the PSC elections, two slates are once again presenting candidates. Strikingly, the leaders of one slate actively campaigned for the same Democratic Party that has imposed the draconian budget cuts affecting us, while the other is headed by a spokesman for the Republican Party. Founded last fall, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) stands for an independent program of class struggle, to mobilize education workers as part of a general counteroffensive by labor and all the oppressed against the capitalist onslaught. While at this time the CSEW does not have the resources to present candidates of its own for university-wide offices, we seek to build an independent class-struggle leadership, opposing both of the contending slates.

The Right-Wing CUNY Alliance

PSC members are right to be revolted by the “CUNY Alliance,” the right-wing challenger slate. The CUNY Alliance pledges to be as cozy as can be with management, and denounces “theatrics,” “strike threats” and “noisy demonstrations.” Seeking to whip up retrograde sentiment, it derides “social and political activism,” claiming that the incumbent New Caucus “focuses on global politics.” CUNY Alliance spokesmen have sought to witch hunt PSC delegates (including from the CSEW) for daring even to raise the issue of Israel’s bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza. Unsurprisingly, as the New Caucus points out, the Alliance’s candidate for union president is a Republican operative in Hamilton Township (NJ).

One of the CUNY Alliance candidates (for Community College officer) is president of the New York State branch of the sinister, ultra-rightist National Association of Scholars, which denounces open admissions and affirmative action. Marching right behind them is “The Patriot Returns,” an Internet sheet finding itself mysteriously in many a CUNY professor’s inbox, which echoes attacks against CUNY as “the unpatriotic university” (Front Page, The Sun, Post, et al.) and the hate campaigns of the far right.

The Incumbent New Caucus

A recent mailing from the incumbent New Caucus says it has “the capacity to build the labor movement the current moment demands.” On the contrary, the New Caucus has shown that it is incapable of genuinely fighting for the interests of all CUNY faculty, students and staff, as well as working people generally. The reason for this is that it is beholden to the Democrats, one of the twin parties of capital in the United States and the one currently in power in New York and nationally.

What the current moment demands is a class-struggle labor movement willing and able to take on the devastating attacks on workers’ standard of living and basic rights, obscene bailouts of Wall Street speculators, the escalating ruling-class war on labor and the oppressed “at home” and abroad. Why is the current labor leadership unable to do this? Most fundamentally, because it chains the unions to the bosses’ rules, institutions, parties and politicians. There is no use denying the fact: It is the Democrats that are conducting the current round of attacks on CUNY, its workforce and students. Yet, rather than advance the strategy or resources necessary to organize those most affected by these attacks, let alone prepare for strike action, the New Caucus supports these very same Democrats. Nor is it alone: last year the New York State Union of Teachers, to which the PSC is affiliated, contributed $11,000 to Governor Paterson’s campaign funds (even though he is not running for any office now).

In its election statement in the PSC Clarion (March-April 2009), the New Caucus boasts that it negotiated “one of the best contracts the PSC has achieved – in record time.” Yet in fact, the New Caucus union leadership sold out CUNY “part-time” faculty, who toil for what are literally poverty wages with no security of employment. As every adjunct and “contingent” CUNY worker knows, this contract deepened the rampant inequality of CUNY’s two-tier (more accurately, multi-tier) labor system, while devastating job insecurity was left in place and is taking its toll in adjunct layoffs today. As for the “record time” in which the contract was negotiated, what this really means is that they shoved it down our throats. They rushed it through a single Delegate Assembly meeting, and refused to create a special contract discussion bulletin even when dozens of delegates and alternates called for one to be established. The duct-tape gags that some adjuncts and grad students put over their mouths at that DA symbolized the travesty of real union democracy that occurred.

After new promises of initiating a massive campaign to organize adjuncts right after the contract was signed, the New Caucus leadership initiated a campaign, all right – to get out the vote for Democrat Obama in Pennsylvania! Their campaign literature states that when the initial $700 billion bailout was proposed, “the PSC was the leading voice in the effort to organize a demonstration supporting labor’s position” – in fact the protest’s slogan of “no blank check” for Wall Street was merely a quotation from Obama, who has now poured trillions into Wall Street’s gullet while drastically escalating the war in Afghanistan and continuing the imperialist occupation of Iraq.

Bowing to the Right

Right-wingers seek to discredit the union itself because delegates exercised their democratic right to debate proposed resolutions on Gaza at the January Delegate Assembly. Despite the rightists’ claims, New Caucus leaders did not push for any straightforward condemnation of Israel’s war crimes, or even of its bombing of our fellow university workers in Gaza. In fact, the “even-handed” resolution some New Caucus supporters had proposed was withdrawn and replaced by one vowing to…“take no position” at this time. Thus, shamefully, as Israeli militarists massacred the Palestinian Arab population and bombed a Palestinian university and schools, the New Caucus couldn’t even condemn this atrocity.

The pattern is a familiar one, with fear of right-wing attacks pushing self-styled progressives ever further from their ostensible goals. In reality, determined struggle by supporters of Class Struggle Education Workers has been required time and again to get the union to take even minimal stands on fundamental issues of working-class solidarity – from the call to free death row black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal to support for last year’s courageous strike by the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation in defiance of the island’s equivalent of New York’s “slave labor” Taylor Law. When NYC transit workers went on strike in 2005, calls on the PSC leadership to seize the moment for a real solidarity mobilization fell on deaf ears, even though the strike was the biggest challenge in years to the very same Taylor Law that seeks to illegalize any kind of “job action” at CUNY.

Last September, the PSC’s New Caucus leadership wouldn’t endorse a demonstration by CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) at Governor Paterson’s office to protest budget cuts and tuition hikes. Reason? They were holding sensitive negotiations with the Governor over state spending on CUNY, and did not wish to upset or embarrass him. At another demonstration initiated by the CCU at the December Board of Trustees meeting, New Caucus leaders collaborated with forces that sought to undermine the protest and turn it into cheerleading for the Democrats. Their call for a “New New Deal” is actually a way to highlight support for the very capitalist party and government that are attacking CUNY faculty, students and staff. Meanwhile, we are repeatedly hearing it asserted in different forms that the CCU is not part of the union, when everybody knows that CCUers have signed up hundreds of people for the PSC.

Not “Lesser-Evilism” but a Program of Class Struggle

Student protesters marching to the 75,000-strong March 5 NYC labor rally chanted “Students and labor: shut the city down!” But with the Democrats in power, labor officialdom deepens its commitment to the practice of collaboration with the ruling class. The wholesale attacks we are seeing today will not be defeated by a strategy that not only centers on lobbying the politicians leading the assault on CUNY and the working class but seeks to “partner” with CUNY management in the process.

Some union members who are critical of the current leadership nonetheless urge support to the New Caucus as a “lesser evil,” arguing that this is “just being realistic.” But it is very unrealistic to believe that supporting class collaboration will somehow ease the way for militancy.

In its parallel to the national political scene, the “lesser evil” argument underscores the fundamental issue of labor’s subordination to the bosses’ parties. While the election of the first black president represents a significant social shift in a country that was built on slavery, politically Obama’s administration is a facelift for the dictatorship of capital – from the bailouts, gutting of auto workers’ right to strike (as part of the auto “bailout”) and pushing anti-teacher “merit pay” to murderous U.S. drone attacks that are driving hundreds of thousands out of their homes in Pakistan today. Instead of accepting the rigged “rules of the game” of ruling-class politics, we need a class-struggle workers party.

