Mexico teachers' strike closes schools in several states

From The Digital Journal

 By Ken Hanly

Aug 23, 2013 in Politics

Mexico - Most of the 26 million Mexican students return to school this week but more than two million were forced to stay home as teachers in several areas launched strikes opposing changes to the public education system.

About 24,000 schools in five impoverished states in the south of Mexico remain closed as teachers strike. Among the chief demands is the cancellation of new federal regulations requiring teachers to take competency exams to be hired and retained. In the state of Tabasco half a million students will not go back to school as teachers demand the resignation of the state education minister.

About 20,000 strikers marched on the National Congress in Mexico City and have set up camp in the central plaza. Leaders say they will stay there indefinitely. Hundreds of strikers attempted to force their way into a session of the legislature voting on reforms and fought pitched battles with police, in which 22 officers were injured. A blockade by teachers on Wednesday forced senators and deputies to hold their session at a convention center. Leader of the largest teachers' union the CNTE, Francisco Bravo, said: “Our demand is for them not to vote the laws, that they suspend the process and that we enter into negotiations that take the teachers' point of view into consideration". President Enrique Nieto persuaded the Mexican congress to pass sweeping educational reforms last December. This month legislation is being negotiated to implement the reforms.

As classes began in many schools and strikers entered the capital Nieto said: "Education is the most powerful instrument for Mexicans to reach new and better opportunities in life." The striking teachers say they are simply scapegoats and that the real problems in Mexico's poorly performing public education system is years of underfunding and endemic corruption in the system. The strike leader Juan Ortega told the press: "We want the whole national education system to be evaluated". While there are serious weaknesses in the Mexican system, the situation has vastly improved from a generation ago. Then, adults were fortunate if they were able to finish six years of grade school. Now almost every child fifteen years and younger is in school. However, the quality varies greatly and Mexico has the highest dropout rate of the 34 OECD member nations.

The head of the National Education Worker's Syndicate or SNTE, the largest teacher's union has been jailed on corruption charges. Somehow while supposedly living on her teacher and union salaries Gordillo managed to amass a fortune of millions of dollars during her more than two decades as head of the union. The strikes taking place now are being led by a rival union that is often more radical, the National Education Workers Coordinator. The fight against the reforms in southern Mexico has been ongoing all year. Teachers in the province of Guerrero attacked and burned government and party offices after the state legislators passed the reforms. Parents in Guerrero are setting up their own classes as thousands of teachers protesting a revamp of the country's education system have closed schools.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/356941#ixzz2czIukzD5

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Solidarity With Striking Mexican Teachers

 by Jack Gerson

Facts for Working People salutes and sends solidarity greetings to the courageous Mexican teachers who are locked in bitter struggle against the Mexican national government’s attempt to impose a U.S.-style corporate reform agenda on Mexican public schools and teacher unions. Last week, tens of thousands of teachers in the southern state of Guerrero dramatically escalated their strike against Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s “national education reform” package by marching on the state capital of Chilpancingo, blocking the highway connecting Mexico City with Acapulco for hours. Within days, teachers in neighboring Michoacan state announced that they were striking until Pena Nieto withdraws his proposals, state victimization of teachers stops, and corrupt former National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) president Elba Ester Gordillo returns the 2 billion pesos ($160 million) that she embezzled from the teachers’ union. The powerful teachers union of Oaxaca state (which has battled state and national governments throughout the past decade) are also striking, as are teachers in parts of Chiapas state.

Pena Nieto’s proposals are modeled after planks of the corporate assault on U.S. public education. They push test-based accountability, linking teacher pay and even their jobs to student scores on high stakes standardized tests. As David Bacon documented in The Nation magazine (“U.S.-Style School Reform Goes South”), the corporate assault on public education in Mexico has heavy backing from major corporate and financial forces – the World Bank prominent among them – and has long-term aims of union-busting, privatization, and downsizing (all of which are already well under way in the U.S.) The Mexican education "reformers" cite the same for-rent academic hacks that are trotted out in the U.S. -- one of their favorites is Hoover Institute economist Eric Hanushek, a notorious teacher-basher whose data distortion has been pretty thoroughly exposed in the U.S.

We should all express solidarity and support for the embattled Mexican teachers. Of course, we should raise solidarity motions in our unions and organizations. We should send letters of support. But the best way to show our solidarity is to ourselves take action against the corporate assault that we face here -- against the downsizing, the outsourcing, the school shutdowns, the high stakes testing, the union-busting. And, finally, that's starting to take shape:

First, of course, was the massive turnout by teachers and community for last September's Chicago Teachers Union strike, an action that has energized public education advocates around the country; 

A few days ago, we blogged about the inspirational and ongoing Seattle teacher-led boycott of their school district's high stakes standardized Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) tests.

