Monday, March 8, 2010
THE FIGHT TO SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA
March 4 was historic. It will be remembered as the day that people began to fight back against the destruction of public education. The student and teacher led offensive took place in cities across the country; teachers, students and school workers demonstrated and marched, showcasing the aggressive methods of the struggle. San Francisco led the way with the biggest numbers. As many as 15,000 people, mostly students, teachers and social service workers attended a Civic Center rally organized by the three teachers unions and the San Francisco Labor Council.
This can only be the beginning. The war on public education has been carefully planned for years, orchestrated by corporate interests and implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike.
The first battle tactic against public education was to starve it. Politicians have consistently lowered taxes on corporations and the rich for the past three decades, thereby lowering state revenues that have created the budget crises in nearly every state. Consequently, public education is in a state of shell shock.
After being under nourished for years, public education is now under full attack, and the blue prints for this “shock and awe” campaign have changed only slightly, from Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Obama’s more savage Race to the Top (both plans badly misuse the English language).
Bush’s plan further undermined public education: schools were labeled as “failures” and teachers were targeted as “incompetent.” Obama’s plan knocks down the pins set up by Bush; Race to the Top rewards states for shutting down public schools and opening up charter schools, many of which are private, and by firing teachers en masse. Both these steps are considered “progress” by anti-public education advocates (arch-conservative Newt Gingrich is on a national tour to promote the plan).
Race to the Top is a competition between states to kill public education: the states that massacre schools and teacher unions most efficiently and ruthlessly are given desperately needed federal funding, while the losers are given sadistic examples of how to earn the President’s praise. Obama spoke highly of the recent mass firing of every teacher in a Rhode Island school, an incident that other school districts will be pressured to imitate if they want Race to the Top money. When this happens — and it will — a fundamental question must be answered: do the union contracts of teachers mean anything to the President? And if teachers cannot be protected by their contracts, cannot this be extended to other fields of labor? These questions answer themselves, and have gigantic implications for the U.S. labor movement.
It is no coincidence that the “finalists” for the Race to the Top are states that have the most brutal anti-union records: most of the finalists are from the anti-union South. Louisiana and Illinois are finalists — two states that have made the most “progress” in shutting down public schools and replacing them with private charter schools — while having fired teachers en masse.
Who are replacing these fired teachers in the newly opened charter schools? Not qualified or certified teachers. Companies like Teach for America are springing up to fill the demand of low cost, non-union teachers. Teach for America is a “non-profit” company — with an operating budget of over $73.5 million — that offers only five weeks of training before one becomes a teacher. No background in teaching is necessary.
Although companies like these are touted as “elite” institutions, The New York Times admits that “…so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning.” (March 2, 2010).
In Chicago, charter schools need only 50 percent of their teachers to be certified, while no charter school teacher is allowed to belong to the Chicago Teachers Union.
Drill sergeants are also replacing certified teachers. In Chicago, shut down public schools have been re-opened as military recruiting centers; five military high schools and 21 military middle schools are now in operation. This was done under the watchful eye of Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan — no doubt achieved in anticipation of the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the need to fulfill recruiters’ quotas.
Oddly, the national discussion over why students are testing poorly has been ridiculously crude, if not outright dumb. Both politicians and the media have focused the blame exclusively on teachers. No attention is given to the fact that so-called failing schools have been bled dry of funding. It is impossible for a teacher to succeed when there is not enough money to buy books for all the students or when classes are overcrowded, especially in schools that have students with special needs.
Poverty, and the countless social ills born from it, are the obvious reasons why students perform poorly (high income schools are never labeled as “failures”). By ignoring this glaring fact, politicians reveal themselves to have ulterior motives. And just like the “war on terror” benefited profit-hungry oil and weapons companies, the war on education has a host of corporations clamoring for an increase in hostilities.
To make clear that the war on education is just beginning, Obama revealed that Race to the Top is only in its first stage: the schools that don’t win — by failing to close enough schools or firing enough teachers — will have more chances in the future. Obama’s Education Secretary explains: “ We want to come back round after round…We’d love to see this four, five, six years out — just keep growing it.” (New York Times, (March 5, 2010). Of course, the more Race to the Top grows, the more that public education shrinks.
Killing public education benefits corporations in two ways:
1) rich investors have new ways to make profitable investments (something incredibly important to them during a recession).
2) Destroying public education allows for more public money to bail out banks and expand war. The deficit created by pursuing these pro-corporate policies is being paid for by cutting education, Social Security, and Medicare.
