Mexican Teachers: "Education is Not a Class Privilige, It is a Social Right"

by Jack Gerson

The previous post on this blog, Ken Hanley's article "Mexico Teachers Strike Closes Classes in Several States", gave a partial picture of the massive and bitter struggle that has been going on across most of southern and central Mexico for nearly a year, including months-long and ongoing mass strikes of teachers in several Mexican states. The root cause of the conflict is the attempt by Mexico's new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, to impose austerity in the form of a neoliberal education agenda akin to the assault on public education in the U.S. and the UK, including tieing teachers' jobs to student performance on high stakes standardized tests, weakening union rights, and modifying the curriculum to be "business-friendly" -- as dictated by the World Bank and a cabal of multinational banks and corporations.

The best popular background article on the Mexican struggle is David Bacon's "U.S.-Style School Reform Goes South",  published last April in The Nation magazine:

http://www.thenation.com/article/173308/us-style-school-reform-goes-south#

However, since that article was published, the struggle has really heated up. Teachers in Guerrero, Michoacan and other states have walked out, joining the Oaxacan teachers (discussed in Bacon's article), mainly led by the CNTE (a large radical national grouping in the national teachers' union).

I think that the essence of the struggle is contained in the April 22 declaration of the teachers of Michoacan state stating their grievances and their resolve and their intention to strike until their grievances were resolved. I'm including it in the original Spanish, but I'll translate the heading:  "Education is not a Class Privilige, it is a Social Right."

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“LA EDUCACIÓN NO ES UN PRIVILEGIO DE CLASE, ES UN DERECHO SOCIAL”

A LA  OPINIÓN PÚBLICA

A LAS GOBIERNOS FEDERAL Y ESTATAL

A LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN:

Hoy, 22 de abril del año 2013, el magisterio michoacano, nos dirigimos a ustedes para hacer saber la determinación que hemos tomado de asumir nuestros deberes cívicos, frente a las reformas laboral, energética, fiscal y educativa, y lo hacemos una vez que tocamos todas las puertas de gobierno, que buscamos oídos para nuestras peticiones, que solicitamos  la protección de la justicia ante los tribunales, que públicamente hemos solicitado ser incluidos en las discusiones para la construcción del modelo educativo  que requiere este país, y la respuesta ha sido negativa. Pero, al mismo tiempo, el trato que nos dan es de difamación desde los medios de comunicación, para justificar el uso de la represión policiaca. Por todo lo anterior, a partir de esta fecha NOS DECLARAMOS EN PARO DE LABORES POR TIEMPO INDEFINIDO, hasta lograr respuestas satisfactorias en lo referente a:

1. La  abrogación del decreto, emitido por Enrique Peña Nieto, que reforma los artículos 3° y 73 de la Constitución, por lesionar el carácter gratuito de la educación al imponer cuotas a los padres de familia, y permitir que la educación sea un negocio de los empresarios; por lesionar los derechos sociales y laborales, legítimamente legados por los hombres que nos dieron Patria; por pretender instituir el contratismo y buscar el despido de más de un millón de maestros con un examen tramposo, que no es una evaluación; y por buscar un mayor empobrecimiento de los contenidos educativos, en detrimento de la formación integral de los estudiantes.

2. El castigo correspondiente a Elba Esther Gordillo Morales por el despojo de nuestro dinero y otros delitos cometidos contra el magisterio y el pueblo de México. Que se realice un proceso de elección de los representantes en nuestro sindicato,  donde todos los profesores participemos. Desconocemos la imposición, por parte del gobierno federal, de Juan Díaz de la Torre, miembro de la mafia de Elba Esther.

3. El respeto total a las Normales formadoras de docentes, por ser un pilar fundamental de la educación pública y gratuita, y legado de la Revolución Mexicana.

4. Que se ponga un alto a la represión física, administrativa, mediática y laboral que los gobiernos estatal y federal han emprendido contra los maestros que luchamos por nuestros derechos y por la defensa de la educación pública, científica, nacional y gratuita.

