CHICAGO, December 3 — More than 500 black, Latino, and white parents, students, education workers and other working-class Chicagoans, including PL’ers, assembled today at a local school to say, “We’re fired up; we won’t take it no more!” Earlier in the week, Chicago Public School (CPS) officials had announced the racist closing or restructuring of 21 schools. Since 2001, CPS has already closed 44 schools, “turned around” 17 more, and opened 80 charter schools in their place.
The overwhelming majority of the closed or reorganized schools are predominantly black or Latino. These attacks disrupt the lives of students, especially the disproportionate numbers of homeless children who attend them. The immediate aim of today’s conference, representing thousands, is to stop these proposals.
As many declared, the responsibility for these actions lay with the politicians at City Hall, the capitalists on the Board of Education, and the bank and corporation directors. They expressed their disgust with the CPS spokespeople who claim that the changes will help prepare every student for college. In reality, students who move from one school to another generally do no better academically, and sometimes do worse.
The real motive for these actions is the money that comes from privatization. The ruling class has decided to spend less on educating poor black and Latino working-class students, in order to boost profits in the developing education business sector. Their plan for our children consists of unemployment, war, prison, and at best a low-wage, dead-end job, not college.
Students Aren’t Just Test Scores
Turnaround and charter schools are also models for the teaching of capitalist ideology. As conference speakers pointed out, many education workers at community-based schools, those targeted by CPS, take pride in serving the children and their families. They aim to provide support when loved ones die or become ill, or unemployed or lose their house. They nurture the emotional, artistic, and physical aspects of the child, as well as the intellectual. This is not what the capitalists want for our children.
The speakers declared that students are not just a test score. The ruling class has always used schools to promote capitalist ideology: patriotism, individualism, and racism. Now more than ever, as the U.S. faces unparalleled competition worldwide, the rulers need future soldiers and workers who support their exploitative profit system.
Many charter schools, along with the Academy of Urban School Leadership schools that manage most turnarounds, take an authoritarian approach to education — just what the capitalists ordered. They will use the common core standards to consolidate the approved ideology and fire teachers whose students fail to absorb it. This approach prizes discipline, parroting the teacher, and the mastery of capitalist lies. Creativity and critical thinking, learning about the world in order to change it are out. The rulers want a cheaper, more profitable, more managed education for workers’ children.
Many conference attendees realized that stopping this round of closings and turnarounds is no long-term solution; the capitalist system will find other ways to attack us. It was clear that attentees shared a strong desire to build a militant, anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement. But there is not yet much agreement around rejecting electoral politics and building a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism. A worker-run communist society is appealing to many, but many still hold the illusion that we can get there peacefully.
Progressive Labor Party members are patiently building support for our ideas, though with uneven effort and uneven results. By spending more time with fellow education workers, struggling together against CPS, working together in activist groups, and supporting each other personally and politically, we will make small breakthroughs that lead to bigger ones. The world our children need and deserve is ours to win.