New York City school students suffer the racist indignity of attending one of the most segregated school systems in the country. This is no accident. It is a calculated plan by the city’s ruling class to maintain exclusive enclave schools that are significantly or predominantly white—and to subject the other 90 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school children to a racist, sub-par education.
The bosses’ segregation strategy is designed to divide the working class, build racist ideas about Black and Latin children, and blame students for the failure of capitalism. Fewer and fewer opportunities exist for young people. High-paying jobs are a thing of the distant past for workers with high school educations. Entry-level, low-paying jobs in offices and restaurants are increasingly filled by people with college diplomas. In this wage-cutting climate, where the bosses are funneling resources into the U.S. military for the next global inter-imperialist conflict, they see no need to pay for a school system that prepares all students to succeed.
Instead, they are fostering a school system of a few so-called “good” schools and a vast number of “bad” schools. The “good” schools are a hybrid public-private system to serve the city’s middle-class and more affluent residents. These schools receive more money per student and get better facilities and more varsity sports teams. On top of that, many have PTAs that can raise up to a million dollars a year or more to further supplement their funding from the New York City Department of Education (DoE).
Racist residential school zones, deliberately drawn to exclude Black and Latin students, are used to keep certain elementary schools mostly white. A school “choice” system to legitimize racist screening practices helps middle and high schools do the same. From a young age, most white students are categorized as “smart” or “talented and gifted” or “hard working.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Black and Latin students are branded as deficient and undeserving of a decent school.
In the midst of these daily racist attacks on New York City school children, the parents, teachers, students, and administrators at Park Slope Collegiate have been trying to build a public secondary school in Brooklyn that is open to all. The PSC community has struggled for years against the DoE’s racist education system. It refuses to track students into ability groupings, a proven tool of segregation. It actively recruits an integrated student body. It publicly protested the DoE’s installation of an elitist enclave school in its building. It continues to battle to rid the school’s campus of metal detectors, and to defend its students against racist assaults by school safety agents and the New York Police Department. Most recently, PSC rocked the DoE’s racist boat by demanding an integrated sports program, with equal access to varsity sports teams for its Black and Latin students. The Progressive Labor Party is proud to have participated in many battles against racism fought by the PSC community.
The bosses and their system are powerful but fragile, which explains why the DoE deems PSC a threat. The recent McCarthyite attack on PSC (see CHALLENGE, May 31), an attempt to use anti-communism to divide the school and stop its multiracial fight against racism, is an old bosses’ ploy. During the Civil Rights Movement, the KKK governors of Mississippi, Alabama, and other Jim Crow states tried to block the unity of Black and white workers and students, many of whom were communists, by declaring that “race mixing is communism. “ New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina and Mayor Bill De Blasio are defenders of the new Jim Crow, which feeds on school segregation and racist inequalities.
Since our formation in the 1960s, PLP has joined workers’ battles against racism. Our Party is committed to the struggle to build a communist society led by the working class, free from capitalist racism, exploitation, oppression, and devastation. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the families and school staff at PSC, fighting to defend young people from a racist school system, is a part of our responsibility to fight for workers’ power and a communist world.