As of May 21, the Reynolds Education Association, east of Portland, is set to become the third Oregon Education Association local to be pushed to strike in the last month. Negotiations in Reynolds have gone on for over a year with little movement from the school board.

A week before the strike date, the school board refused to return to the bargaining table until the Reynolds Education Association brought a proposal that costs less than $4 million, half the cost of the unions’ current proposal. The school board, like everywhere in Oregon is claiming a budget crisis, but in Reynolds, the district has $20 million in reserves.

There is certainly plenty of money for those at the top. The superintendent’s office, which includes her assistant, received a 10 percent salary increase in the recent budget cycle. Administrators’ pay increased by 2 percent last year. Meanwhile, over the last two years, certified and classified staff has been cut to finance these raises.

Many other issues are on the table that have a lot more to do with union-busting than financial concerns. The board wants the ability to fire teachers based on one anonymous written or verbal complaint. It also wants to eliminate all planning time from student contact hours. In addition, the board hopes to eliminate professional development days and add instruction days, with no additional compensation. Other issues include whether or not teachers should see student information concerning past safety, behavioral or criminal reports.

The board also wants to be able to use biased student test scores in teacher evaluations, forbid teachers to take emergency leave days around holidays and ignore seniority as a factor in layoffs. Finally, school officials the power to reopen the contract any time they say they are suffering financial constraints.

The list of non-financial issues, in addition to the ultimatum from the school board, has made it clear the school district wants to push the union into a strike. In the aftermath of an eight-day strike in Eagle Point, in Southern Oregon, the Reynolds school board probably thinks a strike will turn the community against the union.

But that wasn’t the experience of Eagle Point teachers, who said they had more community support, not less. And in the Reynolds district, just last week, 200 teachers and community supporters picketed outside and booed and hissed at the school board meeting.

The battle in Reynolds could be a turning point for Oregon teachers after several concessionary contracts negotiated over the last month. The district has a $20 million surplus, nearly three times the budget carryover recommended by the Oregon School Board Association, which gives Reynolds teachers leverage that other locals facing budget crises don’t have.

THE FIRST two locals to vote to strike were also in the Portland metropolitan area–the Parkrose Faculty Association and the Gresham-Barlow Education Association.

Parkrose teachers reached a tentative agreement just one day before they were scheduled to strike in late April. Gresham-Barlow teachers reached a tentative agreement barely three hours into their strike on April 25 after hundreds of community supporters turned out the night before to a solidarity protest.

Both unions are taking large concessions. Parkrose teachers are giving up 21 furlough days over three years, though some days could be restored in the third year if public school enrollment increases. Teachers will get only half their experienced-based step raises during the three-year contract, while getting no cost-of-living increases.

In Gresham, the new contract also freezes teachers’ cost-of-living adjustments while preserving step increases. But in the second and third year of the contract, the step raises are delayed until June 30. On the other hand, Gresham teachers staved off the five furlough days the school board wanted.

While the fiscal concessions will be painful, they are not nearly as severe as what both districts were asking for just days prior to the strike votes. Furthermore, both unions managed to win several non-financial contract improvements and prevent large cuts to prep time and other attacks on non-monetary contract language.

Unfortunately, the two locals took up one of the concessionary slogans from the Wisconsin uprising, claiming, “It’s not about the money,” but rather about the prep time and the lack of respect. Many teachers did not have the confidence that they could defend their compensation while their standard of living remained above other workers in the communities they serve. Yet in both cases as the strike neared, the community rallied to teachers’ defense, disproving this assumption.

In Southern Oregon, the Eagle Point Education Association, representing not just teachers, but bus drivers, maintenance and custodial workers and other classified staff, reached a tentative agreement on May 15 after an eight-day strike.

Though the membership has yet to vote on the agreement, the Eagle Point school board successfully pressured the union into big concessions on almost every issue. The three main issues were teacher prep time, subcontracting out bus driver jobs and prorating insurance for part-time employees.

The tentative agreement includes a memorandum of understanding that moves prep time to the end of the day. This could require teachers to teach throughout the day from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. without a prep period. The union was able to win a memorandum of understanding that no subcontracting would occur, but only for the first two-and-a-half years of the three-year contract. In addition, a new pro-rated insurance plan will reduce benefits for part-time employees.

Before the strike the school board and the union came to an agreement on the parts of the contract dealing with compensation. Teachers will get no cost-of-living adjustment for the fifth year in a row while maintaining their step increases.

But this agreement, reached before the strike, didn’t stop the school board and right-wing politicians from painting the union as a gang of greedy teachers who were only striking for more money. They also compiled a bogus set of numbers to claim that teachers had a “pay package” of over $92,000, which works out to $68 per hour. In reality, a starting salary for a teacher in Eagle Point is $34,277. Even those at the top of the salary schedule, who have a master’s degree and 14 years of experience, make only $66,412 per year.

Yet in robocalls to parents, the schools board claimed, “Teachers only have to be in school for six-and-a-half hours a day. Teachers only work 190 days a year. On average, a teacher makes $68 an hour with benefits, four times more than the community average. Does that sound like overworked and underpaid to you?”

In an e-mail blast to over 450,000 Oregonians, Republican state Rep. Dennis Richardson sent out a lengthy anti-union rant in which he stated, “It is my opinion that the citizens should stand with their School District and resist the union’s threats and bluster. If the teachers believe a $92,000 annual pay package for 38 weeks of work is too low, let them walk off the school grounds and strike.”

Yet Richardson and others who claim to be concerned about the district’s financial resources had nothing to say when the district that is supposedly strapped for cash poured money into security guards, and training, transportation and housing for substitutes who were bussed in from around the state and paid $330 every day to scab on their fellow teachers.

Despite the concessionary temporary agreement, the strike led to an increasingly active union membership. According to Jay Schroder, a Language Arts teacher at Eagle Point High School, “On our first day back to school, every staff member at each school gathered outside the doors and walked in together at 7:45, and left together at 3:15…As I expressed to the membership at the end of the day on Tuesday, to a resounding cheer–the district has given us a gift; they’ve given us the gift of a strong union. We are together in a way that I have not seen in my 12 years in D9.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

WHILE SOME locals in bargaining years are being driven to strike, others are being forced to reopen contracts to stave off layoffs.

In Portland, Oregon’s largest teachers’ union reached a three-way deal with the city and the school district. Teachers will delay their step increases, saving $2.5 million, the district will find an additional $2.5 million to cut from the central office, and the city council will contribute $5 million out of the city budget. The one-time deal was made to stave off 110 teacher layoffs, but will ultimately lead to an even bigger budget hole next year when Portland teachers are bargaining for a new contract.

In Beaverton, Oregon’s second-largest teachers’ local signed a new two-year contract that exchanges pay cuts and nine furlough days to prevent potential layoffs. Yet the budget crisis in Beaverton is so severe that school leaders still claim they will need to eliminate 344 positions across the district.

But for all the talk of budget shortfalls, the crisis facing Oregon’s schools is political, not financial. As a new report by Our Oregon points out, over the last five years, tax breaks for corporations and the rich have grown by 12 percent while school funding has dropped by 5 percent.

Beaverton, where the cuts to schools are most severe, is where sports giant Nike is headquartered. The mammoth multinational corporation paid a state income tax of 4.9 percent from 2008 to 2010. Precision Castparts, the other Fortune 500 Corporation headquartered in Oregon, paid a state income tax of 2.9 percent.

In fact, the CEOs of these companies could singlehandedly save our schools. Nike cofounder Phil Knight is the 60th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $13.1 billion. He could fill Oregon’s entire $3.4 billion budget deficit, double the salary of all teachers in Oregon (roughly $1.48 billion per year) and still be a multibillionaire.

But rather than campaign on these obvious issues, the Oregon Education Association has chosen to focus on repealing the state corporate tax kicker–an uninspiring legislative agenda that will not likely generate any money for Oregon’s schools in the near future. The OEA abandoned proposals for more substantial tax reforms, like extending the temporary tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy passed by Oregon voters in 2009.

Meanwhile, Oregon’s Democratic governor, rather than pushing for more education funding is focused on setting up unfunded mandates for Oregon’s schools. In order to receive a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, the governor pushed through an education bill that created “Achievement Compacts”–which seem remarkably similar to the punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind.

As Reynolds teacher Tricia Snyder-Neiwert writes, “In this brave new world of the NCLB waiver, schools will compete for state dollars; schools who don’t meet outcomes will be put into receivership; the waiver will still rely on high-stakes testing to measure student, teacher and school success; schools will still be labeled; curriculum will continue to narrow; and our precious resources will go into data collection, new assessment and testing programs, and new curriculum and training.”

With the focus on increased testing and accountability, and the refusal to tax the rich and corporations, teachers and public schools are being set up to fail. In a state that already has the 5th-worst class sizes in the nation, this corporate attack on education is pushing teachers and students to the breaking point.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

THIS IS why it is so crucial that Oregon’s teachers are beginning to use their most powerful weapon–the strike. As Eagle Point Spanish teacher Megan Williamson put it the night before she went on strike, “I’m willing to go on strike tomorrow, because I’m standing up not just for myself and my colleagues, but for my students, for my own child, for the health of education in this country. I want to provide the best quality education I can as a teacher, and I will not tolerate a watered-down educational system.”

But as we’ve seen in Oregon over the last month, the willingness to go on strike does not guarantee victory. This is especially true when school boards and politicians are attempting to use the budget crises as an excuse to break teacher unions. As Eagle Point teacher Jay Schroder writes:

We came into this situation under-organized and under-prepared. Even after our strike vote, up until they closed the schools and kicked us out, we were all pretty optimistic that we could reach a settlement. We’ve had other down to-the-wire bargaining experiences, so this wasn’t a particularly new thing for us.

But something has changed. This isn’t bargaining as usual. Our bargaining team has bent over backwards trying to accommodate the district’s demands, but no matter what we’ve offered, even when we give their own language back to them, it isn’t enough. They have forced this strike now because in this economic climate, they believe they can break the union.

In letters home to parents, in robo-calls made through out the district, in lies to the news media, and in Dennis Richardson’s e-mail blast, we have been slandered as lazy, greedy, despicable, unreasonable, and dangerous. The latest message is that the striking employees are simply gullible tools of a nefarious union conspiracy. It’s brutal and it’s awful, and it is shocking. Our opponents are organized, well-resourced, have been planning this for a long time, and will go to no ends to break us if they can. Be ready.

It’s that in order to begin winning strikes–and winning a better future for Oregon’s schools–a much higher level of organization will be needed. Over the last year, several new groups have formed with that goal in mind.

One example is Portland Area Social Equality Educators, which is bringing together educators in several school districts to collaborate in building union power. The group planning a march on the national office of anti-union, pro-corporate Stand for Children. Other groups organizing teachers, parents and students together like Oregon Save Our Schools and UPSET will be crucial in building a broader movement to save public education.

Those concerned about Oregon’s public schools should join these organizations and help to deepen their roots in communities across Oregon. We must demand that the richest nation on earth allocate enough resources to compensate its teachers adequately and to provide every child with a meaningful, holistic education.

The executive council of the Reynolds Education Association, a third teachers union in Oregon’s East Multnomah County that is also facing attacks, voted to declare an impasse the same day. This opens the possibility that another 600 teachers could be on strike in the coming weeks.

