Every time workers turn around, it seems we face a new attack from school bosses who claim to promote students’ interests. Closing schools, firing teachers, imposing more high-stakes exams, making graduation more difficult--all these are fed to us as part of a recipe to “improve” education. Even budget cuts that savagely reduce resources are put forward as opportunities to help our young people!
Republicans and Democrats across the country, from Obama down to local boards of education, are united in a coordinated effort to cut budgets. NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s attitude typifies the billionaire mindset that guides policy in the US: “ In fact, it’s healthy to go and say let’s cut a little bit and force the principals and the teachers and the administrators to say, ‘Is this program worth it?’ “
Bloomberg’s dismissive tone is disgusting enough on its own. Coupled with the fact that he’s speaking of a city where over 85% of the students are black or Latino, the racism he exhibits is criminal and at the same time infuriatingly typical. And this was the bosses’ attitude before the recent economic crisis hit. Since then, expanding imperialist war and evaporating paper wealth has driven the U.S. ruling class into a frenzy of budget cuts. Forty-four states out of fifty anticipate budget shortfalls for 2012, totaling $112 billion (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2011). Meanwhile, roughly a trillion dollars has been spent on Mid-East wars since 9/11.
These cuts are about more than money. They are about fear and control. When teachers see their job security eroding, they are more easily whipped into line to peddle and defend the bosses’ lies. This fear can intimidate students, parents, and teachers from fighting back against the school system’s racist neglect and miseducation.
Working class unity is vital to our defense. One key to bosses’ “education reform” strategy is the shutting down of “failing schools” so that they can open new or reorganized ones: old wine in new bottles. This amounts to a cover for firing teachers and shuffling kids around so nobody takes responsibility for them. Workers and youth must shut down these failing school systems with mass walkouts and strikes. With the leadership of PLP, these struggles could become schools for communism by turning defensive fight-backs against capitalism into an offensive class war for the future that our children deserve — communism.
Let’s look at why the bosses’ schools can never provide what the working class needs.
Public education, like all institutions under capitalism, is set up for most students to fail. Those who can afford private schooling get small classes, one-to-one tutoring, and excellent facilities. The public schools provide such amenities only for the few students that they are funneling to help perpetuate the ruling class.
The system will not devote resources to students who will graduate into an economy that has no jobs for them. Capitalism’s inability to provide jobs for all workers means that most working-class students sit in over-crowded classrooms with out-of-date textbooks and few if any science labs. These schools have two purposes: to develop workers for the massive low-wage sector of the 21st-century economy, and to produce the foot soldiers for the bosses’ 21st-century wars.
Good teachers find these working conditions revolting. Some quit in frustration; others are driven out by administrators who defend the status quo. And many who remain come to accept and reinforce the message that a certain percentage of their students just won’t “make it.”
It’s no wonder, then, that cynical politicians exploit this crisis and mobilize mass anger against “overpaid” teachers. Even so, there are effective, pro-student teachers in every school. These teachers must choose between allying with the anti-student ideology of the teachers unions and their Democratic Party bosses or uniting with students and parents to struggle against the system that sets them up to fail.
Within the world of education reform, even bourgeois theorists admit that measures like “data-driven planning” or “differentiated instruction” will fail if students’ individual needs are not consistently addressed. It’s common sense that racism and poverty, the by-products of capitalism, increase children’s needs at school. But as capitalist institutions, schools will never be able to fully address these needs for all students, despite the best efforts of dedicated teachers. Any child can learn, but capitalism is not designed to teach every child. Under these conditions,an angry child is showing signs of consciousness, not a “behavioral problem.”
When students don’t succeed in their schools, they need communist leadership to learn to blame the system. They need to reject the ideology of capitalist culture: that if you don’t succeed, it is because you weren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough.
Schools form the foundation for the structure of capital’s domination over our lives. Teachers can choose to side with students and parents and resist this domination. As war and economic crises intensify, the bosses’ attacks on the schools will also intensify, making learning and teaching harder. PLP has a long history of organizing struggles small and large against racism in the school system and building a base for communist revolution. Join us.J
Other Big Lies That The Bosses’ Schools Help Defend and Promote:
The 20-year, intensifying U.S. war in the Mid-East is about stopping terrorism or spreading democracy--about anything except control of oil.
“Shared sacrifice” will fix the economy.
Women are slowly but surely moving toward equality with men.
Past communist revolutions have led to the greatest catastrophes in human history.
Racism has been defeated and is a thing of the past.