SEATTLE, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party members played important roles in the biannual convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) ending here today. We helped lead a rally exposing the Obama Administration’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and a walkout and rally against billionaire Bill Gates. We helped organize and spoke at three forums held by the AFT Peace and Justice Caucus, distributed 600 CHALLENGES, 300 Juneteenth Anti-Racism Supplements and 4,000 leaflets to delegates.
We helped the Peace and Justice Caucus recruit for forums on Haiti, on the fight-back against the racist, anti-working class Race to the Top competition and on Afghanistan and Gaza. They were attended by many rank-and-file delegates. The discussions there raised interesting questions about fights against the ruling class and built ties between delegates. (See box page 7)
The militant walkout against Gates was caused by Party members having political conversations with their friends and others in general meetings about why we should oppose his presence at a union convention. Gates is spending lots of money through his foundation to make changes in education. While he first used his money to help build small schools, now he’s focusing on “teacher quality.” The AFT leadership invited him because he’s already given millions to four school districts for pilot projects.
Gates uses his foundation’s money to influence policies that attack teachers and students. Smaller schools often exclude students with the greatest needs — special education students, English-language learners and many students whose neighborhood schools have closed. Through actions like “school turnaround,” as we’ve seen in Chicago, the Board of Education fires the school’s staff. Then lower-paid, inexperienced teachers are hired in their places — in urban areas the firings are racist because a disproportionate number of black teachers lose their jobs in the process.
At the same time, students are hurt, now having younger, inexperienced teachers, rather than teachers with skills in managing a classroom and teaching their subjects. The reorganization of the schools also resegregates the schools. The AFT has conceded this battle everywhere — only the organization of angry workers in NY, Chicago, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. has led to any defeat of the ruling-class’s attacks.
Due to the dysfunction of so many schools in many cities, parents are choosing charter schools and the smaller schools. Studies show that these new schools aren’t doing any better than the original schools. However, parents are desperate to find what they hope are better schools for their children. The major weakness in these education struggles is the lack of a teacher-parent-student alliance.
The AFT is tightly controlled by the leadership of its NYC local (UFT), and struggle against the pro-ruling-class line of the AFT is difficult. The AFT refuses to criticize U.S. foreign policy. Their Afghanistan resolution was filled with outright lies — such as the U.S. being “drawn into” supporting the government of Hamid Karzai.
Delegates, friends and members of PL and others, fought hard to brand the war in Afghanistan a war for resources, especially oil and gas, rather than a war against terrorism. Other AFT resolutions build plans for further collaboration between the union, politicians and the ruling class. For the union, these conventions are important tools to help win members to the ruling-class’s political agenda — for war and fascism, building patriotism to convince working-class students to fight and die for oil.
Party members on the convention floor and in committee meetings analyzed the situation in Chicago Public Schools, where a rank-and-file caucus has won the leadership of the 35,000-member local and tied poor school conditions to the failure of international capitalism. Some of our ideas took the form of resolutions for debate, which provided talking points for political discussions with teachers and allows us to sharpen our struggles with people we know well.
We held a PLP picnic, bringing friends of the Party to a Seattle park to learn more about our Party and our organizing against the ruling-class attacks. We must build close ties with other workers. PL members spent time with teachers having discussions over lunch and breakfast about the Party and the need to bring revolutionary ideas to our parent, teacher and student relationships.
From the classroom, to the caucus meetings, to the convention floor, to parent conferences, communist teachers must continue to seize opportunities to build the Party. Our Party was essential to the organization of the rank-and-file opposition forces at the convention, providing tactical and political leadership.
Our literature provided ideas and analysis about issues specific to education and also tied those issues to the broader world situations of increasing war and fascism. Our leaflet about the BP oil spill explained how we can’t rely on the ruling-class’s government to solve our problems — either in the Gulf or in the schools. Our comrades led struggle, made new political friends and built stronger ties with old friends.
Overall, the convention was a success for the Party. The recent developments in the Chicago Teachers Union have created opportunities for Party members to focus our work in the AFT while broadening our base among large numbers of workers who are students, parents and fellow teachers. Concentrating on the goal of building the Party and communist relationships while working in the bosses’ organizations challenges us all. Our collective strength and our confidence in the workers will guide us on the road to revolution.