Labor: Shut Down the Port, BART, Bay Bridge
Mobilize Bay Area Workers to
Win Oakland Teachers Strike
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| Oakland Education Association holds rally of thousands on city hall steps, February 5. |
Teachers, Students, Parents, Workers – Build Mass
Pickets Nobody Crosses!
Fight for a Huge Pay Hike, Far
Smaller Classes – Stop School Closures!
Unionize Charters – Turn Them All Into Public Schools
On February 21, some 3,000 educators are going on strike against the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) demanding higher pay, lower class sizes and an end to the underfunding of public schools. Students have already gone into the streets by the hundreds to support their teachers. The union, the Oakland Education Association (OEA), has urged parents and residents to join in building strong picket lines. This is key: it’s necessary to shut the schools down. But that is only the first step: this battle for public education is facing formidable foes, not just the Oakland School Board but the Democrats who run the city and the state of California on up to the Republican White House and Trump’s education czarina Betsy DeVos. These representatives of capital aren’t about to provide quality education to poor, minority, immigrant and working-class children. They only understand the language of power – class power. So we must hit them where it hurts. Shut down the Port of Oakland, Bay Area Rapid Transit and the Bay Bridge with mass labor-led action – then we can talk turkey.
Teachers in Oakland are hurting, and so are their students and their communities. Educators in the OUSD are among the very lowest paid in the Bay Area (third from the bottom out of 101 districts for experienced teachers). Salaries are so low compared to the sky-high housing costs that the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland (over $2,500) would eat up over 40% of the before-tax salary of a starting teacher with a master’s degree. Meanwhile, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell is proposing drastic budget cuts ($20 million for the next school year), including closing 24 of the district’s 86 schools. It’s not surprising, then, that the teacher turnover rate in Oakland (20%, over 500 quit yearly) is double the statewide average. But Oakland teachers are fighting back. For the last year there have been a series of union marches, wildcat strikes and student walkouts leading to a vote at the end of January in which 95% voted to authorize a strike (with 84% of the teachers voting). The situation is so dire that 75 principals of Oakland schools signed a letter saying they support the teachers in their strike.
The Oakland school administration, however, has hard-lined it with the teachers, cynically trying to pit one group against another, always using a projected budget deficit as the excuse. At the latest board meeting, schools chief Johnson-Trammell proposed cutting up to $5 million earmarked for low-income, English language learners and homeless students in order to pay for teacher raises! At a late January meeting, the board voted (over vociferous parental and student objections) to close the predominantly black Roots International Academy, in order to expand the predominantly Latino Coliseum College Prep Academy. The Board has flooded the district with 32 charter schools which drain funds and students from the public schools, then used the resulting financial problems to justify shutting down more schools. Meanwhile, the OUSD was accused last year by an independent agency of “highly unusual” and “suspicious” financial practices including “intentional manipulation” of general funds.
Preparing for the strike, the Oakland school bosses are tossing around threats, declaring that any students who do not attend will be marked as unexcused absences, and lining up a pool of substitute teachers to act as strikebreakers. Solid picket lines should ensure that such “scabstitutes,” as L.A. strikers called them, don’t cross. In turn, Teach for America (TFA) sent out a “guidance” saying that any of its 58 corps members in the District who go on strike stand to lose a $2,000 to $10,000 award they were promised from the federally funded Americorps. TFA (whose co-founder is the CEO of the KIPP charter chain and whose alumni include the hated ex-Washington, D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee) is a union-busting operation notorious for sending unprepared elite college students into low-income schools for a two-year stint, after which the vast majority leave. Its action in Oakland outraged more than 450 alumni who sent a letter denouncing this naked attempt to pressure teachers into scabbing. TFA’s “defense” was that it issued the same antistrike threat during the Los Angeles teachers walkout last month.
The attack on teachers and public schools is being carried out by the Oakland school board, with a pro-charter majority (five out of seven members). As OEA president Keith Brown wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle (20 February), “Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg are spending money to influence Oakland school board elections.” In fact, the board was bought by the Rogers Foundation, Gates Foundation (Microsoft), Walton Foundation (Walmart), Broad Foundation and the former New York City mayor. Los Angeles magnate Eli Broad has used Oakland to try out his school takeover strategies which he then unleashes on L.A., including a School Closure Guide (2009) used to launch a wave of Oakland school closings the following year. Bloomberg has dropped more than $5 million on California elections to elect charter school supporters, including $300,000 in 2017 to finance the Great Oakland (GO) coalition that wants to turn half of local schools into charters. The same forces pumped in millions in a failed effort to elect Green Dot charter CEO Marshall Tuck as state schools superintendent.