Last week, Chicago high school students walked out on their school district's standardized tests to protest the planned closure of 54 schools as well as to protest the tests themselves. These brilliant young people directly linked the school shutdowns with the high stakes tests whose outcomes are being used around the country as the excuse to close schools in low-income communities -- hitting especially hard at black and brown communities. (Philadelphia is closing 23 schools; New York City closed 140 schools and plans to close 23 more; Washington DC closed 24 schools and plans to close another 15; Kansas City closed more than half its public schools; etc.) 

The ongoing and monumental struggle of Mexican teachers to defend the right of all citizens to a public education and basic teacher union rights -- rights guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution -- is a fight against "reforms" that would impose the same formula being fought by the Seattle teachers and the Chicago students: tie teachers' jobs to student scores on standardized tests, adopt new curricula dictated by powerful corporations, discourage critical thinking and demand obedience.

Nevertheless, it's clear that the struggle to defend public education in Mexico is far more advanced than that in the U.S. At least part of the reason for that has been the abject passive, class collaborationist role of the national and state teacher union leadership (and, alas, many local leaders as well. For years, some of us have campaigned to get  U.S. teacher unions to mount mass campaigns against the corporate assault / privatization of U.S. public education: high stakes testing , school shutdowns / downsizing, charter schools, outsourcing. We've been opposed every step of the way by the national and state union leadership (and most local leaders). So while solidarity motions are good, we  need to underscore that the fight being waged in Mexico needs to be waged here as well -- not let the union bureaucrats mouth support while blocking action.

Seattle to Chicago to Guerrero; Philadelphia to Oaxaca; New York to Michoacan. Same struggle, same fight.

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Seattle Teachers Appeal for May Day Solidarity With Their Test Boycott

by Jack Gerson

Seattle teachers are calling for an international show of support and solidarity on May Day for their inspirational fight against high stakes standardized testing.

Readers of this blog may recall that three months ago, teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High unanimously to refuse to administer the districtwide Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) standardized test and launched a boycott that has received national acclaim.  Their boycott has since spread to several other schools.

From the outset, this blog has supported the Garfield teachers, discussed the issues involved in some depth, and urged readers to send messages of solidarity. (See

http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2013/01/support-garfield-high-seattle-boycott.html).

But as the dates for administering the spring semester MAP tests approaches, Garfield teachers fear that the Seattle school administration may be preparing to victimize them. They are asking us to support them again. Here’s the letter they are circulating to appeal for support:

*_Educational Justice Has No Borders:_*
*_Join the May Day International Day of Solidarity _*
*_with the Seattle MAP Test Boycott_*
*_Seattle’s test boycotting teachers need your support for an “educators’ spring” uprising against the MAP test _*
*www.scrapthemap.wordpress.com*<http://www.scrapthemap.wordpress.com/>*__*
scrapthemap@yahoo.com
https://m.facebook.com/SolidarityWithGarfieldHighSchoolTestingBoycott?id=191135177694153&_rdr<https://m.facebook.com/SolidarityWithGarfieldHighSchoolTestingBoycott?id=191135177694153&_rdr>

Dear educators, parents, and students around the world,

On January 9, 2013, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle announced their unanimous vote to boycott the district mandated Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test, which they said was not aligned to their curriculum, was a waste of their students' time and resources, and unfairly targeted the most vulnerable populations. Specifically, Garfield’s teachers expressed their opposition to the fact that English Language Learner students are required to take the MAP test most often, causing them to miss out on vital instructional time in the classroom. In this way, the boycott of the MAP test should be viewed as part of the movement for the rights of immigrants and people from all cultures, nationalities, and linguistic backgrounds to have access to a high quality public education. Garfield High School’s Parent Teacher Student Association and the Associated Student Body Government both voted unanimously to support the teachers' boycott of the MAP test.

Soon after, several other Seattle schools joined the boycott—Orca, Chief Sealth, Ballard, and Center School.Teachers at those schools were originally threatened with a 10 day suspension without pay, but because of the overwhelming solidarity from parents, teachers, and students from across the country, the Seattle School District backed down and declined to discipline any of the boycotting educators. Since then, several other schools have joined the boycott, a survey of Seattle teachers was conducted that shows overwhelming opposition to the MAP test at every grade level, and the movement for quality assessment has spread throughout the nation.

Now the Seattle teachers need your support again.

The spring offering of the MAP test produces the scores that are supposed to be used in Seattle’s teacher evaluations.For this reason the Seattle School District could take a harsher stance against boycotting teachers this time around.

May Day is traditionally a day of international workers solidarity. What better time to show your support for the teachers who have risked their livelihoods to advocate for quality assessment and for our resources to be used to support learning rather than endless testing?

We, the Seattle MAP test boycotting teachers, pledge our solidarity to teachers around the world who are struggling for an education system that supports and empowers our students with curriculum and assessments that are relevant to their lives. In turn, we ask for your support as we struggle for these very goals. Possible solidarity actions include: taking a photo with a message of solidarity and emailing it to us (scrapthemap@yahoo.com), calling the Seattle superintendent and asking him to cancel the contract with the NWEA for the MAP test, having a speaker at your May Day rally address the MAP boycott and the abuses of standardized testing, or boycotting a flawed test in your region.