The logic of lesser-evilism leads away from rather than toward class struggle. It is how capital gets its destructive, profit-driven way, one election after another, be it in the form of the Democratic Party, or those who help subordinate our union to that party today. The interests of CUNY workers and students are incompatible with those of the arrogant CUNY administration and the bankers and real-estate speculators of the Board of Trustees.

We believe that the union should fight for full restoration of open admissions and for no tuition, with a living stipend to make it possible for students without financial resources to study. While in its “security” frenzy the administration is trying to turn the 19 campuses of the City University into gated communities, we call to eliminate the turnstiles, which are a pretext for increasing police control and repression. The Board of Trustees should be abolished, placing CUNY under the control of teachers, students and workers.

The most urgent needs and aspirations of millions of workers, youth, immigrants and members of oppressed communities throughout New York and beyond – our real allies for the struggles that need to be waged – are counterposed to the interests of the ruling class. To defeat the enemies of public education and the basic interests of the working people, we need to unleash the working-class power chained by the program of subordination to capital and its spokesmen. It is this perspective of class struggle that represents a real way out as we face the consequences of capital’s economic crisis today.

2009-02-05T15:47:00.005-05:00

No to Mayoral Dictatorship Over the Schools!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

This year the state law that established mayoral control of New York City schools is up for renewal. Bloomberg has launched an expensive PR campaign to continue his personal dictatorship, which allows him to ride roughshod over the objections of teachers and parents. The UFT has just come out with a report on school governance which would only slightly modify the present system, reducing the number of mayoral appointees on an educational policy council from eight to five. The mayor would still have control, the chancellor would serve at his whim. Teachers, students, parents and staff would have no say at all.

The Independent Community of Educators (ICE) has presented a minority report, which the bureaucracy’s Unity Caucus has tried to suppress, calling for more “checks and balances.” A central board would name the chancellor, with three mayoral appointees and one union appointee. Class Struggle Education Workers stands instead for a system in which policy is set and all school leadership and central administrators are named by councils of democratically elected delegates of teachers, students, parents and workers at the school, district and citywide level. Such delegates and councils would be subject to recall at any time. For teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools!

2009-02-05T15:40:00.007-05:00

The UFT Must Say Loud and Clear:

NO LAYOFFS, NO GIVEBACKS!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

To download leaflet, click on image at right

On January 28, NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein testified before the New York State legislature saying that the slashing of $1.4 billion in funds for city schools could lead to the layoff of 15,000 teachers and “school-based personnel” – i.e., not the suits at Tweed. Some layoffs could even begin this school year, he insinuated. While complaining about the $700 million cut in Governor David Paterson’s budget he has said nothing against the $500 million cut in city funds ordered by his boss, Mayor Bloomberg. Two days later, the mayor presented his “doomsday” budget, threatening that if money isn’t forthcoming from Albany, the Department of Education would fire 14,000 educators, plus dropping another 1,400 positions as teachers retire or leave, along with laying off 8,000 other city employees.

Bloomberg and Klein are well aware that there would be hell to pay if they ordered layoffs on this scale, focusing on teachers. No doubt some of the bluster is scare tactics to get the attention of the governor and state legislature. According to all reports, $1.6 billion of the federal “stimulus” bill is earmarked for New York City schools. But city rulers are intent on using the “opportunity” of the economic crisis to go after the municipal unions, first and foremost the United Federation of Teachers. In presenting his NYC budget, the mayor called for city workers to pay 10 percent of health care premiums, and to require that new employees work longer and retire at a later age to be eligible for city pensions. The union cannot duck or sidestep this threat. The UFT must insist that there be no layoffs and no givebacks, period.

Using the announced budget cuts as an excuse, Klein is also trying to get out from under state mandates to use funds to relieve overcrowding in the jammed city schools and to make up for decades of deliberate neglect of schools in impoverished communities of color. He asked the legislature to give the DOE more “flexibility” to spend money for “core instructional services” (meaning that he could ignore requirements that state funds be used to reduce class size) and to let it “make school cuts more even” (so he could rip up stipulations that schools in impoverished districts be given extra resources). The chancellor also called for the elimination of the Board of Ed Retirement System. The Bloomberg/Klein wish list is part of the ongoing ruling-class assault on teachers and public education generally.

The Democratic governor and “independent” (ex-Democrat, ex-Republican) billionaire mayor have thrown down the gauntlet. UFT president Randi Weingarten rightly responded that every layoff of a teacher is cutting services to children. What she did not do was say straight-out that the threatened cutbacks and layoffs must be fought tooth and nail, and call on parents and working people generally to join the fight to defeat this attack on their children’s education. As usual Weingarten tried to sidestep the fight and pare down the cutbacks. At the December UFT Delegate Assembly she made a PowerPoint presentation repeatedly saying that “I cannot tell you that we can mitigate all of these cuts.” Delegates got the message: they should go back to the membership and prepare them to take a hit. This is dead wrong.

In her press conference responding to Bloomberg’s threat of 15,000 layoffs, the UFT president said, “We know times are tough and that everyone needs to share in making sacrifices, but this is shockingly disproportionate and unfair.” No, everyone doesn’t need to “share the sacrifice.” The Wall Street bankers still gave themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses, even after sinking the capitalist financial system in a sea of speculation and debt. Millions of workers, on the other hand, whose wages have relentlessly fallen for more than three decades, are losing their jobs and their homes. The union should say unambiguously: working people didn’t make this crisis, and we won’t pay for it.

But the UFT tops won’t say this, because they are beholden to the Democratic Party and American capitalism, of which it is a mainstay. Randi Weingarten and the UFT leadership endorsed Paterson when he ran for lieutenant governor together with the ignominiously departed Elliot Spitzer. Weingarten supported Bloomberg’s bid for mayoral control of the schools, and in fact came out for that back in May 2001, under the rabid labor-hating mayor Giuliani! Last year, as the new president of American Federation of Teachers as well as the UFT, she backed Barack Obama for president.

We have noted the important social shift represented by the election of a black president in this country founded on slavery, although American schools are as segregated today as they were half a century ago. But unlike virtually every sector of the education “community” – from school chancellors to union leaders and union opposition groups – as well as the vast majority of the left, Class Struggle Education Workers did not support Democrat Obama for president. Instead, we warned against illusions in this capitalist politician who stood for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the program of corporate education “reform.”

Currently, Weingarten and Bloomberg are looking to the $100 billion in money for education in Obama’s stimulus bill in order to pressure Paterson to bail out New York City schools. But as the UFT bureaucracy pulls out the stops to get the “economic recovery” bill through Congress, they don’t mention that the House version contains $200 million for a “Teacher Incentive Fund” for “merit pay” schemes, $25 million for charter schools and $250 million for state data systems. According to House Education Committee chairman George Miller, these items were inserted at the request of the Obama administration and are likely to be in the final bill.

So in Albany it is Democratic governor Paterson who is calling for cutting $700 million from the NYC schools budget. In Washington, it is Democratic president Obama and the Democratic Congress who are pushing “performance pay” and charter schools. As usual, the teachers unions leaders argue “it could have been worse.” Going down this path they have already given up or whittled down quite a number of union gains, and are preparing to do so again. Last November 16, shortly after Obama’s election, Randi Weingarten declared at the National Press Club in Washington that “as a pledge of shared responsibility,” with the exception of vouchers, “no issue should be off the table.” And in the looming battle over D.C. schools, according to the Washington Post (1 February) the AFT president said she is willing to “modify tenure” to allow removal of “underperforming” teachers in “humane, fast and fair ways.”

