Robin Hoodwinked by Governor Brown

The Los Angeles Times is referring to California Governor Jerry Brown as a “Robin Hood” for his plan to redistribute resources from “wealthy” suburban school districts to their poorer urban cousins. Brown has characterized himself as a civil rights hero since the poor urban districts serve predominantly low income communities of color, suggesting that inequitable school funding is the primary cause of the achievement gap.

Both the Times and Brown are delusional. Robin Hood robbed rich individuals and gave the spoils directly to poor people so they could feed, clothe and house themselves. Brown’s plan does nothing to reduce poverty and gives no money or resources directly to any poor students or their families.

This is no trivial criticism, as poverty is the number one cause of poor academic achievement. Poor children are far more likely than others to be born with low birth weight or suffer malnutrition or lead poisoning (10% of poor children have dangerous levels of lead in their blood according to the CDC), any of which can impair cognitive development or lead to learning disabilities. They suffer higher levels of stress, which causes the overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol, which can impair memory and learning. They are absent far more often (as much as 40% more, according to Richard Rothstein), dramatically decreasing their chances of graduating on time (see here). They have less access to enriching extracurricular activities like summer travel, camp and museum visits, which can cause the achievement gap to increase each year. Lower income families tend to read less to their babies and toddlers and expose them to fewer complex words and phrases, with the result that affluent children have vocabularies that are tens of thousands of words larger than their lower income peers even before they have entered kindergarten (see here and here).

As long as poverty persists, increasing resources to lower income schools will have very limited effect on student achievement. It certainly cannot remove the stress and anxiety that result from living a life of material scarcity and uncertainty and the ongoing sense of powerlessness that accompanies it.

The Times does correctly note that poor districts would not necessarily benefit at the expense of wealthy districts under Brown’s plan. Some poor districts, like Oakland, would actually receive less per student under the governor’s plan, according to both the state education department and the governor's own budget office.

It is also misleading to refer to some districts as “wealthy.”  Certainly some districts have higher percentages of affluent students, but this does not mean they are adequately funded publicly. There probably is no district in the state that receives sufficient funding entirely through property taxes and state and federal revenues. The wealthiest districts receive more money than the poorer districts, but not enough to keep class sizes under 35; hire sufficient nurses, librarians, counselors and teachers; purchase sufficient lab equipment and classroom supplies; or pay teachers’ salaries comparable to those in the private sector. Many of these schools are able to raise funds from parents to supplement what they receive from the state and local taxes, but there are also many lower income schools in so-called wealthy districts that do not have this capability.

Transferring resources from the “wealthy” districts will not come close to restoring what the poorer districts have lost as a result of the $20 billion the state has slashed from education funding over the past few years. Even if it did, that would only bring these schools back to a level that was grossly inadequate (California education spending was among the lowest in the nation even before the recession). “Wealthy” schools can always ramp up their fundraising from wealthy families, but they will continue to have overcrowded classrooms and underpaid teachers.

More significantly, Brown’s plan gives the illusion that he is doing something equitable and rational to mitigate the state’s education problems, when in reality he is simply holding education funding steady at the 46^th lowest level in the nation . This, in turn, allows the state to maintain historically low tax rates for the wealthy and their businesses and to continue defunding social programs that serve the poor, including transitional kindergarten.

