The New Witch Hunt for Psycho Children

Future Serial Killers! (Image from Flickr by Ano Lobb@healthryx

Every time there is a new school massacre, school districts across the nation reevaluate, refine and retest their emergency protocols. The emphasis is always on training teachers in security procedures and identifying potential psychos—even though school shootings account for fewer than 10 deaths per year—with little or no emphasis on providing better overall mental health services for all children at school or improving the conditions they face at home and in their communities (e.g., chronic poverty or physical, mental and sexual abuse)—problems that affect thousands of children every year.

Thus it is reassuring to hear that some school districts are now looking into improving overall mental health services in their schools. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday that San Francisco Unified (SFUSD) is promoting a “new nationally recognized program to identify and help at-risk students,” in which teachers use standardized questionnaires to assess their students’ mental health.  For example, teachers are asked to determine whether a student often, occasionally or rarely seems depressed.

There are, however, several significant problems with the program. First, it requires teachers to do the job of mental health experts, something for which they are unqualified and untrained. While it is possible that this is intended to be the most efficient means of evaluating every child (there are far more teachers than mental health professionals in the school systems), it is also a way for districts to continue to underfund mental health services by having relatively inexpensive teachers do the work of comparatively more expensive psychologists and psychiatrists. Thus, while there may be improvement in the identification of children with mental health needs, there will continue to be insufficient resources to help them.

Another problem is that the program is inherently biased. For example, regardless of whether the program was designed in direct response to recent school shootings, its implementation now, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, will no doubt be in the back of teachers’ minds as they complete the surveys, potentially influencing their responses. Likewise, because the surveys are subjective (teachers are asked to rate each student on how often he or she exhibits each behavior), teachers could inadvertently (or deliberately) portray a student as at-risk because he was a disruptive thorn in the teacher’s side.

As a consequence of being so vague and open-ended the questionnaires are likely to lead to many false positives. Some of the questions could be answered affirmatively for large percentages of students who are simply typical teenagers with little to no risk of ever acting violently toward their peers, themselves or teachers (e.g., Is the student defiant or oppositional to adults? Does he get angry easily? Does she disrupt class activities or have difficulty sitting still?) None of these are evidence that a student will become a school shooter or even necessarily in need of mental health intervention.

According to the Chronicle, several teachers have already been disciplined for refusing to complete the surveys.

Cutting Services Okay, Except for Special Ed

"Education, It's Your Time to Go." (Image from Flickr by dullhunk)

As school districts across the country grapple with dwindling revenues and growing budget deficits, they are cutting more and more programs and services. So far, there has been a lot of whining and complaining by teachers and parents, but not much action.

Now, the California Department of Education is planning to investigate whether San Francisco Unified School District violated federal law by denying summer school services to students with special needs in order to save money. According to a report by The Bay Citizen,  the district’s head of middle school special education, Lisa Miller, told teachers and staff to check with her before authorizing summer school for special needs students because it was too expensive.

The directive, sent to teachers via an email obtained the Bay Citizen, may have violated the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which prohibits school officials from denying special education services based on cost (though it does not provide sufficient revenue for districts to comply). The state Department of Education has been investigating SFUSD’s education plans for roughly 80 of its 6,000 special needs students for the past year, and has found that the district had violated more than 100 state and federal regulations.

A district representative denied the allegations, saying that some staff were offering summer school to all special education students. While this may have been true, it should not be a problem. Anyone who wants to go to summer school should be able to go. Of course all schools should also have sufficient classrooms, teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, textbooks and lab equipment, which they do not.

The only reason to triage summer school students is when there is a shortage of classrooms and teachers, something that is essentially a byproduct of state budget cuts and dwindling property tax revenues. SFUSD may indeed be guilty of violating state and federal laws designed to protect the educational rights of special needs students. However, the state is really to blame for slashing education spending by over $20 billion over the past four years, thus forcing school districts to cut services and triage students, as are the feds, for providing only a one-time pittance to help bail out school districts during the recession.

