Weingarten Takes a Dive for Capitalism

Last week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

The problem is that there is nothing immoral about it. While the majority of schools to be closed are in low income communities of color, the motivation to close them is not wicked, sinful, nor is the goal to harm poor black kids. Rather, the proponents are capitalists exploiting an essentially legal method to crush the Philadelphia teachers union and transfer public K-12 tax dollars to private charters and online schools. Calling it an immoral act merely obfuscates the financial motives (and legal methods) behind it, undermining teachers’, parents’ and students’ ability to successfully resist it.

Another problem is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is essentially just a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school) and BCG members serve on numerous other KIPP boards, as well. Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education and stands to profit handsomely from the closures by offering online courses to students displaced by the closures.

Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt, as well as hedge fund manager and Democrats for Education Reform[er] Whitney Tilson—all cheerleaders for charter schools and teachers’ union-busting. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

BCG was also hired by the Transition Planning Committee (TPC) of Memphis to oversee their mass transfer of students out of the public school system and into private charter schools and has been involved in the post-Katrina plundering of the New Orleans school system, as well as pro-charter and anti-teachers’ union activities in Cleveland, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. According to Diane Ravitch, their goal in Memphis is to increase charter enrollment from 4% to 19% of all students by 2016, which will effectively transfer $212 million from the public school budget to private charter schools.

Union-Sanctioned Union-Busting

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has lost thousands, more. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist in the first place, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has. An occasional high profile arrest, while doing nothing to improve teachers’ job security, working conditions or compensation, does help boost union bosses’ street credibility by making them look like tough, self-sacrificing fighters, rather than parasites.

 
In order to keep members in line (and maintain the good graces of the ruling elite), union leaders need to convince the rank and file that alternatives to strikes and other job actions will be effective. In the case of the Wisconsin state house occupation, the unions argued that they could best reverse their state’s union-busting legislation at the ballot box and convinced everyone to go home.

In the case of Philadelphia’s school closings, Weingarten has similarly distorted the issue, ignoring the impact on job security and collective bargaining power and focusing on political corruption. She described events in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy (an immoral act?)—a politically popular concept that is likely to appeal to community members’ sense of patriotism, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs or stop the closures. Indeed, if the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions.

Why Weingarten Got Arrested

This week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, governor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

What Weingarten did not say was why they want to close dozens of schools (i.e., open up space for private charter schools to set up shop) or whether she was planning on engaging in ongoing civil disobedience to achieve her goals. The fact is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is nothing more than a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school). Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education. Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has no doubt lost thousands, as well. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist at all, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has.

 
Weingarten described her action in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy, which is a politically popular concept, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs. If the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions. 

Ultimately, Weingarten's got arrested because she needed to look tough to her constituents. It was a relatively painless and cheap way to win points among parents and teachers, but not an effective strategy for ending the school closures or saving union jobs.

Sacramento to Shutter 11 Low Income Elementary Schools

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Sacramento City Unified School District plans to close 11 elementary schools, primarily in low income neighborhoods around South Sacramento and the downtown area, the WSWS reports. With only 50 public elementary schools in the city, this amounts to closing one-fifth of the city’s elementary schools.

The district’s rationale for closing the schools is that they are “underutilized,” operating at 40% of capacity. However, as the WSWS correctly notes, this is based on the backward logic that their classrooms aren’t crowded enough [to justify funding them]. The 40% figure is based on a maximum class size of 32 students (even for grades K-2), which is up from 20 students per teacher last year and 16 per teacher in 2000. It is also based on the district’s fear of another budget shortfall, projected to be $10-12 million, despite the passage of Proposition 30, which was supposed to keep education funding steady at 2011-2012 levels. Rather than chopping from the top by laying-off administrators or cutting their bloated salaries, Sacramento (like most other school districts) has chosen to cut teachers and close schools in low income neighborhoods.

If schools were funded based on their actual needs, it would make sense to keep these schools open, even at “40%” of capacity, as this comes to just under 13 students per teacher—slightly less than the 2000 average class size of 16-to-1. The overwhelming body of evidence indicates that smaller class sizes benefit students academically. Teachers are better able to attend to the individual needs of each student, including being able to identify and support learning, emotional and behavior problems that often go unnoticed in larger classrooms. This, alone, could go a long way toward improving attendance, graduation rates and school safety. Smaller class sizes also allow teachers more time to plan, implement and assess more complex and meaningful lessons and activities (or rely less on multiple choice tests and lectures). Lower income schools also have a greater need for smaller class sizes as they tend to have higher numbers of students who are reading below grade level and in need of extra support or remediation.

By closing these schools, students will have to be bused or driven to neighborhoods far from their homes to be crammed into overcrowded classrooms where they will be more likely to slip through the cracks. But this is not the concern of Sacramento’s mayor Kevin Johnson, who built his education credentials by using Gates Foundation money to promote the conversion of public schools into charter schools, (nor his wife Michelle Rhee, who built her career by overseeing one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, while mass-firing D.C. teachers, bashing teachers unions and promoting privatization), Indeed, the mayor’s long-term plans for the soon to be abandoned facilities may in fact be to sell them off to private charter companies.