 Sabidos de los riesgos que corremos por las amenazas de un gobierno que se niega a respetar el derecho de niños y jóvenes de acceder a la cultura universal, tomamos esta determinación porque estamos seguros de la justeza de las demandas, y tenemos claro  que, si bien el Paro Indefinido reduce el número de días clase en las escuelas, no salir a luchar contra esta mal intencionada reforma, es renunciar a contar con escuelas públicas y con programas de estudio basados en el progreso de las ciencias y la tecnología, orientados al desarrollo de las facultades humanas. No salir a luchar, sería seguir aceptando programas de estudio y textos empobrecidos, que tienen al día de hoy resultados catastróficos en niños y jóvenes, y dejarle paso libre al creciente cobro de cuotas y a la destrucción del sistema educativo. Por el cariño y compromiso hacia nuestros niños y jóvenes, seguiremos luchando con la mayor organización, inteligencia y solidaridad posibles.

Echar abajo la reforma educativa no será cosa sencilla, se requiere  contar con la participación decidida y consciente de toda la sociedad en las acciones de oposición y presión política. Se unifican los ricos empresarios, el gobierno, los diputados, senadores, partidos políticos y medios masivos de comunicación para imponer la reforma educativa en contra de los intereses y aspiraciones del pueblo. Por ello, nuestro llamado a unificar todas las fuerzas del pueblo es urgente, por el presente y futuro de la Patria.

Vamos a una intensa Jornada Nacional de Lucha, al lado de los trabajadores y pueblos de Guerrero, Oaxaca, Morelos, Chiapas, Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo, Puebla, Distrito Federal, Tlaxcala, San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Veracruz, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Jalisco, entre otros.

Informamos que en el marco del Paro, además de acciones de presión política, realizaremos actividades culturales, pedagógicas, deportivas, sobre el cuidado del medio ambiente, alimentación sana, etc., en los centros escolares y comunidades, como parte del compromiso que hemos asumido en  el Congreso Estatal Popular de Educación y Cultura, realizado los días 17,18 y 19 de abril, en la ruta de implementar un modelo educativo que responda a los intereses de TODOS los michoacanos.

Y, aunque queda claro, es necesario decirlo: es responsabilidad del gobierno federal y estatal el estallamiento del paro de labores, por su intención de acabar con la educación gratuita de los mexicanos, ¡NO LO VAMOS A PERMITIR!

ATENTAMENTE

“POR LA EDUCACIÓN AL SERVICIO DEL PUEBLO”

SECCIÓN XVIII DEL SNTE-CNTE

MICHOACÁN

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Word to Castlemont Rally Organizers: Stand Together or Hang Separately

by Jack Gerson

Yesterday I attended a rally organized by a group of teachers and administrators at Oakland's Castlemont High School to protest cuts to important programs and support services -- special education, security, and technology. There were about 75 to 100 present at the rally, including at least 50 students.  Many, but not all, Castlemont teachers were at the rally -- but not all were enthusiastic about the rally and its organizers. I talked to several teachers -- I was the teacher union rep (shop steward) at Castlemont for several years before retiring three years ago. Some teachers grumbled that the rally organizers were an "in crowd" of teachers and administrators, and that while their demands were OK they failed to take up the most important issues: egregious union-busting, favoritism, and the systematic cuts, school closures, privatization, and overall strangling of public education throughout all of Oakland.

To understand this, some background is needed. Last year,  Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Superintendent Tony Smith unilaterally imposed a union-busting reorganization on Castlemont and the two other high schools that serve the lowest-income areas in Oakland (Fremont High and McClymonds High).  Smith's plan forced all teachers at Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds to reapply for their jobs every year, a blatant violation of union due process rights and seniority.

The Castlemont faculty was divided on the reorganization. Some Castlemont teachers -- including several veteran black teachers -- argued that this was outright union-busting; that it went hand-in-hand with punitive measures taken against teachers who spoke out against the reorganization or stood up against the school and district administrators on other matters; and that it would very quickly lead to more cuts and even more top-down control by district administration.

But others saw it as an opportunity to gain a measure of autonomy: more freedom to design curricula, collaborate more closely with colleagues, eliminate bureaucratic red tape and make better use of resources. Most of these teachers had less than five years' teaching experience. They were cultivated by OUSD and Castlemont administrators, who told them they were "awesome" and "brilliant" and far superior to more experienced veteran teachers. Many of them worked closely with Castlemont's administrators. Some of them were named "head teachers" in the redesigned schools.