What was Behind the UESF Strike Vote

Guest blogger Andy Libson, from SFUSD (Teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco and Vice-Presidential candidate for EDU slate), talks about the recent strike vote by San Francisco teachers:

On May 10th, 1880UESF teachers, counselors and paraprofessionals voted overwhelmingly (97%) to authorize a strike vote. The UESF strike vote was the first step of a two-step process for strike authorization. The vote was a big step forward for United Educators of San Francisco and showed the immense well of anger building within our membership over the immediate attacks by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD); and the years of sitting-by while district administrators slowly chipped away at our contract and work conditions.

This year, SFUSD is calling for more furlough days, even larger class sizes within both general and special education, massive cuts in the work year for Early Child Development teachers, and cuts in prep time for AP teachers and department heads. What’s more, in March they hit our union with nearly 500 pink slips. All this was done while SFUSD sat on over $75 million of restricted and unrestricted reserves, $40 million of that amount coming from concessions SFUSD already extracted from us in our last contract round in 2010.

Though the strike vote meeting was called late & hastily thrown together by UESF officials, the results of the vote made it clear that all of us (UESF leadership and those of us who had been pushing for a strike vote for many months) had underestimated the immense anger brewing within a layerof our membership and the willingness to strike in the face of years of attacks on public education.

UESF moves because we do

Still, the strike vote was not just a result of the belligerence of SFUSD. It was certainly not the result of persistent contract campaign run by the PLC. The central organizing impetus within UESF for the strike vote came from the reform caucus Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU); and dovetailed with our run for union office.

EDU ran a yearlong campaign to replace the current UESF leadership based on a campaign organized around rejecting concessions (No Layoffs, No Furloughs), rejecting austerity (Tax the Rich) and emphasizing class struggle and strikes as the basis for defending our work conditions, our students and our schools.

The EDU decision to connect its strategy of building for a strike to a campaign for union offices was the subject of much debate within the caucus as far back as August of last year. A central argument against the run was that EDU was too weak within the union to contend for top offices, that we should instead emphasize building from our bases at school sites. There were concerns that EDU did not have the resources to both fight around the contract campaign and run a successful election run.  Additionally,some within EDU opposed the idea of raising a strike openly within our campaign for fear of alienating members and getting trounced in the elections.

Those of us in favor of running a full slate did not counter-pose a contract campaign to an election run but saw them as intimately connected to the political task of making the case to the membership about the need for building a union that was willing to fight concessions; and that building for a strike was the best tool for doing so.  We argued that members would not take our message seriously unless we posed both a clear organizational and, more critically, political alternative to the current leadership.

Socialists and radicals in unions have often worried that contending for formal leadership within our union can pull us away from the rank- and-file. This is true if radicals and socialists run a campaign that focuses narrowly on changing the leadership as a basis for reviving our unions and hide their politics while doing so.

The fact is that decades of low class struggle aren’t just a result of poor leadership. Business unionism as an organizing model combined with record-low strike levels have conditioned workers to tolerate defeat and to systematically lower their expectations of what is possible.

If we are to build a fighting union, our membership will need to be directly engaged and challenged about what is possible if we struggle and the need to construct our organizations (unions, coalitions, political parties) to do so. This means working class politics must be at the center of any reform campaign. The question of who runs for election in a reform caucus is important, but not nearly as important as what politics the caucus runs on.

EDU would not just be running a campaign to change the leadership. We would be using the elections to make the case to the membership that we don’t have to accept concessions, but that we ALLwould need to be prepared to strike in order to win. EDU ran as the leadership prepared to lead UESF in a fight if the members were prepared to wage it. We asked members to vote for us on this basis: a vote for EDU is a vote for you to fight in your own interests and we are prepared to lead that fight.

EDU pushes from below and above

In the last contract round in 2010, PLCwas unwilling to survey members saying it would only be ‘divisive’ in the context of accepting cuts.  But this time, EDU pushed early with an October leaflet to UESF members calling on school sites to poll their members for their top three contract demands. EDU also called on UESF to survey all members in preparation for our contract fight. EDU used this leaflet to introduce UESF members to our position on furloughs, class size, standardized tests, benefits and wages and the need to make strike preparations in order to win our demands.

By the end of November UESF began surveying members. Even though they rushed the process and gave us only two weeks to do the surveys (which EDU pushed to 3 weeks), over 1500 members returned their surveys and gave us all a glimpse of the desire of members to have their voice heard this time.
 In January, as we got closer to bargaining EDU officially initiated its election campaign when it put forward its Executive Officer slate (President, Vice President, VP for Substitutes and Secretary) and called for members to vote for us on the basis that EDU rejects all furloughs and layoffs, as well as any concessions on our work conditions.