Today in Labor History—May 3

Mikhail Bakunin as a Young Man

May 3, 1849 – A popular rebellion broke out in Dresden, with the militant Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin emerging as an "heroic" leader. He was imprisoned in the Konigstein fortress and condemned to death. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1886 - At the height of the movement for the eight-hour day, police shot into a crowd of workers engaged in a general strike at McCormick Harvester Co. in Chicago. Four workers were killed and hundreds were injured. Anarchists called for a public rally the following day at Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality. At the rally, a bomb was thrown, killing several police. No one was ever caught, yet the police arrested eight leading anarchists who were convicted and sentenced to death. The event  became the inspiration for International Workers Day. (From Workday Minnesota and The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1886 – One thousand brewery workers, on strike for a wage increase, marched to the Falk Brewery, in Milwaukee, to encourage workers there to join their strike. They were members of the radical industrial union the Knights of Labor. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1887 – Two explosions at Mine #1 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, killed 97 white mineers and 52 Chinese miners. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1898 – Bread riots occurred in Milano, Italy. They were brutally repressed, with heavy loss of life. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1916 –An uprising by Vietnamese was suppressed by the French. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1919 – Pete Seeger was born, Patterson, New York. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1920 - A young anarchist printer, Andreas Salsedo, “fell” to his death from a 14th story window of an FBI detention room in New York City. He had been arrested during the anti-commie raids launched by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. The FBI claimed it was suicide. (From Workday Minnesota and The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1926 – A general strike by the Trades Union Congress of Great Britain was finally ended after nine days, though coal miners continued to strike through the summer. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1928 – Anarchist Severino Di Giovanni bombed the Italian consulate in Buenos Aires to protest against the Italian dictatorship. The fascists were assassinating Italian antifascists in exile). Nine were killed and 34 wounded in the blast. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1934 – The IWW strike at Draper Manufacturing Co. began in Cleveland, Ohio. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1937 – The Spanish Republican government launched attacks on workers leading to open resistance against Republican and Communist authorities by radical workers, anarchists, and others opposed to the regional takeover of the worker-run telephone company in Barcelona. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1968 – The first battles of the May Upheaval began in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The police arrested 500 students meeting at the University of Sorbonne to protest repression at Nanterre. Revolt broke out along the route taken by police vans, with thousands fighting against the police. Throughout the month of May and part of June, workers and students occupied schools, factories and offices. By mid-May, 10 million workers were on strike. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1971 – 7,000 people were arrested trying to shut down the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam war. (From The Daily Bleed)

May 3, 1974 – Spanish banker Balthasar Suarez was kidnapped in Paris by the "Groups of International Revolutionary Action" (GARI ) in an attempt to free 100 political prisoners in Spain being held by Franco. (From The Daily Bleed)

Supreme Court, Labor Law and the Deskilling of Teaching

The strike is labor's most powerful weapon. It is the most direct and forceful way to pressure employers to cede to workers’ demands. Strikes have become increasingly rare over the past few decades, mostly because of unions’ increasingly dependence on political action (e.g., lobbying, voting as a block, financing campaigns). However, there have been several laws and Supreme Court decisions that have limited when and how strikes could be undertaken or that increased the risks to workers.

In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Mackay Radio (NLRB is the National Labor Relations Board) that employers had the legal right to permanently “replace” striking workers. According to a recent piece in Truth Out, there was nothing in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1934 (nor any other law) that gave employers this right. Rather, the court just figured that it was a right of bosses to can their workers when they were troublesome.

In reality, the NLRA was written to reduce labor unrest and aid employers in their quest for profits by limiting when and how strikes could occur and providing legal recourse for employers when they created too much disruption to profits. The Supreme Court merely interpreted the law in way that was consistent with that of the ruling class and that was favorable to their businesses.

Regardless of the rationale, this right of employers severely restricts workers’ right to strike under NLRA. The threat of being permanently replaced makes striking a very risky endeavor, particularly for the majority of workers who depend on their income to support their families and themselves. This threat is often sufficient to make workers think twice and choose not to strike in the first place.

However, the threat of replacing workers is only credible when two conditions can be met: replacement workers must be available and ready to work and the striking workers are not able or willing to stop them. The latter condition has typically been met through the use of force. The first condition occurs automatically for so-called unskilled work during times of high unemployment. Pretty much anyone can work a cash register, so firing all cashiers at a grocery chain is not a big risk for employers. In contrast, for “skilled” workers, like teachers, the threat is much less credible. So long as teachers are required to have a valid credential, which requires a bachelor’s degree, plus a year or two of professional training, school districts cannot permanently replace striking teachers and still keep the schools operating.

The employing class is working on a solution to this dilemma (despite the fact that teachers, like most workers, have become increasingly reluctant to strike). By deskilling the teaching profession, free market education reformers are reducing the need for highly trained, credentialed teachers. For example, pretty much anyone can proctor a standardized test or monitor a room full of children seated at computers engaged in online curriculum or distance learning. The more schools utilize such methods, the easier it becomes to replace relatively well paid, unionized professionals with low paid, non-unionized workers.

