Last month,
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attacked United Teachers Los Angeles,
California’s largest teachers’ union, in a vitriolic speech at the state
capitol in Sacramento.
Villaraigosa,
a former UTLA organizer turned capitalist politician, seems intent on
presenting himself as the man best suited to serve the interests of the ruling
class. Villaraigosa attacked UTLA, claiming the union opposes all measures that
would “improve” public schools.
This is
just one more incident in a bi-partisan campaign on the part of bourgeois
politicians to attack teachers and their unions.
Barack
Obama has been the most hostile U.S. president to teachers to date. With the
help of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public
Schools, Obama has pushed for a significant expansion of the number of
anti-union charter schools and for other privatization schemes in his
reactionary national education initiative, Race to the Top. This has emboldened
capitalists throughout the country, who would like nothing more than to bust
public sector unions and turn public schools over to the private sector.
Los Angeles
has more students attending charter schools than any city in the United States.
About 10 percent, 68,500 students of the children in Los Angeles Unified School
Districts, are currently enrolled in charter schools.
Due to a
so-called “public school choice” measure passed by the Los Angeles School Board
in August 2009, still more Los Angeles public schools are susceptible to being
taken over by charter schools every year.
The school
board chooses schools every academic year that can be bid on by charter school
organizations, the mayor, or the faculty of a particular campus. Each
interested party writes a plan for how the school should be run. Ultimately,
the school board decides whose plan wins.
When the
communities served by neighborhood schools are given a voice, the support for teacher
plans as opposed to a takeover by an outside organization has been
overwhelming. Due to UTLA mobilizations and strong public support, teacher
plans have won at 30 of the 37 schools chosen under “public school choice.”
This has infuriated the enemies of the working class, the billionaires and
profiteers, who have vowed to learn from their past mistakes.
This year,
42 schools, the largest number ever, have been chosen to take part in public
school choice. Clearly, the mayor and the charter school companies are gearing
up for a fight. Likewise, UTLA must respond by escalating the movement against
“public school choice” in the streets.
Recently,
the American Civil Liberties Union outrageously joined Mayor Villaraigosa in a
lawsuit to end seniority for teachers.
While the ACLU rightly claims that the civil rights of inner-city students are being violated by the disproportionate
layoffs of inexperienced teachers
lacking seniority, it is LAUSD that decides to lay off employees, not
the union. Seniority is not the cause of the problem.
LAUSD’s
share of a Federal Jobs Bill passed by Congress last year was $100 million. If
this money was spent as intended, no one would have been laid off. Instead,
this year hundreds more workers will get layoff notices. Five thousand LAUSD
employees have been laid off since June 2009. Others are being relocated to
campuses far from their homes. Inevitably Los Angeles Unified will demand more
concessions from workers next year.
It is time the teacher unions break with the Democrats
and escalate the fight against layoffs and the privatization of schools. In
order to make a high-quality education accessible to all we must build a
movement of people to protect public education and teachers’ unions.