Why are these teachers willing to strike? Those pushing for cuts to education want you to believe that greedy teachers are simply trying to take money from other workers. As Gresham-Barlow school board member Dan Chriestenson recently posted on the Multnomah County Republicans’ Facebook page, “I view a vote to strike as profoundly offensive and disrespectful to the hardworking families who continue to pay the bills for the district in this down economy.”

In Chriestenson’s world, the contract he and his fellow school board members unilaterally imposed on teachers–one that includes erosion in teachers’ job security, reductions in preparation time and five furlough days and allows for the use of counselors as substitutes–is not “profoundly offensive and disrespectful” to the working families whose children’s education will suffer as a result. The real issue for him is the fact that teachers are preparing to fight these attacks.

What Chriestenson conveniently leaves out is the fact that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. With endless budget cuts, students have fewer resources in the classroom and less support from education assistants and counselors. Increases in class sizes leave every child behind. Many students no longer have the joy of music classes, instruction in physical education or access to the library–all of which have proven to be supportive of student learning.

Further, the loss of prep time hinders educators’ ability to provide the differentiated and creative instruction required to meet various student needs. It also takes away from time educators can connect with families, collaborate with peers and attend meetings on students’ behalf. In addition, the loss of protective language for educators will create an environment of fear in our schools, silencing the educator’s voice for student advocacy and academic freedom.

A student in an overcrowded classroom can get lost. A student with a teacher who doesn’t have adequate prep time will receive less tailored instruction and less feedback on assignments. A student with a teacher who has no time to contact parents will not have a crucial bridge between school and home.

These are some of the reasons why students with nonunion teachers do not perform as well as students with union teachers.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

BUT BUDGET-slashers like Chriestenson are hoping working families will overlook these facts and side with school boards against the teachers’ unions.

This outlook echoes the national attack on public sector unions. Rather than point the finger at the bankers, corporate executives or politicians who paved the way for the economic crisis, and the state budget shortfalls that have accompanied it, conservatives like Chriestenson want you to believe that it is greedy public-sector workers who are to blame.

This argument is part of an effort to divide private-sector workers from public-sector workers in order to lower all workers’ standard of living. The U.S. elite has its sights set on competition with the world’s rising economies of China, India and the rest of Asia. That means drastically lowering the pay of workers here to compete with China’s low-wage working class. In order to accomplish this, America’s rulers need to crush any organized force within the U.S. working class. Breaking the teachers’ unions, the largest single sector of unionized workers in the country, is a key part of that strategy.

If these school districts are allowed to get away with their attack on teachers it will make it easier for other employers to attack workers. As historian Mark Naison explains:

There is another more insidious consequence of the attack on teaching. Every time you undermine the job security, working conditions and wages of one group of workers, it makes it easier for employers to undermine them for all workers.

This is why, during the Depression, many unemployed people organized in support of workers on strike, even though anybody with a job in that era was relatively privileged. They believed in the concept of solidarity–the idea that working people could only progress if they did so together, and if one group of workers improved their conditions, it would ultimately improve conditions for all.

The attack on teachers and other workers is intertwined with the assault on public education. While the government has lent, committed or guaranteed $13 trillion to the banks, and spent trillions on wars overseas, the stimulus package only included about $140 billion in aid to the states, roughly the same size as Wall Street paid out in bonuses in 2009.

As cash-strapped states look to the federal government for help, all they see is the $4.3 billion Race to the Top funds. President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan made states compete for these grants by using eligibility requirements that further the agenda of testing and privatization through the creation of charter schools. And because state governments typically cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy and put the majority of the tax burden on the middle and working classes during the neoliberal boom, most states are now finding huge holes in their budgets as unemployment and foreclosures rise.

The attack on workers and education is a bipartisan effort. By picking Duncan to run the Department of Education, Obama made it clear that his administration was no advocate for public education. More than 300,000 educator jobs have been lost since 2008. If teachers and other workers hope to defend public education and a decent standard of living for the U.S. working class, we will need to use our most powerful weapon–the strike.

For too long, we have we sat by while “shared sacrifice” has meant the rich get richer while we suffer. If there is any hope for the children in our communities–and if we want them to have a future that isn’t confined to poverty, unemployment, debt and despair–we need to teach them the real power that working people have to defend ourselves. We need to teach them there is power in solidarity–that when we fight injustice, others will rally to help.

This is why students, parents, and working people from all over Oregon should be prepared to head to the picket lines starting April 25. Support our schools, defend our teachers!

Margaret Butler, the executive director of Portland Jobs with Justice, and other supporters came to the rally in solidarity with the three unions. As Butler explained, “Teachers all over our state have been taking it for years in terms of cuts, in terms of higher class sizes, in terms of not getting the support to do their job, and it’s just great that these three groups of teachers, who are facing another set of contract cutbacks, have decided to stand up.”

The three school districts are claiming that the budget crisis is forcing them to extract massive concessions from the unions. All three school boards are demanding a freeze in teacher pay and benefits. In addition, the Parkrose school board is asking for a retroactive pay cut, taking away pay increases teachers previously bargained for. In Gresham, the school board is asking for teachers to take five unpaid furlough days, while in Parkrose, the board is asking for 10.

This means that in Parkrose, where the monetary cuts are most severe, teachers would be receiving up to $1,000 a month less in pay for the next six months and between $300 and $600 less each month after that.

While the school boards are claiming teachers are overpaid, the reality is that these cuts to pay and benefits would be devastating for teachers and their families. As one teacher put it in a recent opinion article in the Oregonian [1], “I need to make more money to ascertain and assure the future of my own children and my own future. I do not own a credit card; I do not qualify. I cannot purchase another home should I lose this one; I do not earn enough. I am a teacher, and I cannot afford to send my eldest son to college.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

BUT THE struggle in East Multnomah County isn’t only about defending a decent standard of living for teachers.

Joyce Rosenau, president of the Reynolds Education Association, emphasized that the budget shortfalls are being used as a pretext for attacking non-fiscal parts of the contract. “We have lots of issues in our contract–that have nothing to do with money–that are under attack now,” she explained. “And so we find that they use the financial excuse as a chance to attack other pieces of the contract.”

In fact, many of the concessions the three school boards are demanding go way beyond simple budget issues. In Reynolds and Parkrose, the school boards are asking for a unilateral reopener clauses that would allow them to renegotiate the contract at any time. As David Whitfield, a Parkrose High School math teacher, contends [2]:

The reality is the [Parkrose] school board and superintendent are exploiting the budget crisis to go much further than just balancing a budget. They are using the budget crisis, shock and awe, to destroy the teachers as a collective body, destroy their union. Inevitably, this must undermine teaching and real education for school students in Parkrose. What the board wins now, it has no intention of giving back later. Its proposed cuts and imposed working conditions–for students as well as teachers–inside the schools will be permanent.

In all three districts, teachers are facing a reduction in preparation time, and in Reynolds, the school board is demanding the removal of contract language that requires any preparation time for teachers during the school day. Also in Reynolds, the school board refuses to acknowledge the need to have scheduled bathroom breaks for elementary school teachers because of cuts to support staff who would cover classrooms in the past.

In Gresham, counselors at all grade levels would be required to substitute for teachers up to two hours a day. The Gresham school board also wants to erode teachers’ collective voice by removing the requirement that the district take any input from staff when changing the structure of the school day.

In addition, both the Gresham-Barlow and Reynolds Education Association are facing attacks on job security. In Gresham, the school board wants to be able to lay off teachers according to “competency,” rather than seniority. In Reynolds, the school board wants to be able to use anonymous complaints as justification for disciplining or terminating teachers.

Evan Selby, a Reynolds High School teacher and member of Social Equality Educators, explained the significance of this attack on teachers:

When you think statewide for teachers all around the state–if prep time goes, if unsigned complaints are allowed, if class load increases, it sets a bad precedent…I see this as a larger national effort to crush public employee unions–and specifically teacher unions because we’re one of the larger unions left. This is why we’re asking for people from around the Portland and East-Metro County Area to stand up for our kids because they are the ones that will ultimately suffer because of these terrible proposals.

There are, of course, answers to the districts’ fiscal problems that don’t involve solving the budget crisis on the backs of teachers.

In Gresham-Barlow, the district has cut certified school staff positions by 14 percent since 2008 while at the same time doubling the number of administrators in the district office. A similar pattern has occurred in Parkrose where the school board found the money to give the superintendent a $7,000 raise. This brings her total compensation package to around $170,000 a year, over $30,000 more than the mayor of Portland.

In Reynolds, largely due to previous salary freezes, the district has $20 million left over from previous budgets that is sitting unused while the school board pushes for another freeze to teacher pay and benefits. Fiscal responsibility is the school board’s mantra, but this represents a carryover of 20 percent when the Oregon School Board Association advises a budget carryover of only 6-8 percent. Meanwhile, the school board plans on increasing the salary of the new superintendent and new assistant superintendent they plan to hire this spring.

And of course, while schools and public services across Oregon have felt the painful cuts of the budget ax, Oregon’s 1 percent continues to thrive. Oregon’s mushrooming millionaire households [3] could easily cover the East Multnomah County school budget deficit. Large corporations, many of which pay no state income taxes [4], could also easily fill the budget holes.

Oregonian Phil Knight, the chairman of Nike and 60th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $13.1 billion, could single-handedly cover Oregon’s entire $3.4 billion budget deficit and still be a multibillionaire. But common-sense solutions like these would require a social movement powerful enough to scare politicians into action.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

YET THE scale of the attacks that teachers are facing is forcing them to act now.

In Gresham-Barlow, a district with more than 550 teachers, the school board voted March 13 to implement parts of its final offer. This imposed contract went into effect just before spring break. When teachers return from break, assuming the school board continues to avoid the negotiating table, the union will be left with two options–either vote to strike or accept the punitive contract and allow the school board to gut their right to collectively bargain.

In Parkrose, the smallest of the three districts with close to 200 teachers, the school board has declared an impasse, and after the “cooling-off” period ends April 11, the district can vote to implement their final offer.

In Reynolds, the largest district, with nearly 600 teachers, the school board has not yet called impasse, though it has been bargaining for over a year, and 13 articles of the contract are still open. The board is likely trying to wait and see what happens in the other districts, while hoping to push off the possibility of a teacher strike into the summer, when it would be less effective.

But teachers have shown that they are ready to fight. In Gresham, teachers have participated in a “work-to-rule” campaign for the last several weeks, where teachers were asked to work only their scheduled contract hours without bringing any work home. Teachers gathered outside their school every morning and walked in and out together, before and after school, in a show of solidarity. According to Kara Tison, a member of the union’s organizing committee:

This was extremely challenging to organize initially because teachers consistently work over eight hours a day and don’t believe that they could possibly get their job done in eight hours. It was real tough for a lot of people to not spend their evenings and their weekends grading papers, making lesson plans, etc. The reality is that if school districts did not have this free labor that educators continually give with all their heart, the school systems would collapse.

The intent of this work-to-rule campaign was for the district to see that we were in solidarity with each other, and that if they were going to implement a contract, than we would not volunteer extra time. It also helped teachers recognize for themselves how much they give every day and use that energy under these stressful times to give back to their own families and friends.

The rally and march on March 20 was another big step forward for East County teachers. At the rally, North Gresham elementary school teacher Kathy Thorne encouraged the crowd to view their workday as a product of past struggles:

Every single thing you have that makes your day possible–the contract money that you have, the insurance benefits that you have, your prep time, pay for extra duties–the district didn’t give you any of those things. They never came in one day and said, ‘Gosh, those teachers are such great people. We want to make sure they have enough personal leave. We want to make sure they have enough insurance. We want to make sure they have lots of time to plan great lessons for their kids.’ Your district never said that. For 40 years, [the union] has said that, and your district has fought every single word.

