NYC mayor de Blasio and his schools chancellor have announced a forced integration plan, to increase the enrollment of Black and Latin students at the specialized high schools in what could become the most prominent forced integration plan since the battles of the Civil Rights Movement fifty years ago.
Anti-racist alumni, current students, teachers and parents, some of whom are members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, have an opportunity to win masses of people disgusted by gutter racism to multiracial unity in the fight for school integration. We say that good schools are integrated schools, that good schools take the learning of each student seriously, and that it is impossible for a segregated school to be a good school, including the ones we call elite.
#Blackinbrooklyntech
At Brooklyn Tech, one of the specialized high schools, students and alumni who blasted racism with #blackinbrooklyntech taught us this lesson. Students have started a campaign against racist and humiliating treatment in the school by teachers and officials (see CHALLENGE, 2/10/2016). Since that time other student struggles against sexism and gun violence have maintained strong anti-racist politics. Teachers have formed ad-hoc committees to build up a more anti-racist school tone.
When the mayor’s integration plan was announced, several teachers were prepared to make a public statement welcoming the change. Many teachers, students, and parents who support school integration but have no platform to make their voices heard.
Specialized high schools are only 10 percent Black and Latin; “regular” schools are 68 percent Black and Latin. The stark racism of claiming the best schools are the ones that exclude Black and Latin youth most effectively undermines the kind of national unity required to confront imperialist rivals. The United Federation of Teachers, after sixty years of silence and cooperation as segregation grew in New York City, has taken a position that high school ‘diversity’ ought to be a goal (NY Daily News 5/31).
Racist backlash
The racist backlash to the proposed change has been swift and nasty. Asian workers, Chinese families in particular, are being misled in droves to defend segregated schools (see letters, page 6). The news media played up the disgusting spectacle of working-class Asian folks insulting other working-class families, made desperate to hold on to what meager gains they perceive themselves to have secured.
The entire city is being misled by the false notion that test scores capture a child’s potential to learn. The notion that a substantial increase in the number of the ‘best’ Black and Latin students in the city will ‘drag down’ the level of thinking at the specialized high schools is a gutter racist assumption and is driving much of popular opinion.
 Integration part of war plans
Why now? The rulers have their own reasons for appearing to tackle the problem of school segregation now. Mayor de Blasio is burnishing “progressive” credentials for his next campaign. As always, they are preparing for major war. War plans are always on the back burner for the imperialists, and they need a more robust multiracial armed force to take on their biggest rivals, China and Russia. Parent, students, and teachers have united to form something of a mass movement for school integration in New York City, and this movement has forced the question to the forefront in NYC now.
Our job is to take this fight further than the rulers are willing to go. They want a showpiece adjustment to school segregation. We want the kind of fully integrated and meaningful lives that capitalism makes impossible. Schools are used to preserve the structures of racism that are needed bycapitalism. They need to have winners and losers. The capitalists need to preserve the number of elite higher-income workers that directly serve the ruling class as intellectuals, engineers, and financial managers. They need to maintain the façade of upward mobility in order to preserve the myth of the American Dream.
Defeat the bosses and their ideas
Capitalism causes the working class to fight for the scraps from their table. Instead of fighting for a system that meets the needs of the whole working class. Under communism, every school will be a place that meets the needs of its students. Education would be class conscious, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Communism needs the workers to be educated to help to remake the world.  The fight for school integration now is an opportunity to root this education in the struggle against the bosses whom we will have to defeat to win the world we deserve.