Disaster for Poor, Black and Working People – “Opportunity” for Capitalists
New Orleans Schools: Test Lab
for War on Public Education
for War on Public Education
By Mark Lance
 |
| Survivors seek refuge on the roof of Martin Luther King Jr. school following Hurricane Katrina. MLK was the only one of five schools in impoverished black Lower Ninth Ward to be rebuilt. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images) |
“I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”
–Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Washington Post, 30 January 2010
With 100 mph winds and a 12-foot storm surge, Hurricane
Katrina struck New Orleans,
Louisiana on August 29, 2005. As
the storm passed over the city, floodwaters breached the city’s levees and 80%
of New Orleans
was submerged. Nearly 2,000 died, the victims disproportionately black and old.
People drowned in their attics. Bloated bodies floated in the streets. The
heavily black 7th, 8th and 9th wards were especially hard hit. 400,000 people
were displaced, almost three-quarters of them African Americans. More than 80%
of the schools were inundated, 100 out of a total 128 schools severely damaged
or destroyed.
On the tenth anniversary of Katrina, politicians and “education
reform” advocates are hailing the supposedly miraculous transformation of New
Orleans schools due to the introduction of semi-privatized “charter schools.” President
Barack Obama declared that “we’ve transformed education” in New Orleans, proclaiming the city a “laboratory
for urban innovation across the board” and a “model for the nation.” Former
president George Bush, who launched the charterization of NOLA schools, called New Orleans a “beacon for
school reform.” Earlier, Education Week (29
May 2014) called it “a breathtaking
makeover of an urban school system.”
A look at the record tells a very different story.
Concerned educators from New Orleans, and serious education
researchers and advocates of public education around the country, have
underscored how the “turnaround” story is based on manipulated statistics. Mercedes
Schneider, a Louisiana public school teacher
and publisher of the education blog deutsch29 (August 5), summed up her
dissection of the stats: “New Orleans’
post-Katrina state-takeover experiment does not produce miracles.” Another Louisiana educator,
Michael Deshotels, said that the purported success story was a “great big
fraud.” Historian Diane Ravitch wrote on her blog, “No Miracle in New Orleans” (11 June
2012).
Beyond lying with statistics, the more fundamental point
is that education is where race and class intersect, that by far the biggest
factor determining test scores (and the condition of the schools) is poverty,
segregation and socio-economic status. As Charles Gardner and others such as
Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities)
have pointed out, perhaps the best predictor of test results is the student’s
zip code. The “strategy” of the
education “reformers” to produce their bogus New Orleans miracle was brutally simple: push
out black and poor people and close their schools.
At bottom, the hosannas for school “reform” in the Crescent City are not about improving public
education, but the opposite. New
Orleans has been used as a test lab for “transforming”
the school system to serve the interests
of capital. The winners are the privatizers – the numerous vendors, charter
school operators and investors who are making a killing by milking the
education budget, plus the billionaire “reformers” who are pushing to remake
the system in order to supply the labor force needs of corporations. The losers
are the students, teachers and working people, and all those who see quality
public schools as a democratic right for all.
But by examining and drawing the lessons of what happened
in New Orleans,
we can prepare to better fight the “bipartisan” onslaught against teachers, their
unions and students. It’s all part of the one-sided “war on workers” being
waged by virtually the entire ruling class, from Wall Street to the White House
and even Hollywood, which is now regularly churning out “Bad Teacher” movies.
Statistical Flimflam Behind the Wrecking Ball
 |
| More than 80% of New Orleans schools were inundated. 100 out of 128 schools were severely damaged or destroyed. For the capitalist enemies of public education, this tragedy was an opportunity. |
For the people of New
Orleans, particularly those who couldn’t escape the
city, the storm was an unimaginable catastrophe. For the enemies of public education,
Hurricane Katrina was a godsend. The grotesque, if candid, remark by Arne
Duncan, Obama’s education chief, was no off-the-cuff hyperbole. Rather, it is
straight from the playbook of the original “Chicago Boy” economist, Milton
Friedman, author of the “shock treatment” employed by Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet who butchered 30,000 people after seizing power in 1973. Friedman
wrote in the Wall Street Journal (5
December 2005) that:
“Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”
Friedman proposed introducing competition via
a permanent voucher system “to encourage private enterprise to provide
schooling.”