In the face of this daunting array of capitalist firepower, Oakland educators need powerful allies who can hit the bosses in the pocketbook the way a teachers strike alone cannot. In the L.A. strike, supporters of Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) brought transit workers from ATU Local 1277 to the picket lines and joined with ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) members and family in the harbor area in picketing and strike solidarity preparations. As the strike stretched into its second week, the CSEW called to “MOBILIZE LABOR and Latino, African American, Asian, immigrant and all working people of this city to SHUT DOWN LOS ANGELES…. Shut down the ports, stop mass transit, jam the freeways. That’ll get the bosses’ attention. And it will inspire working people and youth throughout the country and around the world” (see the CSEW leaflet “To Win the Teachers Strike We Must Shut Down L.A.” [21 January]).
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| Teachers and students march down Broadway from Oakland Tech High School to arally at Oakland Unified School District offices, January 18. [Ray Chavez / East Bay Times] |
A key measure would be a mass strike committee, with representatives elected at every school to decide on the course of the strike daily, and ensure that the rank-and-file are in charge, including of the bargaining. Another vital step is a concerted campaign during the strike to unionize the charter schools, under the same contract as other OUSD educators, demanding an end to co-locations, a cutoff of all public school funds to these private schools, and a halt to unpaid (slave) labor required of charter school personnel. To ensure community support the union must insist that stop all school closings is a bottom-line demand. Above all, the strike must be fought politically, against both capitalist parties and particularly the Democrats, who are centrally responsible for the crisis besetting public education in Oakland and all of California today. Instead of going hat-in-hand to beg in Sacramento, teachers from around the state should occupy the capitol to demand cancellation of the extortionate “loan” that was imposed on Oakland schools in the 2010 state takeover (and won’t be paid off until 2024), roll back charters and fully fund schools to meet strikers’ demands. How the bosses’ politicians come up with the cash is their problem.
Democrats and Charters
Across the country, the teachers revolt that broke out last spring is continuing, but with important differences. This time it is in states governed by Democrats, with well-established educator unions, and it is going up directly against the key elements of the privatizing “education reform” pushed by both capitalist parties. In January there was the huge Los Angeles strike of 35,000 teachers in the second-largest school district in the country, affecting over half a million students. But while strikers picketed for a week in the rain, bringing out repeated mass solidarity demonstrations of up to 70,000 supporters, the settlement negotiated by the union bureaucracy sold out those efforts, leaving monster class sizes, with a pay “raise” less than the rate of inflation, and on the key question of charter schools which have drained funds from the public schools, nothing but an insincere letter from the pro-charter school board asking state authorities for a temporary cap (see the CSEW’s balance sheet, “Powerful L.A. Teachers Strike Was Betrayed in Settlement” [23 January]).
Earlier this month there was the three-day strike by Denver teachers centrally against “performance-based” pay, based on student test scores and working in high-poverty schools, known as “ProComp.” This system, put in place a decade ago, turned into a monster, according to strikers, with increased testing and unpredictable bonuses. Worse still, it cut funding for schools with impoverished students and English language learners, whose scores are lower on standardized tests, and more generally penalized teachers for the social ills of this racist, capitalist society. Yet in the settlement, instead of raising teachers’ base pay, the union tops agreed to the school district’s program of continuing the paltry bonuses, while calling for a research study of the system. This is hardly surprising, since when the system was voted into law in Colorado (and then adopted by the Democratic Obama administration’s Race to the Top program), it was endorsed by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. When Weingarten tried to push through such “school-based merit pay” in New York, a CSEW union delegate opposed it and won teachers in the largest program in the system to turn down the $3,000-per-teacher “bonus” (bribe).
