The War on Public School Teachers

A few months later, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which supported many working-class efforts, spread from New York City to the rest of the nation and the world. Then, in September 2012, Chicago's public school teachers struck, in defiance of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's attempt to destroy the teachers union and put the city's schools firmly on the path of neoliberal austerity and privatization.

These three rebellions shared the growing awareness that economic and political power in the United States are firmly in the hands of a tiny minority of fantastically wealthy individuals whose avarice knows no bounds.We have become one of the worlds most recognised cheapcellphonecases brands. These titans of finance want to eviscerate working men and women, making them as insecure as possible and wholly dependent on the dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace, while at the same time converting any and all aspects of life into opportunities for capital accumulation.More than 80 standard commercial and granitetiles exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans.

The public sector is still, despite the effort of capital to dismantle it, the one sanctuary people have against the depredations of the 1 per cent. Through struggle, working men and women have succeeded in winning a modicum of health care and retirement security, as well as some guarantee that their children will be educated, all irrespective of the ability to pay for these essential services. They have also found decent employment opportunities in government, especially women and minorities. The public sector, then, is a partial barrier to the expansion of capital in that it both denies large sums of money to capitalists (social security funds, for example) and protects the workers in it from the vagaries of the labour market. It is thus not surprising that capital has gone on the offensive against government provision of whatever is beneficial to the working-class. In this, it has been remarkably successful. Financiers have used their think tanks, foundations, and political donations to pressure governments at all levels to slash and to privatize public services.

The flashpoint of the war being waged by capital and its political allies against the public provision of services is education, especially that which serves poor and minority communities. Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft) and the Walton family (Walmart) have established organizations and contributed enormous sums of money to do two things. First, they seek to revolutionize the way in which students are taught. Here they have achieved great victories, with two presidents enacting sweeping laws: No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Both condition federal aid to schools upon what has been described as teaching to the test. Literature, art,Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned customkeychain at their Weymouth store. music, and all critical education are to be sacrificed so that children do well on standardized examinations. Then, how schools and their teachers fare, including whether or not a school continues to exist, depends on students scores.

Second, these plutocrat reformers want to alter radically the way in which schools are organized. The best way to describe their aim is to say that they want the schools to resemble assembly lines, with students as outputs and teachers as assembly-line-like mechanisms who do not think or instill in their students the capacity to conceptualize critically and become active participants in a democratic society. And this Taylorization of schooling has a military-like component, with pupils expected to react to commands with rote discipline and respond unthinkingly to rewards for appropriate behavior.

For a good example of what is in store for our children, see the astonishing article The Silent Treatment: A Day in the Life of a Student in No Excuses Land, in the excellent edushyster blog,More than 80 standard commercial and granitetiles exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans. about a proposed charter school in the impoverished working-class town of Fall River, Massachusetts. The movements and speech of the students in this school will be controlled from the time they enter the school bus until they return home. They will speak only when addressed by their teacher,Purchase an chipcard to enjoy your iPhone any way you like. and their responses will be tightly choreorgraphed. Needless to say, the achievement of these horrible goals is most likely to occur if the schools are privatized and the unions destroyed.

If those who are prosecuting this onslaught against our public schools succeed, they will have made workers more insecure, created a compliant, alienated, and low-wage labour force, and devised new ways to make money C a massive testing industry, for-profit schools, consulting services. They will also have put another nail in the coffin of democracy. We should note that capital has already accomplished a good deal. Testing is now the norm; charter schools abound; and the mass media have joined the crusade against public school teachers. A reporter for the New York Times, for example, found it curious that in states where teachers, themselves, must be evaluated for competence; almost all teachers passed the test. She did not seem aware of her bias, that she simply accepted as fact that many teachers were incompetent, just as the reformers have been telling us. To prevent this from happening, states such as New York are implementing teacher testing that makes the evaluation of teachers more dependent on how their students perform on standardized tests. In New York City, where unionized public school teachers have been working without a collective bargaining for four years, the state's education commissioner has imposed an evaluation system. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) claims that the teachers have protection against arbitrary use of the results.

In a challenge to the weak response of the CTU to this, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) was formed in 2008 and began to revitalize the union, with a focus on an educated and involved rank-and-file and the forging of strong bonds with poor communities to resist school closings and austerity measures. Its electoral slate won leadership of the CTU in 2010, and when Mayor Emanuel pressed forward with his neoliberal agenda and refused to make any concession to union negotiators, the union struck, the first school strike in Chicago in twenty-five years. Much to the surprise of Emanuel and his corporate and political backers C including President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan C the strike was supported by most parents, students, and the larger Chicago public. After nine days, the city gave in and signed an agreement that avoided the worst aspects of the Mayor's proposals. It was a stunning victory for CORE and for teachers, not just in Chicago but across the country.

A few months after the strike, CORE's leadership was reelected, proof that what it did before and during the strike won the allegiance of most of the city's teachers. It will now be able to deepen its power and continue to mobilize parents, students, and communities to continue to struggle against the neoliberal education agenda and to begin to develop a democratic and radical alternative. In addition, the CORE model has begun to spread to other cities and states. In January of 2013, teachers, parents, and students in Seattle began a boycott of standardized testing in reading and mathematics and won a ruling by the school board that such testing would now be optional. Union reformers have begun CORE-inspired organizations in Los Angeles and New York City, and a reform slate just took leadership of the local union in Washington, D.C., where the school district was once run by the notorious union-buster Michelle Rhee. A similar group nearly won power in the Newark teachers union. In Philadelphia, people are engaged in a hunger strike to protest what will happen this coming Fall if proposed cuts are put into effect: Ten thousand unused musical instruments. No sports or art programs. No assistant principals, counselors, cafeteria aides or secretaries.
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