Reynolds High School teacher Tom Beaman also spoke to the crowd of teachers and supporters. He eloquently called for a unified fightback against the three school boards:

In 29 years, I have never seen an attack on teachers and public schools like what we now face in East Multnomah County. In all three districts, ridiculous contract provisions have been proposed by school boards that seem determined to drive us to strike…

Out here in East County, an ill wind is blowing. It is a wind of hidden money and union-busting, of disdain and disrespect. The school board negotiation provisions that we all face are neither reasonable nor necessary. They are provisions designed to take back our hard-fought contract negotiated in years past.

We stand on the shoulders of those teachers who came before us. We owe it to them to not capitulate and to not lose those victories they fought so hard to win. We may be three locals, but we face one crisis. Our school boards are leading us down the same path. And while the Reynolds district may be a little bit behind our East County colleagues, we will stand together as we weather this storm!

First, Tom Olson, another former Portland Stand for Children volunteer, has publicly left the organization and has written a revealing open letter to SFC CEO Jonah Edelman. His letter further elucidates how the Portland chapter’s shift in priorities occurred:

[In early 2010,] Holly [Pruett] was the Oregon Stand for Children Executive Director. But, mysteriously, a new “player”, Sue Levin, arrived to begin help you firm up your top down “reforms.” She initially served as the “coach” of the State Race to the Top Team. When we asked if she was now a Stand staff member or a Stand consultant, staff members said that they simply didn’t know. When we read a draft of the Race to the Top proposal, we attempted to provide constructive advice, which, again, was rejected out of hand—particularly by “coach” Sue Levin.

Abruptly, Holly announced her resignation as Executive Director, surprising all the volunteers. We saw no open process to secure her replacement. You (Edelman) did not engage the grass roots volunteers in advising about priority job criteria, nor did you engage them in any search or interview process.

Then you anointed Sue Levin as Holly’s replacement. We were appalled that she had virtually no experience leading grass roots organizations. Instead, we were told that she had a truly impressive background as an “entrepreneur” (a phrase we began to hear you use quite frequently during your transformation during 2009-10). Levin had been the founder and CEO of a women’s apparel company, Lucy, Inc. Prior to that, she had been a Women’s Sports apparel VP at Nike, Inc. Grass roots leadership experience? Absolutely none. Connections with millionaires? A whole bunch.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Another important way to understand how Stand for Children has changed is by looking at the members of its National Board of Directors. Though the Board has always had former CEOs and prominent corporate reformers, they did not dominate the SFC board until the last several years.

In 2006, Laurene Powell Jobs joined the board. She also serves on the board of Teach for America—the teacher-training program that many have criticized for pushing out veteran teachers in poor urban areas and replacing them with cheaper, inexperienced Ivy league graduates who receive a grand total of five weeks training from TFA. Both Powell Jobs and Julie Mikuta, who joined the SFC board in 2007, are integrally involved with the NewSchools Venture Fund. NewSchools is a venture philanthropy firm, started by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financed by many of the same donors that give to Stand for Children—Bill Gates, the Walton Family—as well as other major funders of corporate education reform—SunAmerica and KB Homes founder Eli Broad and Gap Founder Donald Fisher for example. The multi-million dollar fund pours this money into charter schools and “human capital” projects with the aim of using market models and corporate management to drastically reshape the education system.

In 2010, Emma Bloomberg, the daughter of billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the wealthiest individuals in the United States, became the newest member of Stand for Children’s National Board. Emma Bloomberg is a program officer at the Robin Hood Foundation, another venture philanthropy organization who’s Board of Directors is dominated by corporate titans like General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt and JP Morgan CEO Jes Staley.

Other board members of the two organizations include private equity investors, “social entrepreneurs,” and leaders from the private sector including Don Washburn, former executive Vice President of Northwest Airlines, and David Pollock, former CEO of Stormwater Management. The National Board of the Stand for Children Leadership Center includes Vanessa Kirsch, the President and founder of New Profit, Inc. and Jonathan Levine, the managing director of Bain Capital. Both New Profit and Bain Capital are huge investors in SFC and were discussed in my last article.

Jonah Edelman’s mother and Civil Rights heroine, Marian Wright Edelman, has not been on the board since 2006. Excluding CEO Jonah Edelman, 11 of the 13 board members of Stand for Children and the Stand for Children Leadership Center were not with the organization in 2006. And with the exception of SFC’s two founders, nearly every board member comes from a business or venture philanthropy background.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Lastly, my previous article did not cover any of SFC’s activity outside of Oregon and Illinois. SFC also currently operates in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. Below is a brief summary of their anti-union and anti-teacher activities in these other seven states:

Arizona: The Arizona Stand for Children was founded in 2009 and is part of the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) Network. PIE is of course funded by the big three foundations—Gates, Walton, Broad— among others. PIE’s organizers guide encourages its affiliates to recruit CEOs and business leaders to lead their organizations and discourages groups from having too many educators on their governing boards. For more on PIE go here. The Arizona’s chapter’s achievements include SB 1040, which ties teachers pay partly to student test scores using flawed value-added models.

Colorado: Colorado SFC is also a member of the PIE Network and was also founded in 2009. Colorado SFC helped push through Stand’s biggest anti-teacher victory next to the legislation in Illinois: Senate Bill 191. SB 191 ties 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to their students’ test scores. The bill also makes it harder for teachers to receive their due process rights (tenure) and makes it possible for teachers to lose those rights if they get two years of poor evaluations (that are now 50% based on their student’s test scores). For more on SB 191 go here, here and here.

Indiana: SFC came to Indiana in 2011. The executive director of Indiana SFC is Linda Erlinger, a former Development Director for Teach for America Chicago and the executive director of the midwest DonorsChoose.org. Stand entered Indiana just as Republican Governor Mitch Daniels and the Republican-controlled legislature passed legislation that created the nation’s broadest private school state voucher system, expanded charter schools, limited collective bargaining, and signed a bill that tied teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores. With $400,000 in grants from the venture fund Mind Trust and the Joyce Foundation, SFC, rather than try to fight any of these devastating attacks on public education, set up shop to focus on building support for SB 1, the Republican bill instituting merit pay for teachers.

Massachusetts: Massachusetts SFC is also a member of the PIE Network and started activities in the state in 2009. Along with the Greater Boston, the Metrowest, and the Metro South Chamber’s of Commerce, Massachusetts SFC was a member of the Race to the Top Coalition, which helped push through legislation in the Massachusetts legislature to help make the state more attractive to those awarding federal funding from Obama’s deeply flawed Race to the Top program. In doing so, they supported legislation that expanded charter schools in Massachusetts. More recently they touted the newly approved teacher evaluation rules that tie evaluations to student test scores as another victory.

Tennessee: The Tennessee chapter is one of SFCs oldest, founded in 1999. It therefore, like the Oregon chapter, has a longer and more complicated history that is beyond the scope of this addendum but would make a great article for someone else to explore (I’m a bit Standed out at the moment). The most recent activity of the Tennessee chapter, like in Massachusetts, has been focused on pushing legislation that would help win Tennessee a Race to the Top grant. They helped push the First to the Top Act of 2010 that tied test scores to teacher evaluations and put punitive measures in place that punished schools with low test scores by closing them and turning them over to charter operations. For more on Tennessee go here, here, and here.

Texas: SFC came to Texas in 2011 at a time when massive budget cuts were devastating schools throughout the state. SFC’s website declares that “while we can’t prevent cuts at this point, we can still have an impact on how the cuts are carried out.” So SFC championed Senate Bill 4, that (surprise, surprise) tied 30-50% of a teacher’s evaluation to their students’ test scores. According to SFC’s website they also supported an addendum to Senate Bill 8 which removed teacher seniority protection. Tellingly, SB 8 also included unpaid furlough days and salary cuts to teachers salaries, despite the fact that Jonah Edelman and SFC publicly state that they support paying good teachers more.

Washington: Washington SFC began in 2009 and is also a member of the PIE network. They supported SB 5399 and HB 1609 that attacked teacher seniority rights. They also helped the Washington Race to the Top efforts that included legislation to “turnaround” schools that performed low on standardized tests. And though the Oregon chapter helped pass the only “tax the rich” measures in the nation that provided desperate funds for public schools (without making a deal with the Devil ala Race to the Top), Washington SFC maintained “a neutral position” on a similar measure, I-1098. Could this possibly be because Bill Gates, who would see his tax rates rise under I-1098, lives in Washington?

Special thanks to Ken Libby, education journalist and blogger at Schools Matter, for sharing his research on Stand for Children with me. Several parts of this addendum were written using Ken’s research.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, they explained how Stand for Children, a nonprofit ostensibly dedicated to helping “all children get the excellent public education…they need to thrive,” helped push through legislation in Illinois aimed at severely restricting teacher union rights.

Their panel discussion, titled “If It Can Happen There, It Can Happen Anywhere: Transformational Education Legislation in Illinois,” began with Crown painting a picture of an all-powerful teachers union that consistently blocks education reform and has a stranglehold on Illinois politics:

[W]e had a mayor who talked importantly about reforming the schools, Mayor Daley, and we had a CEO of public schools, Arne Duncan, who did everything he could in that environment. But this was not a fair fight. Because of the political strength and the organized strength of the unions, who, each time they came up to a contract session, would not concede on length of day, would not concede on teacher metrics and would insist on additional compensation. And that’s the way things have gone for an entire generation in terms of negotiated outcome.

Crown was particularly angry that teachers in Illinois had maintained their right to strike. “In forty-five of the fifty states there is no right to strike by teachers,” he protested. “So this was an incredibly strike permissive environment with these other efforts by the unions, and so forth, that created an unsustainable structure in our school system.”

But for Crown, whose family has long been a pillar of the Chicago financial elite, this environment changed when Jonah Edelman and Stand for Children got involved.

Stand for Children (SFC) is a Portland, Ore.-based non-profit that emerged out of a 1996 march of over a quarter-million people in Washington, D.C. The aim of the march was to highlight child poverty at a time when Congress and the Clinton administration were preparing to “end welfare as we know it.” According to Susan Barrett, a parent volunteer who recently stepped down from her position in Portland’s SFC chapter, Jonah Edelman:

and a co-founder set up a home base in Oregon, and worked on smaller issues with positive impact, such as after-school program funding and emergency dental care for uninsured kids. Many parents like me who joined SFC a while back still remember how it was an organization fighting for the Portland Children’s Levy, which provided funds for early childhood education, foster care, child abuse prevention programs and a variety of other programs centered on children.

But in the last couple years, Stand for Children has seen an influx of corporate cash that drastically changed the organization’s priorities.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of SFC’s earlier big donors, began by offering a two-year grant of $80,000 in 2005. In the last few years, however, possibly because it realized that SFC could be an effective ally in pushing the corporate model for education reform, the Gates Foundation drastically enlarged its contributions. In 2007, Stand for Children received a $682,565 grant. In 2009, it got a $971,280 grant, and in 2010, it received a $3,476,300 grant—all from the Gates Foundation.

Though the Gates Foundation remains the biggest donor to Stand for Children, other players in the world of corporate education reform have also begun to see SFC as an effective vehicle to push their agenda.