It is a total myth that poor teachers are responsible for poor education in run-down inner city schools. It is the deliberate, massive, racist underfunding of urban education by capitalist rulers who are deeply hostile to public education, seeking wherever possible to privatize it and elsewhere to bend it to the needs of corporations. They seek to create a two-tier system in which high quality education is available only to a select minority, and to bust the unions which stand as an obstacle in their path. This program is shared by both the Republican and Democratic parties, and rather than fight it head-on, the labor bureaucracies at most try to slow down the erosion of gains won through labor struggle. In seeking to have “a seat at the table,” they feed the union-busters’ lies and pave the way for the gutting and ultimate destruction of their own unions.

To resist this offensive, the UFT should seek a fighting alliance of labor including municipal workers unions and the powerhouse of NYC labor, Transport Workers Union Local 100. It must be prepared to use labor’s most powerful weapon, the strike, which means confronting the state Taylor Law which outlaws this fundamental right for government workers. This would require a mobilization of all city labor. In its 2005 strike, the TWU demonstrated that it had the power to tie up the city, the center of international finance capital. That fight was over the precise issue that Mayor Bloomberg is now posing for all city workers: forcing workers to pay for health care and attacking pension rights. But the transit workers were undercut by their own leadership, which never wanted the walkout, and by backstabbing from Randi Weingarten, who refused to publicly support the strike and instead told TWU leader it would be disastrous to continue.

Facing the threat of mass firings, the United Federation of Teachers should declare that it will not tolerate any layoffs, that it will not consent to givebacks of health care and pensions that are some of the few benefits for overworked and underpaid educators. It should defend tenure to the hilt, pointing this does not mean the right to a job for life but only that after three to five years in the system, teachers cannot be fired without cause. Those who want to do away with tenure want precisely to establish a management dictatorship in the schools in which they can throw out any teacher they don’t want, for whatever reason. In Washington and New York it is likely that the unions will be offered a “deal”: weaken tenure (i.e., the already tenuous job security) in exchange for limiting layoffs. The unions’ answer must be a resounding NO!

As in every class struggle, this is fundamentally a political fight. So long as the unions are chained to the Democratic Party of Obama and Paterson, you will see your job protections, health care, pensions and other union gains steadily whittled away until there is virtually nothing left. Already many younger teachers see the UFT as nothing but a health insurance provider, and now that is threatened. To win we need to throw off the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, break the stranglehold of the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party.

2009-01-22T14:45:00.007-05:00

New York City Teachers Stand Up for ATRs

Part of the demonstration outside NYCDOE headquarters, Nov. 24.

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

Hundreds of New York City teachers and supporters rallied at the headquarters of the New York City Department of Education headquarters at Tweed Courthouse on November 24. They were protesting the DOE offensive, echoed by the media, against 1,500 teachers placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool due to the endless school “reorganizations” ordered from Tweed. Another 100+ first-year Teaching Fellows faced dismissal by December 5 if they do not find positions. (As a result of a grievance filed by the union, this deadline was pushed back to the beginning of February 2009.)

The teacher bashing is ultimately in the service of union-busting, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein take aim at teacher tenure. Those placed in ATR status include some of the most experienced and dedicated teachers in the system. This is no accident. Klein wants these teachers “terminated,” as he put it. Partly it’s to save bucks, so they can hire two beginning teachers for the price of one senior teacher. Partly, Klein wants to pit senior teachers and newer teachers against each other, just like he wants to foster “competition” between teachers with so-called “merit pay.” And in large part, it is to uphold the corporate principle that the principals run the school and can hire whomever they want, seniority and tenure be damned. That is, until “underperforming” principals as well get axed by the management “experts” at Tweed who know nothing of education.

An Ad Hoc Committee to Defend ATRs was set up last September following the DOE/media threats against these teachers. The Committee issued a fact sheet that was widely distributed around the system, and launched a petition campaign calling on the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to hold a citywide union mobilization to defend the ATRed colleagues. Hundreds of teachers at more than 100 schools signed the petitions. As a result of this work, the UFT agreed at its October 15 Delegate Assembly to sponsor a rally to show support for ATRS and demand that no new hiring take place until ATRs receive permanent placements.

However, seeking to undercut the mobilization, which it only reluctantly agreed to in the first place, a few days before the rally the UFT and DOE signed a side agreement to encourage, but not require, the placement of ATR teachers. On the day of the rally the UFT leadership held an “informational session” at union offices to explain the side agreement, and even stationed some flunkeys at Broadway and Chambers to re-route arriving teachers away from the rally. But despite this active sabotage, as the UFT tops were sipping wine and munching cheese at 52 Broadway while patting themselves on the back for their “victory,” some 225 teachers rallied in support of the ATRs at Tweed Courthouse. After 1 hour and 45 minutes, the suits finally arrived.

It was a real teacher rebellion. Numerous teachers, social workers, counselors, school staff and supporters spoke from the open mike about their ideas, their stories, their struggle. Every single person who came played an important role in building it at their schools, their committees, and among their friends. Speakers said that while hopefully some ATRed teachers will get positions from the agreement, it does not change the basic structure, which continually produces hundreds of new ATRs, as the DOE keeps shutting down schools, its favorite ploy to shirk responsibility for its own failure to improve education. The demonstrators vowed to continue to struggle for a job freeze until all ATRs who want them have positions.

When the UFT leaders showed up around 6:15 p.m. along with several dozen rank and file UFTers, the demonstrators started a spirited march around the DOE/Tweed Courthouse chanting. Facing shouted objections when she started to start the "official rally" while the march was underway, UFT president Randi Weingarten waited until they returned from the walkaround. After she had spoken, a request was made that Marjorie Stamberg of the ATR support committee be allowed to speak. This was angrily refused. Teachers started chanting to let Stamberg speak, and finally Weingarten had to agree. So the message of the rally was gotten out again, that it was grass-roots organizing in the schools that built this rally, and we need to keep up the struggle.

There were many chants and shouts of “Bring Back Seniority” directed at the Unity leadership--an understanding that it was the sellout of the 2005 contract which has in good part led to this mess we're in. After awhile, when the leadership kept repeating “Let Teachers Teach,” the crowd chanted back, "Place ATRs!"

At the speak-out, which lasted for well over an hour, there were many powerful voices. One of the first speakers was Dr. Lezanne Edmond, Ph.D. in education, literacy specialist and an ATR! She said "we have to stop making education a business and get back to the business of education." Among the speakers were John Lawhead from Tilden High School in Brooklyn, where they have lost many ATRs; Robert Bobrick who came with a group of teachers and students from Lafayette High School; Michael Fiorillo, chapter leader at Newcomers HS, colleagues from the “rubber room;” Christine Grassman from GED-Plus; Angela DeSouza from TAGNY, Keith Brooks from Restart. Dan Feldman spoke from the Teaching Fellows.

