In major cities throughout the United States—from New York to Los Angeles to Chicago and elsewhere—mayors and other politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are testing the waters for a full-out assault on the rights of teachers as workers and the existence of public education.
Mayors like Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Angeles and others who have been the darlings of a union leadership with strong ties to the Democratic Party are once again showing their true colors. They are introducing measures to tie pay to test scores, strip teachers of seniority and extend teacher work hours without limit. Each of these measures represents a direct attack on the hard-earned union rights of teachers and other education workers.
In order to carry out these attacks on an institution that affects millions of working people and their children, the ruling class is engaged in a war of words to camouflage the real nature of the attacks on public education.
The rhetoric, from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to the mayors of the smallest towns, tries to characterize the attacks as merely a choice between educating our children or not. For instance, Cleveland’s Democratic Mayor Frank Jackson was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: “I don’t think Democrat or Republican, pro-union or anti-union, public school or charter school. I’m going to have a conversation about educating children. When you do that, all those other things don’t matter.”
What was Jackson referring to? The “conversation” he is having is a proposed set of far-reaching “reforms” to the city’s education system that include entirely disregarding seniority in layoffs, extending the teacher workday and forcing future teachers’ contracts to be negotiated from scratch—what he calls a “fresh start” provision. These reforms are a threat to not only the lives of thousands of teachers and other workers but to the quality of public education in Cleveland.
The politicians have also tried to characterize the teachers and teachers’ unions as an impediment to educating our children. Villaraigosa has called the teachers’ unions “the one, unwavering roadblock” to improving public education. This line is repeated over and over.
The reality is that each of these cities and towns is facing an ever-deepening budget crisis and the political leadership is trying to find ways to solve the crisis on the backs of workers, students and families. The teachers’ unions—whose interests lie with, and not against, those of the children we teach and the families we serve—are an impediment to inflicting deeper budget cuts. Seniority and tenure rules protect veteran teachers who cost the districts more and feel more secure in fighting for their rights. Merit pay is a way to cut costs. Making teachers work more for less—extending their work hours arbitrarily—is also good for business.
Because of this, the ruling-class politicians also tell us that there is no money and the cuts just have to be made. But the budget crises are not caused by a lack of resources in society. The six biggest banks control assets equal to 63 percent of the U.S. GDP—about $9.5 trillion. The U.S. government spends over $700 billion on the military budget.
In fact, it is the prioritizing of the banks, corporations and militarism that is at the root of the budget crises. Money for people’s needs is constantly being cut while the banks and corporations profit at astronomical rates and the military and prisons receive more funding every year.
The rhetoric of these reactionary attacks on public education is framed in the language of improving, or reforming, a failing system. We are told that if teachers would work longer for less, have their pay tied to test scores and give up seniority or tenure protections, then education will miraculously improve.
Two models of reform
This is patently false. The real solution for improving public education is quite the opposite. Chicago schools offer an example of two forms of reform that expose the lies of the ruling-class’ “reforms.”
While he was superintendent of Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan piloted a program of “turnaround schools” that became the basis for the Obama administration’s “Race To the Top.”
Twelve turnaround schools in Chicago are run by an organization called Academy for Urban School Leadership. AUSL was founded by a venture capitalist, Martin J. Koldyke, who has no education credentials whatsoever. The others are run by a district department.
The staff at turnaround schools are all replaced and the AUSL or district tightly controls all aspects of the school’s operation.
The other model of reform in Chicago is when a school is organized under a local school council that is elected and includes six parents, two teachers, one non-teaching staff person, two community members and the principal. In high schools, a student representative is also elected. One hundred ninety-eight Chicago schools are led by local school councils.
The turnaround schools have received additional monies and facilities upgrades that have not been afforded to the other Chicago public schools.
Designs for Change carried out a study to chart the progress and achievement data comparing these two reform models. This is what they found: Only 33 of 480 Chicago elementary schools were above the citywide average. All of these above-average schools were led by elected local school councils who chose their principals and have unionized teachers, typically teachers with substantial experience. Fourteen of the 33 highest-scoring schools were more than 90 percent African American. Sixteen of the 33 highest-scoring schools were more than 85 percent Latino.No Turnaround School scored above the city-wide average.Only three Turnaround Schools were among the top 100 schools
There is a documented correlation between low teacher turnover and student academic success. AUSL promised that turnaround schools would receive new “turn-around ready” teachers, implying that there would be less turnover. The Designs for Change study proves this incorrect. An average of 42 percent of the original Turnaround teachers who taught in six Turnaround Schools in 2008-2009 were still teaching there four years later in 2011-2012. However, 71 percent of the LSC-led schools’ teachers stayed from 2008-2009 to 2011-2012.
Despite all the rhetoric falsely portraying teachers’ unions as being opposed to the interests of children, ruling-class politicians are not able to change reality. Reality is that a unionized, stable teaching force, working reasonable hours, whose tenure and seniority rights are protected, provide a better education to children—even when they work with fewer resources and poorer facilities. The attack on teachers’ working conditions and unions is an attack on the right to quality public education for all.
There are real reforms that could be immediately enacted that really would improve public education. Those include rehiring the 3 million teachers and paraprofessionals who have been laid off in the past four years, using the additional workers to reduce class sizes and re-implementing arts, music and physical education programs that have been cut. These truly effective reforms could easily be funded for far less than the government used to bail out the banks or is using daily to fund the military.