Furthermore, we, the MAP test boycotting teachers, would very much appreciate being informed about struggles teachers are engaged in around the world. Please let us know if there are any ways we can support your efforts for educational justice.

In Solidarity,

Seattle MAP Test Boycott Committee

The Seattle letter touches on some of the most harmful aspects of high stakes testing.  There are many others, because standardized tests are essential to applying the austerity squeeze to education. They are used to keep score – to measure performance: evaluate, rank, punish students, teachers, and schools.

·      To track, label, and victimize students – marginalize and force out disproportionately low income, especially black students – no jobs or, at best, unskilled jobs await them;

·      To stamp out students’ natural curiosity by insisting on blind obedience: don’t think, just spit out the right answer: A, B, or C; True or False; Yes sir, No sir. Curiosity and conceptual thinking might lead to rebelliousness. Instead of emphasizing concepts and understanding, it’s drill ‘n kill rote learning and “gaming the test”.

·      To shut down schools in low-income communities (Chicago is closing 54 schools this year; Philadelphia 23; Washington DC 15; etc. New York City has closed 140 schools over the past decade, and plans to close 23 more soon. Etc. Nearly all of these schools are in low-income areas, and black communities have been especially hard hit. The result has been increased class size, intolerably long and often hazardous commutes for young students; layoffs of teacher and support staff; elimination of electives and other key programs. Schools are ranked and shuttered based on student scores on standardized tests.

·      To harass and victimize teachers and weaken teacher unions and force out veteran teachers. Replace teachers and schools with computer software and “distance learning.

·      To profit from and privatize public education. Close public schools, open charter schools. Hand out lucrative contracts to consultants and channel billions of dollars to giant corporations who sell everything from textbooks and software to standards and “test-taking strategies” (multinationals like Pearson; McGraw Hill; Kaplan; etc.)

They call austertity “shared sacrifice”. But what’s being sacrificed here is the future of tens of millions of young people. And not everyone is sharing – not the banks, bailed out to the tune of several trillion dollars. Not the big corporations, which continue to feast on austerity-induced privatization, not to mention the gigantic tax loopholes which just get wider and wider. This society’s priorities are upside down. It’s well past time to turn them right side up.

For starters, let’s express our solidarity with the Seattle teachers on May Day.

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Students and workers battle cops in Chile

Chilean students and workers took to the streets again and marched for free, quality education, serious incidents occurred with the involvement of Special Forces weapons politicized police using rubber bullets, tear gas and tanks attacked against thousand of demonstrators.

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Tony Smith: What He Did to Oakland Schools, What He’ll Try in Chicago

By Jack Gerson            

On April 4, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Superintendent Tony Smith gave notice that he was resigning effective June 30 and relocating his family to Chicago to be near his ailing father-in-law. There is little doubt that Smith will soon be a visible presence in Chicago education – quite possibly the next CEO of Chicago Public Schools. It is important for Chicago teachers and community to know just who they are likely to be dealing with – and to those fighting back against the corporate education agenda elsewhere too, given the importance of the struggle in Chicago.

My guess is that Tony Smith’s job in Chicago will be to break or weaken the powerful alliance between teachers, students, parents and community so evident during and after last September’s teacher strike.  There are few who can match him when it comes to talking about the importance of neighborhood schools providing wraparound services to combat the effects of poverty; to recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers; to stimulate authentic learning based on concepts and creativity rather than skill-based rote learning; to provide all the resources that teachers need to teach and students need to learn; to acknowledge and work to overcome racism and its effects; to forge real authentic collaboration between faculty, staff, community, students, parents, and administration; to crack down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing; etc.  For that is exactly what he did when he was appointed superintendent in Oakland four years ago. He talked so well, in fact, that even some skeptics were willing to suspend disbelief and give him a shot.

But in Oakland, it was just talk. Indeed, throughout his career, Smith has been a proponent of the corporate agenda for education and a practitioner of divide and conquer, of charter schools and privatization, of school closures, downsizing, and union busting. Smith takes funding cuts for granted; he goes hat in hand to his corporate patrons to solicit marginal funding (in exchange for carrying out their policies), but does not go after corporate and individual wealth. So in the end, he is just another proponent of “do more with less” austerity sacrifice. He executes the cuts demanded by his corporate patrons. This goes back to his roots.

Tony Smith graduated from U. of California Berkeley in 1992, where he was captain of the football team. He went on to get masters and doctoral degrees in education from UC Berkeley, and from 1997 to 2004 was one of the leaders of the Oakland-based Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools (BAYCES – now the National Equity Project).  At the time, BAYCES was the Oakland conduit for Gates Foundation money, and Gates was heavily promoting the “small school miracle”, engineering the breakup of thousands of comprehensive secondary schools nationally.

