The latest proposal to address the most segregated and largest public school system—eliminate all “gifted” programs. Why now?
For the last twenty years the liberal politicians in New York City have sanctioned the segregation of the school system at the expense of Black and Latin youth in favor of relying on a few elite high schools to directly serve the needs of the ruling class. Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, acknowledge that “separate” could never be equal.
However, now, with greater competition internationally and domestically the bosses need to reverse that trend in order to have a united working class in preparation for future wars.
How do you spell racist? DoE
The Department of Education (DoE), and their racist policies consigns the vast majority of Black and Latin children—approximately 75 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school student population—to a segregated, second class education. These bosses continually expose themselves as the shameless racists they are by subjecting students to daily searches, unequal funding, unsafe drinking water, and unhealthy lunches.
It has to do with war & splits
With war plans always on the burner for the imperialists, they need a more robust multiracial-armed force to take on their biggest rivals, China and Russia. They also need to fight their domestically oriented rivals who have not been won to the Big Fascists’ long-term outlook, “Rising inequality also is straining the health of liberal democracy. The idea of ‘we the people’ is fading because, in this era of yawning inequality, there is less we share in common. As a result, it is harder to build support for the kinds of policies necessary to deliver broad-based prosperity in the long term, like public investment in education and infrastructure” (NYT 8/24). These Big Fascists understand that president Donald Trump, and the domestic-oriented bosses whom he represents, is bad for a liberal world order. The Democrats are corralling supporting for a top-down reform movement that will be used to crush the opposition. In other words, this fake anti-racism will be used as leverage against the subordinate wing.
For the main wing bosses, there is a need for them to win the allegiance of the most disaffected youth and their families into believing the system can work for them. In New York City, that is the role of the fairly newly appointed chancellor of schools, Richard Carranza—he is the latest person that has been chosen to break up the old status quo and attempt to put in place a new face on the racist school system.
Many progressive educators and youth, tired of dealing with and living with the racist conditions of the schools, were excited and encouraged when Carranza came out with guns blazing, claiming he would integrate one of the most segregated school systems in the country. His outward boldness in confronting the racism in schools was a marked difference from his predecessor Carmen Farina. In one of his first public appearances he declared,  “We cannot have excellence, we cannot improve outcomes without tackling the inequities that exist in our system,” (Chalkbeat, 9/4/18).
Unsurprisingly, one year later, Carranza has failed to deliver on his seemingly anti-racist goals and is now in year two of his tenure and trying to tamper down expectations, “If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to walk on water,” (New York Times, 8/23).
We say that good schools are integrated schools, that good schools take the learning of each student seriously, and that it’s impossible for a segregated school to be a good school. We also know that there are no good schools under capitalism.
Real communists led anti-racism
The fight at Park Slope Collegiate (PSC) which began in 2010 around school integration illuminated how the DoE was building segregation by installing “elite” schools into neglected campuses where mainly Black and Latin students attended. Because of the united, militant, multiracial, and anti-racist fightback of students, parents, teachers and community members at the school throughout the years, the liberal bosses needed to ensure that other schools would not follow in PSC’s example.
The bosses only want a showpiece adjustment to school segregation. One of the key lessons learned from the PSC struggle is that multiracial unity is the key to defeating racism and the bosses are incapable of creating a school system that serves the need of the working class.These liberal misleaders will never be able to give working class youth the education they deserve.
Not surprisingly, when faced with real anti-racist fightback, the DoE’s response was to attack the school years later with claims of “Communist organizing” (New York Times, 5/4). This failed attempt at extinguishing the fightback happening at the school is deeply rooted in antiracist history going as far back to the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights movement and beyond. Communists have led the multiracial fightback against racism in the streets, the schools and universities, the workplace, and the military.
The liberal bosses in NYC were counting on anti-communism to frighten and silence anyone who stood up against their racist policies. The investigation also laid bare the ugly reality that liberal politicians are the main enemy under capitalism. Even though this attack was initiated from three anti-communist staff members inside of the school, the DoE along with the liberal mayor, de Blasio and then school chancellor Carmen Farina, were silent during this attack on this integrating school while publically paying lip service to school integration.
Fake anti-racism
Lip service is still all the bosses have delivered under Carranza and de Blasio. The liberal duo were unsuccessful in their attempt to increase the enrollment of Black and Latin students at the specialized high schools in what would have been the most prominent forced integration plan since the civil rights movement. The State Legislature killed the plan largely due to opposition from Asian lawmakers and a billionaire’s lobbying push. Carranza and de Blasio have failed to convince them that they have to sacrifice to the cause of winning Black and Latin students into the system.
Carranza has also spent $23 million on instituting mandatory implicit bias training for all 125,000 of NYC’s teachers along with more culturally responsive curriculum. The training essentially removes the blame from the bosses and the racist education system that they have created and supported and places it on individual teachers. We call on teachers to reject this fake anti-racist training and instead unite with their students and their parents and fellow education workers in fightback. We must train our future leaders to fight against the whole capitalist system.
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.