The opponents of the plan were right. Even the reorganization's supporters now recognize that they are suffering more cuts. And they also realize that the district's promise of more autonomy and more freedom was a ruse. Indeed, the main organizers of yesterday's rally were teachers and administrators who had supported the union-busting reorganization.

It's good that they've had one eye opened. But they still won't oppose the reorganization. They still won't call for putting an end to teachers having to reapply for their jobs. And they won't give up the notion that they're somehow special: they claim that Castlemont is "the exception", being treated more shabbily than all the other schools in OUSD. But badly as Castlemont has been treated, McClymonds and Fremont have been treated just as shabbily. So have many middle schools and elementary schools in the low-income, overwhelmingly black and Latino sections of Oakland.

To get support, it's necessary to give support.  That won't happen until the rally organizers and their cohort oppose the reorganization that forces teachers to reapply for their jobs every year at Castlemont (and at Fremont and McClymonds Highs) and until they demand adequate support, resources, and funding for all Oakland students at all Oakland schools (not just at Castlemont).

I want to address one more question: Why did the rally organizers support the reorganization in the first place? What impelled them to look for a special solution for their school alone, repudiating job security and due process rights, lining up with -- and, let's face it, cutting deals with -- district and site administrators? A good part of the blame for this has to be attributed to the failure of the local, state, and national teacher unions to adequately respond to and beat back the assault on teachers and public education.

For the past ten years, Oakland public schools have been relentlessly attacked by the corporate forces out to decimate, privatize, and ultimately destroy public education.  In other pieces I've written -- for this blog and elsewhere -- I've detailed the savage cuts inflicted on Oakland public schools under the state takeover of OUSD (2003 - 2009, when the district was essentially handed over to the minions of Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad) and then deepened in the past four years by OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith after the state takeover officially ended. Enrollment in Oakland public schools declined from 55,000 to 37,000 over the past decade, while charter school enrollment quadrupled.  Outsourcing to private consultants and contractors soared, as did spending on compensation for district administrators. School libraries were closed; the Adult Education program was annihilated; many elective programs were eliminated. Oakland teachers have been without a contract for the past five years, and are now among the lowest-paid teachers in the state (earning on average more than $12,000 a year less than the state average).

This did not have to be: a determined campaign by OEA, backed up by the vast financial resources of CTA (the statewide teacher union) and NEA (the national teacher union) could have beaten back the attacks and inspired others elsewhere to fight too. But OEA, CTA, and NEA did not fight. Instead, OEA's primary leaders insisted that OEA was too weak to fight, and that it was essential to collaborate, cooperate, and act as team players with the Oakland school district leadership. Many teachers -- particularly younger, newer teachers -- concluded that since the union can't or won't defend them, their best bet was to seek out individual solutions. That's what happened at Castlemont. But it doesn't have to remain that way. If the union will take the lead in building a united fight with parents and community, it can build support and assert the kind of power in the streets that we saw from Chicago teachers and parents last September.

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Oakland Teacher Speaks Truth to Those Who Won't Assert Power

by Jack Gerson

On Saturday, Oakland public school teacher Craig Gordon  received the 2013 Human Rights Award from the Alameda/Contra Costa Counties Service Center (ALCOSTA) of the California Teachers Association, the statewide affiliate of the 3-million member National Education Association (NEA, the largest union in the U.S.) Here's a video of Craig's acceptance speech, in which he argues that CTA and NEA (and their local affiliates) must abandon their strategy of collaborating with and caving in to the demands of management, politicians, and corporate billionaires and undertake direct action and strikes statewide and nationally to fight privatization and to demand a bailout of schools and services not banks and corporations.

As you'll see on the video,  the audience gave Craig a standing ovation. But many of those standing and applauding are the very local and statewide CTA leaders who have for years blocked our efforts to fight, insisting that collaboration with management and reliance on Democratic politicians at the local and state levels was the most that could be done. Now, after mass teacher / student / community strikes and actions in Chicago last fall, these "leaders" no longer openly bash every mention of the word "strike" and / or the call for mass action at the local, state, and national level. But they still won't act. And it's not the word that matters, but the deed.