Friedman’s acolytes in Louisiana wasted no time in exploiting their
“opportunity” to remake the city, starting with the people. “We finally cleaned
up public housing in New Orleans,” crowed Republican
congressman Richard H. Baker from Baton
Rouge. “We couldn’t do it but God did” (New York Times 6 June 2006). An atypical
quote from a Republican yahoo? Then how about Times columnist and National Public Radio stalwart David Brooks:
“If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.”
–“Katrina’s Silver Lining,” New York Times (8 September 2005.)
 | |
| Survivors of Katrina in St. Bernard public housing protest over their exclusion from replacement housing after their minimally damaged homes were torn down. (Photo: Bay View [San Francisco]) |
“The
same people”? Brooks was longing to disappear New Orleans’ black and poor. He got his wish.
More than 175,000 black residents left New Orleans in the year
after the storm. As many as 100,000 never returned.
Journalist Naomi Klein cited New Orleans as Exhibit A in her book on The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism (2007). She began her narrative by observing:
“In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid was brought back online, the auctioning off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.”
While national leaders cheered, in New Orleans, charter schools “are seen by
many African-American parents as a way of reversing the gains of the civil
rights movement,” Klein noted. She also linked the New Orleans “remake” to the
U.S. occupation of Iraq two years earlier, where Bush’s “shock and awe” bombing
was followed by “mass privatization [of previously nationalized oil wells],
complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized
government.”
The formula: catastrophe for the masses equals opportunity
for the capitalists. But the “solution” Klein puts forward, “people’s
reconstruction efforts,” is hardly radical but a liberal diversion to avoid the
need to take on the rule of capital.
Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish
School Board (OPSB) got rid of 7,000 school employees, including all the
teachers, by putting them on “disaster leave” without pay. Many were homeless,
most of them black, and all of them represented by the United Teachers of New
Orleans (UTO), at the time the largest union local in the south. The firings
were made permanent in March 2006.
 |
| New Orleans school authorities showed their “appreciation” of teachers by firing 7,000 school employees. Above: library at G.W. Carver High School. (Photo: Times-Picayune) |
Today in New
Orleans, 49% of the schools’ teachers are African
American, down from 71% in 2005. Turnover has nearly doubled since Katrina with
many of the new teachers coming from programs such as Teach for America (TFA) and
lacking a long-term commitment either to teaching or to the city’s residents. According
to a study by the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, more than half of all teachers
have five or fewer years of experience while the percentage of certified
teachers fell from 79% to 56% since 2003.
The Recovery School District (RSD) was created in that
year to run a handful of failing New
Orleans schools. After Katrina, the Louisiana state legislature gave the RSD
control of four-fifths of the city’s schools. The RSD then closed or chartered
every school it re-opened. Seventeen better-performing schools stayed in OPSB,
thereby creating a two-tier system. As of September 2014, all of the schools in
the RSD were publically funded but privately run charters making it the first
all-charter school district in the U.S.
Supporters of school “reform” (charters schools, union
busting and high stakes testing) cite statistics that allegedly confirm the
turnaround of New Orleans’
schools. Most point to an article, “Good News for New Orleans” by Douglas Harris of the
Education Research Alliance (Education
Next, Fall 2015). Harris claims that in 2012, 63% of
children in New Orleans
elementary and middle schools were proficient on state tests as compared to
37% in 2005 and attributes those gains to charter school reforms. Allegedly,
graduation and college entry rates likewise increased.
But Mercedes Schneider reported on her deutsch29 blog that
the state’s own statistics tell a far different story. “New Orleans Recovery
School District ranked
70th out of 73 districts in the state. Its ACT scores are virtually unchanged
over the last three years. The RSD ACT scores are far below the state average”
(Louisiana’s
2015 District ACT Composite Scores, Deutsch29,
5 August 2015). As for the reported improved numbers of college-eligible
students, the RSD’s scores are still below the cutoff for a tuition waiver at Louisiana State University.