Today in Labor History—May 2

It Is Forbidden to Forbid, May 1968, Paris

May 2, 1886 – Twenty-five hundred workers marched in Milwaukee for the 8-hour day. Governor Jeremiah Rusk supplied the Milwaukee National Guard headquarters with increased ammunition and the entire city police force with four companies of infantry & artillery. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1896 – U.S. Marines landed at Corrinto, Nicaragua, to "protect" US interests. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1911 - The nation’s first workers’ compensation law was passed in Wisconsin, providing benefits for employees injured in the workplace. (From the Daily Bleed)

Gustav Landauer, 1890s

May 2, 1919 – Gustav Landauer, Education Minister in the short-lived Bavarian workers Republic, was murdered by soldiers. Landauer was a signatory to the Ernst Joël Petition (1915), along with other leading cultural figures of the day, like Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Kurt Eisner, S. Fischer, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich Mann, and Thomas Mann. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1919 – Beginning of a Brazilian General Strike that involved 50,000 workers throughout Sao Paulo. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1924 – The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the involuntary sterilization of mentally retarded persons. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1933 - Adolf Hitler abolished all labor unions, leading to the mass arrest and murder of thousands of communists, anarchists and labor activists. (From Workday Minnesota and the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1963 –Bull Connors jailed 958 children in Birmingham, Alabama. Those not jailed got blasted with fire hoses and attacked by dogs. (From the Daily Bleed)

Barricades, Paris, May 1968

May 2, 1968 – A Protest at University of Nanterre escalated into the French student strike. By May 20, six million workers were on strike, growing to ten million within a few days. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1968 – Though Martin Luther King, Jr. had recently been assassinated his Poor Peoples' March on Washington, D.C. proceeded as planned, led by successor Ralph Abernathy. 3,000 people erected Resurrection City on the Mall until the 17th. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 2, 1980 – Pink Floyd's hit single "Another Brick in the Wall," with its chorus of kids chanting "We don't need no education," was banned by the South African government. The song was adopted by striking black teachers and black children, upset about inferior education. The Apartheid government called the song is "prejudicial to the safety of the state." (From the Daily Bleed)

Paulo Freire, 1997 (Image by Slobodan Dimitrov

May 2, 1997 – Paulo Freire (1921-1997), Brazilian philosopher & educator, died of heart failure in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (From the Daily Bleed)

California Democratic Party “Rejects” Corporate Reform Agenda

Democrats in the California state legislature approved Resolution 13-04.47 last week—also known as “SUPPORTING CALIFORNIA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND DISPELLING THE CORPORATE “REFORM” AGENDA.” The resolution, sponsored (and probably written) by the California Teachers Association (CTA), California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and the California Faculty Association (CFA), the three largest unions representing teachers and university professors in the state, specifically criticizes two corporate reform organizations—Democrats for Education Reform (DfER) and Students First (Michelle’s Rhee’s organization)—because they

“see public schools as potential profit centers and children as measureable commodities . . . [support dismantling] free public education . . . and replace it with company run charter schools, non-credentialed teachers and unproven untested so called ‘reforms.”

However, the resolution makes no concrete commitment to do anything to actually curtail the growing power of billionaire philanthropists, investors and hedge fund managers, let alone increase funding for public education, protect teachers’ job security and academic freedom, or even improve learning outcomes for students. It merely “reaffirms” the Democratic Party’s

“commitment to free accessible public schools for all which offer a fair, substantive opportunity to learn with educators who have the right to be represented by their union, bargain collectively and have a voice in the policies which affect their schools, classrooms and their students.”

This resolution might be encouraging if it had any teeth, or even any credibility. However, the Democratic party (and the teachers unions) have continually watched idly (and in many cases encouraged) all the things they criticize in the resolution, including the growth of private, for-profit charter schools and online, digital and distance learning schemes; the erosion of teacher’s collective bargaining rights and the deterioration of student learning opportunities. Even the criticism that the reformists are reducing children to mere commodities rings hollow when virtually every politician, regardless of party (as well as most teacher and student advocates), has been calling for more STEM graduates, and for all students to graduate career- or college-ready—which is to say all students have a price on their heads and a value to employers. Never mind that there is currently a glut of STEM graduates and thousands of jobless science PhDs, while pretty much the only people getting jobs at all are those willing to accept low wage work in the service sector. Children are a commodity, and the less employers have to pay to educate them now, the more they save on their taxes and the less they’ll have to pay to employ them later.