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Suspend Oakland Schools Superintendent Tony Smith

by Jack Gerson

The following leaflet was distributed at today's citywide membership meeting of the Oakland Education Association (OEA -- the Oakland teachers union). It was distributed again at this evening's meeting of the Oakland school board. For those outside the Oakland area, Tony Smith is the schools superintendent (for more details on Smith, see our previous blog post here.) Otherwise, the leaflet speaks for itself -- and it speaks volumes about the ongoing privatization and systematic dismantling of public education.

                                                   Suspend Tony Smith

                                          No More Cover-ups

             No More Victimizing Students, Staff, Community

                   No to Gary Yee as Interim Superintendent

Tony Smith is on the way out. But not soon enough.

Serious charges have been made against Smith, against the school district’s chief lawyer (Jacqueline Minor), and against past and present OUSD police chiefs Peter Sarna and James Williams.  One of the OUSD cops involved in the killing of Raheim Brown, Jonathan Bellusa, says that Smith and Minor tried to coerce him into giving the same version of the shooting as the other cop involved, Barhin Bhatt (who shot and killed Raheim Brown). Bellusa, acknowledging that he ordered the first shots, says the subsequent rounds that killed Brown were unnecessary because Brown was already incapacitated.  Bellusa says that he’s been singled out for retaliation because of this, and because he brought complaints of racist harassment against former OUSD police chief Peter Sarna.

Bellusa’s charges must be taken seriously and investigated transparently, with full community involvement. Did Smith and his legal staff try to manipulate and cover up how Raheim Brown was murdered? Why did Tony Smith want to promote Barhin Bhatt to OUSD police chief after he killed Raheim Brown (only community outrage blocked this)? Why did killer cop Bhatt command the OUSD police invasion of the Lakeview sit-in – tapping away at his gun holster in the presence of children? 

Then there’s the big picture:  the privatization and destruction of Oakland public schools, victimizing low-income areas and especially targeting the black community. We’re all aware of how OUSD was laid low by six years of state takeover: privatizing -- $80 million+ per year in outsourced contracts; downsizing – closing or “redesigning” more than half of Oakland public schools, closing libraries in most middle schools, eliminating electives, shutting down vocational programs, laying off support staff (custodial, clerical, food service, building repair and maintenance, security, …), quadrupling charter school enrollment  while shutting down public schools and driving out  nearly 20,000 public school students,  increasing teacher turnover dramatically,  punishing students for creativity and rebelliousness by focusing on rote learning and obedience enforced by high stakes testing. All low-income areas were hard hit. West Oakland and East Oakland communities were hit hardest.

Tony Smith wasn’t brought in to undo the damage done by the state takeover. No, he was brought in to continue their program, to deepen it, to give it polish and spin with “passionate” rhetoric and claims of his “racial sensitivity.” Spin and hype to cover the ongoing corporate-backed attacks. He is their creature, a creature of the Eli Broads and the Bill Gates. And he made things worse. Tony Smith went after the most vulnerable. He tried to cut early childhood education, and met teacher / staff / community resistance. He tried to cut Special Education, and met even fiercer resistance. But he did succeed in virtually eliminating the Adult education program. When Tony Smith arrived in 2009, Adult Education served 25,000 students. He shut down more than 95% of the program, victimizing the most vulnerable: single mothers, high school dropouts looking for a second chance, and immigrant workers desperate to learn language and customs.

And Smith has brought more charter schools – including semi-private ones. More school shutdowns. More program cuts. Bigger class size.  A high school dropout rate of nearly 50%. The most vulnerable areas, communities and neighborhoods were the hardest hit by the attack on anchors of the communities, their neighborhood public schools and their main source of hope, the hope of a future for their children. Heartless atrocities that can only be explained by a combination of malevolence and incompetence. Even before Smith closed five more elementary schools last June – four predominantly black, one predominantly Latino – young children in largely black Northwest Oakland (North of Macarthur, West of MLK) were being shipped by bus to schools in the far corners of East Oakland (beyond the Coliseum).

And now all hell is breaking loose. YouTube videos are circulating of students fighting students and even of students fighting teachers. We blame Smith, and we blame the board that approved his policies and, at best, turned a blind eye to what was going on. At best.

So we demand a full and transparent inquiry into Sgt. Bellusa’s charges, with full community involvement.

