January 19th was the deadline for state grant applications under Obama’s “Race to the Top” (RttT) program. The program’s goal is to restructure the public education system on a national scale, by bribing states to bust teachers’ unions, centralize and privatize public education. At least eleven states (including CA, NY, MA, IL, and TN) are changing their state laws to be eligible for tiny amounts of grant money ($4-5 billion to be distributed nationwide over the next four years, about  $110 per school-age student per year. This top-down policy change, which attacks the working class and centralizes the power of the ruling class, is a clear example of how fascism is developing in this country.

U.S. capitalists are in an economic crisis. As the budget shrinks, their fiscal priorities become increasingly clear. They will continue to pay for imperialist wars and to prop up falling profits, giving huge breaks to banks and other corporations. Meanwhile, they will continue to depress the standard of living of the working class, through layoffs, reduced compensation and benefits and by slashing public services. Capitalists must cut back on higher-paid, unionized public employees, such as teachers and transit workers.

The two teacher unions represent one quarter of all unionized workers in this country and are an obstacle to the massive cuts and restructuring that the ruling class needs to do at this time. Race to the Top calls for a massive expansion of charter schools, especially through takeovers or conversions of schools that are currently unionized public schools. At such schools, superintendents may “close” a school one day and “reopen” it the next, having thrown the teachers’ contract out overnight. In “underperforming” schools, all staff can be fired and forced to reapply for their old jobs, or the school can simply be given over to a charter school management company. We have seen in recent articles about schools in Chicago that schools facing “reorganization” serve primarily black and Latino students. The same is true of the nineteen New York City public schools now slated for closing.

However bad these reforms will be for teachers, working-class students have much more to lose. As U.S. capitalists restructure the economy to support imperialist wars, they don’t want to pay a lot of money for 10-12 years of public education for every student. They want to further track and segregate public education, in order to educate a small percentage of students in technical fields needed for military service and future war production. This can be done at magnet and high-performing, selective charter schools. Meanwhile, they are abandoning large numbers of inner-city working-class students to a rotten education at low-performing charters and increasingly under-funded public schools where the neediest students land by default. The racist nature of the system ensures that black and Latino students are those most victimized by the crisis in education, as they face the worst odds in finding jobs, healthcare and affordable housing outside of school.

But in this period, U.S. capitalists face more than an economic crisis; they face a political crisis. As they move into a state of permanent wars abroad and cutbacks at home, they must get the U.S. working class to support these changes. Thus, every major newspaper has been attacking teachers and teachers’ unions, blaming them for the poor quality of education in urban schools. At the same time, they claim that charter schools are “the answer” to problems in urban education. Their goal is to split students and their families from the teachers, and get them to support the “reforms” that will worsen their own education. 

RttT also calls for greater standardization of curriculum across the country, and encourages states to work together to develop new state tests. (Previous education articles have discussed how curriculum standards are used to build patriotic, pro-imperialist ideas.) Further, it calls for “linking teacher pay and teacher tenure to student performance.” RttT calls for more data collection on students and teachers which will be used as ammunition for administrators against teachers and for the government against districts. And as teachers lose the job protection the contract used to provide, they may be scared into compliance and will be far less likely to stand up for their students.

We must continue to build a militant teacher-student-parent alliance against these attacks, pointing out how this is part of developing fascism. We must show our friends that the racism which separates us is an obstacle we must conquer as we fight for a new system that will serve all students. We don’t just want reforms that might get a few more books in classrooms or save a few inner-city schools from closing. Workers have won those reforms many times, only to have them taken away as the bosses are doing now. We want communism, a system where workers will run the world, including creating schools that serve the needs of our young people. We need schools that teach all of our children to read, write, do math and know our true history so that they can contribute to a workers’ society rather than serve as cogs in the capitalist machine. J