New Profit Inc. is the other major player that has funded SFC since 2008—to the tune of $1,458,500. According to its website, New Profit is a “national venture philanthropy fund that seeks to harness America’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to help solve the country’s biggest social problems.” New Profit’s “strategic partner” is Monitor Group, a consulting firm that was recently criticized for signing a $3 million contract with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for a PR campaign aimed at rehabilitating the regime’s image.

The Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the extremely wealthy owners of Wal-Mart, made a 2010 grant of $1,378,527. Several other major funders are tied to Bain Capital, a private equity and venture capital firm founded by Mitt Romney—currently the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

To think that bedfellows like these are just handing over millions in cash and expecting nothing in return would be naïve. As Susan Barrett wrote in an eye-opening article about the changing atmosphere inside Stand for Children:

Parents and community members most likely do not know that SFC now has private equity investors and venture philanthropists on the board, making decisions for the organization as it grows new chapters…

My fear is that unwitting parents and community members will join SFC because they want to rectify the problems they see every day in their children’s public schools, such as underfunding, lack of arts programs, large class sizes and cuts to the school year, only to find that they get roped into very different goals. With SFC inspiring many of its members to run for school board seats, and the funding it gives through its PAC, I worry we will lose a truly democratic discussion and action on education weighted in favor of corporate reforms.

Barrett goes on to explain how the priorities of the Portland chapter have changed:

About three years ago, some team leaders at my school became uncomfortable when they were asked to engage in what they considered to be tacky conversations with teachers around hiring practices. When a fellow parent and I were asked to take over as the new team leaders for this school year, we were cautioned about this, but otherwise, we all assumed SFC was working to enhance public education, and this was just a minor mistake along the way…That was a red flag, but now, as I look back and connect the dots, I see so many more.

I think about the visits from the Policy Director of the New Teacher Project, and the former aide to New York City charter operator Eva Moskowitz, who said she was moving to Portland and trying to set up a chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-charter, hedge-fund driven organization. I think about their push for Oregon to submit a Race to the Top application, (which the state did initially, but it failed); and how the organization acted as the “social justice partner “of Waiting for “Superman” and urged parents to attend the film. Only recently did I come to realize that the SFC Portland director, Tyler Whitmire, is the daughter of Richard Whitmire, author of The Bee Eater, a book lavishing praise on Michelle Rhee.

This past year, Oregon SFC staff wanted us to press our legislators to pass a “bipartisan education package,” which basically tied the release of much-needed school funding to the expansion of charter schools, online learning, and other so-called “reforms.” SFC also pushed to lower the capital gains tax….

This stance is a great departure from what people would normally expect of SFC, and only makes sense when you see the wealthy investors on SFC’s National Board of Directors, and how billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation are now funding and driving the organization’s agenda.

As SFC begins to expand across the country, new chapters will likely be controlled from the top with the corporate-driven agenda as their first priority.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

This was certainly the case in Illinois, where Stand for Children played a part in crafting what they are touting as their biggest victory yet: Senate Bill 7.

SB 7, which passed the Illinois Senate in a unanimous vote and the General Assembly with a single dissenter, undermines seniority as the basis of teacher job security and specifically singles out the Chicago Teachers Union by severely restricting its right to strike.

Which brings us back to Jonah Edelman and his unrestrained arrogance. At the Aspen Ideas Festival—sponsored by the Aspen Institute, another Gates Foundation recipient that works on corporate education schemes such as the Teachers as Human Capital Project—Edelman caused an uproar for his comments about SB 7.

In a speech caught on video and posted to YouTube, Edelman gives a step-by-step account of how Stand For Children worked to undermine teacher union rights in Illinois. After explaining how SFC essentially bought a handful of Illinois legislators with campaign contributions—most crucially, Assembly Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat who had been shunned by the unions after pushing to cut teachers’ pensions a year earlier—Edelman explains SFCs strategy:

After the election, Advance Illinois and Stand had drafted a very bold proposal we called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance. It let principals hire who they choose. It streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially—from two-plus years and $200,000 in legal fees, on average, to three to four months, with very little likelihood of legal recourse.

And most importantly, we called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state—essentially, proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue at impasse. So a very, very bold proposal for Illinois, and one that six months earlier would have been unthinkable, undiscussable.

And after the election, I went back to Madigan…I reviewed the proposal, and I confirmed his support…The next day he created an education reform committee, and his political director called to ask for our suggestions for who should be on it. And so in Aurora, Ill., in December, out of nowhere, there were hearings on our proposal…

In addition we hired 11 lobbyists, including the four best insiders and seven of the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a statewide public affairs firm…We raised $3 million for our political action committee between the election and the end of the year. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.

And so essentially, what we did in a very short period of time was shift the balance of power. I can tell you there was a palpable sense of concern, if not shock, on the part of the teachers unions in Illinois that Speaker Madigan had changed allegiance, and that we had clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down their throats, the same way the pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier.

Stand’s “Performance Counts” was used as a battering ram to get the less harsh Senate Bill 7. As Edelman explained, “[B]ecause we started extreme, we gave ourselves room to come back….And so, in the course of three months…[the unions] essentially gave away every single provision related to teacher effectiveness that we had proposed…Not irrationally, not idealistically. It wasn’t a change of heart. It’s because they feared that we were able to potentially execute our collective bargaining proposal.”

Edelman’s anti-union comments rightly produced outrage among union and education activists and Edelman, realizing he had blown Stand for Children’s progressive cover, issued an extended apology. Edelman said he regretted that he “left children mostly out of the equation,” and that the speech “could cause viewers to wrongly conclude that I’m against unions.” The lengthy apology was obviously nothing more than an attempt to rehabilitate the image of SFC and Edelman.

For their part, the leaders of Illinois’ three main education unions blasted Edelman in a joint statement:

We heard a lot from Jonah Edelman about power in politics, power over unions and management power over teachers. Sadly, we didn’t hear anything in that hour-long session about improving education…What’s worse is that these false claims clearly show an organizational agenda that has nothing to do with helping kids learn.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

What should be clear after reading Edelman’s remarks is that Stand for Children, rather than standing for the rights of poor children, has become an organization that stands for Corporate America. In order to push its agenda, groups like SFC try to get parents and other community members who care about education to buy into the myth that teachers have bloated pensions and are impossible to fire.

But any real account of the current atmosphere for teachers flies in the face of this fairy tale.

Chicago, in particular, has seen its school system devastated by a slew of corporate reformers: Paul Vallas (1995-2001), who later became the architect behind the union-busting and charterization plan in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Arne Duncan (2001-2008), who privatized Chicago public schools at a rate of about 10 per year before becoming Barack Obama’s Education Secretary; Ron Huberman (2009-2010), who weakened protections for probationary teachers and cut sports programs, while paying exorbitant salaries to central office officials; and now Jean-Claude Brizard (2010-present), the former superintendent of Rochester, N.Y., where 95 percent of teachers voted “no confidence” in his administration.

Chicago has become a testing ground for corporate education policy, which has created a terrible atmosphere for teachers.

For example, a week before the Edelman scandal broke, the Chicago Reader printed an insightful story by Ben Joravsky about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that debunks the teachers-are-impossible-to-fire myth. According to Joravsky, Allison Bates, a third-year science teacher at a high school called Austin Polytechnical Academy, “was fired and banned from working anywhere in CPS for the unforgivable sin of—hold on to your hats, folks—not putting her lesson plans in the red folder, as her principal told her.”

Bates’ first principal had given her an “excellent” rating, but within a year, he was promoted to the central office and replaced by a new principal from North Carolina, and Bates was given an “unsatisfactory” rating. This rating had nothing to do with her ability to manage a classroom or teach science to her students, but was due to her forgetting to follow the principal’s instructions to put printed-out copies of her lesson plans in a red folder.

As Joravsky points out:

[P]robationary teachers—that is, those with less than four years in the classroom—have no tenure rights. They have their jobs on a year-to-year basis and can be fired without much of an explanation. Moreover, probationary teachers who are given unsatisfactory evaluations and who are not rehired at their schools are slapped with a do-not-hire designation. Principals can hire back teachers evaluated as unsatisfactory, but if they don’t, the teachers are essentially banned from ever teaching anywhere in the CPS system.

This story reveals that the complaints of Edelman and James Crown about the difficulties in firing teachers are nothing more than a pretext for attacking what few rights teachers have left.

For the first several years, when teachers are in their probationary period, they can be fired for almost any reason. When teachers receive “tenure,” they can still be fired—the difference is that now they have access to due process, a basic right written into most union contracts, and they can file a grievance if they feel they were unjustly terminated.

Though cloaked in language about helping children, the purpose of further restricting teachers’ rights to due process and to strike is to take control of the classroom out of the hands of teachers and the communities they serve—and putting it under the authority of corporate boardrooms.

Breaking the teachers’ unions—now the largest sector of organized labor in the U.S.—is about smashing any organized resistance to the bipartisan drive for austerity. Edelman’s comments may be unique in their candor, but the ideas he espouses are commonplace among corporate education reformers—whether they come in Republican or Democratic clothing.

As the Edelman scandal makes clear, the ruling class is preparing to export the strategy it adopted in Illinois to the rest of the country. It will be up to teachers, parents and students to expose organizations like Stand for Children—and organize the fight to defend public education.

Scholastic has also partnered with Shell Oil Company to create science lessons that explore “energy conservation and practical ‘green’ solutions,” which help focus students on their own individual “carbon footprint” while conveniently ignoring Shell’s much larger one. Scholastic’s “Shedding Light on Energy” teacher’s guide that is still promoted on their website (along with the Shell curriculum) was written by the Chamber of Commerce, whose unwavering climate change denial was too much for even Apple, the company named the biggest polluter in the technology industry by Greenpeace. Other previous Scholastic clients have included McDonald’s, Cartoon Network, Nestle and Disney.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The story of Scholastic’s partnership with the American Coal Foundation is unique, not because the coal industry is paying Scholastic to help distribute propaganda aimed at benefiting their corporate image, but because teachers and environmental activists spoke out against this dirty corporate marriage and forced a divorce.

It started when Bill Bigelow, an editor of Rethinking Schools and a member of Climate Justice Portland, contacted the American Coal Foundation to see if they would send him some coal for a lesson he was teaching as part of a larger unit on climate change. Not knowing that Bigelow was a climate justice activist, the American Coal Foundation representative agreed and informed Bigelow of the coal curriculum that Scholastic had produced for them.

“It didn’t surprise me to learn that Scholastic had a partnership with the coal industry,” said Bigelow. “To read most mainstream textbooks, you’d think that all of them are sponsored by the coal industry. They consistently downplay the climate crisis and fail to get students thinking critically about what and who is responsible.” In fact, the Spring 2011 issue of Rethinking Schools is titled “Climate Crisis in the Classroom.” The lead editorial points out how most classroom textbooks approach climate change with equivocating and ambiguous language that stands in stark contrast to the clear scientific consensus. The editors write, “If the purpose of education is to serve humanity, then this climate emergency should be accompanied by widespread rethinking and revision of the curriculum—a massive undertaking to equip children to understand the causes of the climate crisis and the enormity of its potential consequences.”

The Scholastic coal curriculum does precisely the opposite. After receiving a copy of “The United States of Energy” Bigelow wrote a scathing critique of the curriculum for Rethinking Schools. He points out that “the Scholastic curriculum includes nothing about perhaps the worst aspect of burning coal: that it is the single greatest contributor to human-created, climate-altering, civilization-threatening greenhouse gases.”

