CSEW: Vote No on Question 2 in Massachusetts
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| Class Struggle Education Workers at 10 February 2014 "Save NYC Public Education" protest. "Democrats Obama & Cuomo Spearhead Privatization of Public Education." (CSEW photo) |
Class Struggle Education Workers urges Massachusetts voters to vote “No” on Question 2 on the November 8 ballot which proposes to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state. If passed, the measure would open the floodgates to a proliferation of these privately managed schools, thereby draining billions of dollars from public schools and widening the economic disparities in education. Schools with black, Latino and other minority populations, as well as students with special needs, will be hit the hardest. Vote No on 2!
Both the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and the
Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have
mobilized their memberships to get out the vote against the ballot initiative. Reportedly
much of the public agrees with them, with one poll showing 52% against expanding
charters vs. 39% in favor. This is in the face of a flood of big bucks pouring
into the coffers of the pro-charter campaign, which has far out-spent (by $19.5
million to 13.4 million) the Save Our Public Schools effort, largely funded by
teachers unions.
According to a report
by WBUR Radio Boston (27 October), more than four-fifths of the funding for the
“Yes on 2” came from out of state, including from Walmart heirs ($1.8 million),
the Koch brothers and ex-New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Three-quarters was
“dark money” from 501(c)(3) lobbying
outfits that are not required to list their donors. The largest contributor
($13.5 million) is Families for Excellent Schools, a front for Wall Street
hedge fund moguls who are behind the Success Academies and the drive for
charter schools in New York.[1]
The MTA last spring issued a detailed (108-page) analysis
of this well-financed privatizing onslaught, Threat
to Public Education Now Centers on Massachusetts (May 2016). But in
addition to the usual suspects of right-wing business lobbies, the forces
supporting Question 2 include the liberal Boston
Globe and its owner, the New York
Times, which have been aggressively pushing the anti-labor agenda of
corporate “education reform” and calling to greatly expand the overwhelmingly
non-union charter schools.
The editors of the Globe
(October 30) claim that “Studies have shown that charters in Massachusetts are
producing verifiably better academic results than district schools.” The Times (6 November) chimed in with a puff
piece by columnist David Leonhardt, “Schools That Work,” also purporting to have
scientific data that charters outperform public schools. The “proof” is a paper
funded by the U.S. Education Department, which backs charters, and the New
Schools Venture Fund, which was set up to push charter schools.
The study is nothing but sponsored academic propaganda,
using cherry-picked data of the six top charter high schools in Boston, while
excluding lower-performing or closed charters as “unsuitable” for analysis. Using
fancy statistical formulas, it shows that this handful of “high-performing”
schools perform highly on SAT and other high-stakes standardized tests. It
leaves out how those schools push out lower-scoring students, sending them back
to the public schools; the impact of having free labor of Harvard and MIT
interns helping students, etc.
In fact, studies nationwide show charter schools overall
have no better and often lower scores than public schools, and in some cases
(like Ohio and Nevada) have become notorious for fraud. They siphon off funds
from public schools ($450 million a year in Massachusetts, billions
nationally). And charters increase racial segregation, as an October 15
statement by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People noted
in “calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the
strengthening of oversight in governance and practice.”
For all the pretense of being a “grass roots” initiative,
a main purpose of this Wall Street-sponsored “astroturf" movement for
charter schools is plain and simple union-busting. The state teachers unions
(MTA and AFTMA) naturally are opposing Question 2, saying it would be bad for
both teachers and students. But the national AFT has been equivocal. In
response to the NAACP resolution, AFT president Randi Weingarten did not endorse the call to oppose charter
expansion, saying only that she “look[s] forward to continuing to work with the
NAACP….”
The reason for this equivocation is simple: long-time AFT leader
Al Shanker first proposed charter schools and the sellout union tops have
continued to back them ever since. Weingarten pretends that the AFT founder intended
charters to be “teacher-led laboratories … to improve instruction,” but from
the outset they aimed at breaking up public schools. Shanker, a right-wing
social-democratic Cold Warrior, supported Reagan’s education “reforms,”
complaining that the school system “more resembles the communist economy than
our own market economy.”
Moreover, among the biggest supporters of charter schools
are Democratic president Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton, who was the lawyer for and board member of Walmart. Obama’s
secretary of education, John King, co-founded a charter school in Boston and
has emphatically said he would vote for Question 2. And the union-hating
Democrats for Education Reform (a Wall Street operation) launched an ad blitz
for a “yes” vote under the slogan “Advancing Obama’s Legacy on Charter Schools”
(Boston Globe, 5 November).
Yet the Fall issue of MTA
Today urges its members to “Vote AGAINST Question 2 – and for Hillary
Clinton.” The NEA and AFT are bulwarks of the Democratic Party, staffing its
phone banks and doling out millions of dollars to elect candidates of this
capitalist party, who then turn around and attack teacher unions. From the
battle over Boston busing in the 1970s to today, the fight for high quality,
integrated public education for all must be a fight against the partner parties
of American capitalism.
As we noted in our analysis earlier this year of the disastrous experience of the charterized New Orleans schools (“New Orleans Schools: Test Lab for War on Public Education” and “‘Slave Market-Based Education Reform’ in NOLA”):
“A strategy to fight the enemies of public education begins with naming the enemy: capitalism. Every day teachers confront the all-sided oppression of this capitalist society. More than anything else, low academic achievement correlates with poverty….
“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….
“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.”
Class Struggle Education Workers urges Massachusetts teachers others to “Vote No on 2” and join the struggle to build a class-struggle workers party!
[1] See “9
Billionaires Are About to Remake New York’s Public Schools –Here’s Their Story,”
The Nation, 19 March 2015.
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.