Liberal Rulers Sharpen Racist Attacks; PL Summer Project Hits Back

NEW YORK CITY, June 28 —  The working class in this city has endured 11 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s racist, anti-student education reform. These policies have accompanied a massive escalation of brutal police tactics against black and Latino youth, anotably stop-and-frisk, and a wholesale assault on the mainly black and Latino unionized city work force. (For the first time in history, every municipal union is without a contract.)
Bloomberg’s Wall Street buddies weathered a brief period of scrutiny at the height of Occupy Wall Street. Since then, they have resumed drawing huge bonuses, free from criticism.  Meanwhile, the mayor brags that his greatest legacy is his denial of years of raises to city workers — and that the main problem with stop-and-frisk is that it fails to harass more black and Latino workers and youth. Racism is getting worse, not only in New York City but nationwide. That is the context of education reform.
The Progressive Labor Party is responding with a two-pronged Summer Project. In New York, we are continuing the struggle for justice for Shantel Davis, the 23-year-old woman who was executed by a cop in Brooklyn last year. In Atlanta, we will take the struggle against racism to the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA).  Like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the NEA leadership refuses to confront the intensifying racism in our schools. To do so would expose the limits of capitalism. Instead, union leaders are tripping over themselves to cooperate in the latest education reform schemes.
AFT President Randi Weingarten issues joint-authored articles with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in American Teacher, the AFT’s own publication. The NEA plans to honor Jerry Brown, the rabidly anti-union governor of California, at their convention.  Our union leaders are too tied to capitalism to imagine, organize, or demand meaningful change.
With the cooperation of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s affiliate of the AFT, Bloomberg has implemented familiar features of the education reform playbook: performance pay for teachers, elimination of tenure, more high-stakes testing.  As tests have been made harder, then easier and now harder again with the Common Core curriculum, college readiness scores remain dismal.  The on-time graduation gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts remained unchanged in 2012, ranging from 20 to 22 percentage points. These numbers have been stuck at these levels for five years.
We Need Communism
Public education, like all institutions under capitalism, is designed for most to fail.  Those who can afford private schooling get small classes, one-to-one tutoring, and excellent facilities. Under such privileged conditions, the bankrupt lessons of individualism, elitism, and patriotism sink in all the more deeply. Meanwhile, public schools provide these high-cost amenities only for the few students being groomed to help the ruling class manage its capitalist system.
The schools we work in 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.
When students fail in the bosses’ schools, they need communist leadership to learn to hold the system accountable. They need to reject the capitalist ideology that those who don’t succeed aren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough.  When teachers face the latest attack upon students in the guise of education reform, we need to redirect the debate toward the racist social conditions that set up most of us to fail.  Through our Summer Project and communist school, PLP will equip a new generation of fighters with the practice and theory that are essential for a communist revolution.