We demand the immediate suspension of all those named, pending the outcome of the investigation: OUSD superintendent Smith, OUSD chief legal counsel Minor, OUSD police chief Williams, Rahim Brown’s killer Bhatt.

We demand that the board not appoint Director Yee – or any other board member – to the superintendent position (be it “acting”, “interim”, or permanent) pending the completion of a full, transparent investigation of the charges.   What has Yee done to stop the blatant racism, class bias and violence embodied in the District police actions and the endless cuts in schools and programs?  Absolutely nothing!

Jack Gerson, OEA retired, former member OEA Executive Board & Bargaining Team
Bob Mandel, OEA retired, former member OEA Executive Board & Bargaining Team
Gerald Smith, former BPP, member Oscar Grant Comm. & Justice for Alan Blueford
Bob Wells, Oakland Adult Education, retired

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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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How Wall Street Preys on Teacher Pensions

by Jack Gerson

Ten days ago Danny Weil published, on dailycensored.com, a scathing analysis of how the biggest predators on Wall Street have been invited in to plunder teacher pension funds -- especially in California and Texas, but throughout the country. Teacher pension trustees now say that there are vast "unfunded liabilities", and politicians like California Governor Jerry Brown are sharpening their knives while they provide quotes to the media about how funding for public employee pension obligations create budget deficits and force the state to impose harsh austerity cuts to essential public services. This is the prelude to demands for teachers and other public employees to accept cuts to their retirement income. Indeed, such proposals are already echoing in state houses and legislatures.

Investment from employee pension funds helped finance the boom on Wall Street. But when the crisis hit, Wall Street demanded -- and continues to demand -- multi-trillion dollar bailouts from the public by cuts in jobs and services to working and unemployed people. The big banks pretend to be "risk-takers" who deserve fat returns as compensation for their "risk". But as the story of teacher pension funds illustrates, it's our livelihoods-- our savings, our pensions, our essential services -- that are at risk. Not theirs. They demand and get bailed out over and again. And they admonish us for being so careless with how we let our money be invested (invested by them, of course).

One of the important points to take away from this article is the culpability of the state teacher union leadership in standing idly by while over the past five years Wall Street hedge funds swooped in to prey on the pension funds. The story of such financialization isn't unique to teacher pension funds. Big capital is financializing and privatizing whatever can be privatized and financialilzed, commodifying or recommodifying much of what has long been public, in the process, wresting away gains fought for and won by working people over the past century and a half. These austerity attacks won't go away until we make them go away.

But enough from me. Here's Danny's article, as originally published at dailycensored.com:

http://www.dailycensored.com/financial-capitalism-and-the-us-teachers-pension-fund-fraud/

Financial Capitalism and the US teachers’ pension fund fraud

Danny Weil

An “internal study” of the California Teachers’ Retirement System (Cal STRS) indicates that the public school pension fund faces a $64 billion deficit, according to the Sacramento Bee, dated  February 4, 2013 (http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/02/california-teachers-pension-fund-faces-64-billion-deficit.html#storylink=cpy=).
The California State Teachers Retirement System produced the report in response to a legislative resolution.  The release of the “internal study” followed on the heels of chiding by the Legislature’s budget analyst, Mac Taylor, who indirectly admonished neo-liberal Gov. Jerry Brown for ignoring “huge” unfunded liabilities associated with the teachers’ retirement system and state retiree health benefits” in his new ‘budget’.
Cal STRS receives money from the state, from local school districts and from teachers themselves, but the source of the funds income is also highly dependent on investment earnings.  Like most pension funds throughout through-out the nation, Cal STRS was decimated during the recent Great Depression that continues unabated. And while the California Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) has the power take money directly from the state treasury as it sees fit, STRS cannot; they must receive specific appropriations from the Legislature in order to fund the state teachers’ pensions.
Fully funding the California teachers’ pension fund, we are told, would require $4.5 billion more a year — excluding projected investment earnings.   The system in its report stated that the shortfall would be ‘eased’ by setting lower funding targets and/or stretching out contributions (ibid). This means less money for current and future retirees.  The most important financial move, Cal STRS fund managers said, is to begin closing the deficit, rather than allowing it to widen further.  Sound like calls for austerity?  Sure does, sure is.  But wait, there’s more, and it is truly nauseating, frightening and painfully keeping with the logic of capitalist economics.
Pension funds are now dressed up hedge funds with current and future disastrous consequences

According to a recent article found at Dollarcollapse.com, pension funds are now morphing into hedge funds, a virtual back alley crap game or what Dollarcollapse calls “rolling the dice in exotic investments”, for Wall Street and their minions (http://dollarcollapse.com/investing/pension-funds-become-hedge-funds-roll-the-dice-on-exotic-investments/).