EDU also called for a raise for paraprofessionals and Child Development workers (who don’t make a living wage in our bargaining unit), and an increased health care contribution from SFUSD for our members with families. Most significantly, EDU called on UESF to begin now to make preparations for a strike in order to win these demands; citing the spirit of the Occupy movement and the specific example of educators in Tacoma who waged a successful fight against concessions with a militant 10-day strike.

When SFUSD launched its attack on our members by demanding 495 layoffs, EDU called for a rally at the Board of Education as a response to the district’s attack. The PLCcalled such an action ‘premature’ and likely to provoke SFUSD unnecessarily. Though few members came to the Board meeting, EDU’s action signaled to the leadership that we would not be waiting for the PLCto give us permission to act.

In February, when SFUSD revealed the full scale of its attack on our contract and that SFUSD was sitting on millions of dollars in reserve (up to $75 million), UESF leaders had no strategy for countering the district.  They seemed to make no effort to inform UESF members of the scale of the attack or the fact that SFUSD actually had the money to avoid most of the cuts they were proposing. EDU pushed UESF to get the information out and urged the UESF bargaining to team to take a position of “No” to any-and-all cuts proposed by the district. This position was supported by the UESF survey of the membership that showed that members were looking for a pay increase and a raise in benefits and were very reluctant to accept more furloughs or further increases in class sizes.

By the end of February, the PLCstill did not have a strategy for fighting the district and told members that SFUSD bargaining team was in ‘disarray’ because Superintendent Garcia was preparing to step down. This ‘disarray’ did not stop SFUSD from bypassing seniority in the layoff process, skipping over schools in the "Superintendent's Zones" leaving other schools to face more layoffs. This was a blatant attempt to use layoffs to divide and bust our union.
In the face of this obvious escalation, EDU called for another mobilization to the Board of Education and proposed initiating the strike vote process as a response to the provocation. UESF leaders supported EDU’s call for mobilization but ruled EDU’s call for initiating the strike process (or even discussing strike) “out of order” because SFUSD would see such discussion within UESF as ‘bargaining in bad faith’. Still, the March rally at the Board of Education was successful and EDU had a large visible presence at the action.

By the end of March, the UESF bargaining team declared at the Assembly that they would not be accepting any of the proposed cuts and would be demanding an across the board pay increase of 2%.  At that meeting, UESF President Kelly told the Assembly that this position meant we would likely need to be choosing between striking in the spring or the fall.

By this time, UESF had adopted many of the major points that EDU was running its election campaign on. It had become clear within EDU and to our supporters that PLCwas feeling the pressure of both an intransigent school district on one side and EDU’s campaign to win leadership, push for “No Concessions” and prepare for a strike.  The constant pressure from EDU at Executive Board meetings, Assemblies and while appealing directly to the membership during our campaign was pushing UESF leadership to move.

 Near the end of March, EDU formally started its site visits to talk to members about why we were running, why they should vote for EDU, and why they should prepare to strike. These site visits were a critical part of our campaign and proved the linchpin to connecting EDU election run to the contract fight within our union, building internal pressure for a fight and build a more democratic, rank-and-file run union.

Over a two-month period (March-April) as the contract fight was picking up, EDU candidates visited almost 30 of the 125 schools in SFUSD. This outreach was made possible, and necessary, because of the current crisis in education and the desire for members to hear an alternative.

It was also a result of the fact that EDU had been an active caucus for the three years since our first election run in 2009.  Had EDU beenjust an‘electoral’caucus thatwent tosleep between elections, we would not have built the relationships that got us into so many sites.

During our many visits to work sites, the response to the EDU message was positive; members raised many questions about what a strike would look like, what it would take to win, and if we, the membership, were ready to do it.  It would be a myth to report that EDU faced only agreement from members on our message, but at all sites we visited we sparked new conversations about the role of unions in defending public education, and the need for militant methods and radical ideas in shaping the course of our struggle.