There were speakers from ICE (Independent Community of Educators), Teachers for a Just Contract, Progressive Labor Party, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a student from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the Support Committee for the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR), and others. Everybody wanted to talk, and did. There was a class of 30 students with their teacher from the Harry Van Arsdale Labor Studies Program at SUNY, who came to observe labor struggle in action.

At the speak-out, and again from the UFT bullhorn, Marjorie Stamberg of the CSEW called to “smash the Taylor Law” which keeps us from exercising labors powerful weapon – the strike. The main way the labor bureaucracy ties workers to the bosses is through what Daniel De Leon called “the labor lieutenants of capital.” We need a class- struggle leadership, a break from the Democrats and Republicans, and a workers party and workers government, she concluded.

The union leadership wanted to have at most a celebration of their side agreement. Hundreds of union rank and filers showed they were determined to keep up the struggle, not just for the ATRs but against all the anti-union attacks coming down the pike in this economic crisis. There is a lot of work to do, but November 24 was a great beginning.

After November 24...

2009-01-22T13:00:00.001-05:00

After November 24…
(A Contribution to the Discussion)

Recent postings by Angel Gonzalez and Sean Ahern underscore a broader discussion that has gained force in the wake of our successful demonstration in defense of teachers being held in the limbo of the Absence Teacher Reserve this past November 24. After years of givebacks, as the UFT leadership abandons one gain after another while critical voices in the union are marginalized; in the face of a broad offensive to gut public education, which puts children last and ensures that no vendor is left behind, how can we take the readiness to fight that energized everyone on November 24 and go forward.

What gave the mobilization for the ATRs its energy was that it was a united-front action built by union activists which drew in several opposition groups, as well as many unaffiliated teachers – because we all understood the common danger and the need for a powerful response. The slogan, “If you’re not an ATR today, you could be tomorrow” summed it up. That’s why we fought for it to be an official union demonstration – this affects everyone. And that’s why teachers and other school workers turned out in a real teacher rebellion despite the best efforts of the UFT leadership to divert and derail the struggle.

As both Angel and Sean note, the ATR issue is the “tip of the iceberg.” It is the current point of attack of the privatizers and corporate “reformers” who are waging a frontal assault on public education. A few months ago, the issue was “merit pay.” Tomorrow it will be teacher tenure. But it’s important to see the big picture: that beyond the particular attacks, there’s a war going on here, a class war. And if it’s “one-sided class war,” as many have commented, that’s because of the role of the labor bureaucracy in keeping workers in check. It’s not about Randi Weingarten personally.

The united front is a method for common action. It is not the basis for building an on-going opposition to the present Unity Caucus bureaucracy, which is busy selling out what union gains are left. For that, we need leadership based on a class-struggle program, and that is what we need to build now.

Angel links the teachers’ struggle to the current financial/economic crisis, the worst since the Depression of the 1930s. This is quite correct – teachers are under attack while the government is showering $8.5 trillion to save the Wall Street banks. To fight this poses questions of class, power and leadership. Sean's posting emphasizes how the struggle against the corporate education “reformers” is a multi-faceted struggle. His emphasis on the racist hiring policies of the Bloomberg/Klein administration is a key element of what we need to fight.

It's also true that the response to this has been fragmented, with a number of different blogs, caucuses and groupings struggling on issues of class size, ATRs, high-stakes testing, union democracy, police brutality against minority students, etc.

The answer is not to simply amalgamate all the opposition groupings in one big mega-caucus. The result will be mega-confusion. Many colleagues were greatly encouraged by the turnout and militancy of the November 24 demonstration. Those of us involved in organizing it were taken by the power of the response, despite the active sabotage by Unity. Running off endless leaflets, and distributing them all over the boroughs more than paid off, as it touched a chord of struggle among teachers.

A common action is one thing, and there will be others. A common caucus, or coalition or “rank-and-file” movement is something else again. The rule in such coalitions is that the program gets determined by the “lowest common denominator,” where everyone can agree. And that LCD will be simple trade unionism. But simple trade unionism in this period where working people are under attack across the board, where every union gain is being taken away, is impossible. In this period of capitalist decay, reformism is a dead-end: if you are not prepared to fight the system as a whole, you are destined to fail.

Case in point: Michelle Rhee and the Washington D.C. school system fight against teacher tenure, which is shaping up as the formative education battle of the next administration. If it’s broken there, the fight will come to New York. If you haven’t seen it, read Time Magazine’s chilling cover story of Rhee as the wicked witch of corporate education reform, complete with broomstick to “sweep away” teachers who don’t toe the line.

You can’t fight against these attacks within the framework of the capitalist system that created them. That is why the UFT leadership supports the thrust of the so-called educational “reforms” (read: union-busting) while trying to make them marginally more palatable. They are loyal to this system and the politicians who uphold it, from Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who enforced the Taylor Law against the TWU, to Republican billionaire Bloomberg, and now Barack Obama. Obama’s election represents a significant social shift in this country, which was founded on chattel slavery and has been a bastion of racism ever since. But Obama in the Oval Office will rule in the interest of capital, from bombing Afghanistan to keeping the U.S. in Iraq to “reforming” D.C. schools.

We also need to be clear on the nature of the union bureaucracy, which acts as a transmission belt from the bosses to the workers, what Daniel DeLeon called the “labor lieutenants of capital.” Randi Weingarten is carrying out the program of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg, while trying to sugar coat the bitter pill so we’ll swallow it.

It’s necessary as well to understand the role of the government and the state. Both the Puerto Rican teachers in their recent strike and New York teachers face draconian anti-labor laws. The minute we step out on strike, when we do, we’ll be hit in the face with the Taylor Law, just as the FMPR had their representation cancelled under Puerto Rico’s Law 45. The fundamental fact is that it is a class struggle, and what we need is a leadership with a class-struggle program and the determination to fight this through.

Program is key. It’s not enough to just oppose Michelle Rhee in D.C. – or Joel Klein as Education Secretary. Those who support Obama will be paralyzed when his education minister comes out for those policies or a soft-core form of them. Weingarten can’t fight them, because she supports the Democratic Party. That’s why she is busy “putting everything on the table,” from charter schools to “merit pay” to teacher tenure. And neither can union oppositionists who join the UFT bureaucrats in supporting Democrats mount a real fight.

Obama is in favor of “performance pay,” doubling money for charter schools, making it easier to fire teachers and reforming rather than abolishing No Child Left Behind. When the UFT/AFT switched its support from Hillary Clinton to Obama, they conveniently “forgot” these facts. Clinton, by the way, has supported “merit pay” since the 1990s when as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas she got a $100,000 contract from one of the main organizations pushing for this.

Likewise, it’s not enough to be for “union democracy.” For example, in opposing Weingarten/Unity’s attempt to gag the opposition in the guise of prohibiting videotaping (which the union has a right to do), some have cited the Landrum-Griffin Act as an authority. This anti-labor law was passed after the Teamsters won the first national Freight Agreement in the mid-’50s, in order to control the labor movement, in the name of defending ... “union democracy.” We want to rip up these labor laws, not stand on them.

What’s next? Taking the union to the bosses’ courts like so many union caucuses have done over the past couple decades. What happens when they win? A new layer of bureaucrats get in, who proceed to sell out struggles because they “owe” the government. Just look at the TWU, and how Roger Toussaint called off the December 2005 strike that shut down the city, and has just signed a no-strike pledge.