In the report written by author, John Rubino on January 28^th, 2013, he notes that there was a time when running a pension fund used to be one of the more facile jobs in finance.  Money came in steadily and predictably from member contributions and the funds were then invested in AAA grade bonds and blue chip stocks.  The target was to meet a modest, but assured, annual return of 8% interest (ibid). Not anymore. That was before the financialization of capitalism and the economic collapse.
Now, as the author correctly notes, the pension funds in effect have two criminally incompetent overlords trying to serve two contradictory economic demands.  On the one hand, at the national and state level the US borrows too much and lets its banks go on an unregulated ‘wilding’ with dire consequences for working people.  This causes and has caused severe debt crisis’ to which the overseers of capital respond by lowering interest rates to the point where investment grade bonds, once the heart and soul of pension funds, yield next to nothing.
At the state and local level, the corporate owned governors and mayors refuse to raise taxes on their real constituency, the corporations and the rich, which would have the beneficial effect of balancing the funds; they instead pressure funds to continue to make their ‘vig’ of 8%.  This, even though not only is this stupidly optimistic, but it is wildly impossible.  So, what are the pension fund managers doing now?  They are doing what financial capital requires: they are acting like gambling casinos by increasingly turning the whole pension fund investment strategy into a dangerous explosive landmine, twisting them into hedge funds, all to the detriment of working people and to the advantage of Wall Street.
This is how financialization works.  It is a particular phase of capitalism where everything is monetized and commodified.  Take the Texas Teachers’ Retirement system as just one example.
Texas Teachers’ Retirement system
In his article, Rubino goes on to write about the Texas Teacher Retirement System.  According to Rubino:
“On the 13^th floor of a sleek downtown office building here, the trading desks are manned overnight.  The chief investment officer favors cowboy boots made of elephant skin.  And when a bet pays off, even the secretaries can be entitled to bonuses” (ibid).
We are not talking about a high flying private hedge fund but instead, these desks are manned for the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, similar to Cal STRS.  The public pension fund has 1.3 million members that include school teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers throughout the state.  They all labor under the assumption they will have retirement benefits they worked their entire lives for.
Yet rather than reduce risk in the wake of declines in interest rates, the pension fund manikins are now getting hostily aggressive, loading up on private equity investments and other non-traditional investments that they say promise to return pension funds to the halcyon days of steady and safe returns.
The Texas Teacher Retirement System fund has $114 billion dollars and now boasts some of the riskiest bets in its history with $30 billion dollars committed to private equity, real estate and other ‘so-called ‘alternative investments’ since early 2008, as the economic crash washed ashore like a Tsunami.  Amongst the ten largest U.S public pensions, this makes it the biggest such investor in Wall Street backed equity investments.  The funds currently have an average alternatives allocation of a whopping 21%!  Don’t let them fool you again.
According to tracker, Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service, the Texas Teacher Retirement System brought in an annual return of 3.1% between December 31, 2007 and December 31, 2012.  This was more than the average media return of 2.6% for similar years (ibid).
The argument made by the pension investment officials for their investment in Wall Street is that investment in private equity is necessary to help offset declines in other investments it is embedded in.  So, we are told that investment in Wall Street is necessary to assure adequate pay-outs to current and future retirees.  Sound familiar?  The Chief Investment Officer for the workers’ pension moneys, Britt Harris, says he can perform miracles in light of the deteriorating state of US financial capitalism and “smash” the reality that government pension funds area on the short end of most investments — another one of those economic genies of trading.
So, with this particular shortsightedness and love for free markets, in November 2011 the Texas fund made one of the largest single commitments in the private equity system’s history: they invested $3 billion dollars in KKR and another Wall Street parasite, the Apollo Global management group (APO).  Three months later, unbeknownst to the vast majority of fund members, they bought $250 million dollars of the world’s largest hedge fund firm with member monies – Bridgewater Associates out of Connecticut.  This marked the first time time in history that a U.S public pension fund has purchased such a large stake in private equities, betting member dollars as if they were players in a casino roulette game.