The overall lesson from our visits was that there was a definite layer in ALLour schools that had been waiting for a group like EDU that was not afraid to take ‘extreme’ positions like “No Cuts!” and “Tax the Rich!”  A group that was not afraid to talk about strikes, and more importantly, not willing to ‘say anything’ just to collect votes.

In April, UESF launched the “Enough is Enough!” campaign. It called for a May 10th membership meeting, but refused to publicize it as a ‘strike vote’ meeting. While UESF leaders agreed it ‘might’ be a strike vote meeting, EDU pushed the leadership at every chance, made the May 10th date a focus of our campaign and informed all school sites we visited that they should be telling all members to ‘save the date’ and to consider it a strike vote meeting unless we were told it is not.

SFUSD’s response to rumors that UESF might have started the strike vote process was to declare impasse and end negotiations. This escalation forced UESF leaders to declare a strike vote. Caught between an intransigent school district and a radical and active caucus, they would have to act or else appear weak to both SFUSD and members about to vote in the union election. At the May 10th meeting, EDU passed out a flyer to all members denouncing the bullying tactics of the SFUSD and urging members to stand fast in our demand to reject cuts and get a 2% raise.  EDU called for a “Yes!” vote, urged members to be prepared for a second vote in the Fall and argued for immediate preparations for a potential strike in the Fall unless SFUSD backs down.

Five days later, the UESF elections were completed and votes tallied. EDU did not win the Presidency or Vice-Presidency (but lost by only 60 and 110 votes respectively).  EDU won the Secretary and Vice-President of Substitutes position. EDU also took all but a few of the Executive Board positions for which we ran. The one dark cloud for our union was the low voter turnout with only 800 of 6000 members submitting ballots to decide the union leadership. This low voter turnout (lower than last election) shows the apathy of many of our members toward our union and its leadership (whether it be PLCor EDU). Membership apathy and disaffection represent a challenge to any group looking to build a fighting union.

Next steps: strike and union reform

Still, for EDU, the results represented important gains. EDU was closing in on the existing leadership, and had pushed them to shift left and do things they had no intention of doing back in January.  We had also shown in practice what it means to build a democratic union by pushing for the member survey, putting forward our ideas at the Assembly and going to sites to directly engage members around our contract and our union.

By running an aggressive campaign that was a clear political alternative to the existing union leadership, EDU used its election campaign to begin to transform the debate about our union among UESF members. We talked with hundreds of members about the fact that fate of our schools is wrapped up with the fate of our union. In the process, we broadened our base of contacts at a number of sites throughout the school district. These sites will be central points of contact for continuing our contract fight next fall.

EDU has also become a stronger caucus over the course of the election.  The debates around the campaign that started in August were revisited over the course of the campaign as we discussed how to pitch our message to the members and how to talk about strikes in relationship to our campaign. There were definitely times when EDU was preparing to step back from running an aggressive, class-struggle campaign, but the debates we had throughout the year in which reminded ourselves of the political goals we set out in August were essential for the caucus to mature politically and organizationally.

For those of us in EDU who are socialists, we ran openly as such. That it never proved an issue among our members, within EDU nor among our election opponents says something about the ability to run on radical politics if you are willing to run on them boldly and openly - while still acknowledging and respecting voices within our union who disagree.

EDU’s campaign shows how running for office can be directly connected to reviving class struggle and how building a reform caucus around radical politics can push our unions to break out of their business unionism straight jacket.  We believe this work can be done in anywhere members are frustrated with their do-nothing unions, but we must start now. This means building reform caucuses across the country with the explicit aim of building for strikes and occupations (and other work actions) and putting socialist politics back into center of union debate and discussion. It is not enough to just raise the specter of social justice unionism; we must see our central task as reviving class struggle unionism as the best way to fight for social justice and the only means for making revolutionary change. Union elections and building reforms caucus centered on class struggle can be a part of that revival if we are prepared to put our politics front-and-center.

Within UESF, the way forward is clear. EDU must make all preparations in the Fall to push for a second strike vote and oppose any concessions demanded from SFUSD or the current UESF leadership (if they crack under pressure over the summer).  It also means opposing any ‘trigger cuts’ which ties our contract and work conditions to Governor Brown’s tax initiative.