In Oakland, starting in about 2001, BAYCES “designed” the breakup of three of the city’s six comprehensive high schools – the three “lowest-achieving” schools, those serving the city’s highest poverty areas, with overwhelmingly black and Latino enrollments – Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds High Schools. I was a teacher at Castlemont, which was broken into three small schools in 2003.  BAYCES “redesign” included permanently closing the school’s library and consolidating the librarian’s position; eliminating French and eliminating the French teacher position; closing all three vocational academies (construction, culinary, and fashion), although all three provided job training in an area of sky-high unemployment for blacks and Latinos under 25 years of age.

We said at the time that this under-resourced breakup of Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds would drive out students and teachers, encourage the growth of charter schools, and make already unstable neighborhoods still more unstable. And that is what happened: Castlemont’s enrollment went from 1,750 in 2003 to fewer than 600 last year. McClymonds went from 1,000 to 250; Fremont from 2,300 to 750. At the same time, charter school enrollment in Oakland quadrupled.

In 2003, in the midst of the BAYCES-led breakup of Oakland secondary schools, the state of California put OUSD in receivership, ostensibly because the district’s budget was $37 million in the red. For the first two years of the state takeover, BAYCES openly co-administered OUSD with Eli Broad’s handpicked State Administrator for OUSD, Randy Ward, and an army of other Broad Institute graduates. During this period, scores of custodians, nearly all maintenance workers and many food service workers and drivers were laid off; libraries in nearly every middle school and several high schools were closed; charter school enrollment soared. Randy Ward introduced Results Based Budgeting (RBB), in which school sites were told that they were responsible for nearly all expenses, including teacher salaries – pressuring principals to try to force out veteran teachers in favor of lower-paid and untrained Teach for America recruits, and to cut supplies and resources to the bone (at more than one school, teachers were told that they needed to pay for copier paper out of their own pockets).

Tony Smith was a BAYCES leader when these policies were put in place. He left BAYCES in 2004 – not in protest, but to advance his career. From 2004 to 2007 he ran the Emeryville, California schools. From there, he went to San Francisco for a year and a half as Deputy Superintendent.

Fast forward to Spring 2012. Tony Smith has been OUSD superintendent for three years – ever since the state takeover ended in 2009.  Despite his passionate and eloquent rhetoric, Smith has continued – even deepened – the harmful policies put in place during the state takeover. He has maintained Ward’s Results Based Budgeting and, like Ward, has used RBB to target veteran teachers.  Now, in April 2012 Smith, who participated in the ill-conceived break-up of the three high schools while at BAYCES, announces that the position of classroom teacher will be abolished at Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds, where now all teachers will be “teachers on special assignment” and the small schools replaced by “Acceleration High Schools”.  The reconsolidation was as ill-conceived and as poorly designed as the breakup had been: the libraries remained closed; custodial, food service and clerical staffing remained inadequate; support services were scarce; overall the schools remained terribly resource-starved.  The elimination of the classroom teacher position was a transparent excuse for violating the due process and seniority provisions by forcing all teachers at the three high schools to reapply for their jobs every year.

School size isn’t the primary determinant of success. BAYCES breakup of the comprehensive high schools a decade ago was destructive. Smith’s reconsolidation has been destructive too. And Smith has gone a step beyond to overt union busting, by forcing teachers at these three schools to reapply for their jobs every year.

Indeed, Smith has trampled on virtually every hope he raised in his smooth but false talk of three years ago:

·      Neighborhood schools? Smith closed several, including five elementary schools last June (scaling to adjust for the difference in size between Chicago and Oakland public school enrollments, those five closures alone would be equivalent to the 54 schools Rahm Emanuel et al plan to close). When a group of parents, teachers, and community staged a 17-day sit-in at Lakeview Elementary to protest the closure of the five schools, Smith sent in the cops to evict us.

·      Wraparound services? Two years ago Smith gutted Adult Education – from 25,000 students when he arrived in 2009, the program now has been all but wiped out. He made cuts to Early Childhood Education. He eliminated counselors at the district’s largest high school. Etc. Those few services he did introduce were partial, and based on soft money from his friends and patrons in the corporate foundations.

·      Combating racism? All of the schools Smith closed last year were majority minority enrollment – four black, one Latino. Many of the schools in the black and Latino communities that remain open have become more segregated under Smith.

·      Recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers? Establishing collaborative relations? Oakland teachers have been without a contract since 2008, and are paid 20% below the state and county averages for public school teachers.  In 2010, when negotiations broke down over Smith’s demand that the teachers union accept no pay increase, larger class size, weakened seniority and academic freedom, Smith imposed his terms on the union – the first Superintendent in OUSD history to do so. Union-busting then in 2010, just as he did two years later by forcing the Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds teachers to reapply for their jobs.

·      Providing the resources teachers need to teach and students need to learn? Several Oakland elementary schools were chosen by the state to receive supplementary funding for class size reduction, resources, and support under the Quality Education Improvement Act (QEIA) funding, a program aimed at helping the state’s lowest-achieving schools. For the past two years, OUSD has lost millions in QEIA funding because all but one or two of the QEIA-eligible schools failed to meet class size targets – clearly not a problem of poor site administrators, but rather of an inept and unsupportive district administration.

