Student-Parent-Teacher Unity Needed — Fight Racist Education Reforms

“One Newark,” Superintendent Cami Anderson’s blueprint for the city’s schools, comes straight from the tiny minority of super-rich profiteers who rule the U.S. While some Democratic Party politicians have criticized how Anderson imposed her plan on Newark’s students, parents, and teachers, there is general agreement about its objectives. One Newark aims to educate the children of the largest and one of the poorest cities of New Jersey to better serve the needs of the ruling class. The beneficiaries will be JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and ExxonMobil.
Anderson’s plan will close a number of elementary and high schools over the next three years, lay off one-third of the staff, and destroy the concept of neighborhood schools. Families will now be forced to apply to all schools, beginning in kindergarten, with students as young as 8 forced to ride public transportation. As in many other cities, this will also accelerate the invasion of privatized charter schools, that stress conformity, strip teachers of union protections, and give the bosses more direct control over curriculum.
The education system in any society is vital to the interests of the class that rules. The Progressive Labor Party stands with students, parents, and teachers in fighting against One Newark while also organizing for a working-class revolution that will smash the entire capitalist system.
No matter how hard we fight, schools under capitalism will never serve working-class youth. Even if the schools were to “work,” they would work only for the capitalist bosses. From their content (like the U.S. ruling class winning World War 2, rather than the Soviet workers’ Red Army) to their “hidden curriculum” of keeping students obedient and passive, the job of these schools is to keep workers mentally enslaved. This explains the Newark schools’ metal detectors, the “no-tolerance” policies and the emphasis on standardized tests.
The working class needs a different kind of education. We need schools that will train our youth to see the world objectively and struggle for a communist society based on equality.
The Struggle Sharpens
The fightback is growing. The Newark Student Union — born out of the 2013 budget cuts that slashed after-school programs and funding for the arts — is one new force organizing against Anderson. Another is the Newark Parent Union. Teachers and administrators are increasingly vocal in their outcry, and local clergy and community leaders have joined the fray. From sit-ins at the Board of Ed to street rallies of hundreds of activists, the struggle has surely sharpened.
But Anderson has done well by the state education officials who renewed her contract on June 27 for another three years, beginning at $251,500 annually. The bosses are clearly pleased with her iron-fisted rule. After four principals spoke out against the superintendent’s school closure plan, they were immediately suspended from their jobs. Another principal was suspended after the head of the school’s parent organization posted an agenda critical of the superintendent and then had an altercation with two of Anderson’s assistants. The parent is now barred from entering all Newark public school buildings.
At the end of May, the entire administration of University High School was fired for failing to file enough computerized data on their teachers for the central office to see. More than 200 students walked out of University High School the next school day.
Students the Main Targets
In Newark, as in many other cities with mostly black and Latin workers, this racist system has hit especially hard. The unemployment rate is double the state average. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of children living in Newark below the poverty line increased by 28 percent, and the number living in extreme poverty (under $11,525 for a family of four) increased by 38 percent!  In 2012, 44 percent of Newark’s children lived in poverty, nearly triple the state average. To deflect workers’ anger at capitalism, the system that creates these savage inequalities, the bosses scapegoat the schools and education workers.
From Michelle Rhee in Washington to Arne Duncan (now Obama’s Secretary of Education) in Chicago, school reforms have done nothing to improve the education of working-class students. The template for One Newark was Duncan’s Chicago plan, “Renaissance 2010.” Its main components were school closures, teacher layoffs, and a move to charter schools. The plan devastated working-class communities. Six years after its implementation, even the bosses’ paper, the Chicago Tribune, admitted it had failed to improve the skills of working class youth.
Education workers feel under assault, and they should. The reformers’ attack on tenure, teacher layoffs, ballooning class sizes, and overwhelming paperwork has changed the way workers function in these schools. But the main targets of Anderson’s administration are the students. Under capitalism, schools are designed to discipline the next generation of workers.
Anderson is moving to force administrators and teachers to discipline students to better prepare them to serve the bosses. At the end of this school year, the principal at Science Park High School, one of the top 500 high schools in the U.S., was slammed with an evaluation of “partially effective.” The reason? Most of the Newark Student Union’s leadership came from this school, and the administration and teachers had failed to discourage them from fighting back.
Students, and particularly black and Latin youth, are no strangers to the attacks now faced by education workers. By joining together in fighting back for better conditions, students and teachers can create “schools of struggle” to prepare us for the larger, longer-term fight against the bosses’ profit system, capitalism.
“One Newark” Fits Rulers’ Plans
We all know the public schools have been “failing” for years. Why the urgency now? As CHALLENGE has often noted, it has everything to with the decline of U.S. imperialism. China, Russia, and other rivals are threatening U.S. capitalists’ status as the top superpower. To protect their position, U.S. bosses need a skilled and docile working class. They need workers, especially black and Latin workers, willing to work long hours for poverty wages and to fight and die in imperialist wars. How can they do that?  By promoting fascist ideas: obedience to the state’s leaders, sacrifice for the “homeland,” and a vicious, blame-the-victim mentality toward all who do not “succeed.”
To win workers to these reactionary ideas, the rulers must condition children from a young age. They need to mold students to see greedy business leaders as heroes and education workers as “selfish.” They need to train young workers to accept cutbacks in social services, a necessity to fund the bosses’ next war and line the capitalists’ pockets. The education reform movement is bankrolled by super-rich financial and technology billionaires. It’s the creature of right-wing think tanks and Wall Street boardrooms, using a phony humanitarian cover to mask their real purposes.
The vultures behind the school reform movement are out to smash teacher unions and tenure protections. They are imposing business-style “accountability” on school employees. They have friends in very high places. The Obama/Duncan “Race To The Top” initiative is designed to promote charter schools and “performance-based” rating of teachers.
Cami Anderson’s One Newark represents one of the bosses’ most ambitious efforts to reorganize the public schools to meet the pressing needs of U.S. capitalism. A recent New Yorker article shows how U.S. Senator Corey Booker, the former Newark mayor, allied himself with this racist movement. In 2010, Booker teamed with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to devise a secret reform plan for Newark schools. Since “real change has casualties,” Booker and Christie decided it was necessary to exclude parents and teachers from the discussion. Instead, the goals and details of the plan would be worked out in advance with Mark Zuckerberg, its billionaire backer of Facebook fame.
 Meanwhile, the .01 percent who actually rule the U.S. understand the true goals of the school reform movement. Joel Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, war criminal under George W. Bush, led a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.”  Their 2012 report makes the bosses’ concerns clear: “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”  It continues, “Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America’s security.”
A number of recommendations in the CFR Report, including school choice and common core standards, are the centerpiece of the school reorganization plans in Newark and other big cities. We need to escalate our fightback against Cami Anderson and One Newark. But we cannot forget that the root of these anti-worker reforms is the capitalist system.