Outraged by the pro-coal curriculum, Bigelow contacted the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and together with Rethinking Schools and Friends of the Earth they launched a campaign in early May to pressure Scholastic to remove “The United States of Energy” from their website. There was an immediate response from people all across the country. Within a few hours of launching the campaign over 1,500 people had sent letters to Scholastic asking them to remove the curriculum. Within days a whole slew of news outlets picked up the story including Mother Jones, Time, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Times. Some of Scholastic’s own book authors began contacting the publisher to express disgust with the coal industry partnership.

After a two day publicity nightmare, Scholastic agreed to the campaign’s main demands. They pulled the curriculum off their website and acknowledged that partnering with the coal industry to develop lesson plans was a bad idea. But that’s not the end of the story, because as noted above Scholastic still has an entire division that sells its curriculum services and its logo to all kinds of corporations hoping to create “brand awareness” and “consumer loyalty.” The coalition that now includes Greenpeace USA, 350.org, Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Citizen, and Teaching for Change is demanding that Scholastic end their InSchool Marketing division.

As Bill Bigelow concluded, “I had no idea that this campaign would reach so many people — or that Scholastic would be forced to sever ties with Big Coal. What I found so encouraging about the struggle was that so many education activists, parents, environmentalists, and just plain folks were paying attention to what kids are learning about coal and energy issues. And we won. We showed everyone that if people do their homework and get organized, we can influence the curriculum in important ways. It’s nice to force a small change in the practices of a big corporation, but my aim was never to win over Scholastic. Whether or not we can claim victory really depends on whether we can build a movement of teachers, parents, and environmental justice activists to reshape the school curriculum about energy and climate issues.”

With only a little knowledge of Haitian history before the earthquake, I listened attentively to the daily reports on Democracy Now. As I learned about the role the U.S. government had played in Haitian affairs—the multiple occupations, the support for dictatorships, the CIA-backed coups—it seemed to me that the “aid” effort had to be viewed in the light of this history. For example, after the U.S. government took control of the Port-au-Prince airport, several journalists reported that planes carrying French and Cuban doctors and emergency supplies were turned away.

One year after the earthquake, more than a million Haitians are still homeless, only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed, and only 10 percent of the $5.3 billion in aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has been spent. In the aftermath of the failed aid effort, a deadly cholera outbreak has exploded across the country. So far 5,000 Haitians have died of the disease out of 300,000 who have been infected. The Haitian writer and activist Jean Saint-Vil told Democracy Now, “One year after the earthquake, we are seeing the Haitian population being treated and seen as a threat, rather than as an asset.”

The role played by the U.S. government raises critical questions for students and teachers. How does Haiti’s history explain why it experienced such devastation as a result of the earthquake? Who or what is responsible? And why has Haiti not been able to quickly rebuild and recover?

These were the questions I wanted my civics students at Lincoln High School in Portland, Ore.,to address. Lincoln is a large public school serving Portland’s predominantly white, moderately affluent Westside. A few months after the earthquake, I prepared a unit that I hoped would take my students through a learning experience similar to the one I went through in the first weeks after the disaster.

We spent the first two weeks of the unit building background information. It was important that students understood the significance of the Haitian revolution—the only successful slave rebellion in history—which became an inspiration for other revolutions across the world and ended in the creation of the first independent nation of Latin America in 1804. My students were stunned that it took nearly 60 years for the U.S. government to recognize the first black republic, that the French immediately saddled Haiti with a debt of 90 million gold francs to pay slave owners for their “stolen property,” and that in 1915 U.S. Marines invaded Haiti and occupied the country for 19 years. My students wondered why they had never before learned about the U.S. occupation of Haiti. As Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat so eloquently explained: “Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.”

Through readings, film, and art, we surveyed Haitian history. The more recent historical events—the U.S.-supported Duvalier regimes, the popular Lavalas movement that brought President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, and the two U.S.-backed coups that decimated the movement and eventually exiled Aristide to South Africa—were eye-opening for students, just as they were for me. In one video students watched Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberté, explain the significance of this history as the backdrop to the 2009 earthquake:

This earthquake was preceded by a political and economic earthquake with an epicenter 2,000 miles north of here, in Washington, D.C., over the past 24 years.We can say, first of all, there was the case of the two coups d’états held in the space of 13 years, in 1991 and 2004, which were backed by the United States. They put in their own client regimes, which the Haitian people chased out of power. . . . Aristide, in both cases, was taken from Haiti, essentially by U.S. forces. [Aristide was exiled to South Africa after the 2004 coup. He returned to Haiti, over Obama’s objections, in March 2011.]

Learning some of this history helped students grasp what Danticat calls the “long and painful cycle of destruction and reconstruction, self-governance and subjugation” that Haitians have endured.

Putting the Tragedy on Trial

For the final week we turned our class into a courtroom and put the tragedy on trial. I used the trial as the basis for a final unit essay. The assignment for both the trial and the essay asked “Who is responsible for the tragedy in Haiti?” and began:

In Haiti, a 7.0 earthquake all but destroyed Port-au-Prince, the capital city, and killed more than 230,000 Haitians. In 1994, an earthquake of similar force hit Southern California with relatively minor infrastructure damage and 72 people killed. This means that the tragedy in Haiti cannot be attributed solely to this natural disaster. What other factors have contributed to this catastrophe? Who or what should be held responsible?

In small groups, students took on the role of one of five defendants: the U.S. Government, the French Government, the Duvaliers, the Haitian People, and the System of Profit. I played the prosecutor, charging each group with the murder of thousands of Haitians because of their role in exacerbating the crisis. I wanted hard-hitting indictments that, well, would make students defensive, and require them to think hard from their group’s perspective. Here is an excerpt from each indictment (download full indictments here):

The U.S. Government: In 1915, your marines invaded Haiti to protect U.S. business interests. You imposed martial law and rewrote the constitution to benefit foreign companies. . . . Most U.S. presidents supported the brutal Duvalier dictatorships with massive amounts of aid, despite their terrible human rights records. . . . You opposed Aristide’s government because it was looking to build the national self-sufficiency of Haiti. . . . So the natural catastrophe of the earthquake was preceded by more than 100 years of political and economic catastrophes “made in the USA” that made the devastation of the earthquake even worse.
The French Government: When Haitians won their independence in 1804 from you, their colonizers, they would have had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen slave labor. You, however, were convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners. So in 1825, with warships stationed off the Haitian coast threatening to re-enslave the former colony, King Charles X of France came to collect 90 million gold francs—10 times Haiti’s annual revenue at the time. . . . This callous debt has shackled the Haitian people for years and made the destruction caused by the earthquake even worse.
“Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier: As dictators, father and son, you ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 to 1986. Under your regime, Haiti was marked by both extreme poverty and immense wealth, as it still is today. Per capita income was only $377 in 1985, while the Duvalier family fortune was estimated to be more than $500 million, most of it obtained through corruption. . . . While you ran Haiti, you incurred $844 million in debt to international banks, which Haitians have been forced to pay back for decades. . . . Although neither of you was in Haiti during the earthquake, your legacy of poverty and debt made the effects of the earthquake much worse.
Haitians: Although you are the victims of this crime, you are also guilty of committing it. After a valiant struggle to win independence, you handed over the reins of the government to one tyrant after another. . . . In fact, the United States would never have involved itself in Haiti if you had been able to create a stable democratic government. . . . If you had organized your own society to build stronger infrastructure, the damage from the earthquake would not have been so great.
The System of Profit: You are not a person or a government, but a system. . . . True, the French and U.S. governments put their country’s business interests in front of the Haitian people’s livelihood. But what made them act the way they did? . . . Obviously, no one person, group, or government can be blamed for the tragedy in Haiti. It’s a much larger process that at its root is economic.

After reading their full roles, each group of students prepared a defense. I encouraged them to also state which other groups they thought should shoulder the blame. (Each group had access to the indictments of all the other groups.) When the groups finished preparing, I picked one person from each to be on the jury and swore them in—getting all jury members to pledge fairness and impartiality.

Throughout the activity, students were able to bring both their knowledge of Haitian history and the aftermath of the earthquake into their defenses and accusations. I was struck by how well students performed their roles, even if they disagreed with what they were arguing.

The group representing the United States tried to minimize their involvement in Haiti and instead blamed the Duvalier dictatorships and the Haitian people. “It is true that we have intervened in Haiti many times,” acknowledged Bethany, speaking for the group, “but we have only done so with the intention of helping the Haitian people.” The group used the argument of humanitarian intervention, echoing several Fox News and ABC clips we had watched the week before. Bethany concluded, “It is the extremely corrupt government of the Duvaliers, and the Haitian people who allowed them to take power, that deserve the blame.”

But no other groups let the U.S. government off the hook. After each defense, I required the defendants to field a few questions from the prosecutor (me) and students on the jury. For example, Josh asked the U.S. defendants, “How can you blame the Duvalier dictatorships when you gave them so much aid?” I asked: “And how can you blame the Haitian people when after they overthrew the ‘corrupt government’ that you supported, you worked to undermine their first democratically elected administration?” These can be challenging questions for students to answer on the spot, so I encouraged them to consult with each other before responding.

Then I read a new indictment, and the next group began their defense. Representing the government of France, Jacob admitted responsibility for the initial debt the French demanded from newly independent Haiti but asserted, “Our involvement wasn’t anywhere close to the destruction caused by the occupations, coups, and selfish policies of the U.S. government.” The group defending the system of profit claimed that although they set the rules of the game, it was corrupt players like the Duvaliers and the governments of France and the United States who chose to abuse those rules. Those representing the Duvaliers attempted to portray themselves as mere puppets of the powerful U.S. government and maintained that they were merely following the rules of a broken system.

But the most damning critique came from the students representing the Haitian people. Speaking for the group, Sarah reminded us of the history of struggle in Haiti beginning with the Haitian revolution and culminating in the Lavalas movement, but stressed that “at every step along the way, foreign powers—in particular, the U.S. government—have been suppressing Haitian democracy and attempting to shape Haiti to their own interests.” Referring to the U.S. involvement in the aid effort after the earthquake, she concluded: “What is extremely disgusting is that when Haitians were most in need of help, the U.S. could only think of itself. They brought 20,000 troops into Haiti to bring stability for their corporations and prioritized their own interests over the desperate need of the Haitian people.”

Who’s Guilty?

After all the groups had finished presenting and answering questions, I gave the jury some time out in the hall to deliberate. I told the jury to decide which group or groups were guilty and to assign percentages of blame to each group. As the jury deliberated, I asked students to step outside their roles and write about who they thought were the guilty parties and why.

Most students attributed responsibility for the tragedy to three groups: the U.S. government, the French government, and the Duvalier regime. Julie gave 30 percent of the blame to the French government: “After 15 years of rebellion and war, the Haitians should have been free and in control of their own country. Yet France still refused to recognize Haiti as an independent nation. They threatened to re-enslave the Haitians unless they paid 90 million gold francs—10 times Haiti’s annual revenue at the time! Unable to refuse or pay, the Haitians were left with a debt that crippled their economy for years to come.”

Jacob gave 25 percent of the blame to the Duvalier dictatorships: “Because Haiti had such terrible, selfish leaders it never economically developed and its citizens weren’t even able to express their opinions without fear of repression. The Duvaliers stole millions of dollars from the Haitian people and their policies only exacerbated the gap between rich and poor.”