The result was a return for the fiscal year ending on August 31, 2011 that was 7.6%.  Now pension ‘managers’ say they can help the fund reach its goal of 8% annually over the long haul and they are proceeding full speed ahead.  In a ten year period ending in August of 31, 2012 the Texas Teacher Retirement System had an annual return of 7.4% (ibid).
Of course none of the investments had the approval of working people who fund the retirement system.  This is partly due to the enormous task of investing but mainly due to lack of democratic decision making and oversight which is the nasty business that pension fund managers, in cahoots with Wall Street, loathe.  Nothing could be worse than having the wolves of capital in their elephant skin boots subjected to transparency and member oversight.
And just where were the teacher unions and bus driver unions and cafeteria worker unions when all this was happening?  They were nowhere in sight.  Their ‘bosses’ either didn’t know, care or understand the haughty risk the pension weasels were making on behalf of their members.  The fat cat union bosses have shown a penchant for Wall Street and neo-liberalism in general, favoring begging over bargaining and fancy luncheons with powerful paid for politicians and wealth managers over their fiduciary duty of member oversight.  They prefer to be team members rather than looking out for their real members, working people who are drastically declining in numbers as privatization clouds the horizon and economic decimation provides the meat for the noxious roux.
The average teacher, bus driver and cafeteria worker simply wants to do their job and to make a living, feed their children and provide for retirement, a chore that is not possible under the current regime of capital.  Mis-education and a lack of critical thinking skills have left workers prey for the wolves of high-finance while the pension managers ski in Aspen, buy fancy boots and otherwise screw over workers by investing in a system of mendacity and despair that has proven time and time again to be a time bomb.  All this while Wall Street gets fatter, bonuses are given out with impunity and privatization squeezes the life out of civil society.
Leveraging workers’ pension through debt
This grand charade is all about leveraging debt, which is the specialty of Wall Street and their cronies.  “Leverage’ relies on borrowing more and more sums of cash and then using derivatives (phony insurance) to make large investments in Wall Street.  In this way the funds don’t have to put up as much cash – money they don’t have anyway.  It is like borrowing on credit cards to buy stocks and bonds but it is much worse, for it is not an individual problem, it is a socio-economic one that promises to drive the funds right down the same path as the banking crisis and housing “bubble” that brought down whole countries and economies, like Greece.  All of this is great for Wall Street and death for workers.
But never mind:  for the money changers, such as the world’s largest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates and a numerically growing number of hedge fund bosses state, this type of leveraging is not like that which crashed banks, devasted lives, washed worker bodies onto the shoreline of despair and economic ruin and left them in peonage; it, they say, is “different.  Not to worry this time, these deacons of depravity and greed say they are firmly and safely in control of the financialization scheme which of course is tantamount to saying that an alcoholic is in control of his or her own addiction or the military industrial complex has a firm hand on the tiller of cost control.
They have even bent the language to their own self-serving advantage, a sophist’s tool, and they now call this ‘financial strategy’ “risk parity” (ibid).  There are many such criminal firms such as AQR Capital Management and the Clifton Group out of Minneapolis who are greedily sucking their fingers in anticipation of their own bonuses, capital gains and primitive accumulation strategies which promise to make them even more super-rich than they currently are and allow managers and executives to reap heady bonuses.
When questioned, the minions of Wall Street who serve as the real shadow managers of the funds say that they are using a modest amount of leveraging and assure workers and you, the reader, that this is what makes their strategy brilliant and different from those employed by investment banks.  Do not be beguiled, this is the same strategy that created the largest transfer of wealth into the pockets of the one percent in the history of the world.
Of course it is not only a self-serving lie and unthinkable ruse, but it is unsustainable.  The chickens will come home to roost just as they did in the bankster fraud and housing debacle.  Cannibal financial groups like Bridgewater and their founder Ray Dalio, like the matchstick men they are, have pitched the idea to other pension fund ‘trustees’ and have even made a documentary style online video about the Ponzi scheme.
They all employ the same rapacious rap.  According to an interview with Bridgewater con-man, Ray Dalio:
“Ironically, by increasing your risk in the bonds you are going to lower your risk in the overall portfolio” (ibid).