These are just a couple of illustrations of why we cannot all “join together” in one big happy opposition family caucus. It will fall apart at the first test. A lot of colleagues have done a lot of good work on class size, on ATRs, on high-stakes testing and other issues. They should continue to do so. It’s necessary to address other issues as well, including immigrants’ rights. There has to be a serious discussion about the history and future of this union, from the “AFL-CIA” “state department socialist” Albert Shanker, to his wannabe imitators of the fourth reincarnation.

I am putting forward the program of the Class Struggle Education Workers, a newly formed group including members of the UFT, PSC and other education workers. The issue of public education today raises every question of racism, class and imperialism. As we fight on every issue of social justice, we need to understand their roots in and to struggle against the capitalist system as a whole. That’s why we call for a class-struggle workers party.

We will be proposing a public forum on the battle over public education, in the hopes of furthering this crucial discussion. In the meantime, I encourage people to read our CSEW leaflet that was distributed at the November 24 demonstration and the CSEW program on our web page: edworkersunite.blogspot.com.

Marjorie Stamberg
December 2, 2008

2008-12-24T14:11:00.015-05:00

Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter
No. 1, November-December 2008

CUNY Adjuncts, Students Launch Fight to
Stop Tuition Hike, Budget Cuts and Layoffs

To see the full Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter in pdf format, click on the image to the right.

HUNTER COLLEGE, NYC, November 12 – The plaza outside the Hunter West Building rang with chants: “No budget cuts, no tuition hike!” “Lay off [CUNY chancellor] Goldstein, not adjuncts!” Organized by CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), the rally protested an announced $600 tuition hike, together with $51 million in CUNY budget cuts (just for starters) which have started to bring layoffs of adjuncts and other “part-time” workers. Departments at several CUNY campuses are announcing course cancellations and the formation of jumbo class sections, pushing faculty to take on more students.

“Join us in saying: NO layoffs, NO cuts in classes, faculty or staff; NO tuition hike; and NO to CUNY’s two-tier labor system. YES to saving our jobs, YES to what our students need, YES to defending public education!” read the leaflet calling the protest, which drew over 200 students together with “contingent” and full-time faculty. The event gained wide coverage in English- and Spanish-language TV, radio, and print media.

“We have to unite faculty and students to stop this attack,” exclaimed a sophomore, who added: “the best teachers I’ve had were adjuncts.” Organizers were delighted by the participation of Hunter undergraduates, at least twenty of whom got up to give the first protest speech of their lives. Not the last, though: “This fight is only beginning,” several declared. As the capitalist financial meltdown continues, Governor David Paterson is calling the legislature back to enact more cuts. “Meanwhile, bankers got more than $700 billion, and they keep getting more,” one freshman said from the soapbox (actually a plastic milk crate).

Many of the impromptu student speakers related how difficult it already is for them to stay in school, as tuition, fees and living costs collide with parents’ job losses. One sophomore said, “They’re trying to destroy public education and replace it with corporate slime.” Students and faculty alike expressed outrage at the new $55,000 raise for Chancellor Goldstein, which pushes his salary and perks past the half-million mark. Making over $200,000 apiece, the top 27 CUNY execs are now paid a total of over $6 million a year. The crowd chanted to cut their pay by “50, 60, 80, let’s make it 100 percent.”

In addition to the economic crisis and Wall Street bailout, several speakers linked the attack on public education to the colonial wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, which go together with war on basic rights “at home.” As an example of how working-class power can be mobilized, some pointed to West Coast longshore workers’ May Day port shutdown against the war. Crucial to a fight against layoffs, cuts and hikes will be bringing in powerful sectors of the city’s labor movement, including immigrant workers, and those not yet organized into unions. With budget cuts aimed squarely at the black, Latino, working-class and poor population, there is a need and potential for large-scale mobilization, which some middle-class sectors, facing impoverishment, would likely support as well. The key is militant, effective mobilization. Leaders beholden to the Democratic Party of Paterson and president-elect Obama are not about to organize this; it’s up to us to make it happen.

The next step by the CCU will be a student/faculty organizing meeting at Hunter on November 18. Student friends of the CSEW have taken the lead in gathering support for this event from innumerable Hunter campus clubs and organizations. Meanwhile, protests are being planned at LaGuardia and a number of other campuses. The Professional Staff Congress (representing 20,000 faculty and staff at CUNY) should immediately call half-day (afternoon) campus assemblies of faculty, students and staff, to prevent any layoffs or course cuts. Up to now, however, PSC leaders have said little and done less.

To win, militant, massive mobilization is required. “You have a right to an education, and it should be affordable, which means free,” adjunct activist Igor Draskovic told the crowd, which responded: “Education is a right – Fight, fight, fight!” The rally’s emcee (also a member of Class Struggle Education Workers) pointed out that the notorious Taylor Law has been used to try to stop people from even uttering the “s-word,” and asked if students knew what the “s-word” is. “Strike, strike, strike,” they erupted. Some chanted, “Student walkout, teachers strike!”

The sentiment was refreshing, especially in light of the virtual non-response so far by union leaders. A few placards asked a pertinent question: “What about ‘a day without adjuncts’?”

To prepare effective action, the basis must be set. This will require persistent, intensive and systematic organizing. If management thinks it can balance the budget on our backs, it’s got another think coming. Our task may be summed up in the motto popularized by Rosa Luxemburg’s comrade, the German revolutionary and anti-militarist organizer Karl Liebknecht:

Educate – Agitate – Organize.

Obama Education Chief Duncan to Lead Attack on Teachers, Public Education

2008-12-17T21:25:00.021-05:00

Chicago Schools Chief Axed Over 400 Educators This Year

Obama Education Chief Duncan to Lead
Attack on Teachers, Public Education

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

So President-elect Barack Obama finally broke the suspense and announced his selection of his “good friend” Arne Duncan, the head of the Chicago Public Schools, as education secretary. Big surprise, Obama has been buddies with Duncan for years. The choice has been portrayed as way to please both sides in roiling debates over education policy pitting the conservative teacher union bashers against liberal ed school professionals who want more investment in schools. “Both camps will be OK with the pick,” said the director of education policy for the Business Roundtable. In fact, Duncan will spearhead the drive for corporate education “reform” that aims at regimenting public schools to fulfill the manpower needs of big business and the military. And the first target in this education war will be teachers.

George Bush’s education czarina Margaret Spellings declared Duncan a “kindred spirit,” a “reform-oriented school leader who has been a supporter of No Child Left Behind and accountability concepts and teacher quality” (Washington Post, December 16). Randi Weingarten, speaking as head of the United Federation of Teachers and the national AFT, gave her nod of assent in advance: “Arne Duncan actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way” (New York Times, December 14). Chicago teachers report that Duncan fired 400 teachers in 2008, even before the current school year began. But don’t worry, says Weingarten, Duncan will fire you “collaboratively.”

Ever since the election of Obama on November 4, the lobbying has been intense over who would get the education post. E-mail petitions circulated against New York schools chancellor Joel Klein or D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee as secretary. For all his talk of “change,” the Democratic president-elect is staffing his administration with the same right-wing crowd that ran the Clinton regime, plus Bush’s current war secretary Robert Gates. But Obama had already made clear he would keep U.S. forces in Iraq and escalate the war in Afghanistan. It was his liberal, labor and reformist leftist supporters who peddled the illusion that he would be an “antiwar” president.

