United Action Challenges S.F School Downsizing

San Francisco, February 24 — Several hundred students, faculty, and supporters occupied the administration building of City College of San Francisco (CCSF). They were challenging state bosses’ plans for cuts to classes, programs, faculty and staff, and to limit community colleges to full-time students transferring to 4-year colleges or earning vocational certificates. The changes, if they go through, could turn working-class students’ dream of lifelong learning and chances at a good living into a nightmare of lifelong debt slavery and grinding servitude to the ruling class. 
Under the bosses’ “Student Success” initiative, even those allowed to continue in community colleges would graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in debt which they could neither pay off with low-paying jobs, nor escape from by filing bankruptcy.
Students are demanding that all the cuts be reversed, and that Proposition A tax money, approved by the voters to save City College, be used precisely for that, and not by the bosses. They are demanding town hall meetings at all campuses to help students organize. The bosses want to go forward with a list of 14 demands from the accreditation agency for downsizing and more administrative control at the colleges. The student-worker campaign is demanding that the agency’s changes be scrapped.
The strong points of the struggle are solidarity between students, faculty, and the community. Two to three times the number of expected people showed up at a recent community meeting. The weak points are Internal tensions between some people’s desire to “fix” the school by bowing to the accreditation agency’s demands for downsizing and administrative control.
This contrasts with others’ call for a more wide-ranging fight against the bosses’ national educational agenda of downsizing, privatization, and control of teachers and students with standardized testing.
The fact is education under capitalism follows the golden rule: those who have the gold make the rules. These bosses’ rules push racism, sexism, and the idea that capitalism is the best system possible. No matter how many reforms may be won, the schools will always teach the bosses’ ideology. PL’ers involved are discussing the communist vision of education where we work to serve society. Stay tuned.