Statistics don’t lie but statisticians do.
In Milton Friedman’s 2005 letter to the Wall Street Journal, he refers to
students as “consumers.” Not surprisingly, those pushing a “portfolio
management model” of education resort to the same kind of subterfuges that a
typical corporation does to improve its “bottom line.” An Education Research
Alliance report (March 2015) admitted that in many New Orleans schools, “leaders
used a number of strategies in response to competition …which include
‘glossification,’ or marketing existing school offerings,” and “‘creaming’ and
‘cropping,’ actively selecting or excluding particular types of students.” One
technique for courting more affluent families was an invite-only open house.
It’s clear which students are in demand. So who’s out?
Special education students were pushed from school to school. Non-English
speaking students complained that their civil rights were being violated.
Parents felt elbowed aside by out-of-town “experts.” And always, the discipline
– like silent lunch for kindergarteners. “Expulsions were out of control,”
admitted a former RSD official. “The traditional schools were dumping grounds”
(U.S. News & World Report, 18 August 2015). For example, the George Washington
Carver High
School in the Lower Ninth Ward was given by the RSD
to Collegiate Academies, a charter network notorious for its heavy-handed discipline.
In the 2012-13 school year, the Collegiate Academies had an average suspension
rate of over 62%.
This practice is by no means peculiar to New Orleans, of course. In my own class (New York City adult
education), one of my students has a daughter in a private charter. “They’re
like soldiers,” the mother said. “She can’t wave to me when I see her at
school. She has no friends, because the kids are not allowed to talk to their
classmates.” Her daughter is in the third grade.
One way for a school to elevate its performance numbers is
to simply make dropouts disappear. Every student leaving a Louisiana public school receives an exit
code. Since out-of-state transfers can’t easily be checked, assigning an Exit Code
10 (“Transferred Out of State”) to a student who dropped out would not affect a
school’s graduation rate. In a state audit of a random sampling of exit codes
for the class of 2013, every single New
Orleans record lacked verification.
In another ploy, some school principals decided not to
advertise open spaces and chose to forgo additional funds rather than accept “troublesome”
students. In the words of one principal, “The enrollment game is the game in
town. It’s how we get our funding” (“The Uncounted,” International Business Times, 28 August 2015). Under community
pressure and after a ruling by Louisiana
courts on a suit by the Southern Poverty Law Center that New Orleans schools were violating special-education
students’ civil rights, the RSD has made some changes, but the incentive
remains.
When students are “consumers,” and education is a
commodity, the goal is to get lots of customers into the store. But make sure
they’re the ones you want. As another school leader succinctly put it: “Every
kid is money.”
Winners and Losers: Who Profits from Charter Schools?
New Orleans schools were in terrible shape
prior to the hurricane. A June 2007 study by the UTNO, state and national
teachers union reported, “Before Katrina, well-credentialed veteran teachers
already were in short supply in the city’s schools.” Test scores were among the
worst in the country. In the last state achievement tests before the storm, three-quarters
of 8th graders couldn’t demonstrate basic skills in English and language arts,
while 70% were below basic in math (The
Atlantic, January-February 2007). The
OPSB was $450 million in debt, bureaucratic infighting and corruption among
school board members and administrators were rampant. There were so many
investigations being conducted that the FBI opened an office in the district.
From a pre-Katrina baseline it shouldn’t be too hard to
demonstrate “progress.” When the storm hit, there were 65,000 students in the New Orleans public school
system. Today there are 45,000. By losing tens of thousands of its poorest and
least well-served students, the average score of those that remained is bound
to improve. As one New Orleans
parent wrote to the blog Education Talk New Orleans (September 1):
“10 years ago the state took all of those “bad” schools and promised to do a better job. They never re-opened many of the schools, so automatically by virtue of doing nothing but keeping some schools closed, the RSD can take credit for having fewer failing schools. The state then closed 26 RSD New Orleans schools displacing nearly 5000 students in a 6 years time period. That will certainly get you fewer failing schools. THAT’S PROGRESS! The LDOE even closed 7 of the new charters schools it opened post-Katrina, displacing 1700 of those 5000 students. That is certainly a way to make your charter school performance look better than it actually is.”