The closing of these schools (and the growing class sizes) are part of the growing rationalization of public education which, until recently, had been run in a relatively inefficient and wasteful way from the perspective of capitalists. Increased class sizes support a reduction in state spending on education. Assuming that the schools continue to churn out graduates who are sufficiently educated to fill existing job openings and consume existing products, increased class sizes increase the efficiency of education (i.e., the number of workers produced per dollar spent). The desperate pleas by Obama, Bill Gates and others for a better educated workforce so we can compete with India and China are not pleas for the masses to have doctorates or expertise in programming and biotechnology. Rather, our successful competition depends on having a few who can create innovations that keep our domestic capitalists ahead of their foreign peers and a large docile, low wage workforce that churns out these innovations at the lowest wages and highest profits possible.

The past decade of budget cuts, layoffs, increased class sizes and emphasis on lectures and high stakes tests have had no noticeable effect on American industry, which has made record profits for each of the past several years and throughout most of the past decade (minus one or two years at the beginning of the recession). Despite the attacks on and gutting of the U.S. public education system, American children are graduating with sufficient skills to keep the system running, while a small minority of students (overwhelmingly coming from affluent families) continue to graduate with the skills to run the businesses and develop new technologies and innovations.

New Orlean Teachers Union Rising From the Dead?

Zombie Teachers Union? (Nanning Teachers College, Guangxi, image by Rex Pe, Flickr)

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became the poster child for what Naomi Kline dubbed “Disaster Capitalism.” Businesses came ostensibly to “help” residents recover, but in actuality were there primarily to help themselves to billions of dollars in disaster relief funds.

While Katrina did not do significant damage to the school system, the general chaos and misery that followed provided excellent cover for public education profiteers, who convinced the city to turn over most of the school district to private charter school operators and fire all 7,500 of its teachers, driving a hefty spike into the heart of the union. Since Katrina, the feds have pumped $3 billion into New Orleans schools (Labor Notes reports), providing considerable opportunities for private business to turn a profit. The charter schools have received millions more from private donors like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey.

The union fought back in the courts and, after seven years, won a small victory this June when a judge ruled that the firings were illegal. This provided little relief for the teachers, however, as very few will get their old jobs back (though some will receive small settlement payments). It also leaves the city’s schools in the hands of private charter school operators

Nevertheless, United Teachers New Orleans (UTNO) has been trying to rebuild its membership and regain a foothold in the city. The union currently has around 1,000 members (about one quarter of the city’s teachers), though it has no contracts at any New Orleans schools (according to Labor Notes). Their efforts are further hampered by the fact that, under Louisiana state law, they are not guaranteed the right to collectively bargain.

UTNO organizers face other challenges as well, such as recent state legislation that weakened tenure protections, thus making it easier to get rid of experienced veteran teachers who are often the most vocal union advocates.

Ironically, (but not surprisingly), New Orleans schools are performing poorly, despite the large influx of funds. None of the Recovery District’s 15 “direct-run” schools, and only 21% of its charter schools, received passing grades in state evaluations. Governor Bobby Jindal essentially blamed the teachers for these terrible scores and used the scores to garner support for the legislation, which requires that 50% of teachers’ evaluations be based on student test scores. Thus, if scores remain low (which they likely will, since they are influenced primarily by students’ socioeconomic status), teachers will be unlikely to earn tenure and will face the constant threat of dismissal, especially if they are seen as union supporters or troublemakers.

To make matters worse, in order to earn tenure, teachers will have to receive five “highly effective” ratings within six years, and veteran teachers can lose tenure after a single “ineffective” rating. Keep in mind that few districts evaluate their teachers every year, or require “highly effective” ratings (“satisfactory” or “effective” are generally considered adequate). In addition to making tenure virtually impossible, the frequency of evaluations, itself, is an unreasonable burden on teachers and their students. Each evaluation cycle, teachers must attend meetings with evaluators, complete extra paper work and jump through other hoops that take away time from their students and their teaching responsibilities.

Within the six district-run schools, UTNO has close to 80% membership. Labor Notes writes that in these schools, much of the old contract is still enforced. It is a different story in the charter schools, where union membership is negligible. Under an agreement with the Recovery District, however, UTNO is permitted access to the schools and is entitled to dues check-off for any teachers who sign up.

The challenge is getting these teachers to sign up. Many are young Teach For America (TFA) graduates hired on short-term contracts who do not see union membership as being in their interests. Others have been told outright to avoid the union, as it is dominated by the same veteran teachers who caused the problems plaguing the school district (that TFA grads were supposedly there to fix).

There is a lot of fear and ignorance of unions that UTNO must counter. More importantly, they need to convince teachers, including TFA teachers and those at private charter schools, that union membership is in their interests and will benefit them, both in the short- and long-term. This means improving things like job security, pay and benefits, working conditions and class sizes.

UTNO has not been able to do this. It has launched an admirable community outreach campaign and engaged in numerous solidarity actions with other unions and community-based organizations. It has helped fight school closings and takeovers. Yet its members acknowledge that they’re not in a position to win much right now. Indeed, as long as its members can have tenure stripped away for low student test scores, they are at risk of losing the small foothold they still have within the district.