School systems across the country are facing the worst cutbacks in decades, while Obama’s promises to withdraw from Afghanistan are coming undone barely six months after he made them. In a brazenly honest way, education secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to “let no crisis be wasted” in the ruling class’s ongoing strategy to solve their economic and military problems through attacks on the working class. This is the same Duncan who accelerated the re-segregation of the Chicago school system, coupled with a noxious cocktail of education “reforms” now being imposed throughout the country through the bribery of Obama’s cynical “Race to the Top.”
Charter schools, merit pay, data-driven teacher evaluation, standardized exams — none of these bosses’ ploys can meet the needs of students. Teachers must not be fooled into siding for or against any of these schemes. They’re all intended to deliver students more efficiently into the hands of the ruling class, to be exploited in the workplace or the military. It’s a contradiction for the rulers to “leave no child behind” in a “race to the top.” In such a race, working-class kids will inevitably lose because the capitalist education system was never designed to prepare all students to succeed.
Major ruling-class figures are saying so themselves. In the May/June 2008 issue of “Foreign Affairs,” the house organ for the Rockefeller wing of the ruling class, prominent pundit Fareed Zakaria wrote, “If the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country.”
If we do the math, that’s two-thirds of the working class that the rulers plan to leave behind. They are using the latest financial crisis as an opportunity to trim spending on classrooms and pension funds. They need a school system that will preserve the status quo of class relations. Under capitalism, a portion of workers is always disposable. In a society founded on slavery, these are mostly black and Latino workers. With rising racist unemployment devastating millions, the ruling class needs schools to help reorganize society and to crush the idea that a job is a basic right.
Nobody in education — no liberal in the White House, no union misleader — is dealing with the heart of the matter. The basic drive of capitalism toward imperialist war and increased exploitation of the working class makes education reform a joke. The exceptional cases where schools do a better job of educating our youth can only be viewed as oases in a desert of racist neglect, not as models that the bosses will reproduce for all. Education reform will make education for the masses a meaningless process of test prep. Teachers also stand to be more sharply exploited, and will be forced to work harder for less money.
Communists need and value every one of us. Each individual contains the potential to understand and change the world. Through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of working people banished disease, illiteracy, and imperialist exploitation from their societies under the leadership of communists. These magnificent movements were reversed, but their achievements can and must be replicated and deepened. Communism, and only communism, leaves no child behind. Join PLP!