“People ask me if things are better 10 years
after Katrina,” a special education and parent leader in New Orleans said. “I say ‘better for whom?’”
For the top performing students in the OPSB schools, maybe things are better. But for special education students, or tens of thousands minority kids
from poor families traumatized by Katrina? Not so much.
The companies producing test and test prep materials are
doing fine. How about charter school executives? Now we’re talking. Kathy
Riedlinger, CEO at the Lusher Charter School
in New Orleans pulled
down $316,306 in 2012. Micky Landry, the top exec of Choice Foundation, got 258
K. (Times Picayune, 9 January 2015). Education bosses in the
Big Apple do even better that their counterparts in the Big Easy. David Lenn
at KIPP made $395,350 (New York Daily News 27 October 2013).
Eva Moskowitz at the Success Academy Charter chalked up $475,244 in 2012. Before
he stepped down as CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Geoffrey Canada, featured
in the pro-charter film Waiting for
Superman, made a cool half million – over $512,000 in salary, expense
account and pension in 2010, plus various fees and other perks.
Who else is making money from charter schools?
The business TV channel CNBC (15 August 2012) posed a question, “are
charter schools a wise addition to your investment portfolio?” to David Brain, President and CEO of Entertainment Properties Trust. It’s
worth quoting Mr. Brain’s response at length.
DB: “Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a high-demand product. There’s 400,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools, the industry’s growing about 12-14% a year. So it’s a high-growth, very stable, recession-resistant business. It’s a public payer, the state is the payer on this category, and if you do business with states with solid treasuries then it’s a very solid business….
Anchor: David there has been somewhat of a backlash to charter schools in some areas given their use of public money, as you noted. Any risk to the growth of charter schools generally?
DB: I don’t—there’s not a lost of risk, there’s probably risk to everything but the fact is this has bipartisan support. It’s part of the Republican platform and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, has been very high on it throughout their work in public education. So we have both political parties are solidly behind it....
Anchor: You’ve invested in retail centers, ski parks, you’ve got charter schools, you’ve got movie theaters. If you could buy one thing right now, David, one type of asset in real estate, what would it be?
DB: Well, probably the charter school business. We said it’s our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of the portfolio. It’s the most high in demand, it’s the most recession-resistant. And a great opportunity set with 500 schools starting every year. It’s a two and a half billion dollar opportunity set annually.”
–CNBC, 15 August 2012
Now you know why they call it the “portfolio management
model” for education! In this model, the David Brains win, while you, everyone
like you and public education generally lose.
Capitalist Education “Reform”: Hedge Funds, Cash Flow and National Security
The problems of the New
Orleans schools can’t be separated from the problems
of the city. Child poverty in New
Orleans is at 39%, unchanged since the storm. Economic
inequality has increased. For black households, median household income is 42%
of whites’. An
article from the National Journal (20
October 2014) paints a picture of post-Katrina New Orleans:
“But away from the French Quarter, New Orleans is not the same place it once was. The famously African-American city has gotten whiter and more Hispanic. Townhouses have popped up where housing projects once stood, pushing poor, black residents to the suburbs to find cheaper rent – or to homeless camps under the city’s highways.
“Outside grocery stores and apartments, immigration agents frequently detain and fingerprint Central American workers who settled in New Orleans after cleaning up the mess Katrina left behind. Latinos now outnumber the city’s established community of Vietnamese refugees, who are keeping the Louisiana shrimping industry afloat after a double hit from Katrina and the BP oil spill. Then there’s the influx of the so-called white ‘YURPS’ (Young, Urban, Recovery Professionals.”