·      Cracking down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing?  Relative to its size, OUSD under Smith has double the administrative overhead and double the outsourced contracts compared to the average California school district.

Last year, Tony Smith said he wouldn’t care if all Oakland schools were charter schools. Oakland already had the state’s highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, and that percentage has increased under Smith (from about 17% to about 20%).

And when Tony enters the game, be prepared to ante up. Although Oakland teachers have not had a raise in five years and are among the lowest paid in the Bay Area, Smith demanded and got a 6% increase over his predecessor’s salary when he signed on as superintendent in 2009. Smith earns a base salary of $265,000 / year. His total annual compensation, including benefits, comes to more than $352,000.

A thread runs through Tony Smith’s career: to attempt to counterpose, in practice, what he asserts to be the interests of students and community to those of teachers and staff. This aligns him with the corporate agenda. And, in fact, he is one of their rising superstars: witness the "philanthropic" funding to OUSD, cited in Smith's resignation letter and in the school board's accompanying statement. (This goes back at least to his BAYCES days [1997 - 2004], where he managed BAYCES connections with the Hewlett Foundation.). But smooth though his tongue may be, Tony Smith’s divide and conquer strategy was beginning to backfire on him in Oakland -- witness the widespread, if passive, support from the community for the sit-in at Lakeview Elementary, or the increasing heat he has been taking at board meetings from community in west and east Oakland.

So while Smith’s family health issues may well be real, I have to believe that he was looking to get out of town. And I have to believe that his corporate patrons want him in Chicago, where they think he’ll be able to win the community back to their side and break the teacher – community alliance. Prove them wrong.

(Originally posted on the Chicago education resistance website, substancenews.net)

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Student debt: the next bubble? Let's confront this class war.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired

Iran has been downgraded for a minute or two as North Korea offers US capitalism’s spin doctors a better option for keeping its population focused on imaginary external enemies.  The intention in the Korean Peninsula is regime change which would open up new territory and a new source of cheap Labor power. US capitalism presents North Korea as a serious threat (see previous post) as it wages a domestic war on all aspects of our lives and the misery and death that is a result of this war far outweighs anything foreign.  The details of this war on its own people, this class war, are available if you look for them, if you ignore the propaganda and the absurd War on Terror.

Leaving aside the more brutal forms of oppression here in the US, the prison industrial complex that houses more than 2 million souls, more than any other country, the homelessness or the miserable health care system that leads to thousands of deaths and is the leading cause of bankruptcy, we should consider debt.  Millions of people are enslaved by debt.  People use credit cards to buy food, purchase health care and other necessities.

As we saw with the onset of the Great Recession when poor and low income people, desperate for shelter and keen to avoid the clutches of the landlords and rent payments where your rent pays the mortgage on someone else’s home, were conned in to loans that they would inevitably default on. The consequences of not paying the moneylenders are dire:

"I just wanted to be able to eat and sleep in my house and have a roof over my head…” one 89 year old woman still working told the Wall Street Journal*,  "Every day at midnight when I go to sleep, I think maybe when I wake in the morning they'll tell me to get out."

This is how capitalism treats older workers; this wasn’t a foreign plot. Then we should consider the human and financial cost to society of all the illnesses caused by the stress brought on through living in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity in modern day debt bondage.  A bad credit rating in the US can keep you from getting a roof over your head, a car, and other important needs.

The new potential debt bubble is the student loan market.  I have written about this in the past and that there shouldn’t even be such a thing as a student loan market. Education, like health care, a job, housing, would be a right in any society that claims the mantle civilization.  The cost of a university education has risen more than 40% in the last ten years and student loans with some $1 trillion in outstanding debt have surpassed credit cards and auto and are now second only to home mortgages as a source of consumer debt according to the US Federal Reserve. As recently as nine years ago, outstanding student debt was around $250 billion.

Some economists are alarmed at what they see as a debt bubble that will equal the housing bubble that led to the 2007 meltdown.  Their concern as always, is the damage to the system, an economic disruption that halts profit taking and creates the potential for social unrest.  Others say the figures are not so bad, “….average debt for graduates with debt is around $27,000, which is small compared to mortgage debt,” saysNeal P. McCluskey of the Cato Institute, "For students going to good schools and pursuing in-demand degrees, it should not be hard to pay off.” Oh, I have lots of friends at Harvard and Brown and that’s just what we need, more MBA’s.

In the wake of the austerity war on wages and working conditions, in particular public sector jobs, leaving college owing $27,000 (this is the average) is a considerable burden even if you find employment.  There are hundreds of thousands of young people with college degrees that cannot find work in their field. “If a college student takes a $25,000-a-year job, as many are, the debt to income ratio is very high,”, says Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University. He adds that there are thousands of students that owe way above the average.

