Covid-19 lays bare racism of capitalist education

After a month of school closures due to Covid-19, capitalist education is increasingly exposed as an exercise in racist neglect, where sowing obedience and using grades to sort our children into ‘winners and losers’ are the goals, not learning.
Students, parents and education workers today must reject this regime of schooling.  Now is the time to provide the youth of the working class with an emancipatory and class-conscious education.  Communist teachers in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are fighting to be at the forefront of such an effort.
Across all subject areas let’s fight for an understanding of this crisis through a more class-conscious program of science, math, history and language so that our young people and their families can see by our example that only we, the working class, hold the key to a healthier future – communism.  
The response of the bosses’ school systems to Covid-19 is a mounting racist disaster.  Segregation and imperialism funnel the worst attacks toward the most exploited members of our class.  By March 4, schools in 188 countries were closed, impacting 1.5 billion students (Washington Post, 4/6), over 90 percent of the world’s students.   
The lost time and learning that working class youth are suffering will never be made up. Like those uncounted dying at home in NYC (NYT, 4/10), the losses suffered by the children of our class will never be fully accounted for.  Worldwide, many of our class brothers and sisters who are refugees and internally displaced persons (especially teenage girls who attend school at lower rates than boys) will never return to school (UNESCO.org, 4/10).
Even as their education system, like their health care system has collapsed, the bosses still seek to sort children into categories that will shape their lives. In a survey of education bosses from 84 countries, 22 replied that their educational systems were moving forward with high-stakes exams as planned, while 11 canceled them and 23 moved forward with modified/online versions.  Population sorting remains an essential function of capitalist schooling.
Bosses abandon working class children
In the Los Angeles Unified School District schools were closed with no provision made for any type of distance learning to be put in place, and PLP is organizing teachers to serve the working class in the face of the bosses’ racist neglect.
Instead of figuring out how to give each student a chance to learn, the ruling class in Philadelphia cynically cancelled distance learning citing ‘equity concerns’ (Philadelphia Tribune, 3/18).  Posing as anti-racists, liberal school bosses in Boston and the Seattle area have made similar racist decisions (Time, 3/15), cutting off access which disproportionately affect working class youth.  
In New York City, the viral epicenter of decaying U.S. capitalism, the ruling class has adopted a program of laptop distribution and shipment of iPads by mail but only AFTER leaving the schools open so long that known viral hotspots developed in school buildings across the city (Gothamist.com, 3/29).  A determined cover-up of the spread of Covid-19 in schools is underway.  Meanwhile, the technology shipment has failed to reach some 240,000 students (DeBlasio press conference, 4/11).  Since closure we have seen anti-student principals pressure teachers to simply pump out assignments, while making ZERO effort to see how students are actually doing during this crisis.  All teachers, especially newer teachers with fewer job protections, must turn to the working class by reaching out to students and parents to ensure that schoolwork does not become a new source of oppression and stress.  
The bosses failed system tries to shift blame to parents
The vast majority of our students are Black and Latin youth. A survey generated by PLP teachers shows that their obligations to care for younger siblings have grown, that many live-in cramped apartments and take turns on a single laptop over weak internet service with no good quiet place to work.  A provider’s job loss haunts nearly half our students, while the other half with a parent still working endure the stress of seeing their mother or father leave home and risk exposure daily in order to earn their pay.
Assignments related to what is happening all around us and which point to ways students, parents and teachers can fight our way through this crisis together will help all of us.
High school student engagement with distance learning in NYC has declined every week, reflecting mass discontent with canned lessons not relevant to the urgent problems of the present.  For younger students stuck at home, the situation is no better.  Workers must reject hollow calls for ‘parent accountability’ for distance learning which is divorced from reality as millions of jobs evaporate and the remaining ones become virus-plagued death traps.  
The working class can educate our children
Class-conscious education workers and parents must fight for the attention of every young mind and focus youth inquiry on using language, science, history and math to discover the truth about how capitalism brought the Covid-19 crisis into being and how ruling classes will resort to intensified fascism in the response they cobble together, while loved ones grow sick and die all around us.   
As ruling classes squabble over which working class lives matter and which do not, students, parents and teachers must hold fast to the only political program which makes the survival of the international working class the only priority – communist revolution.  “Red Medicine: Socialized Health Care in Soviet Russia” is available online and provides a glimpse of the kinds of advances in health care and education that are possible when the working class holds power.  We see health care and education being organized in an anti-sexist way where the well-being of every single worker and child comes first.  Readings from this 1933 book and discussion questions for distance learning and study group use will be posted on the PLP website in the coming period.
We call on education workers and parents drafted into the work of educating their children at home to send to Challenge all lessons that build a materialist understanding of Covid-19.  The bosses' media reeks of the stench of the profit system and many workers have the good sense to keep it at arms-length.  Yet our class cannot be left at the mercy of superstition and rumor which fill the gap in the search for answers. J
Every class-conscious worker must become knowledgeable about health care, and more concerned than ever with the ideas our children absorb.  With the cancellation of state exams in New York and elsewhere, education workers have an increased opportunity to teach what really matters.  The latest NYC decision to leave schools closed through the end of the year in June is a challenge and an opportunity to build multi-racial unity with our students and their families on the basis of class struggle for a decent education and a communist future.