Rotten to the [Common] Core

As the bosses’ economy continues to tank, one news report after the next warns that young people are entering the worst job market ever.  This “new normal” of high unemployment and relentless attacks on salaries, benefits, and unions has teachers running scared as well.  In hot pursuit is the main wing of the U.S ruling class. As these capitalists find themselves losing ground to their imperialist rivals, they are pushing for greater, more centralized control over what is being taught.
Most recently that push has taken the form of the Common Core — our common enemy.
The Common Core is a set of learning goals the bosses have established that require even more high-stakes testing.  It is a part of President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top,” a competition where the losers — students and teachers alike — are trained to blame themselves, not the racist, exploitive capitalist system.   Education workers, parents and students must not be fooled by the bosses’ stated goal to use the Common Core to ramp up “critical thinking.” Real critical thinking would uncover the truth that capitalism can never work for the vast majority.
Budget Cuts Tied to Imperialist Wars
The budget pressure facing schools across the U.S. is directly tied to the multi-trillion-dollar expenses from the failed imperialist adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the need to fund future wars in the Middle East and eventually Asia.  The budget cuts are frontal attacks on teachers and their unions. But their primary targets are working-class students. Today these young people spend their days in degraded learning conditions. Tomorrow they may be battlefield casualties in the bosses’ next imperialist war.
United, teachers, parents, and students could effectively fight back against these anti-worker education reforms. That’s why the bosses design these reforms to drive a wedge between education workers and the families they serve.  
Common Core is the latest development in a long-standing ruling-class effort to produce workers to serve its industrial and military machines and to control school curricula. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed heavily to the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the agency that spawned the College Board and its racist and hated SAT. Starting before World War II, the Carnegie Foundation, a leading force in the racist eugenics movement (breed only genetically “superior” people), spent millions to develop standardized tests. In 1965, it initiated the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is still used today as a national standard to measure the fitness of the working class for industrial and military competition with the U.S. bosses’ overseas rivals. With an estimated 30 percent of high school graduates now lacking the tools for military service, the crisis of capitalist education is acute.  
The same U.S. ruling class forces are now positioning themselves in a desperate fight to maintain supremacy, a struggle that will inevitably lead to bigger and broader wars. Every education reform pronouncement of Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is framed by a thinly veiled rhetoric of war. The priority, they tell us, is to make sure U.S. capitalism is not “surpassed,” by its rivals, and that its workers are prepared to compete in the global economy. As surely as trade wars lead to shooting wars, education workers, students and parents must harbor no illusions about the true purpose of education reform: war preparation.
The Liberal Myth of Opportunity
The broad shift in the U.S. economy away from manufacturing and toward the so-called “service sector” has placed new pressure on the rulers to dress up their schools as places where any young person can unlock their opportunity to a better future, if only they try.  Racism makes a mockery of this promise. Liberal commentators like Diane Ravitch take this hypocrisy seriously — reforms like the Common Core undermine U.S. democracy, as she says repeatedly.  In Ravitch’s world, we ought not to expect proficiency from all students. She believes we ought to be honest in saying that schools must do a better job in more fairly sorting out young people for various rungs on the job market ladder. And as the job market trends toward a status quo where a small number of highly educated (and debt-ridden) college graduates claw their way into a “knowledge economy,” while most remain locked into a lifetime of sporadic employment and low earnings, the myth that every worker had a chance at success becomes ever more important.  To make workers continue to blame ourselves for the failures of the capitalists’ system, the mirage of a high-quality education available to all becomes ever more crucial.  Enter the Common Core.
The Common Core exists in the same world as the one where racist police murder and National Security Agency surveillance go unchecked.   The Common Core’s intensified monitoring and computerization provides the rulers new avenues for control over what is said in classrooms and staff meetings.  National teacher union leaders have embraced these steps toward fascism. On the local level, union leaders have done little more than question or negotiate the pace of their implementation.  Talk of “higher standards” and “critical thinking” is a foil to win well-meaning and anti-racist teachers into the patriotic fold.  
True critical thinking would lead to massive strikes and walkouts.  We should aspire to this higher standard of learning and action. Yet the important teachers strike in Chicago last fall teaches us that we must aim for even more.  A radical, militant, anti-racist alternative is desperately needed in battles against segregation and racist school closures in Chicago, New York, and throughout the U.S. The Progressive Labor Party is establishing a beachhead for bigger battles to come.  Education workers, students and parents must fight tooth and nail against the Common Core and war budgets with our eye on the biggest prize. We must organize a movement for a working-class revolution. Our goal is to win the world our children — and theirs — deserve: a communist world.