Seattle Anti-Racists Strike Back

Last month’s Seattle teachers’ strike, the first in the city’s schools in 30 years, marked a qualitative advance in efforts to build militant anti-racism in a 5,000-member union. Years of struggle by the Social Equality Educators (SEE) caucus paid off in making the five-day work stoppage more politically effective—and a foundation for building a fighting, anti-racist organization for years to come.
In Seattle as elsewhere, public schools have been under sustained attack. Billionaires are raiding what remains in the public coffers as the capitalist ruling class attempts to centralize control of education. In Washington state, the fiasco of school funding was laid bare by a state Supreme Court ruling that held the Legislature in contempt for failing to fully fund basic education.  Educators reached their breaking point, and the strike was the result.
But as subsequent events made clear, reform politics in the current period is a game rigged by the capitalist bosses and their allies in union leadership. Despite a unanimous strike vote by the rank and file, the union’s executive board and representative assembly were authorized to suspend the strike on their own, with the general membership having no real say.
Nonetheless, we achieved some success.  A 40-member bargaining team fought for guaranteed recess time, the requirement of “Race and Equity Teams” at each school, and the removal of test scores from teacher evaluations. These demands generated broad public support. We strengthened our position by defying union leadership and organizing 200 educators in our zone to march five miles to the district headquarters. The march pressured the union leadership and sent a message to the bargaining team to hold the line and stop submitting weak counter-proposals. This action built unprecedented solidarity in our ranks, and a tentative agreement was reached that night.
In the end, we won 30 minutes per day of guaranteed recess for all schools—a rebuff to administrators in low-income, majority Black and Latin neighborhoods, where recess had been cut to as little as 15 minutes in a fool’s errand to increase test scores. We won the establishment of Race and Equity Teams in 30 percent of schools, a wedge for teachers to expose racism and build anti-racist practices.  While we’ll never get rid of racism in the schools under capitalism, we can use these teams to develop more people into anti-racist fighters. Finally, we won the fight to eliminate test scores from teacher evaluations, a major blow to the capitalists’ national education reform movement.
Capitalist Schools Bound to Fail
These concrete achievements are important. But we should be clear that the strike’s main victory was to- develop consciousness among educators as participants in class struggle, however unevenly. Of course, illusions persist.  As many see it, the next step in this struggle is to force the hand of the State Legislature, possibly through statewide strikes, to reform the tax structure for education funding.  This strategy fails to address the reality that capitalist education will never serve the needs of the working class. Even if the state “fully” funds education, by the bosses’ standards, we will still be stuck with the general crisis of global capitalism and the particular crisis of U.S. imperialism.  We will still face attacks from a ruling class demanding that workers do more for less.  Our students will still face a future of racist police terror, mass unemployment, and forced recruitment into the next global imperialist war.
But to the extent that we can continue to develop working-class consciousness and workers’ confidence in their collective power, we will have taken another step forward.  Now we have to mount more mass struggles to demonstrate that capitalism is not a system that can be reformed. It must be replaced by communism, a system that will transform education to meet the needs of all students—and the anti-racist, anti-sexist society they will help to build.