Lauren pointed out that the Duvaliers were merely pawns in the economic strategy of the United States. She gave the U.S. government 50 percent of the blame: “The U.S. is mainly responsible for the extent of the tragedy in Haiti because of their support for the Duvaliers, their efforts to destabilize and remove Aristide, and their imperialist promotion of sweatshop labor in Haiti. The current aid effort is equally disastrous. It is horrific the lengths the U.S. will go to keep a country impoverished and desperate in order to increase the profits of U.S. corporations.”

There was a healthy debate about how much blame should be assigned to the system of profit. Although Lauren condemned the U.S. government, she also believed that the system of profit should not be blamed because “under any economic system people still get taken advantage of. Governments need to regulate the abuses of all systems.” Jacob disagreed. He wrote: “While capitalism can’t be punished like a normal human being it deserves much of the blame for setting the unfair rules of the game. Without the drive for profit, would the French and U.S. have needed to exploit cheap Haitian labor? Would the Duvaliers have been able to maintain such insatiable greed at the expense of Haitian people? Capitalism forces companies and governments to take advantage of people in order to stay alive.” Though students struggled with the concept, I think it was important to include the system of profit as one of the defendants. This role forced students to grapple with the idea that these different individuals, governments, and social groups were acting within a framework that encourages decisions that value profit over human need.

Students were also conflicted about whether the Haitian people deserved some of the blame. Although most felt it was unfair to blame the Haitians for the tragedy they were the victims of, some wondered whether they could have done more to improve their circumstances. Rebecca gave Haitians 10 percent of the blame: “The Haitian people overthrew the French government and the Duvalier regime. They came together to get rid of unjust regimes that weren’t benefiting the people. If they did it before, why couldn’t they do it again?” But Sarah disagreed: “I don’t think the Haitian people deserve any of the blame. At every step they resisted much more powerful foreign powers. They fought against the French to win their independence and they fought against the U.S. and the Duvalier dictatorship the U.S. supported. The Haitian people built a powerful movement that brought Aristide to power. They resisted again and again but they were up against much more powerful nations with very different interests. You can’t blame them for that.”

After the Trial

In the trial role play, I’d had to make tough choices in narrowing the defendants to a manageable number, but now I wanted students to question my choices. After the role play, I asked students to reflect on other possible “defendants” that I may have left out. Lauren pointed out: “U.S. corporations took advantage of Haiti’s low-cost labor, the mainstream media has been complicit in reporting only the U.S. government’s side of the story, and the IMF and the World Bank played just as big a role as the French government in saddling Haiti with debt.” Another student commented: “It was difficult to think of the Haitian people as one singular group. We could have split the Haitian people into several different categories.”

Indeed, when I originally conceived of the trial I had split up the Haitian people into Aristide and the Lavalas movement, poor farmers, factory workers, and the Haitian elite; but ultimately I decided I did not have a big enough classroom for that many groups. Lumping all Haitians into one category made it difficult for students to discuss the complexities of Haitian society, and led some students to more confidently assign blame to Haitians and overlook the rich history of resistance against the ruling elite.

Despite these weaknesses, the role play was a wonderful primer for their unit essay. Students were able to first articulate their ideas in class discussions and then put them in writing during the post-trial reflection. The trial was a perfect prewriting activity since it allowed students to collect and present evidence that they would later use in their essays. The essays were thoughtful, in-depth, and comprehensive, despite no previous engagement with Haitian history and politics before this unit.

Most students expressed despair about the situation in Haiti. In the future, I would like to spend more time covering how Haitians have organized in the aftermath of the earthquake. In particular, I would teach about the mothers and grandmothers in KOFAVIV, who have set up their own security in several refugee camps to protect each other from sexual assault. This is a heart-wrenching yet important example of Haitian self-organization in the face of the most disastrous conditions. I also plan to provide more examples of organizations doing positive work in Haiti, like Partners in Health. Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, Partners in Health runs the Zanmi Lasante Medical Center, which delivers health care through a network of clinics throughout Haiti’s central plateau and advocates for social and economic rights for their patients.

Yet, even without these examples, a few students were able to find hope in the shadow of the tragedy. Sarah concluded her essay with a call to action: “Haiti is an impoverished, unstable nation, living under the thumb of first world countries. But the earthquake is a wake-up call and potential for a new beginning. Though the American reconstruction plan centers on low-wage assembly line jobs, Haiti has fertile soil that could be used for the benefit of the Haitian people. Haitians have shown again and again that they can organize together against oppressive regimes and meddling foreign governments. We need to learn from them and demand that our own government step back and let Haiti govern itself and choose its own path.”

First published at Rethinking Schools

The truth is that Arne Duncan is in denial and he is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving him wrong every day. This is the message from those who are protesting his policies from Cambridge to Chicago to Providence and beyond. And it will certainly be the message when thousands of educators gather at the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C. at which Diane Ravitch (not Arne Duncan) will be one of the keynote speakers.

Cambridge —Last Thursday, Harvard graduate and current U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was honored as the Chief Marshall of his alma mater’s graduation ceremonies.

Traditionally, the Chief Marshal for Harvard Commencement is elected from the class that is celebrating its 25th reunion, according to the Harvard News Service. Duncan, who graduated in 1986, was elected to the post by his classmates.

But for a handful of educators and activists just outside the university gates, the event wasn’t a reason for celebration.

Close to 60 protesters gathered in Harvard Square to speak up against Duncan’s policies as secretary of education — policies, they said, that depend too much on standardized testing.

“We are here to let the world know about the problems that he’s caused for our teachers and our families,” Liza Womack said. Womack — herself a Harvard alum, an elementary schoolteacher and an organizer for Speak out for Public Education — emceed speeches by educators, activists and local politicians.

Many of the speeches were critical of the federal Race to the Top program, which awards grant funding to states that meet certain criteria, including developing testing standards to evaluate teacher performance.

In his speech, Alfie Kohn called the program “operation discourage bright people from wanting to teach.”

“There’s so much more to education and public education than what you can measure in a standardized test,” Cambridge School Committee member Marc McGovern said just before the protests started. “We are losing creativity, collaboration and critical thinking skills. We have to focus on all the things that don’t fit into a nice, neat little box.”

In a fiery speech of his own, former City Councilor and current council candidate Larry Ward urged the crowd to “keep fighting, keep fighting and keep fighting.”

“Arne, get out of our lives and get out of education,” he said.

Copyright 2011 Cambridge Chronicle. Some rights reserved

This seems like a great way to build a national movement to defend public education. A protest like this one should be organized everywhere Arne Duncan (and Chris Christie) go.

For Anyon, the deterioration of public schools during this period cannot be explained without understanding the political economy of cities. Urban policies such as redlining, tax codes that favored corporate investment outside the city, property tax laws that penalized cities with shrinking property owners to tax, all contributed to the disinvestment and increased segregation of public schools.

Anyon extends this critique to flagship education policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. She maintains, “both regimes have counted on education to solve the problems of unemployment and increases in poverty…. Race to the Top, and its antecedent No Child Left Behind, are policy substitutes for economic reform.” She makes the important case that more education does not often translate into more and better jobs. In Anyon’s words,

in 2006, the occupational demands of jobs required that only 27.7 percent of the workforce have a college degree or more. The Department of Labor predicts this share will rise by one percentage point to 28.7 by 2016…. In 2005, One of six college graduates was in a job paying less than the average salary of high school graduates. Between 8.8 and 11 percent of people with a bachelor’s degree made around the minimum wage…Even the education levels of welfare recipients are higher than ever…. Given these fallacies in the argument that higher education standards and more difficult tests will pull people out of poverty by allowing them to obtain good jobs, it would make sense to actually create good jobs for people who need them.

Anyon points to a range of progressive economic policies as the way to fight poverty: minimum wage legislation, a progressive tax code, anti-poverty and jobs programs, affordable housing and public transportation and more union-friendly labor laws. Yet Anyon argues that in order to win these reforms we should draw on Marx’s vision of political struggle. She draws on the social movements of the past in order to provide a vision for how education reform is won:

The radical tumult of the early 20th century Progressive Era opened public schools to the community in many cities, and increased educational opportunities for working-class immigrant families in the form of kindergarten, vacation schools, night school, social settlement programs and libraries. As a result of the Civil Rights Movement Head Start, a radical innovation by activists in Jackson Mississippi, moved to center stage in federal education policy; and segregation of blacks in public schools became illegal…. In the 1970s and 80s, the women’s, disabilities, and bilingual education movements also had significant impacts on schooling—opening up opportunities previously denied great numbers of students.

Her final chapter suggests ways to extend Marxist theory and practice for contemporary problems. In particular, she asserts that David Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession, where public resources are converted into private profit-making enterprises, can help us understand the increasing drive to privatize public schools. Anyon also claims that an analysis of the increased financialization of the economy should help inform any examination of schooling today. As she writes, “School districts, as well, have been caught up in the financial turmoil, and have been dispossessed of money they invested with wealthy hedge funds and banks…. towns and cities have lost almost 30 billion dollars in the last two years, as they have attempted to extract themselves from complicated financial arrangements.”

While these efforts to extend Marxist theory for contemporary issues should be welcomed, throughout the book Anyon also mischaracterizes Marxism and uncritically gives too much ground to Marxism’s critics. She names a number of education scholars who use Critical Race Theory or feminism in their critiques and base their analyses of oppression on race or gender rather than class. We should certainly acknowledge that important contributions to our understanding of education often come from scholars who are not solely inspired by Marxism, but in Marx and Education there is no discussion about how these theories stack up to the Marxist view of oppression and more importantly, which theories might be more helpful for those fighting racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This leaves the reader with the false impression that Marx and Marxists, more generally, have had little to say about racial or gender oppression.

Anyon also argues “Marxist theory is based on industrial capitalism as it existed in the late 19th century,” and consequently, “in addition to organizing at the ‘point of production’…we need to organize society-wide. The struggle is no longer only of low-income, minority and white working-class families against the capitalist class. Working for progressive change now involves all of us.” This analysis seems to stem from a misinterpretation of Marx’s theory of the working class, which she characterizes as “the industrial proletariat.” But Anyon goes even further conceding, “’Revolution’ itself appears an old fashion concept.” These formulations strike me as particularly misguided at a time when revolutions are spreading through the Middle East and North Africa with the working class playing a crucial role.

There are also crucial discussions that are completely absent from the book. While this should be expected in a short introduction only a little over one hundred pages long, I think some subjects left out are too important to be neglected. There is no discussion of the class position of teachers or the teachers’ unions, or why the unions continue to back the Democrats despite their position on education, or how Marxist teachers could work inside the unions to challenge these policies and help build a social movement for better public education. Given that teachers are the largest sector of unionized workers in the country, this seems to be a glaring omission. Furthermore, while there is plenty of discussion on misguided ruling class policies, there is little written about why —from a ruling class mindset—these policies are being implemented, and in particular, why they have gained steam during the economic crisis.

Despite these weaknesses, Marx and Education is a crucial text for those looking to explore how Marxist theory can be and has been applied to education. In little more than one hundred pages, Anyon provides a crucial starting point for Marxists looking to explore education theory and makes a strong case for the relevance of Marxist theory in the struggles to defend and improve public education.