It’s no surprise the Business Roundtable considered the choice of Arne Duncan ideal for Obama. Duncan has ostentatiously presented himself as the champion of corporate school “reform,” emphasizing management control. In April 2007 Duncan axed 775 probationary teachers on one day. When teachers lose their positions due to school closings, they can be fired if another principal doesn’t pick them up, as Joel Klein yearns to do in New York. If you want to know why it’s important to have teacher tenure, look at Chicago.

Arne Duncan presides over the most segregated school system in the United States. In more than 400 of the 600 schools, the student body is over 90 percent black or Latino. Of the more than 40 schools that Duncan has closed, all were black; elite schools, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly white. In the one integrated segment of the public school system, magnet schools, Duncan has raised the possibility of eliminating diversity criteria as “unconstitutional” and contrary to “school choice.”

But it’s oh-so “collaborative,” says Weingarten. It is true that Duncan “collaborates” with Chicago Teachers Union president Marilyn Stewart, who negotiated a disastrous contract last year introducing so-called “merit pay” and legitimating the CPS’ rampant school closings. Stewart rammed the 2007 contract through the CTU House of Delegates, refusing to count “no” votes. She has done nothing to stop the proliferation of charter schools, an Obama favorite.

But the fundamental point is that Obama has been working hand-in-glove with Duncan for years, and this is widely known in educator circles. Back when Weingarten and the rest of the UFT/AFT leadership were pumping for Hillary Clinton, they alluded to Obama’s support for “merit pay,” charter schools and axing “low performing” teachers. But the minute they switched to Obama, all this was conveniently forgotten. Leading up to the election, an article published by The Internationalist (November 2008) noted of the different groups promoting school “reform”:

“For sellout union bureaucrats and would-be union militants alike, their support for the Democratic Party in particular and capitalist politics in general guarantees that they cannot defend education workers from the approaching storm. So long as George Bush was in the White House, they could count on sympathy from liberals and indeed most of the population. But against Obama they will be isolated, and stymied by their failure over the last quarter century to oppose outright and propose a real alternative to big business education policies….”

Arne Duncan as education secretary is the direct result of the “lesser evil” politics that chain teachers to the Democratic Party. We in the Class Struggle Education Workers call instead to build a workers party that can transform public education under a workers government.

Vote Down the Bureaucratic “Gag Rule,” Keep Government Out of Union Affairs!

2008-12-17T12:53:00.009-05:00

Vote Down the Bureaucratic “Gag Rule”
Keep Government Out of Union Affairs!

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

Only a few days after the successful November 24 mobilization at Tweed Courthouse in defense of the ATR teachers, we got some blowback from our union leadership, which had unsuccessfully tried to squelch it. A motion was circulated for the upcoming executive board, and will come up at the December 17 Delegate Assembly. It’s purportedly against the presence of news media, recording, videotaping or transmitting union proceedings. In fact, this is a gag rule.

It’s a given that labor organizations have every right to do business without the prying eyes and ears of management and its hacks and flacks in the media. But that is not what this is about. It grew out of the videotaping, by a union member, not of a regular union meeting, but of a special gathering (complete with wine and cheese) called with the aim of drawing people away from the union protest, which the Delegate Assembly had voted for, outside the Department of Education. But their ploy didn’t work – people came out to the demo in the hundreds.

The leadership could simply rule that there will be no video or audio recordings at meetings and be done with it. But here we have an elaborate resolution about the “free and open debate” in which members can speak “honestly and frankly in union meetings without fear that their words and images will be reproduced in the news media or on the Internet without their knowledge or permission” (our emphasis).

Again in the “resolves” it seeks to demand respect for the right “that their words and images will not be transmitted or reproduced without their permission.” This is not talking about a reporter from the big-business press sneaking into a meeting.

What does this mean? You can’t e-mail back to your chapter what the union reps said at the meeting? That you can’t quote what top union officers said at the D.A. on one of several list serves or blogs? Evidently, only THEY can report on it, and put their own spin on it? In the guise of defending the “words and images” of certain members (the leaders) they really want to stop the words of the membership.

There’s quite a slippery slope here. These open-ended formulations could be used to sanction a UFT member for quoting what an officer (such as president Weingarten) said in her report or discussion at the meeting. While, for now, no specific measures are mentioned, this lays the basis for disciplining dissidents.

What “free and open debate” are they talking about? At the D.A.? You got to be kidding! Two or three delegates get to speak for about one nano-second and the officers drone on for a good hour and a half. Any real discussion is reserved for the last 20 minutes, as most delegates are tromping out of the room. But the bureaucracy has not been able to shut down the free-wheeling discussion on the blogs, which is about the only outlet for real discussion among the union rank-and-file. Our opposition to bonus pay was waged there; our fight to preserve seniority, our struggle to defend the ATRS --- all of these were organized by the rank and file and aided by discussion on the blogs.

Oppose Landrum-Griffin

In objecting to this “inept gag order,” however, a posting on the ICE-UFT blog (November 30) argues that it would be a violation of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. We strongly object to this appeal to one of the most notorious anti-labor laws regularly used by the government to ham-string, “investigate” and interfere with unions’ internal affairs.

There’s a class line here, and this is where we differ from many union oppositions. It’s an elementary labor principle to oppose all intervention by the capitalist government or its courts in union affairs, just like it’s a principle never to cross a picket line.

Landrum-Griffin grew out congressional investigations of labor, following the election of Jimmy Hoffa as president of the Teamsters union in 1957. It was based on the “perception” that the Teamsters Union was corrupt. What they actually perceived was that under Hoffa the Teamsters were rapidly organizing Midwest over-the-road truckers which a few years later led to the first national Master Freight Agreement, which dramatically raised truckers’ wages. They went after Hoffa in an effort to break union power.

From the moment that trade unions appeared, the government, representing the employers has passed thousands of laws to contain and paralyze if not directly outlaw the labor movement. Even where they ostensibly aided union organization such as the 1935 Wagner Act, setting up the National Labor Relations Board, these bodies are now regularly used to prevent workers from organizing.

These days they don’t use crude measures like the “criminal-syndicalism” acts, and instead profess concern for “union democracy.” But you can be sure that when they pretend to guarantee “clean elections” or “membership rights,” they are doing so in order to control the outcome. Various leftist groups that sued the unions under Landrum Griffin (Miners for Democracy, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, New Directions in the TWU and others) used the government to get into office, and then were beholden to them.

From the Taylor Law (used by Democrat Spitzer against the 2005 TWU strike) to Landrum Griffin (prepared by Democrat Bobby Kennedy), to the Taft-Hartley Act (signed by Harry Truman) which provides the basis for anti-strike injunctions, the government is no “friend of labor.” Where there are problems of corruption, violations of union democracy, etc, labor must clean its own house. It’s our union – we need to take it back.

In the meantime, the answer to the gag rule is “blog away”!

Rallies Against Budget Cuts, Layoffs, CUNY Tuition and MTA Fare Hikes

2008-12-16T22:50:00.003-05:00

On December 16, after New York's Democratic governor David Paterson presented his 2009 cutback budget, a rally was held outside Paterson's NYC office, called by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing faculty and staff of the City University of New York (CUNY). CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), a grouping in the PSC speaking for adjunct and other part-time employees, also called to protest there, demanding No Tuition Hike, No Budget Cuts, No Layoffs.