The implication that the “reformists” are solely responsible for dismantling public education is also an obfuscation of the facts. California, which ranked 46^th in per pupil spending in 2010-2011, spent $2,856 less per student than the rest of the U.S. and would have had to increase education spending by $17.3 billion to reach parity with the rest of the country (less than the $20 billion the state had slashed from its education budget between 2008 and 2011). California also fell to 50^th in ratio of students per teacher and per librarian and 49^th in ratio of students per counselor.

During the past decade the gap in per pupil spending between California and the rest of the nation grew each year, yet most of this was the result of cuts to state funding (often bipartisan), not because of policies of the reformists.  This has been exacerbated by California’s increasing reliance on state taxes, rather than local property taxes—a consequence of Proposition 13, which passed in 1978, decades before Students First or DfER were even gleams in the reformists’ eyes. Prop 13 allowed businesses and wealthy homeowners to keep their property tax rates at 1978 levels, thus reducing revenues available for schools and shifting more of the burden onto the state. Prior to Prop 13, California’s schools received 53.7% of their funding from local property taxes and only 35.3% from the state. By 2010-1, they received only 29.8% from local taxes and 56.8% from the state. (Data from the California Budget Project)

If the Democrats truly cared about providing quality “free accessible public schools for all,” they could dramatically increase revenues by raising taxes on the wealthy and their businesses, increasing royalties on oil extraction (California is currently the 3^rd largest onshore producer of oil in the U.S., yet it is the only oil producer with no severance tax and has a far lower overall tax rate for its oil producers than either Texas or Alaska), taxing marijuana sales and abolishing the death penalty and Three Strikes law. Democrats currently hold a super majority in both houses of the state legislature, giving them the power to raise taxes and override the governor’s veto, the first time they have had this power in 120 years. Instead, they gave us Prop 30, which imposes an infinitesimal tax increase on the wealthy and increases the regressive sales tax (which disproportionately affects lower income people), but barely holds education funding steady, thus maintaining California’s status at the bottom in per pupil spending (and restoring none of the $20 billion the schools lost over the past few years).

They could also reverse Prop 13 and dramatically raise the portion of education funding coming from local property taxes, thus reducing schools’ current dependence on the whims of state legislators and greed of the state’s business owners. Instead, they have made another nonbinding resolution and even this only proposes closing one of the initiative’s loopholes. If the lawmakers were to convert their Prop 13 resolution into law (something they so far have not attempted), property taxes on businesses would be reassessed “regularly” instead of being locked into their 1978 values. While this would certainly increase revenues, it still allows millionaires to maintain artificially low tax rates on their multiple multi-million dollar homes.

The notion that Democrats are opposed to privatization and the influence of millionaires is also patently false. Governor Jerry Brown, arguably the head Democrat in the state, created two of his own charter schools in Oakland when he was mayor there and used his powers as mayor to divert city staff members to charter school duty. Both charters were heavily funded by wealthy donors. Furthermore, Prop 30, which was pushed by Brown, initially permitted the funneling of tax dollars away from the free public K-12 system and into the pockets of private charter schools. He also proposed killing California’s transitional kindergarten program, which helps low income children catch up to their affluent peers by the time the reach kindergarten.

The resolution is nothing more than window dressing, an attempt by the unions to make their buddies in the Democratic Party appear to be pro-union, pro-teacher, and pro-education. The unions need this window dressing because they have done virtually nothing to resist the reform agenda. For example, when New York, Illinois and Los Angeles imposed Value Added Measures as part of their teacher evaluation plans, the unions whined and complained, but eventually rolled over and accepted it without a real fight. They argued that they couldn’t strike because it had been imposed by state law, in Illinois and New York, or by court order, in Los Angeles. 

This is ridiculous and pathetic on several levels. First, when the state or courts dictate how teachers are evaluated—something that has historically been negotiated between the teachers’ unions and their school districts—they are shredding teachers’ collective bargaining rights. The unions have accepted this attack on collective bargaining in the name of democracy (or, more precisely, in order to not offend their patrons in the Democratic Party). Second, workers have a long history of striking despite injunctions, vigilantes, police violence and even armed suppression by the military or national guards, risking beatings, imprisonment, deportation and death. Indeed, most strikes were illegal during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The 1936-7 Flint Sit-Down Strike was declared illegal. Sympathy strikes and General Strikes were made illegal in 1947 by the Taft-Hartley Act. The 1981 PATCO strike was declared illegal by President Reagan, resulting in the mass firing of air traffic controllers. Many of the strikes and protests in support of the 8-hour work day were declared illegal. Many of the Civil Rights, women’s rights, gay rights and anti-war marches were declared illegal.

