For the U.S. corporate elite, education reform which means privatizing as much as possible of the school system and attacking the collective power of teachers is a strategic task. To these people, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg and his henchman, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, are heroes.
For eight years, NYC officials have relentlessly sought to tie school performance rankings as well as teacher evaluation and pay to dubious high stakes test data. They have closed 91 schools, overwhelmingly in Black and Hispanic working-class neighborhoods, and opened 100 privately-run charter schools, almost entirely in the same areas. They have allowed the charter operators to take space in public school buildings and to push out public schools, some of them very popular and successful.
They did this in the name of helping kids succeed and had some public support for their policies, especially with many parents in poor neighborhoods desperate to give their children a decent future. But public opinion is beginning to shift against privatization, and resistance from parents, teachers, and students is starting to grow as people see through the hype.
When Klein announced in December that he wanted to close 19 public schools, this provoked protests of hundreds outside individual schools and crowds of up to 900 at public hearings, overwhelmingly opposed to these destructive proposals.
On January 26, thousands gathered to protest at Brooklyn Technical High School where the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), a rubber-stamp body with eight of thirteen members appointed by Bloomberg, was to decide the fate of the nineteen schools. What followed was nine hours of testimony full of raw working-class anger from parents, students, and teachers.
People pointed again and again to the way a two-tier system is being established. The charter schools get every assistance and are able to pick high-performance students. They have far fewer students with special needs, or English as a Second Language learners, and weed out troublemakers while the remaining public schools become even more likely to fail as they shoulder the increased burden. Parent after parent pointed out how Bloomberg and Klein were seeking to divide working-class communities around this issue.
In the end, the PEP, predictably, did its masters bidding and voted to close all the schools. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), along with others, including the NAACP, is now suing the city to stop the school closings. While there is nothing wrong with this, it should not be a substitute for the protest movement which had begun to have a real impact on public opinion.
The ongoing attacks will force people to fight back. Bloomberg and Klein want to shut down another 100 schools and open 100 more charters over the next four years. They also want to introduce merit pay for teachers and to be able to allow principals to simply lay off the teachers they dont like. On top of this, the schools face massive budget cuts this fall. Bloomberg and Klein have threatened to lay off thousands of teachers.
The main obstacle in the path of the privatizers is the 100,000-strong UFT. Unfortunately, the UFT leadership in recent years has made concession after concession. There has been more militant rhetoric recently from the leadership against school closings and charter schools, but that is partly because there is a union election in a months time. The opposition in the union, including members of Socialist Alternative, has called on the union to endorse and build for a rally on March 4, following the lead of California teachers.
The fight in New York has national ramifications. The Obama administration has been using the so-called Race to the Top fund as a carrot to force cash-strapped states to make education reforms, including lifting caps on charter schools and tying performance evaluation for teachers to test data. Rhetoric aside, the real target here is the powerful national teachers unions. The sad irony is that these unions are hamstrung because of their complete dependence on a political strategy of cultivating relationships with friends of labor Democrats.
The good news is that a more energized, militant opposition is developing in the New York UFT and in a number of other local teachers unions around the country. These opposition forces must link up their fight nationally while deepening their links locally with disillusioned parents and students. The fight to defend public education is a fight for the whole working class.
For a full view of the working-class anger at the New York Panel for Education Policy, see an article by Jesse Lessinger at www.socialistalternative.org.