LOS ANGELES, August 23—The teachers’ union UTLA is taking a strike authorization vote to demand smaller class sizes, funding for “community schools,” and salary increases. Class sizes in regular subjects are now 42 students per class. In some subjects, it is as high as 55. Many schools have nurses and psychologists only one or two days a week. Working-class Black and Latin students are hit the hardest. Extremely segregated schools, and decades of racist policies against Black and Latin students and communities, has resulted in large racist disparities in education. As Progressive Labor Party always asserted, the teachers’ working conditions are the students learning conditions.
Additionally, teachers struggle with the cost of living and are desperate to get whatever the bosses give them. On average, teachers in California make $4,000 less per year than the national average for teachers, yet cost of living in Los Angeles is 43 percent higher than the national average. The bosses’ media attacked teachers, claiming they are getting overpaid, and that raising salaries and school funding  would “lead to insolvency and state takeover.”
The best way to have an education system worthy of the working class is to overthrow the ruling class through communist revolution. Only under communism will students achieve a meaningful education that will serve our class. In the meantime PLP will help lead the organizing around this potential strike with our students, their families and other school workers. Through fighting to give schools our students deserve, the LA working class can realize the power we have and our potential to lead society.
Beutner serves the ruling class
The new LA Unified Schools District (LAUSD) Superintendent Austin Beutner is ready to “prevent a strike, which will harm students, families and the communities we serve” (Los Angeles Times, 8/28). This is the typical rhetoric used by the ruling class to divide the working class in order to convince us that it is not in our interest to fight together against the system. Capitalism is the enemy of the whole working class, teachers, parents and students alike.
Beutner is no friend of working-class students and families. He was an investment banker, has no experience managing a school or district, and used to work for then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (a well-known enemy of the working class in LA). Beutner was also a board member for Inner City Education Foundation’s Public Schools, a charter group with schools in south LA. Many pro-charter groups lobbied for him to become superintendent, and one of the school board members responsible for hiring him was Ref Rodriguez, a charter school backed ruling-class criminal convicted of laundering at least $25,000 in public education funds.
It is no secret that Beutner’s role is to cut funding for public schools and continue to attack students and working-class families. Charter schools have been used to divide student populations into two groups: those who will serve the ruling class in “management” positions, and those who will remain super-exploited workers. In essence, they increase racist exploitation and divisions in order to serve capitalism.
Working-class anger bubbles up
All this has angered students, parents and teachers, especially in working-class Black and Latin schools. Many are ready to fight back. The teachers union is using this righteous anger to “bargain for a better contract” with the school district. As usual, they are attempting to divert our anger away from our true enemies —the ruling class and the racist, exploitative system of capitalism—and focus it on getting a pay raise and a few concessions. Let’s not be taken for a fools by neither the bosses rhetoric,or by the union misleaders.
Our enemy is capitalism, which serves the interests of the ruling class by suppressing the interests of working class teachers, students and families. The only way to combat it is to fight as a united working class. We must strike, not to “bargain” with the capitalists, but to take the power back from them. The more the working-class struggle refuses to be contained within the bosses’ parameters, the more our class—students, parents, and teachers—will learn class-consciousness. No classroom can provide that experience or lesson.
The Progressive Labor Party and friends here will fight hard in the reform movement and use these struggles as a school for communism. Stay tuned for all the exciting details to come. Fight for communism! Power to the working class!