Most recently, on February 21, West Virginia teachers walked out, again, this time over a bill in the state legislature to legalize charter schools. Once again, the schools in all 55 of the state’s counties were shut, hundreds of teachers besieged the state capitol in Charleston. The bill, pushed by right-wing groups like “Americans for Prosperity” funded by the Koch brothers, called for authorizing seven charters, plus money for vouchers for private schools and paying parents for home-schooling! In typical fashion, the AFT affiliate favored a house of delegates bill, for “only” two charters. But when the state senate sent back the original bill, the lower house, feeling the heat from the striking teachers in the corridors, indefinitely tabled it. (Teachers voted to continue the strike just in case there was a move to reconsider.) So under pressure, a Republican-controlled state legislature took a harder line against charters than the union tops. Again, not surprising, as the AFT has operated its own charter school (with a substandard contract) and bragged about its long-time leader Albert Shanker originating the charter movement.
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| ATU transit workers from L.A. and Oakland along with ILWU in solidarity with striking Oakland teachers, February 21. |
The “mainstream” (capitalist) media have taken note of the goundswell of opposition to privatized charter schools from teachers and parents alike, and the turmoil this has caused in the Democratic Party (see Valerie Strauss, “Why the L.A. teachers strike is so uncomfortable for so many Democrats,” Washington Post, 16 January). Some, echoing the union bureaucrats are claiming, “Success of Los Angeles Teachers Strike Rocks Charter Schools, and a Rich Supporter,” New York Times, 28 January). The Times article stated, “The strike is the latest setback for the charter school movement, which once drew the endorsement of prominent Democrats and Republicans alike.” It noted that “It is still unclear how much practical impact the deal will have on charters,” adding: “But the defeat in the court of public opinion is clear: After years of support from powerful local and national allies — including many Democrats — charter schools are now facing a backlash and severe skepticism.” But the “court of public opinion” won’t stop the powerful forces that are out to corporatize and privatize public education.
In fact, as in Los Angeles, the major foes of striking educators in Oakland are Democrats: Bill Gates, Eli Broad and now Bloomberg once again, who is major bankroller of the Democrats for Educational Reform charterizers. The fact is that the Democrats have been pushing charters even more than the Republicans, who prefer vouchers. Democrat Barack Obama and his education czar Arne Duncan required states that wanted “RTTP” funds to lift caps on charters. Charter schools are no more “public” than “defense” contractors who milk the budget of the Pentagon war machine. They are designed as union-busting vehicles which demonstrably increase segregation, among other things by “cherry-picking” students and forcing out those with low scores – “separate is not equal.” This “public-private partnership,” so beloved of Democrats like Obama and the Clintons (Hillary was on the board of Walmart, and has worked with Eli Broad since she was first lady of Arkansas), are a weapon to destroy public schools. Weingarten’s mentor as AFT leader, Shanker, was a virtulently anti-communist social democrat who once declared that “public education operates like a planned economy” that “more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy” (New York Times, 23 July 1989).
Today as a century and a half ago, the communists are the foremost fighters for and defenders of public education. The AFT and NEA bureaucracies are in the pocket of the capitalist Democrats, for whom they do the donkey work of phone-banking and house-to-house canvassing at election time. While criticizing “excessive” charters, the union tops refuse to call for outright opposition to these parasitic private schools. Even when they are supposedly “non-profit,” charters are a cash cow for financial speculators as they leech off the public education budget and seek to bankrupt public schools. Meanwhile, the labor misleaders bank their whole “strategy” on lobbying Democratic politicians, from Governor Gavin Newsom to Senator Kamala Harris, whom some are looking to as a broker to settle the Oakland school strike. Oakland had the double misfortune of having Democrat Jerry Brown as mayor and then governor pushed charters with a vengeance (and opposed unionizing them).
The Democratic Party presides over racist repression against African Americans, Latinos and Asians in large cities across the country, has waged imperialist war from Afghanistan to Latin America, and deported more than 8 million immigrants under Obama – far more than Trump and Bush combined – while aggressively promoting charter schools and “performance-based pay” for educators. As long as the unions are chained to the Democrats (or Republicans, or Greens), they will suffer one defeat after another, which the bureaucrats will try to prettify as victories. The answer is to forge a fighting leadership of the unions to break with all capitalist parties and build a class-struggle workers party that fights for a workers government, to make it possible for education to serve the interests of the working people and the oppressed.
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.