EDU’s election run, and the strike vote it helped produce, has proven that there is a deep reservoir of support within our union that is prepared to reject any concessions and to draw a line in the sand to defend public education. Those members are prepared to strike! So are our sisters and brothers in Chicago. So are higher education teachers in the California Faculty Association. The ground is set this Fall for a successful strike wave that can finally take back what has been stolen from us and the families we serve.

End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

One of the most vitriolic and idiotic elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their more senior colleagues) out of jobs.

But what about administrators who lack the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty of criminal misconduct.

Should we end due process, seniority and tenure for administrators?

Oh yeah, they don’t have these protections. They have something better: status and power.

Consider the case of Ramon Cortines, former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth $250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset management, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines, like other high powered abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.

While the out-of-court settlement precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his professional or social wellbeing.

San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt, Inept and Abusive Administrators

Not long after Cortines left San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw the misallocation (and theft) of millions of dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years, while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,” she said about her SFUSD staff and teachers.  Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.

Ackerman then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to install surveillance cameras despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.  She then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.

Cheaters Prosper

In Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating scandal. In both cases the administrators threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in test scores.

Rather than relying on independent outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education also recommended that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.

Rhee was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit, Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes for children. What is most important to them is improved business opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.

Hall, who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution 4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District, with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.

California Judge Rules in Favor of Seniority

The current wave of Ed Deform is breathtaking for the diversity and quantity of ill-conceived and destructive demands being made by its proponents. Despite the fact that these reforms contribute to the demoralization of teachers and potential flight from the profession at a time of teacher shortages, while also deteriorating safety and learning conditions for students, it seems like legislators and the courts are perfectly content to support and promote the madness.

However, in a breath of fresh air, administrative law judges recently ruled that San Francisco Unified and Sacramento City Unified did not have the authority to ignore state seniority laws in their attempts to keep veteran teachers at low-performing schools. While state law allows for few exceptions to seniority-based layoffs, administrative law judges recently ruled that San Francisco Unified had not made a compelling case for ignoring seniority, while Sacramento City had done so only partially, according to Thoughts on Public Education, (TOPED).

Unfortunately for veteran Sacramento teachers, the rulings of administrative law judges are not binding and the Sac City school board voted unanimously to ignore the judge and exempt all teachers at all seven of the district’s “Priority Schools.” The consequence will be that many inexperienced teachers will have jobs next year, while many experienced veterans will not. The SFUSD board decided not to contest Administrative Law Judge Melissa Crowell’s decision,   according to TOPED.

Fensterwald wrote that state law emphatically requires teacher layoffs to be based on seniority, but allows for two exceptions. The first is pretty obvious: a newer teacher with specific expertise cannot be bumped by a more senior colleague who lacks that expertise. For example, a 5-year veteran English teacher cannot replace a physics teacher with only 2 years of experience (unless that English teacher also has a physic credential).

The other exception, which allows districts to ignore seniority in order to protect students’ right to equal educational opportunity, is more open to interpretation and abuse. Districts like LAUSD have successfully argued (with the aid of the ACLU) that seniority causes low performing, low income schools to lose a disproportionate percentage of their teachers during layoffs.

There are numerous problems with this argument that have unfortunately been ignored or discounted by judges. First, layoffs hurt students at all schools, regardless of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and their schools’ test scores. This is because layoffs lead to increases in class sizes and teacher workloads district-wide. This in turn decreases their ability to assign and grade meaningful assignments, monitor student safety, facilitate extracurricular activities and provide one-on-one attention. It also leads to declining course offerings.

It is also important to understand why low performing schools tend to have higher percentages of novice teachers in the first place and to critique the fairness of this for lower income students. The fact is that lower performing schools typically have a disproportionate percentage of lower income students. They also are among the most difficult schools to work in because of higher rates of absences and discipline problems and, more significantly, the burdensome punishments imposed by NCLB as a result of their lower test scores. In short, teachers at lower income schools are expected to work a lot harder and longer for the same pay as their colleagues at more affluent schools.

If we want to talk about equal educational opportunity and bias within the educational system, we need to end the Apartheid-like system that allows some schools to have as many as 80-90% of their students on free or reduced-cost lunch, while others in the same city or district may have fewer than 5%. Likewise, as long as we continue to allow a significantly more challenging workload for teachers at certain schools, those schools will continue to see an exodus of their more experienced teachers and a higher percentage of novice teachers.