And total student debt is not just in the form of official public or private loans.  Parents are loaning their children money either through their savings or through taking out lines of credit or second mortgages. Meanwhile, not only is the delinquency rate on student debt climbing, the amount of debt is increasing even faster. In 2005 average student loan debt was $17,233 rising to $27, 000 by 2012, an increase of 58% in seven years according to MAINST. COM.   Credit card and auto loan balances decreased during that period.

Professor Vedder says he is opposed to forgiving the debt because the taxpayer will not be able to absorb it.  The bankers, auto bosses and other coupon clippers got to our pocket books first but there is still plenty of money in society, I have shared those sources on these pages many times.  There is the more than $26 trillion the super rich stash away in offshore accounts, an amount equal to the combined GDP of the US and Japan.  "Studies have estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year," says the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists after receiving leaked information about tax havens and offshore accounts where the 1% hide the money they have stolen from us.

And what does it cost to fly stealth bombers and B52’ around the Korean Penninsula?  The cost to the US taxpayer of these predatory incursions and occupations and the bases that go with them is extensive. And these ventures are not defensive measures, they are to protect and expand the influence of US capitalism.  These are not our wars.  The policies coming out of Washington and the Pentagon do us far more harm than some 7^th century Mullah in Pakistan.

The psychological, physical and inevitably financial costs to us brought about by market forces are huge. This is a domestic war being waged on us day in day out.  As their policies deprive so many Americans of health care, education, a roof over our head a job, and certainly a vacation abroad, we night consider a nice camping trips to one of the beautiful state and national parks we have in this country but they’ve blocked what was once a cheap alternative to Paris as they close our natural wonders in order to place the burden of their crisis on to our backs.  This will not continue unchallenged forever.

As you mull over whether or not this poverty stricken little country called North Korea that suffered almost total annihilation in an imperialist war will take away your rights or the crazed Mullahs of Tehran will destroy your freedoms, remember the WMD’s in Iraq---remember Powell telling the world how dangerous they were and how they could destroy us all.  Remember the Gulf of Tonkin.

Most of all consider that more and more parents are taking out life insurance policies on their children because they have taken out loans to pay for their education. They don’t want to lose their own homes if they are saddled with a student debt if their child dies. This is what happened to one woman who told her story to the Financial Times:

“The loans company calls two or three times a day. They’re just coming after me like sharks to repay loans that funded an education my son will never get to use…..I’m worried that my home will be taken away if I don’t pay. They will not forgive the loans. Had I known the severity, I would not have let my child go to college. It’s a nightmare,”

It’s not some foreign terrorist creating this nightmare; it’s a domestic one.

“Clearly we are in a tipping point and there will be repercussions,” says the above quoted Professor Vedder.  He is right about that. But it’s quite clear if we take the time to think about it that it is not the little man in Iran, or the rather youthful leader of the Stalinist regime in North Korea we need fear.  The most devastating war we are facing is the domestic one, the class war and it’s time we took the offensive in it.

From our previous blog on this issue:

No to austerity, money is everywhere:

* Cancel all student debt, make the rich pay
* Federally funded education at all levels
*Corporations out of education
* Reduce class sizes K thru 12 to 15
*student, parent teacher control of curriculum
* Take the banks and finance houses under public ownership and control
* Allocation of capital on the basis of social
*Build an independent working people's political party based on our organizations and communities
*For a democratic socialist society--production for social need not profit

* WSJ 3-12-07

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Teachers are not to blame for education crisis; they are victims of it.

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

We hear it over and over again; autoworkers are the cause of the problems in the auto industry.  Muni (public transportation in SF) operators are the cause of the problems with San Francisco’s mass transit service, and social workers are to blame when young children are abused.

The war on the public sector is ferocious and the 1% and their representatives in the two Wall Street parties have teachers and their unions on top of their hit list, the main teachers Union, the NEA, is the largest Union in the country.  The capitalist offensive is determined to put the US working class on rations to do that it must wage a war on organized labor.

I just read an article in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle.  The article is about a new report being released today which calls for  “..an overhaul..” of  the way Oakland, a major city on the East Shore of the San Francisco Bay, runs its public school system.  I haven’t yet read the report itself which is the product of an evaluation by the National Council on Teacher Quality but it is clear that this is the same old story----blame teachers for the crisis in education. 

The evaluation was sponsored by a group called the Effective Teacher Coalition of Oakland which according to the Chronicle includes, “..local parent and youth groups, one of the school district’s labor unions, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.”  The group commissioned the evaluation in order to get an “outside perspective on improving teaching in Oakland” and “a third party perspective.”, and got their wish.  The project also received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.  That should be a red light right there.

The recommendations from the NCTQ focuses on “..using market-based forces to improve teacher performance…”. But it is market based forces that are the cause of the crisis in education just like they were the cause of the 2007 crash, the cause of the crisis in auto, the cause of homelessness and lack of health care. 

Oakland CA Lakeview School sit in

It is shameful that a trade Union supports the project although it should come as no surprise given the role the leaders of this Union played last August during the occupation of an Oakland school that was scheduled to be closed. Such recommendations like curbing seniority rights; reducing sick leave from ten days annually to five, ending tenure for teachers after two years, and that districts be free to layoff teachers without using seniority which is now required by law are eventually supported in one way or another by trade Union leaders at the highest level throughout organized Labor. These attacks occur throughout all industries.