These are the real reasons behind the attack on public education. All the stupid hype behind “bad teachers” is a cheap ruse to obscure the debate. But to achieve their plan, the corporate elite must remove a long-hated obstacle: teachers’ unions.
This makes the national protest day on March 4th all the more relevant. Teachers’ unions are waking up to the corporate-inspired attack. If organized, teachers are an incredibly powerful social force: they are highly respected by the community, have strong connections to parents, and most importantly, if they do not work, neither do many parents.
Teachers perform a dual role of educating and daycare; their value to society is incredibly high. March 4th was the first time teacher unions organized with students, parents and public service workers to demand more money for education and social services. If they continue to do this, the larger community will support them unfailingly. In San Francisco many of the demonstrators demanded: “Tax the rich to fund public education.” This is indeed a solution that needs to be adopted nationally, before the economic crisis claims more public schools and destroys more social services, eliminating even more jobs
U.S. Troops Withdrawing in Masses from Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — U.S. troops are withdrawing from the shattered capital, leaving many Haitians anxious that the most visible portion of international aid is ending even as the city is still mired in misery and vulnerable to unrest.
As troops packed their duffels and began to fly home this weekend, Haitians and some aid workers wondered whether U.N. peacekeepers and local police are up to the task of maintaining order. More than a half-million people still live in vast encampments that have grown more unpleasant in recent days with the early onset of the rainy season.
Some also fear the departure of the American troops is a sign of dwindling international interest in the plight of the Haitian people following the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake.
"I would like for them to stay in Haiti until they rebuild the country and everybody can go back to their house," said Marjorie Louis, a 27-year-old mother of two, as she warmed a bowl of beans for her family over a charcoal fire on the fake grass of the national stadium.
U.S. officials say the long-anticipated draw down of troops is not a sign of waning commitment to Haiti, only a change in the nature of the operation. Security will now be the responsibility of the 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force and the Haitian police.
A smaller number of U.S. forces — the exact number has not yet been determined — will be needed as the U.N. and Haitian government reassert control, said Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of U.S. Southern Command, which runs the Haiti operation.
"Our mission is largely accomplished," Fraser said.
American forces arrived in the immediate aftermath of the quake to treat the wounded, provide emergency water and rations and help prevent a feared outbreak of violence among desperate survivors. They also helped reopen the airport and seaport.
There has been no widespread violence but security is a real issue. A U.N. food convoy traveling from Gonaives to Dessalines on Friday was stopped and overrun by people, who looted two trucks before peacekeepers regained control, U.N. officials said.
They managed to escort the other two back to Gonaives. There were no reports of injuries.
The military operation was criticized by some Haitian senators and foreign leaders as heavy-handed and inappropriate in a country that had been occupied by American forces for nearly two decades in the early 20th century. But ordinary Haitians largely welcomed the troops, many out of disenchantment with their own government.
"They should stay because they have been doing a good job," 35-year-old Lesly Pierre said as his family prepared dinner under a tarp at an encampment in Petionville. "If it was up to our government, we wouldn't have gotten any help at all."
U.S. soldiers said they had nothing but warm encounters with the Haitian people.
"They're real good people. They just want help," Army Private First Class Troy Sims, a 19-year-old from Fresno, California, said as he prepared to board a flight back to the U.S. "I feel that us being here helped a lot. If we weren't here, things probably would have gotten out of control."
There are now about 11,000 troops, more than half of them on ships just off the coast, down from a peak of around 20,000 on Feb. 1. The total is expected to drop to about 8,000 in coming days as the withdrawal gathers steam. The military said more than 700 paratroopers left this weekend.
Soldiers are now gone from the General Hospital, where they once directed traffic and kept order amid the chaos of mass casualties. There are no more Haitian patients on board the USNS Comfort, which treated 8,600 people after the quake. .....
..... At a country club in Petionville, where some 100,000 Haitians are living in rough shelters in a muddy ravine, only a few soldiers remain of the several hundred there after the disaster.
Alison Thompson said she was nervous about the smaller U.S. troop contingent.
"Soon we are not going to have any security," said Thompson, medical coordinator of the Jenkins/Penn Relief Organization, which runs a field hospital at the edge of the ravine. "Everybody is just so worried that they are pulling out because it's going to get dangerous."
It was the same concern for Louis at the national stadium.
"If the troublemakers see that there is some kind of force here, they will think twice before they do anything," she said. "They are already getting ready to stir up trouble."
But Ted Constan, chief program officer for Partners in Health, said that the way to address security is to get adequate shelter and other aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now stranded in squalid encampments.
"The real solution is to deliver services ... rather than turn Haiti into a military state," he said.
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