Layoffs should also be recognized as an artifact of the class war being waged by the rich against the rest of us, in which the wealthy contribute less and less in taxes and rob the state of revenue for education. In other words, if the rich were paying more in taxes—possibly only what they were paying prior to the Reagan era—there would be no need for layoffs.

However, this dynamic hurts students’ educational opportunities in far deeper ways than increased class sizes and losses of popular teachers. The declining tax base also results in shrinking public health, nutritional and other services that benefit low income families, thus exacerbating many of the effects of poverty like higher rates of learning disabilities, cognitive impairment and absenteeism.

Teacher Strike Vote in San Francisco

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Members of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), the union representing San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) teachers, are set to vote this week on whether to authorize a strike, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today. The district is demanding a $30 million cut to teachers’ salaries and benefits over the next two years. UESF wants a 2% pay increase and says the district is sitting on an $80 million surplus.

Less than a week ago, the district declared an impasse in their contract negotiations. The 6,000-member UESF will take the first of two required strike votes this Thursday. Even though there are only three weeks left in the school year, UESF President Dennis Kelly said there is still time to strike. Indeed, a strike at the end of the year could be particularly effective, as it could delay or prevent the issuance of grades and report cards.

Like other districts throughout the state, SFUSD is crying “Uncertainty,” and claiming that any surplus is needed as insurance.

It is true that K-12 education faces $5 billion in cuts if voters reject the governor’s tax initiative in November. It is also true that even if the initiative does pass, SFUSD will still receive the same anemic funding it did during this school year. What is not clear is the veracity of the district’s claim that the failure of the tax initiative would result in $80 million in losses to SFUSD.

Squeezing Blood From Turnips

Even if the district’s claims are accurate, there is no justification for making further cuts since, by their own math, they would need only $80 million to cover the losses caused by the possible failure of the tax initiative (and only $30 million to cover teachers’ salaries, a sum they most definitely have in reserve). Nevertheless, their current contract proposal demands that teachers accept four additional furlough days for each of the next two years, even if the tax initiative does pass. (This would add $7 million to the district’s surplus), while Superintendent Garcia wants an additional five furlough days each year if the tax increase fails in November.

The austerity does not end there. Sup. Garcia wants to eliminate sabbaticals and the extra prep periods currently offered to Advanced Placement teachers, which would save the district another $3.5 million. The district has called for a reduction in teacher training, to save another $3.1 million. And it wants to cut pay and health benefits for full-time substitutes, which would save another $1 million. The district also wants to increase K-3 class sizes from 22 to 25.

Strike Early, Strike Often

San Francisco teachers (indeed most teachers) have made so many concessions over the past few years that there is virtually nothing left to give. Their union has argued that the concessions would save jobs or keep conditions close to the status quo. In reality, it has resulted in a downward spiral in pay, benefits and working conditions for teachers and a concomitant decline in learning conditions for students, with increasing class sizes and declining services, course offerings, librarians, nurses and counselors.

There have been very few significant teacher strikes in the past thirty years. As a result, school districts have grown more aggressive in their demands and tactics. They have become accustomed to the unions making compromises, giving concessions and accepting austerity in exchange for jobs and labor “peace.”

During this same time period, the locals’ parent organizations (AFT and NEA) have increasingly focused their resources and energy on political campaigns, often at the expense of organizing and the promotion of strikes.

The time has come for unions to start taking a harder line. It is time to start thinking of strikes as something potentially positive (since they are the most effective way of achieving improvements in working and living conditions), rather than something to be feared and avoided. While strikes may be risky and bad for students in the short term, they also have the ability to slow down and even reverse trends that are bad for students in the long term.

Strikes also have the ability to beget more strikes by inspiring workers in other districts or even in other industries. During the past few decades of increasing union-management collaboration and declining labor militancy, bosses had no reason to take seriously the threat of a strike. In contrast, when bosses start to see an increase in strikes, they understand that workers are becoming more aggressive and militant and they start to take their demands more seriously. If enough teachers unions go on strike at the same time, they can start to pressure the state, as well as their districts. In fact, a state-wide General Strike of public sector workers may be the most effective tactic for achieving a sufficient increase in taxes necessary to adequately fund schools, health, safety and other public services.