A Marxist Program to Fight for
Integrated Quality Public Education
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Highly Selective Booker T. Washington School (MS 54), on Upper West Side, one of top 10 NYC middle schools in exam scores. Located only blocks from Harlem, its students are 62% white, 8% black. Only 1.3% are English language learners.
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The struggle over public education cannot be separated from the overall class struggle against capitalism. The fight for school integration through busing came after the civil rights movement, the upheavals in the Northern ghettos and massive opposition to the U.S.’ war on Vietnam. Conversely, the Supreme Court decision that marked a turning point in ending busing (Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell) came in 1991, at the high point of the imperialist-led counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as U.S. president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a New World Order. Ever since, capital has been on a rampage against working people internationally, destroying social programs and union gains left and right.
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Stuyversant High School auditorium. Selective specialized high schools are
necessarily discriminatory. Only 10 black students were admitted in
Stuyversant's September 2017 freshman class.
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politicians, and to point the way to a workers government to bring down the dictatorship of capital.
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were among the first to call, in the Communist Manifesto, for universal free public education. Today it is still the Marxists who are the most consistent defenders of the public schools, even as we fight for socialist revolution to transform them. In doing so we raise a series of democratic and transitional demands.
Residential segregation has always been driven by governmental action and business decisions, from “redlining” by the banks and “covenants” that excluded black people and Jews from wealthier areas, to the flight to white suburbs to avoid school desegregation, to the gentrification that is pushing many lower-income and even middle-class residents from historic black neighborhoods. In New York City, this has been facilitated by the deterioration of rent control. Calls to expand rent control[1] and for a vast expansion of public housing to be built under union control would greatly curtail gentrification. It would also point the way to resolve the housing shortage, end mass homelessness, expand union construction jobs and give stability to the 100,000 homeless students. In the meantime, there should be a call for the homeless to occupy empty apartments and to mobilize workers action to stop evictions.
On the educational dimensions of the fight against pervasive race and class segregation we are for the unionization and expropriation of all private schools as well as semi-privatized charter schools and their inclusion in the public school system. This includes replacing religious schools with secular public schools: Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious groups are free to impart religious instruction on their own. The absence of private schools would go a long way toward integrating the schools. Successful private schools such as the Chicago Lab school could be reorganized as public schools with non-selective admissions.
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PS 188 on the Lower East Side. 52% of its students are
homeless, 48% have family income below poverty level.
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In New York City fully one-third of all high schools are selective, requiring entrance exams, essays and interviews, using opaque algorithms and other mechanisms to screen applicants. We advocate the abolition of competitive admissions for specialized high schools and the replacement of “gifted and talented” schools and programs with advanced placement and other quality academic programs in all schools. Selective mechanisms necessarily discriminate against oppressed social groups (particularly African Americans, Latinos and immigrants), they foster a poisonous culture of elitism, and they are not necessary to realize the potential of the brightest students. Well-funded unitary suburban high schools are just as able to produce winners of science prizes or achieve high scores on PISA exams and NAEP assessments as a Bronx Science, Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High, the Queens Baccalaureate School or Brooklyn Tech.
We reject the mantra of “school choice.” This capitalist criteria treats education as a commodity, to be regulated by a market, rather than a fundamental social right. In a system with a vast difference in the quality of schools, “choice” is guaranteed to produce “winners,” which will always be those with the most economic and social resources, and “losers,” which will necessarily be the most oppressed. “Choice” also undercuts local schools which can be and often are the organizing centers for social life in poor areas. We are for unitary schools at all levels, with the option of thematically specialized high schools and programs (performing arts, music, automotive, aviation, harbor, science, technology, etc.) on a non-discriminatory basis.
Instead of militarizing schools, as the charters are doing with “no excuses” discipline and enforced silence in the hallways, and as the regular schools do with police posted inside the schools, we demand: Cops out of the schools! Shut down the school to prison pipeline! And while we’re at it, we call to abolish the DoE’s Office of Special Investigations. When they are not witch-hunting teachers and principals for communism,[2] the sinister sex-obsessed Savanarolas in the OSI are avidly seeking New York Post headlines by prosecuting women teachers for party pictures or intimate photos that were once on their Facebook pages because they couldn’t figure out the obscure privacy settings on Mark Zuckerberg’s tool for police/employer surveillance.
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(Left) Police arrest student at Park Slope Collegiate for having pin holding together his broken glasses, March 2015. (Right) School safety cop arrests eighth grade girl at PS 22 in the Bronx, May 2014. In 2016-2017 school year, 8801 students were arrested in school. Shut down the school to prison pipeline!
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Marxists are also for labor schools such as John Dewey propounded, in which instructional time is combined with exposure to and participation in productive labor in a range of activities. But this pedagogical principle, the democratic form of school governance by those actually involved in the education process and others of the above demands can only have, at best, an episodic and limited expression under the rule of capital, which will oppose them tooth and nail. The bourgeoisie limited Dewey’s pedagogical strategy to the Chicago Lab Schools (while perverting it into narrow vocational schools). It was only carried out on a large scale in the early Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution.[3] We raise such democratic and transitional demands today in order to point the way to the revolution that will be necessary for the schools to serve the interests of working people.
Take the issue of how to concretely fight racial and class segregation in New York. Various liberals and reformists now call for “controlled choice.” This is a capitulation to the right-wing mantra of “school choice,” similar to the way feminists capitulated to anti-abortion bigots by dropping the “A-word” and talking only of a woman’s “right to choose.” But who is to control the choices? Elaborate formulas of low, medium and high achievers on tests, measures of poverty such as eligibility for subsidized school meals and the like are just a stand-in for racial criteria prohibited by the reactionary Supreme Court. This will achieve nothing. The issue will not be settled in the ed schools or the Department of Education but on the streets.