Ultimately, if teachers and other workers want to retain their right to collective bargaining, let alone improve their working and living conditions, they need to be willing to engage in strikes and other forms of collective action, even if it sometimes involves civil disobedience. The same is true for changing the tax structure, increasing education funding, and keeping public education under the control of local communities rather than corporate boardrooms.

Today In Labor History--May 1

May 1, International Workers Day!!!!

Mother Jones (Library of Congress)

May 1, 1830 - Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was born. Mother Jones was renowned for her militancy and fiery oration, as well as her many juicy quotes. She once said, “I’m no lady. I’m a hell-raiser.”  She also was an internationalist, saying “My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression.” Despite the difficulties of constant travel, poor living and jail, she lived to be 100.  (From Workday Minnesota and the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1866 – Beginning on this day, white Democrats and police attacked freedmen and their white allies in Memphis. By the end of the three-day race riot, 48 were killed. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1883 - Cigar makers in Cincinnati threatened to strike factory owners continued to make them pay 30 cents per month to heat their factories.   (From The Unionist)

May 1, 1884 – The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), forerunner of the AFL, resolved that "8 hours shall constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886." Ironically, the FOTLU, which was one of the first bureaucratized “business” unions and which was created as a conservative foil against the radical Knights of Labor, essentially contributed to the ensuing mass insurgency with its resolution. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1886 – The first nationwide General Strike for the 8-hour day occurred. 340,000 workers struck in Chicago, Milwaukee cities throughout the U.S. Four demonstrators were killed and over 200 wounded by police in Chicago. The US will set another day as Labor Day to undercut world solidarity. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1888 - Nineteen machinists at the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad, angered over a wage cut, voted to form a union, which ultimately became the International Association of Machinists. (From Workday Minnesota)

May 1, 1889 – The first International Labor Day was celebrated. The U.S. decided to create its own labor day in September to undercut worker solidarity and to white wash away its violent history of repressing strikes and worker protest. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1890 – The first May Day celebration in Poland saw about 10,000 workers assemble in Warsaw. All nine organizers were arrested and sent to Russian prisons, where two of them died. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1891 –The French army tested their new Lebels machine guns against peaceful May Day demonstrators that included women and children carrying flowers and palms, killing 14 and wounding 40. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1894- The cross-country march by Coxey’s Army of the Unemployed ended with in a march down Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C. (From Workday Minnesota. Also see Today in Labor History, April 29)

May 1, 1899 – Tzarist police arrested 3000 of the 20,000 participants in Warsaw’s May Day demonstration. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1901- The Cooks’ and Waiters’ Union struck in San Francisco. They were demanding one day of rest per week, a ten-hour work day and a closed union shop for all restaurants in the city. (From The Unionist)

May 1, 1905 – 60 workers found were killed in fights with police during May Day protests in Poland. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1906 – 1,200 members of the Iron Molders Union in Milwaukee struck for shorter hours and more pay. They lost the strike after two years of bitter struggle. One employer, Allis-Chalmers, spent $21,700 to hire the Burr-Herr Detective Agency, resulting in more than 200 assaults on union members, including union leader Peter Cramer, whose was killed. The agency offered one unionist 10 dollars for each striker he beat up. (From the Daily Bleed)

May 1, 1933 - The first issue of the Catholic Worker was published. The Catholic Worker was founded in New York City by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, anarchist-Catholics. The first run of the paper published 2,500 copies. By 1936, circulation had risen to 150,000. (From the Daily Bleed and Workday Minnesota)

May 1, 1938 - Congress enacted amendments to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, extending protections to the employees of state and local governments. However, these protections didn’t take effect until 1985 because of court challenges.(From The Unionist)

May 1, 2006 - Millions of immigrants, participating in a national day of mobilization, stayed home from work. Their goal was to demonstrate their economic power and demand comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration laws. It is estimated that 100,000 gathered in San Jose, California, 200,000 in New York, 400,000 each in Chicago and Los Angeles.  There were demonstrations in at least 50 cities. Despite their numbers, the country has seen a wave of increasingly repressive and racist immigration laws enacted locally in places like Arizona, Georgia, Florida. (From Workday Minnesota, The Unionist)