This is the voice of American greed and it resounds well within the halls of depravity that is Wall Street which profits off of economic demolition and looks to take stumbling pensions down the road of economic purgatory.
The California State Teacher Retirement System
And of course this leads us back to Cal STRS.  With a shortfall such as that borne by the California pension fund, one can imagine this Nigerian web scam to be swallowed by the pension bosses here in California and elsewhere, who manage workers’ money for a profit, but do so with disdain for the workers’ themselves and a penchant for tying themselves to the crap game of casino capitalism.  These con artists avoid having to answer questions about such “innovations” such as day trading during the high tech stock bubble and house flipping during the housing boom, practices that are hardly innovative but more about yawing financial appetites and greed.  Remember these hideous practices were also sold under the auspices of ingenuity at the time they were fathomed but soon became to be known as criminal practices and investment ruses that were devastating for working people.
My wife is currently receiving disability retirement benefits from the California State Teacher Retirement System.  In this year, her check payment for February was lower than that paid in January.  She has written Cal STRS to find out why and is awaiting a reply Cal STRS says they will have put in her “in-box” online at their website in 20 days.  But as the clock runs out on her health and her funds quickly deliquesce, one can only view the financialization con with disgust and wonder how many other retired teachers who have devoted their lives to children will be affected.
This is all part of the privatization plot favored by Jerry Brown, enemy of the working class and cozy operator for the ruling class.  To avoid having to raise taxes on corporations and the rich who invest in him, Brown and the pension fund managers have created low hanging fruit for Bridgewater and other such criminal enterprises.  Remember, we are talking about billions of dollars here, even trillions of dollars in public pension funds.
So now you know the sordid tale of pension funds and pension leveraging, a seat at the black jack table for workers and a prime example of rapture capital accumulation for the rich.  If the practices are allowed to continue should you be a public school teacher, much like a worker who pays into Social Security, you will eventually find there is no security, that the system is rigged and the hefty bubble subject to burst.
Meanwhile, Wall Street fat cats get fatter, receive hefty  bonuses for wrangling the funds into Wall Street, and get larger all while more elephants are slayed and workers’ lives for the bootlicking fund managers drown in unpayable debt as worker retirement becomes merely a sultry dream to be replaced by homelessness, financial ruin, suicide, sorrow and decimation.
If you thought such heady political gimmicks like proposition 30 would help stave off economic devastation for underfunded schools or even staunch the bleeding inherent in the mendacious system of financial capitalism, you were wrong.  The only thing that can bring about security and equality for those who work and the public educational sector is class consciousness, education, organization and mobilization.  Anything less is a fool’s game.  It is time working people in conjunction with the students and communities they serve go on the offensive and not be forced to crouch into the corner of defensiveness.  But this will largely have something to do with how we see the world and how our perceptions are managed by a ruling class that understands very well this moment in history; a ruling class that like other monarchies of old, is more class conscious than its labor counterparts.
Meanwhile, my wife waits for an answer in her on-line ‘inbox’ from the unaccountable Cal STRS fund managers who don’t give a damn about how much she contributed to society, her growing physical disability or her future.  We will let you know if and when we get their reply.  In the meantime, organize, educate and mobilize: this is the only hope we have.

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Obama to Pre-Schoolers: This Won't Hurt a Bit

In his State of the Union message earlier this week, Barack Obama announced his intention to focus on "improving" early childhood ("pre-K") education -- in much the way he and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have "improved" K-12 education. Here's a poem by the writer Mark Naison, circulating on education activist lists, that gives a pretty good preview of what Obama has in mind:


On the President's New "Pre-School Initiative”
By Mark Naison

Test them in the cradle
Test them in the crib
Test them in the infant seat
And when they wear a bib
Test them eating baby food
And when they ride a bike
Test them when they fall asleep
Or picking up a mike
If you don't test your infants
They'll never get a job
Sorting shirts in Wal-Mart
They'll probably steal and rob
The entire US economy
Depends on taking tests
We'll never compete globally
And fall behind the rest

Illustration:
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_nclb_cartoons.php?id=852

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