For the rulers of America,
post-Katrina New Orleans is a model of the
“creative destruction” of capitalism, in the famous phrase of Austrian
economist Joseph Schumpeter, precursor of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago School.”
Kristen McQueary, a member of the Chicago
Tribune editorial board recently wrote that, “I find myself wishing for a
storm in Chicago
– an unpredictable haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break.
Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the
rooftops. That’s what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak” (Chicago Tribune, 13 August 2015). Faced with an uproar, like Duncan, McQueary later tried to “clarify” her
despicable remarks.
 |
| Lower Ninth Ward under water, 30 August 2005, the day after Hurricane Katrina struck. The Lower Ninth has never been rebuilt and still looks much like it did right after the waters receded, except for the empty lots. (Photo: AP) |
But like former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s statement
that he longed to “blow up” the New
York school system, such overly frank statements
express the real animosity of the capitalist ruling class toward public
schools, teachers and teachers unions in particular. The nationwide, bipartisan
attack on public education is not the result of misguided educational policy.
It is the strategy of politicians,
business leaders and their think tanks who want education run like any other
capitalist enterprise: privatize the schools, break the unions, evaluate
teachers and schools solely through standardized, high stakes testing. For what
purpose?
There are various interests at work. For one, there are
the hedge fund operators, who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in
charter schools. You may have wondered why these Wall Street speculators are so
interested in education. One of them, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV of Eagle Capital
Management, let the cat out of the bag in an interview for a New York Times (6 December 2009)
Dealbook article on “Scholarly Investments”: “The schools are ‘exactly the kind
of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on,’ Mr.
Curry said, ‘with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves
get any of it’.”
Hmm. No money for the money men – like $0 in management
fees on the huge investments in charters, 0% interest on the millions flowing
through their coffers. You think? And
what was it that led to the collapse of a lot of hedge funds in the 2008 crash?
Oh yes, insufficient/negative cash flow. This isn’t philanthropy, they are investing in this trillion-dollar
education “industry” in part as insurance.
The next time the market goes south, they may take a beating but with a
steady stream of government funds they can avoid going under.
 |
| Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice |
Other capitalist forces have broader aims in mind.
“National security,” for one: i.e., preparation for war and economic competition.
In March 2012, a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force, chaired
jointly by former head of the NYC public schools Joel Klein and former U.S
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, made their case for school “reform”: “Human
Capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce
that capital will undermine America’s security,” the report states. “Large,
undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States
to physically defend itself, protect its secure information conduct diplomacy,
and grow its economy.”
Recommendations from the task force? “With the support of
the federal government and industry partners, states should expand the Common
Core State Standards, ensuring that students are mastering the skills and
knowledge necessary to safeguard the country’s national security.” This fear is
echoed by the Broad Foundation (assets: $2.1 billion) one of the Big Three
(along with the Walton and Gates foundations) financial backers of school “reform.”
The Broad Foundation worries that “Too many people are not qualified to join
the military, in part because they lack adequate education.”
For all these forces, New Orleans is key. Last October, Eli Broad
hired the former state superintendant in Louisiana,
Paul Pastorek, to lead the effort to privatize the schools of 50% of the
children now attending public schools in Los
Angeles. Then there’s Paul Vallas, former
superintendant of the New Orleans RSD, who was previously CEO of the Chicago public schools
where he was succeeded by none other than Arne Duncan. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel is the former chief
of staff to Barack Obama. It was Emanuel who famously said “never let a good
crisis go to waste.” The ruling class took that to heart with Katrina. Republican
Bush started the wrecking job, Democrat Obama is continuing it. It’s up to us –
to the education workers, students, parents and working people – to stop them.
The War on Teachers, Unions and Public Education
 |
| The perpetrators: Arne Duncan (left), Democrat Obama’s “education czar,” and Paul Vallas, then Louisiana Recovery School District chief, in October 2009. Both are former CEOs of Chicago schools, and point men for the capitalist war on teachers and public education. (Photo: Matthew Hinton/Times-Picayune) |
Today, there are countless activists, writers and bloggers
dedicated to resisting the takeover of public education by private forces.
