Battle Privatizing SF City College: Bosses Seek Profits from Education Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, February 6 — Four hundred students, teachers, school workers and community members streamed into today’s meeting at San Francisco City College (CCSF) to protest the cuts and reorganization plans ordered by the State government-imposed Special Trustee. She already forced an additional 8.8 percent teacher wage-cut after teachers unfortunately agreed to a 2.5 percent wage-cut last year. This trustee also ordered the layoffs of 49 classified workers, 25 part-time instructors and 18 part-time counselors.
CCSF serves 85,000 mainly working-class, Latino, Asian, black, and immigrant students. The government accreditation commission (ACCJC) is threatening to close our college in the future, which has scared some into accepting cutbacks. The commission claims to be “independent” and composed of educators and others representing the “public interest.” In reality, it is part of what communists call “the state apparatus.” The “public interest” is actually the needs of the capitalist ruling class to stifle, stratify, and divide the working class. At the same time, the education “state apparatus” promotes a mass blame-the-victim mentality, as more younger people can’t find a stable job (See “Why It is Hard to make it in America,” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2012).
PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE as friends and people entered the room. We fight against the destruction of public education while at the same time present a communist alternative of what education should be:  an apparatus to develop everyone to their fullest potential to participate in, and have the power to make real decisions, in a society based on the concept, “from each according to commitment and ability to each according to need.” The mass movement here is moving beyond just voting for change.
According to ACCJC: What are CCSF’s Crimes?
Is it education? Is it related to funding? No, not according to ACCJC. The “crime” seems to be too much money spent directly on students and educational workers, including benefits and pay for part-time instructors. Instead, the Special Trustee will put the money in the reserve fund and in retiree benefits: areas from which capitalist “investors” can make money. We must fight against the following attacks, which are racist and anti-working class in nature.
The “crime” seems to be:

• Not enough “professional” administrators who side with the cutbacks.
• Too much democracy: Department Chair people are elected by their peers and have an important role in managing the School.
• Too many campuses around the City, which give easier access to SF’s population.
• Too many free classes where many people learn English and prepare for Citizenship tests.

Whose interest do the ACCJC and the Special Trustees Serve?
These changes are part of the campaign of the Lumina Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council, which represent the needs of billionaires (like Bill Gates and the Koch brothers), to privatize education. The Gates Foundation and Lumina gave $3 million to oversee our college. Big capitalists and corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash with no profitable place to invest it. Now, they have discovered the $650-billion education industry. Corporations need to control the ideological content of education to create a submissive workforce. They invest in and promote:

• Loan indebtedness for college-age students (banks and even the federal Department of Education make profits);
• Charter schools (some for profit, others to destroy existing public schools); “private” tutoring for younger students (for profit);
• Testing at all levels (a for-profit $1.3 billion industry)
• Privatized colleges and online classes.

Communism Serves the Working Class
Under capitalism, all education — public, private, for-profit, or otherwise — serves the needs of the ruling class. The communist world PLP is fighting for means that all education is free. In fact, there would be no money, no wages or production for profit. Education would be everywhere and international: schools, work sites, neighborhood collectives, and childcare centers. Those who do “the work” would do the planning and implementation because communism eliminates divisions between “mental and “manual” labor.
The purpose of education would be to empower the working class worldwide, to encourage and develop collectivity and cooperation, to show how we depend upon each other and that all value comes from the labor of workers. International working-class unity would smash the national borders. Education would not only be free, but it would be in the interest of the working class. In order for that to materialize, we must destroy these Boards of Trustees in our colleges and this capitalist state.