At the end of that rally, which drew several hundred participants, well over 100 demonstrators marched to a second protest outside the Midtown headquarters of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) called by the Take Back Our Union Movement in Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the union representing New York City subway and bus workers. Among the speakers at this demonstration was Sándor John, who teaches labor history at CUNY and is a member of CCU and Class Struggle Education Workers. Below is a video clip of his speech.

Chicago UE Workers Occupy Plant, Electrify Labor

2008-12-07T12:38:00.005-05:00

The following resolution is being circulated by UFT members in the CSEW:

WHEREAS, on Friday, December 5, the owners of the Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago abruptly closed the plant, giving their employees only three days notice, in flagrant violation of the federal WARN Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) requiring 60 days notice or pay for that period; and

WHEREAS, the workers at Republic Windows occupied the plant demanding that they receive more than $1 million in back vacation pay and severance pay owed to them by the company; and

WHEREAS, the plant occupation, a powerful form of labor struggle harking back to the sit-down strikes of the 1930s that built the CIO industrial unions, has been greeted by workers around the country, pointing the way forward; and

WHEREAS, the U.S. government and Federal Reserve are funneling $8.5 trillion to bail out Wall Street and the major banks, including $25 billion to Bank of America which cut off credit to the company; and

WHEREAS, the courageous workers at Republic Windows, including many immigrant workers, must not stand alone against finance capital, and instead should receive active support from all Chicago labor and workers around the country;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the United Federation of Teachers convey its full solidarity with the Chicago sit-in strikers and encourage the Chicago Federation of Teachers to actively join picket lines and protests in support of their union brothers and sisters; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the UFT shall make a substantial donation to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund (37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607); and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the UFT join with unionists around the country, and encourage other New York City unions to do likewise, in picketing Bank of America affiliates in upcoming protest actions.

Below see three short videos on the Republic Windows plant occupation in Chicago from December 6.

Chicago UE plant occupation video #1

Chicago UE plant occupation video #2

Chicago UE plant occupation video #3

Teachers, CUNY, City Workers Under Attack

2008-11-30T21:29:00.005-05:00

The following leaflet by UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers was distributed at the November 24 rally to defend teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve. For more information see the Web site of the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend ATRs

As Gov't Bails Out Bankers

Teachers, CUNY, City Workers Under Attack

Mobilize Class Struggle to Defend Our Jobs, Our Students and Our Rights

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

The United States is in the throes of what is admitted by all to be the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Already more than $1.5 trillion have been budgeted to shore up the banking system, while more than a million workers have lost their jobs this year and millions more are about to be thrown onto the unemployment lines. The predatory Wall Street moguls who set off the crisis with their unbridled speculation gave an ultimatum to Congress to come up with the ransom money (the “bailout”) while working people are shafted. Congress complied.

In New York City, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced multi-billion-dollar cuts in the current budget and more to come. Governor David Paterson is demanding that state workers unions reopen their contracts to give up wage gains already agreed to. Public employees’ pensions are potentially at risk due to the stock market panic and finagling by the reinsurance giants. In the midst of this all-round crisis, the NYC Department of Education has illegally siphoned off millions of dollars mandated by New York State to reduce class size, and refused to give positions to more than 1,500 qualified teachers who are ready, willing and able to teach!

Activists in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have been mobilizing to fight against this latest attack by the DOE and its boss, Mayor Bloomberg. Yet the biggest obstacle to a successful struggle against the endless assault on teachers and municipal workers is the labor bureaucracy which chains the unions to the capitalist system and the Democratic Party in particular. This is made crystal clear as Democrats are about to control the White House and both houses of Congress in Washington, as well as the state house and both branches of the New York state legislature in Albany – and the attacks on working people multiply.

During the 2008 presidential election campaign, the Democratic and Republican candidates echoed many of the same themes on education. Charter schools, “merit pay,” making it easier to fire teachers? Barack Obama and John McCain underscored their agreement. And both praised the viciously anti-labor chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools, Michelle Rhee, who has declared war on the unions and vows to eliminate teacher tenure.

Since the election of Obama, the various Democratic Party constituencies have been lobbying for their preferred policies and their favorite candidates for cabinet posts. In the middle of this wheeling and dealing, the new American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten stepped up to the plate to announce that “as a pledge of shared responsibility,” except for vouchers for private schools, “NO issue should be off the table” so long as it is “good for students and fair to teachers.” And who decides that? For Weingarten, it’s all up for grabs.

In addition to her new post as AFT chief, Weingarten continues to head up New York City’s UFT where she has presided over a steady erosion of union gains, particularly under NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg. In fact, Bloomberg introduced the union leader at her November 16 speech to the National Press Club. Weingarten returned the favor, declaring: “is there a role for differentiated pay – the kind of pay that Mayor Bloomberg and others call merit pay and still others call performance pay? Of course there is.” So much for the fundamental union principle of equal pay for equal work.

The UFT leader’s trademark is to go along with just about every anti-union educational “reform,” unless it affects her dues base, while modifying it slightly, repackaging it as the “least bad” option, and selling it as a “victory.” But each of these “victories” eliminates vital union job protections. This is the logic of “lesser evil” politics common to the labor bureaucracy as a whole, which puts them in bed with capitalist politicians (usually Democrats, but also the occasional Republican like Bloomberg). Weingarten says “collaboration” is key. What she’s talking about is class collaboration, when what’s needed is sharp class struggle to defeat the assault on unions.

The AFT supported Obama because “he said repeatedly that education reform must be done with teachers, not done to teachers.” So with a little stroking, the union misleaders will accept from supposed “allies” like Obama what they bridled at when it came from certified labor haters like Bush. Throw in a couple billion dollars and apply some make-up, and the AFT will accept a “new look” No Child Left Behind act, instead of calling to junk the anti-teacher, anti-student law outright. And when Weingarten talks of “teachers’ buy-in,” she is buying in to the bourgeois lie that teachers are responsible for the sorry state of American schools.

A perfect example of the mess created by the UFT is the current battle over the fate of some 1,400 educators in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), and another 120 first-year Teach Fellows who have not received positions. The highly qualified teachers end up in the ATR pool not because they “incompetent,” as the bourgeois press claims and NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein implies, but because they were “excessed” when their schools or programs were organized out from under them by the Education Department.

In 2005, the UFT leaders bargained away seniority transfer rights in exchange for a salary increase. Where teachers previously were guaranteed a job when schools or programs were eliminated, now they must be rehired by a principal. And under Tweed’s cynically named “Fair Student Funding” formula, school administrators can get two inexperienced teachers for the price of one experienced teacher earning higher pay. Or the principal may not like union activists, or whistle blowers inclined to question some of the shenanigans of school managers. So ATRed teachers sit in sub pools or even do the same job as before, but without the job security of an assigned position.

The bottom line is that under the “business model” education “reform” of Bloomberg/Klein, supported by Democrats from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, administrators are given total authority, until they are unceremoniously bounced by Tweed because they have run afoul of some statistical model based on “high stakes” bubble tests. As long as this is the case, and so long as the union doesn’t buckle on the “no layoffs” clause in the contract or abandon teacher tenure, the DOE’s reorganization mania will continue to produce hundreds of new ATRs every year.