Their work is informative and often inspiring. Yet in almost all cases, while
exposing the truth about school reform and its political, media and financial backers,
there is little or nothing in the way of a strategy for fighting it. Diane
Ravitch’s Reign of Error, an eloquent
exposé on “the hoax of the privatization movement,” concludes with the feeble statement
that “we must work together to improve our public schools.”
As we wrote in “Three ‘R’s’: Ravitch, Research and
Revolution” (Class Struggle Education
Workers Newsletter No. 4, Summer-Fall 2014):
“Ravitch reveals the dangers of corporate ‘reform’ and privatization, but her responses are confined within the framework of capitalism and the acceptable discourse of the Democratic liberal brand of bourgeois politics. Therefore her proposals are doomed to failure, for this is not primarily a ‘conversation’ about what is effective education reform. It is a bruising battle over union-busting, privatization and class power.”
The “reformers” are not out to improve public
schools, they want to gut public education, milk the education budget for
profit, destroy teachers unions, regiment students and make the schools into
skills training institutes. Educating students to critical thinking is the last
thing they would want. The rampant standardized testing, endless test prep,
linking teacher evals to student test scores are all part of a class war being waged by a united ruling
class.
Public school students in New Orleans, their parents and teachers don’t
just face a pro-charter mayor (Democrat Mitch Landrieu) and until recently a
rabidly pro-reform governor, Republican Bobby Jindal. In her blog (November 22)
Diane Ravitch hailed the election of John Edwards, a Democrat, as Jindal’s
replacement: “Great News from Louisiana!
New Governor!” Edwards may not be the kind of crazed teacher basher as his
Republican predecessor, but he will just tone down the corporate reformers’ projects.
He declares that it is “not true” that he wants to ban charters, that he won’t eliminate
vouchers, that “I’m not about ending choice, I’m about informed choice,” etc.
(Huffington Post, 30 November).
Sort of like NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, about whom we wrote:
“Liberal Democrat NYC Mayoral Candidate Won’t End ‘Stop and Frisk,’ Charters or
Privatization of Public Education,” even as many teacher activists and the
United Federation of Teachers backed him. (See the October 2013 Class Struggle
Education Workers leaflet, “Despite
the Hype, de Blasio Will Be ‘Bloomberg Lite”.) As we predicted, so it has
come to pass.
Advocates of public education are up against a national
network of politicians from both parties, big business and education “reformers.”
They are also opposed by a cadre of journalists in the mainstream media, and
think tanks funded by the billionaire philanthropists. To see their reach, check
out the “supporters” of the Chalkbeat education news sites in New York and
elsewhere which include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (as well as the
Gates Family Foundation), the Ford Foundation and Walton Family Foundation. Or
look at the Education Week web site
funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Broad,
Cooke, Ford, Gates and Walton foundations, among others.
 |
| New Orleans police state. White cops beat 64-year-old black retired teacher Robert Davis, who lost his house in the Ninth Ward to post-Katrina flooding, 8 October 2005. (From AP-TV video) |
And this juggernaut
of ruling-class heavies isn’t just relying on its journalists for hire. The big
guns of education “reform” have a whole state apparatus to enforce their will. At
their beck and call is an actual army of police and National Guard (as well as
private security guards) ready to bust strikes … and heads as ordered in case
any student, parent or union gets out of line. Remember how the enforcers of
“law and order” terrorized the desperate people they found in the streets after
Katrina hit, how whites were “struggling to feed their families” while blacks
were called “looters”? Just last August, an appeals court upheld a decision to
overturn the conviction of the five New Orleans cops who shot six unarmed African
Americans on the Danziger Bridge, killing two. The victims’ “crime”: they were
trying to get food and water six days after the storm.
