Chicago: Mass School Closings Fire Up Students, Teachers

CHICAGO, March 28 — Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has announced the closing of 54 schools, plus a turnaround for another six and co-shares for 11. This unprecedented attack on students, parents, teachers, and other school workers is racist to the core. Virtually all of those impacted by these actions are low-income working-class black students. Many of these students (and teachers) have been shuffled from school to school as CPS goes about the business of destroying public schools. CPS has systematically starved schools in the city’s predominately black South and West sides of the resources they need, and now they are shuttering them completely.
The attacks on education are part of the attacks on all the meager services, including health care and housing, for the working class. The capitalists are tightening OUR belts, (not theirs), as they ramp up their competition with capitalists in China and other countries. The U.S. ruling class is preparing for the inevitable war with their rivals and needs public money to pay for that war. They expect the working class to pay, as they always have, in blood and money, for ruling-class wars.
The head of CPS, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, is trying to sell this attack on the students and educators as the opposite. She promises that students will get a better education in their new “welcoming schools,” saying they will all get iPads, air conditioning, and special programs. Yet, out of the other side of her mouth, she talks about the necessity to close schools to save money. The numbers don’t add up and the most likely scenario is that when schools open next August, those impacted by school actions will be in complete disarray.
There is a huge rally planned for March 27, called by the Chicago Teachers Union and other union, community, parent, and student groups, in opposition to the school closings. Other militant actions are being planned as well. However, it is unlikely that many, if any, of the school closings will be rescinded. This is an attack we have already seen carried out in a massive way in Detroit, New York City and Philadelphia.

This is just the beginning. The ruling class is going to keep hitting us with attack after attack. The reform struggle, passionate as it often is, will not do the trick. The only way to stop these monsters is to take away their power and replace their racist profit-based system with a working-class system, communism. Of course that will be a hard fight, but harder still will be life under capitalism if we don’t fight to end it.
Progressive Labor Party in Chicago and around the world is working to make that happen. In Chicago, the PLP has stepped up its sales of CHALLENGE newspaper, is winning friends to be part of our May Day event, and making a particular focus among CPS teachers, parents and students. PLP plans to take leadership on March 27 in motivating the fight for communism as the solution to school closings and the other horrors capitalism foists on the working class.