It is not hyperbole. Mayor Emanuel, in the service of Wall Street, is trying to destroy public education and get rid of the Chicago Teachers Union.
That is why March 27 over 5,000 people marched on the school board in Chicago on a cold winter afternoon. Students and Teachers Fight Back!, a project of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Chicago, brought signs to the march that read, “Stop the Racist School Closings Now!”
Many of the protesters were youth from Black and Latino neighborhoods that depend on the public education system for stability, food and many other direct and indirect forms of aid.
Chicago Public Schools, in the largest mass school closing in history, plans to close 53 schools next year. Virtually all of the schools on the chopping block are in poor and minority neighborhoods, continuing the trend of eliminating public schools in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Outrageously, CPS is planning to place as many as 40 students in a class.
Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, has gone on record saying that Mayor Emanuel told her that 25 percent of CPS students are “never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything.”
The stakes in this battle to save public education are extremely high for poor families and people from oppressed communities. A phony budget crises—Chicago is an immensely wealthy city—is being used, together with a racist divide-and-conquer strategy to set up an apartheid education system in the city.
Billionaires are bankrolling the privatization of education and the war on public education. They are using their politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, and their media in this calculated and pervasive campaign. Why? They seek to take over the education system so they can overwork and underpay teachers, reap enormous profits from education and set the ideological agenda for our children.
What does Wall Street have planned for the 25 percent or more of the children that in the thinly veiled racist phrasing of Mayor Emanuel “can’t be helped” by their corporation-run schools? The growing prison-industrial complex, abject poverty and a completely eviscerated public school system.
Should racist politicians who work on behalf of the super-rich be allowed to close schools against the people’s will? No.
At the March 27 rally, Lewis suggested that the union will fight the school closings and that no matter what happens, students should show up at their current school on the first day of classes next year. This is great idea. Action must be taken in order to stop the destruction of public education in Chicago.
Instead of politicians and administrators killing education, students, parents and teachers should occupy or take over the Chicago schools and run the schools in their own interests.