There is a real problem facing school integration in major cities in the U.S.: the small number of white students in the public schools. In New York City, 25% of school-age children (age 18 and under) are non-Hispanic whites, but only 14.8% of the students in the NYC school system are. Dissolution of private schools into the public system would be an essential part of any viable effort to integrate New York City’s schools. Busing to the suburbs, as the Trotskyists advocated in Boston in the 1970s? Not so easy in a vast metropolis like New York. There are areas where that could work: build a string of magnet schools along the northern city limits that could integrate students from the Bronx and Westchester County. Likewise with schools in the Far Rockaway ghetto, just over the line from Nassau County.
Manhattan is logistically simple: integrate schools of the Upper East Side with those of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), and those of the Upper West Side with adjacent areas of Harlem – no need for busing. In racially and economically diverse areas like the Lower East Side, it’s even simpler: junk the school choice regime while assuring balanced populations of zoned schools, as the District 1 Community Education Council has advocated against the educrats at DoE headquarters in Tweed Courthouse. The technical aspects of school integration are not the problem. The real issue is the need for a sharp political fight against liberal racism and against the Democratic Party, which is why liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists won’t touch it. And it will take integrated workers defense guards to ensure that the schools are safely integrated.
Moreover, a successful integration effort is dependent on a massive expenditure on improving all schools, so that the result is better education for all. Plus facilitate travel with free mass transit – rip out the turnstiles! – tripling the number of trains at night and on the weekend, and introducing modern signaling technology to increase train frequency (and prevent transit worker deaths). Yet we are dealing with a subway system that is still using pre-World War II switches! All this underlines the basic fact that any real struggle for integrated quality public education will quickly come up against the limits of decaying capitalism.
The extreme segregation of New York City schools is a product of government action, capitalist market forces and unvarnished racism. It is the result of ending busing programs, of slashing education budgets, instituting “school choice” and promoting apartheid charter schools, while banks and real estate developers gentrify neighborhoods by taking advantage of tax breaks and weakened rent control. Plus the fact that schools are financed by local property taxes, and all backed up by Wall Street and Washington. It will take a sharp battle mobilizing the workers movement all of the oppressed to overcome those powerful forces.
What’s needed is a class-struggle leadership that has the program and determination to take on capital. The UFT leaders of the Unity Caucus, ensconced in their Wall Street office tower, are incapable of and opposed to waging such a struggle. When they had a chance, in the fight over charter expansion, they instead engaged in dead-end backroom horse-trading with the capitalist politicians. In every election, they endorse Democratic candidates from Obama to Hillary Clinton, Cuomo and de Blasio. These are the same bourgeois politicians who carry out the privatizing education “reforms” dictated by Bill Gates, the Walton family, Wall Street financiers and imperialist outfits like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the OECD.
Nor will you get such a fight from the various union reform groups such as the Movement of Rank-and-file Educators (MORE) in New York, the Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators (CORE) in Chicago or their equivalents in other major cities. Their ingrained reformism means ducking the issue of racism and refusing to fight the Democrats’ stranglehold over the unions. While talking “social justice” and including supporters of various ostensibly socialist organizations, they don’t challenge racist American capitalism. In NYC this reached the point that when black Democrat Al Sharpton called a march on Staten Island to protest the police chokehold murder of Eric Garner in the summer of 2014, while the UFT tops supported the march, MORE opposed the call for solidarity and issued a statement grotesquely calling for “unity” with the “brothers and sisters” of the PBA (Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association)![4]
A leadership calling for unity with the repressive forces of capitalist state certainly cannot defeat the capitalist assault on public education. But these reformists don’t intend on fighting capitalism – they want to administer it. Which is why when they win office, they act just like the pro-capitalist bureaucrats they replace: witness CORE’s ignominious sellout of the 2012 Chicago teachers strike.[5] Class Struggle Education Workers is radically different. We marched in the 2014 Staten Island demonstration, calling for workers mobilization against racist cop murder, and denouncing the Democratic Party. The CSEW is committed to “the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed.” Its program calls to “Oppose resegregation of schools: separate is not equal. Stop discrimination and racist attacks against black, Latino, Asian and immigrant students.”[6] It calls for workers action against imperialist wars, and for a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government.
As materialists, we understand that, as Karl Marx insisted in The German Ideology (1847):
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production….”
So long as the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, with its economic and political power it will control the educational system, both ideologically and by reproducing the structure of the workforce and social classes. What Marxist educators must do is to join with the working class and oppressed sectors in building resistance to challenge that dominant power, organizing concrete struggles against the oppression it embodies, and raising revolutionary consciousness in the course of forging a vanguard to lead that struggle to overthrow it. We will only do away with segregation by a revolution to sweep away the capitalist system of racism, war and exploitation once and for all. ■
[1] Which could include repealing vacancy bonuses (allowing up to 20% increases and deregulation above a certain level), preferential rent provisions and the expiration of rent ceilings accompanying tax abatements, among other measures.
[2] See “Anti-Communist Witch Hunt in NYC School,” Class Struggle Education Workers blog, 28 June 2017.
[3] See John Dewey, “New Schools for a New Era” (1929) in Marxism and the Battle over Education, special supplement to The Internationalist (January 2008). Yet the massive campaign of educational innovation begun under Lenin and Trotsky was halted by the conservative, nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy that usurped political power and resorted to authoritarian rule as it abandoned the goal of international socialist revolution.
[4] See “MORE Takes a Stand … With the Police,” in The Internationalist No. 38, October-November 2014.
[5] See “Chicago Teachers: Strike Was Huge, Settlement Sucks,” The Internationalist special issue, December 2012.
[6] See Class Struggle Education Workers program on page 52 of this issue..
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. See the CSEW program here.