The response from leaders of the Oakland Education Association,  (OEA) as far as I can see, is the usual astonishment at the ferocity and full frontal attack, The Chronicle quotes Trish Gorham, OEA president,  “It’s an advocacy piece” she says.  Yes it is Trish, yes it is.  She adds, “It’s over the top, it wasn’t even subtle.”  This is the voice of a Labor official that has no answer whatsoever to the austerity agenda, it is a plea for help,  “We accept the changes are necessary but please be a little less aggressive.”  And the bosses have not been subtle for quite sometime, how could anyone not have noticed that.  Teachers have been savaged over the past period with job losses and wage cuts.  In this period concessions just lead to more concessions.

“The teachers’ union criticized the report as divisive and custom made to drive a broader policy agenda” the Chronicle writes. What on earth would make anyone think otherwise?  Have the policies and practices coming out of Washington and the US Congress regarding social services or toward workers and our families been “subtle” of late?  And of course there is a broader policy agenda. The question is, what is the leadership of organized Labor from the top down going to do about it?  So far they have cooperated with the austerity agenda as they whine about the excesses. The Labor hierarchy is wedded to the Team Concept, the view that workers and bosses have the same economic interests and this is what drives their class collaboration.  They worship market forces too and look to the market for answers to all things.

I worked as a teacher’s aid in the Oakland public schools many years ago.  It taught me to have nothing but the greatest respect for teachers; it is not easy to give a child the attention they need when you have 30 or 35 of them in a class speaking five different languages. But it is poverty and social disruption that is the main cause of the crisis in education. Children bring all the ills of capitalist society in to the classroom.  Job losses, home eviction, parents working sixty hour weeks, wage cuts, elimination of public services of all kinds, these have an affect on personal relations in the home. When capitalist economic crisis becomes more severe like the period we have come through, this makes matters worse. Social crisis makes it harder for teachers to teach and harder for students to learn.  The report says they want to cut down on absenteeism, but like social workers, these conditions outside of the classroom weigh heavily on teachers, making their jobs very stressful.

What really happens is that students, parents, family life is hit by capitalist crisis and through that, the teachers in our schools.  And like any job or profession, some people have difficulties or when conditions are bad become more disillusioned than others, the task is to help them. The report pays lip service to this but its main focus is on blaming teachers and weakening their Union.

According to the SF Chron. The report recommends giving principals complete control over hiring, a sort of education equivalent to Detroit’s new one-man dictatorship.  The report adds that, “Oakland needs to find ways to consider the best interests of students when deciding where to assign teachers…”

Since when do these people care about the “best interests” of students?  Oakland has been closing schools left right and center, schools that are attended primarily by students of color, an already distressed community in the madness of capitalist society, this will add to problems this community faces.  But all aspects of public education are on the chopping block. We saw the beginnings of what could have been a mass movement to drive the capitalist offensive back in 2010 when college students arose in masses to oppose fee hikes but the heads of organized Labor in California, with 2 million workers affiliated to it refused to bring the power of Labor to the table.

These battles cannot be won by individual cities, individual school districts or individual local Unions.  Beyond the Occupy movement we have also seen numerous pockets of resistance to foreclosures, environmentally destructive projects like the pipeline, the prison industrial complex which houses two million souls, and against cuts in education. We must link these struggles together and we do that by broadening our demands.

We have to build a generalized mass movement against all aspects of the austerity agenda.

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CCSF rally against the cuts. Tim Paulson, Labor Council leader speaks

by Richard Mellor

I went to a rally in San Francisco tonight that was called to protest the cuts in education and the cuts at City College of San Francisco in particular.  I don’t know too much about the details of this particular assault but I did hear one speaker say that $53 million in CCSF funding was cut by the state government in Sacramento.

I didn’t stay too long as it was very much the same old stuff. There were lots of young people there and that was positive.  But I have been to so many of these rallies that it gets a bit depressing after a while.  I was at the protest against the Iraq war in London in 2003 and some reports said there were over two million people there which is amazing in a country with a population of 53 million. Not only that, they weren’t the “usual suspects” leftists, anti-capitalists, anarchists and members of one left group or another. They were ordinary working folk and middle class people.

As exciting as it was, that demo didn’t stop the slaughter of the Iraqi people.  And it becomes crystal clear that simply demonstrating will not stop wars or the austerity measures being introduced in the aftermath of the present capitalist crisis that arose in 2007. Let’s face it, the Greeks have had who knows how many general strikes and it has not driven the capitalist assault back.  Not only have the Greeks protested, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Irish have all had mass demonstrations against the austerity measure forced on them by what they call over there the Troika, the European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Commission. These are all isolated actions, which is why the 1% don’t fear them like they would Europe wide stoppages and disruption of business as usual.

I’m sorry for this but I am digressing.