Here in New York,
a teachers strike would have to take on the state’s notorious Taylor Law, which
bans strikes by public workers. As for police in the schools, you need only to view
the sickening videotape of the October 26 assault on a black, female student in
a Columbia, South Carolina high school.
 |
| New Orleans SWAT team police arrest Lance Madison after cops killed his brother on Danziger Bridge, 4 Sept. 2005. Murder conviction of killer cops was overturned by appeals court. (Photo: Alex Brandon/Times-Picayune) |
To win, we need fighting unions. But the American
Federation of Teachers and National Education Association refuse to take the
corporate ed “reformers” head-on. They both supported Obama in 2008 and 2012,
who in turn installed Arne (“I Love Katrina”) Duncan as his education “czar.” What it will
take to defeat the teacher union bashers and public education privatizers is
hard class struggle. With a one-week strike in September, Seattle teachers won their first
cost-of-living raise in six years and an end to use of students’ standardized
tests to evaluate teachers, as well as a one-year ban on out-of-school
suspensions, and smaller special education classes. They didn’t win a
reduction in the welter of standardized testing and other demands, but they
wouldn’t have won anything without a fight. And for the last several months, Detroit teachers have
carried out a series of bold “sick-outs” protesting the abysmal conditions of
the schools, including notably protesting during a visit by Barack Obama.
 |
| Fighting back: United Teachers of New Orleans rally on National Day of Action for public education, 10 December 2013. (Photo: UTNO) |
The war on public education is bi-partisan. It’s not just
the Koch brothers and right-wing Republicans. It’s also Democrats from Obama on
down, including New York
governor and big-time Common Core proponent Andrew Cuomo. Attacking the Chicago
Teachers Union was the centerpiece of Democrat Rahm Emanuel’s 2015 mayoral
re-election bid. In 2012, “Mayor 1%” provoked a strike by the CTU by cancelling
a union-negotiated raise and laying off more than 900, predominantly black,
teachers. But when faced with a court order, the CTU leadership, led by the
Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), shoved a sellout contract down the
throats of the union’s House of Delegates which initially voted it down.
 | ||
| Needed: class-struggle union leadership. Above: Chicago Teachers Union demonstrates, June 2015. In 2012, CTU tops raised such demands, then dropped them in bargaining and after a hard-fought strike rammed through asellout contract after delegates voted it down. |
Still, teachers, in the crosshairs of the education “reformers,”
have powerful allies starting with educators in every school district in the
country. Teachers are by far the most highly organized section of the U.S. working class (union representation of
teachers in New York
State is 98.4%), which is
why we are under attack. And we have
allies: our students and their parents and above all, our brothers and sisters
in organized labor. We teach their kids! Let them try to open a struck “reform”
school in New Orleans
if teachers are joined on the picket line by longshoremen from ILA Local 3000. What
would happen in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia if Teamsters, transit
workers and sanitation workers, as well as students and their parents, join the
picket lines of the people who are with their kids every day in class?
Will this be easy? Certainly not. A class-struggle
strategy requires a fight with the existing labor bureaucracy which embodies the
opposite: class collaboration. On the eve of the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, American Federation
of Teachers president Randi Weingarten was at the Democratic National
Convention endorsing Barack Obama. Weingarten cited “common ground” with the
politicians, local and national, who had declared war on her own union
membership. Weingarten’s AFT has already endorsed Hillary Clinton (former board
of directors member at Walmart and attorney to Eli Broad) for president in 2106.
Weingarten is a perfect example of a “labor lieutenant of capitalism” who
chains workers to their mortal enemies.
Class Struggle Education Workers puts forward a program to
fight the privatizing education deformers
down the line. Against the present mayoral dictatorship over schools in New York and many other
large cities, we call for teacher-student-parent-worker control of the schools.
We say forthrightly that it’s necessary to break the Democratic and Republican
parties of capital, and we need to build a workers party to fight for a workers
government, to lay the basis for the badly needed revolution in education. It’s not an easy path, but it’s the only
road to quality public education for everyone, for education that serves not
Wall Street but working people. Join the
CSEW!
Mark Lance teaches
math at the Continuing Education program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the 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. See the CSEW program here.
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the 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. See the CSEW program here.
No comments:
Post a Comment