The November 24 rally is demanding that the Department of Education “give assigned positions to all teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve who want assignments before any new teachers are hired.” This was approved at the October 15 UFT Delegate Assembly in an amendment put forward by a rank-and-file ad hoc committee to support the ATRs. The UFT leadership was never enthusiastic about the rally, at one point calling it a candlelight vigil, and did little to prepare for it. Then less than a week before the rally it announced that a side agreement had been signed with the DOE to facilitate placement of ATRs.

The side agreement includes complicated language and funding formulas that would somewhat counteract the present disincentive to hire experienced teachers. This may result in the placement of some present ATRs, which would take some heat off Bloomberg/Klein for refusing to give classes to 1,500 qualified teachers in the middle of an economic crisis, when classes are more overcrowded than ever. But it doesn’t alter the basic frameworks, so there will be more ATRs next year. And as shown in a revealing analysis by James Eterno, it would even create an incentive not to hire ATR teachers until November “when ATRs go on sale” (see “ATR Step Forward?” at iceuftblog.blogspot.com)

In addition, nothing is said in the side agreement about the Teaching Fellows who will be “terminated” if not given a permanent position by December 5. Also, while the new formula applies to centrally funded ATRs (whose schools were closed), it does nothing for school-funded ATRs (whose programs were closed). And in signing the agreement Klein made a point of saying that he had not abandoned his intention to “terminate” ATRs who are not hired by a principal. Far from being a victory, this is an attempt by UFT and DOE bureaucrats try to hide a problem created by abandoning a fundamental union gain.

We UFTers who are members of the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a recently formed union tendency also including members of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York, defend public education against capitalist attack. We fight for all teachers to be given positions, to defend teacher tenure, to abolish disciplinary “rubber rooms” in which teachers subject to unjust accusations are penalized, to restore seniority transfers and for equal pay for equal work. But in addition to upholding basic trade-union rights and opposing corporate educational “reform,” it is necessary to transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed.

Bloomberg/Klein won mayoral control of the schools with the support of the UFT leaders, and seek to give dictatorial control to school managers. The CSEW calls instead for councils of teachers, students, workers and parents to control the schools. Such a genuinely democratic school system would be opposed by the capitalists and Democratic and Republican politicians alike. To fight for such demands it is necessary to prepare the UFT, PSC and all municipal and state employees unions, and win the support of students, parents and workers, to defeat the Taylor Law which outlaws strikes by public employees.

The election of the first-ever African American president signals an important social shift in this country founded on slavery, whose legacy continues today. But even as Democrats and Republicans (and most of the left) talk of a historic election, racism has hardly been overcome: U.S. schools are as segregated as ever, and there was a post-election lynch mob murder of an immigrant on Long Island. And Obama in office will defend the interests of capital – starting with the bailout of Wall Street while ripping up union contracts, starting with the United Auto Workers. He will leave tens of thousands of U.S. colonial occupation troops and mercenaries in Iraq, escalate the war on Afghanistan, expand the bombing of Pakistan and perhaps hit Iran.

The continued imperialist war, the war on working people in the U.S., the “bipartisan” lovefest over corporate “education reform” are all part of a broader capitalist consensus to solve the economic crisis by tightening the screws on the working class. To fight this, the key is a build a leadership on a program of class struggle in opposition to the class collaboration of the present union leaderships. While the labor tops keep on backing Democratic and Republican politicians, we in the CSEW call to oust the sellout bureaucrats and build a workers party to fight for a workers government!

Class Struggle Education Workers Formed

2008-11-30T21:11:00.005-05:00

Class Struggle Education Workers was formed in September 2008 by activists in two New York City education unions: the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), representing public primary and secondary educational personnel, and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents faculty and staff at the City University of New York. We also seek to involve campus and school administrative staff and maintenance workers who are in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as well as other unionized and non-unionized workers. Those initiating the group played leading roles in fights against merit pay and in defense of “excessed” teachers in the NYC schools, in opposition to the “two-tier” labor system at CUNY, in defense of immigrant students and in solidarity with striking teachers in Mexico and Puerto Rico. The felt need was for a grouping to help provide a clear orientation and leadership in the struggle to defend and transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed. This intersects almost every crucial social and political issue of the day and ultimately means bringing down the rule of capital. As this requires a thorough-going break from the entire framework of “business unionism” and the outlook of the union bureaucracy, general calls for more militancy and union democracy alone only lead to a dead end. Instead, the Class Struggle Education Workers is based on a class-struggle program, presented below.

Class Struggle Education Workers' Program

We have formed Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) as part of a broader fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed rather than, as it is at present, an instrument for the disciplining of labor in the interests of capital. The subservience of organized labor goes beyond the PSC, UFT and AFSCME, and we look forward to a class-struggle tendency encompassing militants in a number of unions. We support the basic positions expressed in the Internationalist pamphlets Stop CUNY's Anti-Immigrant War Purge and Marxism and the Battle Over Education. We stand for:

Free public education from kindergarten through graduate school. Abolish corporate-dominated Boards of Trustees and mayoral control of the schools: students, teachers and workers (together with parents at primary and secondary schools) should democratically control schools and universities.

Stop education privatization and making the City University of New York into “Wal-Mart U”! For militant action against deepening inequality at CUNY and throughout the school system. Abolish the two-tier academic labor system that pays adjunct and other contingent education workers poverty wages. Job security, parity and full health coverage for adjuncts and all “part-timers,” including graduate students: equal pay for equal work. Unite against the drive to gut public higher education and turn it into a “platform” for making profits.

Defend and transform public education in the interests of working people and the oppressed. Oppose capitalist corporatization. Cancel all student debt. Living stipend and free housing for students. No to “charter schools” as an opening wedge to privatization. Down with “merit pay” in any form. In UFT: Full-time positions for all teachers “excessed” or “reorganized” out of their jobs (ATRs). Defend tenure, restore seniority, abolish “rubber rooms” that penalize teachers subject to unjust accusations.

Oppose resegregation of schools: separate is not equal. Stop discrimination and racist attacks against black, Latino, Asian and immigrant students. Fight budget cuts, tuition hikes, exclusionary tests and all anti-working-class, anti-minority measures. Restore open admissions, no tuition. Down with the anti-education “No Child Left Behind” act. Stop anti-immigrant “war purges” (like the one CUNY launched in 2001) against undocumented students and workers. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants.

Mobilize the power of labor together with minorities, immigrants and students in an all-out fight to smash the Taylor Law. Keep bosses’ courts out of the unions. Police and military recruiters out of the schools. No cops, prison or security guards in the unions. For a single union of all university workers. Oust the sellout bureaucrats, for a class-struggle leadership.

Parental leave for all. Free childcare on campus, available round the clock for students and employees. Full reproductive rights, including free abortion on demand and full availability of contraceptives; no to reactionary campaigns against sex education.

Defend the rights of labor, minorities, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians. Make PSC defense of Mumia real – mobilize workers’ power for his freedom. Solidarity with teachers and all workers in Mexico, Puerto Rico and elsewhere.

End union support to capitalist politicians (Democrats, Republicans, Greens, et al.). For workers’ strikes against the war – Defeat U.S. imperialism. Oppose U.S. war threats against Iran, Cuba, China, North Korea. For a class-struggle workers' party to fight for a workers' government.

– Original version presented 24 August 2008; this updated version incorporates the changes made at the founding meeting of the CSEW, 26 September 2008.

For more information, write to Class Struggle Education Workers at: cs_edworkers@hotmail.com