What bothered me tonight is what always bothers me at these events.  A lot of well-intentioned, (particularly the youth) speakers get up and assail the attacks.  Some of them though are seasoned leftists types who belong to one or another of the umpteen left groups that exist in this area who are very familiar with these events and speaking at them.  On the platform also was Tim Paulson, the head of the San Francisco Labor Council, the county arm of the AFL-CIO. This body has affiliated to it 150 local unions and 100,000 workers.  It exists in a city that had a general strike in 1934 and San Francisco, many of the Labor glitterati will tell you, is a “Union town.”

The head of the SF Labor Council spoke for a few minutes and commented mostly on various electoral measures that would produce some funds for education.  He made a few other empty comments about how good it was to be here etc.

So what were the electoral gains?  The two he mentioned were Prop 30, which increases the sales tax and adds a permanenttax on the wealthy to offset education cuts. This has, as many have said, “stopped the bleeding” and after sending out 20,000 reduction In force notices to teachers last year, school districts in California only sent out about 2,400 such letters this year so far according to the Huffington Post.   We certainly wouldn’t oppose that but we have to look at it in perspective; according to a White House report, 300,000 jobs in education have been lost since 2008.

Paulson, who is on the executive board of the California Democratic Party also mentioned Measure A. Measure A is a $79 annual property tax, that voters were blackmailed in to supporting that will last for eight years.

In other words, Paulson said nothing that would inspire anyone.  But that’s his intention.  Maybe the rich will pay more taxes, maybe they won’t.  But the rest of these electoral measures places further burden on workers and the middle class.  They don’t make the rich pay for their crisis; they make us pay. We have to pay more for the education of our youth.  You can’t expect much more from Paulson as he is but an agent of the Democratic Party, in the workers’ movement; a party of Wall Street funded by the likes of Goldman Sachs.

Many of the young people are impressed that a major Labor leader comes and speaks at a rally about education and in opposition to the cuts. But Paulson isn’t opposed to cuts. He wants slightly less severe cuts.  Like students and the youth, workers rights, wages and benefits are being savaged under the guise of “shared sacrifice”.  Workers are working longer hours and the pace of work is intensifying. In auto, new hires, mainly younger people are expected to work for half the pay of older workers. We reported here about the Chrysler worker who was suspended and since terminated for protesting on his own time about a new shift schedule that eliminates overtime after 8 hours. In fact, 10-hour days are becoming the norm, a schedule that hurts older workers in particular. Then there’s there grocery workers whose pensions are under attack and who are earning $21 an hour after 41 years service.  What sort of future does this mean for young people?  The Union hierarchy has all supported these developments.

When SEIU local 1021 members rejected a concessionary contract in 2009  their leaders claimed they were “confused”.  (similar story here) Tim Paulson agreed and joined with the SEIU leadership in forcing a concessionary contract down the members’ throats. He told the media that he was“hopeful that if it’s approved, the mayor will rescind the layoffs”.  In other words, concessions or layoffs, these are the alternatives presented to workers, never an offensive strategy, never make the rich and the 1% pay. Never shut down the economy, stop the wheels from turning and Labor can do that, organized and Unorganized together. If they workers reject this strategy, the likes of Paulson and other Labor officials at the highest levels combine to wear them down, force the bosses’ concessions on their members

The same is true of education. 

But here’s what irks me the most. At gatherings like these there are numerous socialist and leftist groups. More importantly, some of them share the platform with supporters of austerity measures like Tim Paulson. Some of them did tonight. Some of them even have positions in the Union movement or, in some cases, the Labor councils.

But that a Labor leader that refuses to mobilize or at least have a strategy to mobilize the potential power of his/her members and instead actually functions to suppress any movement from below that attempts to launch a real fight back against the employers’ and their austerity agenda, can speak on the same platform as socialists and activists and no one points this out or alludes to the contradiction in any way is shameful. A young speaker before him in his innocence alluded to how militant this man was. The young people in the audience are not aware of the potential power of organized Labor even in our weakened state.  They are not aware that the rank and file member that pays the dues would have no clue who this person is for good reason and that his role has been to suppress any attempt by his the rank and file of the Labor movement to fight back.

They are not aware that the average member hates the Labor hierarchy for the right reasons, that they take money in the form of dues payments yet cooperate with the bosses’ austerity agenda.

Could you imagine being on a platform with someone you know is a racist, him speaking on the need for unity and you not mentioning it?  Or with a vicious misogynist speaking on women’s rights and you saying nothing, refusing to alert the audience to the truth. It’s one thing if such an individual publicly admitted their mistakes and had changed course’ we all make mistakes.

--> When Tim Paulson said to the thousand or so young people that attended the rally that the San Francisco Labor Council “stands behind” you; every socialist, every seasoned activist and trade Unionist present knows this is meaningless; it's not true, so do those who shared the platform with him and they said nothing; they allowed him to con the youth, give them false hopes.

We do not have to call these people names.  But to say nothing is criminal.  It helps to delay the movement. It is to let down the working class.

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