Jean Anyon’s new book, Marx and Education, offers a powerful response to this common critique. The book uses the trajectory of Anyon’s own scholarship, along with several of her contemporaries, as a road map for exploring the contributions of Marxist thinkers to education policy and research. In this short introduction, Anyon hopes to encourage others to use a Marxist framework to solve the many dilemmas educators face today. As Anyon points out, those problems are numerous:

Education budgets across the country are relatively far less than they were in recent years, despite the federal stimulus moneys that became available in 2009. In such difficult times, curriculum in many urban schools shrinks to the bare bones of test prep worksheets, as art, music, and sports become distant memories. Services in poor neighborhoods and districts are cut, and low-income students and their families suffer.

More and more, middle-class jobs are disappearing, and one in ten college graduates is in a minimum wage job; over a quarter of low-wage job holders have had some college education. Since 2009, more than half the students in the U.S. K-12 classrooms have been eligible for free or reduced lunch. And the proportion of students who attend high poverty schools has increased by 42 percent since 2000, with almost half of black and Latino students in such schools (and five percent of whites). A 2009 study of college completion found that 91 percent of low-income students who enter a four-year college do not finish, with most citing lack of money as the reason. In these times of high joblessness, long-term unemployment, and increasing poverty, it is not difficult to see how Marx may be relevant.

Indeed, it is not only the opportunity gap between the rich and the poor and the budget cuts to education and public services that make Marx’s ideas pertinent for educators, but also the deskilling of the teaching profession, the ever-increasing expenditures on capital—computers and other gadgetry—, and the bi-partisan drive to break teachers’ and other public sector unions, that makes Marxism more relevant than ever.

According to Anyon, the introduction of Marxist ideas into the social context of education began in the late 1970s, as leftists inspired by the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s went in to the field of education research. In 1976, radical economists Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis published Schooling in Capitalist America, one of the first Marxist texts to receive wide attention in education circles. Schooling in Capitalist America challenged the dominant notion that education is the golden ticket out of poverty. In fact, Bowles and Gintis argued that schooling actually reinforces class divisions. As Anyon summarizes, “The authors argued that the experiences of students, and the skills they develop in school in different social contexts (e.g. working-class or wealthy communities), exhibited striking correspondences to the experiences and skills that would characterize their likely occupational positions later…. Because of this correspondence, education did not seem to be the ‘social leveler’ Americans had long been taught. Rather, schools tended to reproduce unequal labor positions that the economic system had created.” At the same time Bowles and Gintis lived through the student struggles of the 1960s and saw how schools and colleges can be places where a highly egalitarian and political consciousness is developed and fostered. Using the Marxist dialectic, they pointed to the central contradiction in the education system: “while the system of schooling certainly functions primarily to legitimate and reproduce inequality, it sometimes produces critics, rebels, and radicals.”

Inspired by Schooling in Capitalist America, Anyon aimed her early research at gathering empirical data to back up Bowles and Gintis’ claims. Her first seminal study investigated fifth grade classrooms in five different elementary schools in New Jersey—two working-class schools, a middle-class school, an affluent professional school and an executive elite school. Anyon found that the pedagogy used in each school corresponded to the income bracket that school served:

The Working-Class Schools: In the two working-class schools, work was following the steps of procedure. The procedure was usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice on the part of the student. The teachers rarely explained why the work was being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. Most of the rules regarding work were designations of what the children are to do; the rules are steps to follow…. Work was often evaluated not according to whether it was right or wrong, but according to whether the children followed the right steps.

Middle-Class School: In the middle-class school, work was getting the right answer. If one accumulated enough right answers one got a good grade. One must follow the directions in order to get the right answers, but the directions often called for some figuring, some choice, some decision making…. Answers were usually to be had in books or by listening to the teacher. Answers were usually words, sentences, numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and one should be neat. Answers must be in the right order and one can not make them up.

Affluent Professional School: In the affluent professional school, work was creative activity carried out independently. The students were continually asked to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involved individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and material. The products of work in this class were often written stories, editorials and essays, or representations of ideas in mural, graph, or craft form. The products of work should not be like everybody else’s, and should show individuality…. When right answers were called for… it was important that the children decided on the answer as a result of thinking about the idea involved in what they were being asked to do. Teacher’s hints were often to “think about it some more.”

Executive Elite School: In the executive elite school, work was developing one’s analytical intellectual powers. Children were continually asked to reason through a problem, and to produce intellectual products that were both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought was to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems, and then to apply these rules in solving a problem. School work helps one to achieve, to excel, to prepare for life…. The work tasks of the children in this school seemed to speak less to creativity or thinking independently… In many cases, work involved understanding the internal structure of things: the logic by which systems of numbers, words, or ideas are arranged and may be rearranged. And the type of control for which the children were being prepared involved being treated with respect, as equals. They were expected to set their own priorities, internalize control, and exercise it appropriately.

Anyon’s study certainly seems to confirm Bowles and Gintis’ theory that the traits and skills learned in the education system correspond to the needs of the economy.

The other two works published in the 1970s and 80s that Anyon notes as crucial Marxian texts on education are Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum and Henry Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education. As Anyon explains, Apple’s work reveals “that not only does the experience of schooling have reproductive qualities, but so does the content of learning—the formal curriculum itself…. Language patterns, ways of knowing, and specific bodies of knowledge of dominant groups are what the U.S. educational system validates as legitimate and therefore correct…. Thus in school, the knowledge and ways of seeing the world of dominant white (male) elites in U.S. society are validated by being included in the school curriculum, and students study the lives of presidents and generals, but not of working class, blacks, or women.”

Giroux’s Theory and Resistance in Education argues that the ways in which working-class students resist schooling often stem from the dominant schooling culture as described by Apple and Anyon. What working-class student wants to learn about a bunch of dead rich white guys? Who wants to simply be taught to follow rules and mechanically answer questions that seem to have no relevance? Giroux contends that any analysis of student resistance should take these questions into account and not simply dismiss confrontations as anti-authoritarian behavior. Seen in this light, student defiance can challenge the dominant culture reproduced in schooling.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This is the first part of my two-part review of Jean Anyon’s Marx and Education. Read the second part here.

When you look at budget fights from California to Oregon, from Illinois to New York, from Massachusetts to Washington D.C., it should be apparent that not only are Democrats refusing to fight, but they are taking an active role in pushing austerity. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely the rest of the labor movement will follow the firefighters example.

I am a high school social studies teacher and a member of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest union in the United States. In 2008, the NEA spent more money and had more of our members working on the Obama presidential campaign than any other union. So it should be no surprise that on May 5, the NEA Political Action Committee voted to recommend endorsing Obama for reelection in 2012. The membership will be voting on this recommendation at the NEA Representative Assembly meeting in July.

In announcing the recommendation, NEA President Dennis van Roekel asked:

Will we allow Congress to gut Medicare, slash education and cut Social Security, and continue to make it just fine for hedge fund managers and corporations to sidestep paying taxes?…It is time to stand strong for what we believe in and what is right for students and families, schools and the nation. President Barack Obama has proven he deserves a second term.”

Did I miss something? How does defending Medicare, education and Social Security and wanting corporations and hedge funds to pay taxes lead to a vote for Barack Obama?

Obama just helped to pass the biggest single-year budget cut in history–$38.5 billion–much of which came from education, labor and health care programs. These cuts will devastate low-income communities across the country. They include cutting $390 million from a program that provides heating assistance for low-income people and $600 million from community health clinics. Another cut ends Pell grants, which provide financial aid for college students, during summer school. Another eliminates $3 billion in bonuses to states that have increased the enrollment of uninsured children in Medicaid.

Obama has also proposed a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years, largely through more cuts to essential services. As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, this plan includes $360 million in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. How exactly is supporting a President who is championing cuts to Medicare and Social Security preventing those programs from being gutted? And how is endorsing a President who proposes draconian cuts to programs that help the most vulnerable standing strong for students, families and schools?

What about taxing corporations and hedge funds? While it’s true that in a recent speech Obama promised to end the tax loopholes for corporations, at the same time, he proposed to lower the already absurdly low corporate tax rate from 35 percent to less than 30 percent and possibly as low as 26 percent. These proposals come at a time when U.S. corporations are making record profits. Furthermore, why should we believe that Obama would actually close the loopholes when he has a long track record of breaking promises that would benefit ordinary people and not billionaires?

Additionally, there is no evidence to indicate the Obama administration has any desire to curb the extravagant profits of hedge funds. Along with the NEA, hedge-fund managers were huge donors to Obama’s campaign in 2008. In fact, Wall Street donated $10 to Obama for every $7 they gave to McCain. And while the hedge fund titans may be giving more to the GOP in 2012, you can bet they’ll also have plenty of cash left over for the “world’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party.”

Unlike the NEA, Wall Street actually gets something for the money they spend on elections. The bailouts and the array of programs Barack Obama and his economic advisers continued or concocted as the first priority of their administration amounted to the largest transfer of wealth in U.S. history from taxpayers to Wall Street. Back when the Democrats had complete control of Congress (since it seems like we’re trying to forget that they still control the Senate), they passed a financial “reform” bill that does nothing to prevent banks from making the same risky decisions that led to the financial meltdown and subsequent bailout.

What should be apparent is that if we want to prevent politicians from gutting Medicare, slashing education and cutting Social Security, if we want them to change the regressive corporate and income tax structure and bail out Main Street rather than Wall Street, we will need a much better strategy than simply reelecting Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2012.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

IN ADDITION to these backwards priorities, Obama has presided over some of the harshest attacks on public education in decades. As education scholar Diane Ravitch has pointed out, when it comes to education, Obama’s presidency has been like Bush’s third term.

In fact, Obama’s Race to the Top program, which asks states to compete for a limited pool of cash, is a neoliberal privatization scheme Bush probably wishes he had come up with. It dangles money in front of cash-starved state governments and only lets go if they end restrictions on charter schools (almost all of which are non-union) and tie teachers’ pay to students’ standardized test scores.

Arne Duncan, Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education, made a name for himself in Chicago by pushing the corporate agenda and privatizing schools at a rate of about 20 per year. As Secretary of Education, he has touted the wholesale privatization of public schools and the breaking of the teachers’ union after Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” He applauded, along with Obama, the firing of every single teacher at Central Falls, a high poverty high school in Rhode Island. And he has backed the most power-hungry, teacher-hating administrators, like Robert Bobb, who has helped push the Detroit public school system to the brink of financial collapse and is now asking teachers and students to pay the price.

Duncan has partnered with the most influential pro-corporate foundations–the Gates and Broad Foundations in particular–in crafting his business plan for America’s schools. As Joanne Barkan reports:

Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from [The Gates Foundation]; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad’s education division until February 2009 (as did former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers).

It is for all these reasons that when Duncan tried to show his “appreciation” for teachers in an open letter praising our hard work, many teachers were appalled at the gap between his words and his actions. Teacher after teacher after teacher after teacher after teacher after teacher wrote brilliant, sarcastic and condemning letters in response. As Ravitch acutely observed, “Teachers reacted to the letter with outrage, as if it were addressed to the turkey community on Thanksgiving Day.”

At the very least, the NEA should listen to the voices of teachers across the country and refuse to support Obama’s reelection campaign until Arne Duncan and his corporate cronies are fired.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

YET I think the most compelling reason not to support Obama is the enormous struggle that erupted in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on public-sector unions.

Sparked by a teacher sickout in the capital of Madison that spread to other schools across the state, unionists, students and non-unionized workers occupied the Capitol for nearly a month. Not by electing Democrats, but by marching, by occupying the Capitol, by refusing to go to work, by building solidarity, Wisconsinites were able to shift the national conversation away from blaming public-sector workers. In doing so, they received support from workers across the country and around the world.

But the uprising in Wisconsin didn’t just change the political climate, it changed people. As ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher Ann Marchant explained about her changing work environment in Stevens Point, Wis.: “The big difference I’ve seen is in the community of the school. We have been marching in front of the school together every day for four weeks. I feel like I live in a community now instead of a bubble.”

As many teachers and students, including myself, reported after visiting Madison during the uprising, you could learn more by participating in a few days of struggle at the capitol than years of schooling would teach you. New York City public school counselor Leia Petty described the atmosphere many of us observed in Madison: “The sense of pride and dignity has returned to many who have never felt it in their life: proud to be union, proud to be a worker, proud to be standing up and knowing you’re not in this fight alone.”

All of this was accomplished with only vague and tepid comments of support from the Obama administration. Obama never visited Wisconsin during the protests despite having promised on the campaign trail to walk the picket line with workers if collective bargaining rights were ever under attack.

What the relentless corporate assault during Obama’s presidency has made clear is that we are in a fight for the very survival of public schools. In the last 12 months, nearly 100,000 public education jobs have been eliminated. It’s time to stop throwing away our money, time, and energy for candidates who turn around and attack us once they’re in office. It’s time to build a new political strategy for the labor movement–to draw our line in the sand.

If NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s statement of support for Obama reveals the inadequacy of labor’s past, Wisconsin shows us the way forward. Rather than spending millions of dollars in union dues trying to counterbalance the massive sums of money Obama will be receiving from Wall Street, we should be using that money to hire laid off teachers as organizers. Rather than encouraging NEA members to spend countless hours phone banking and canvassing for Obama, we should be convincing them to initiate and help organize Wisconsin-style protests around the country.

I’m sick of watching the sinking ship that is organized labor desperately try to rearrange the deck chairs…and I don’t think I’m alone.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I will be speaking on From the Moral Majority to the Tea Party: Understanding the Right in the US at this year’s Socialism 2011 conference over 4th of July weekend in Chicago. The Socialism conference is an annual summer conference that brings together activists and radicals from all over the US. Check out the website and register for the conference at socialismconference.org. It is always the highlight of my summer.

Peterson was part of the struggle in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting attack. I visited Madison during the mass protests in March and interviewed Peterson about the struggle in Wisconsin and the issues at stake for teachers.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

OVER THE last few years, we’ve seen an increasing attack on teachers in the context of education “reform.” Can you explain what the climate in Milwaukee and Wisconsin looked like before Governor Walker’s “budget repair bill” that set off the struggle?

THE CLIMATE was bad. Milwaukee is home of the largest publicly funded private school voucher program in the country, with over 20,000 students participating. For two decades, voucher proponents, heavily funded by right-wing foundations, have been attacking public schools and teachers as their key argument for why privatization must occur.

Moreover, the conservatives in the state and their media outlets detest the fact that the state teachers’ union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), plays such a large role in state electoral politics. On top of all that, we have the agenda of Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan, which has enabled the right-wing teacher-bashers, but basically doing the same thing–putting most of the blame for school problems on the shoulders of teachers.

Don’t get me wrong–some criticism is justified. There are gross inequalities and serious problems in schools. The solution, however, is not to privatize, but to transform those schools and the underlying economic and social inequalities in the communities that surround them.

WHEN I was in Madison for the demonstrations against Walker’s bill, I heard many union members chanting, “It’s not about the money, it’s about the rights”–basically stating that they were willing to take all the economic cuts in the bill if they could keep their collective bargaining rights. On the other side, there were figures like Rose Ann DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, who have claimed that labor has never been in a better bargaining position, and that the line should be held at no concessions. Where do you stand on this, and what is your sense of where other teachers stand?

I BELIEVE that the WEAC and AFSCME leaderships took this position for tactical reasons–they were sincere in their willingness to make that concession, and would have done so had the Republicans had any interest in compromise. But that wasn’t the case.

Clearly, most public-sector workers know that we are underpaid relative to private-sector workers with equivalent education. The pension payments we get are part of our overall benefits package. We have taken lower wages for years to make sure our pensions are secure. Workers now are very worried that they won’t be able to make it financially.

TEACHER SICK-OUTS across the state were integral to the first several days of protest, when the state Capitol building in Madison was occupied. Can you give us a sense of how these were organized?

SPONTANEOUSLY. STATE law prohibits public-sector unions from striking or engaging illegal work actions. The president of WEAC did, however, call on teachers and workers to show up in Madison and to “sit down as close as you can” to the state Capitol. Many teachers saw that as a nod to call in sick.

Teachers used social media (e-mail, Facebook and texting) extensively and old-fashioned communication techniques (meeting, talking and phone calling) to try to convince colleagues to call in. At one point, there were a few dozen people crammed into the Rethinking Schools office in Milwaukee, using the phones as a base of operation.

Teachers went back to school because of their understanding that working-class parents could only be imposed on so long before sentiment would turn against us. Short of a general strike that is well-planned and -coordinated, one sector–particularly one that is so intimately connected to caring for the children of the community–can’t politically sustain such a work stoppage.

WHAT ROLE have networks like Rethinking Schools or the Educators’ Network for Social Justice (ENSJ) played in these mobilizations?

ENSJ HAS used its large e-list to keep people informed of daily protests and actions. We have also shared background articles, sample flyers and other materials through the list. Rethinking Schools has opened its offices for meetings and organizing, including one hastily called mass meeting that within two hours drew nearly 100 teachers on a Sunday night.

THE FIRST day I was in Madison–the day teachers went back to work–I met an elementary school teacher who told me that her co-workers were discussing how to go on strike. She expressed that because she taught at a low-income school where the free meal students got was often their only meal for the day, teachers were very reluctant to just leave. On the other hand, she said teachers had begun conversations about how to open the school with a skeleton staff, as a child-care facility while most teachers continued to go to the daily protests.

How widespread do you think these conversations are, and do you think there is a possibility of more workplace actions in the future?

THE CONVERSATIONS are happening daily. There has been a qualitative growth in class consciousness among not only public-sector workers, but also the general population in Milwaukee. There are, however, conservative teachers. Some voted for Scott Walker and are socially conservative. In a democratic union movement, they have the right and should have the opportunity to express their opinions to our membership.

In the end, though, the overwhelming sentiment is to fight back. We will not let our loss of the initial battle deter us.

WHAT DO you think it will take to win the struggle in Wisconsin?

PERSEVERANCE. EDUCATION. Political organizing and a multi-tactic approach. There is a real need for people to understand that only through several simultaneous tracks will we win this.

There has to be a legal approach to try to challenge many of these laws and regulations in court. There has to be direct action–including pickets, protests, rallies, creative nonviolence disruption of Republican events. There has to be massive educational efforts–printed materials, YouTube videos, listening sessions.

There has to be electoral work–recall campaigns of the Republican Senators, and in one year, the governor. There also has to be support for pro-labor candidates in any election in the state. The politicians need to get the message: If you attack working families in Wisconsin, you’re going to be out of a job. Period.

On a strategic level, public-sector workers and unions have to build solid coalitions not only with private-sector unions, but the broader working class as a whole. Particular work has to be done with people of color who have been disenfranchised for so long, and who have legitimate complaints about the racial and class inequalities that have been part of public institutions for too long.

WHAT DO you think is the significance of the movement in Wisconsin for teachers and students nationally? How do you hope this will affect the national conversation about education reform?

IN WISCONSIN, teachers have played a leading role in the working class struggle against these attacks. This kind of role is unprecedented. While we have temporarily lost the first battle for collective bargaining rights, we will continue that struggle while now opening up a new front to battle the draconian budget cuts proposed for the next two years.

The absurd “reform proposals” being put forth by the Duncan cabal are damaging to the education of children, particularly those who live in communities of color. Duncan and company have no clue what life is like in the classroom. They have no clue what our students’ lives are like in neighborhoods that suffer Depression-like economic conditions. They did nothing to try to protect the rights of teachers when under attack by our Governor.

One of our chants in Wisconsin is “Shame, Shame, Shame.” The same should be chanted wherever Duncan appears.

It’s my hope that what we have started here in Wisconsin will not only spread throughout the country, but will be a basis upon which we can organize with broadening circles of parents and activists to demand real reform of our educational system–and for that matter, the entire political and economic system in this country.

There have been many articulate responses to Secretary Duncan’s letter from teachers across the country. One teacher pointed out Duncan’s actions speak louder than his words. Another teacher expressed the cynicism many of us felt while reading the letter and posed a series of questions Duncan’s words provoked. The comedian’s among us turned to satire, pointing out the irony in Arne’s sudden discovery of teacher appreciation and asking us to read between the lines to find the more blunt language Arne forgot to include.

This range of responses mirrors the range of emotions I had while reading Duncan’s letter: anger at his hypocrisy, deep skepticism about his newly found respect for teachers, but also a small sense of accomplishment that education activists have been able to shift the rhetoric of education reform away from blaming teachers. However, I fear that most educators, not knowing Duncan’s sordid past, won’t be reading between the lines of his letter. What follows is a brief summary I wrote a while back about Duncan’s pre-Secretary of Education career that will hopefully make you think twice about how much appreciation he actually has for teachers:

Arne Duncan’s neoliberal remaking of the Chicago school system stands as a chilling reminder that when it comes to education policy, the Democratic Party is not too far behind its chief rival. As Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman have noted, Duncan “presided over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about 90 percent nonwhite. Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools, and fired entire school staffs.”

Duncan, who has never taught in a classroom and attended private schools all his life, has been a leading corporate-reformer in education. As Joel Spring points out in his book, Political Agendas for Education, Duncan worked as the education program coordinator at Ariel Capital Management, where a headline on a brochure for there main school, Ariel Community Academy reads, “We want to make the stock market a topic of dinner table conversation.” First graders are given $20,000 to invest in a class stock portfolio and each graduating class is supposed to return the original $20,000 to the entering first grade and donate half the profits to the school with the rest distributed amongst the graduates. Duncan quickly moved on to become an executive of the Chicago Public Schools by age 35 and its CEO at 38.

Duncan headed up the Renaissance 2010 plan established by the elite Commercial Club, a century-old Chicago institution comprised of the largest and most powerful corporations in the city. With the help of the corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearny, the Commercial Club unleashed one of the most ambitious school privatization schemes since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Renaissance 2010 called for the closing of one hundred public schools and reopening them as privatized charter schools. It was a page taken directly out of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) playbook. NCLB, passed in 2001, created a host of unattainable achievement goals measured through massive amounts of high-stakes standardized tests. Under these new unachievable targets, schools are set up to fail and when they do the federal government swoops in and “restructures” them. Like NCLB, Renaissance 2010 targeted schools that have “failed” to meet Chicago’s accountability standards as defined by high-stakes standardized tests and turned them over to non-profit and often for-profit charters.

Another integral part of the plan is to hand control over schools away from teachers, their unions, and community residents and into the hands of the business sector. At least two-thirds of the newly opened schools will be nonunion. The Commercial Club raised $25 million from the corporate sector to close public schools and reopen them under the governance of an unelected board called the New Schools for Chicago organization. The NSC is appointed by the Commercial Club and composed of leading corporate representatives and Chicago Public Schools executives. The “civic leaders” on what the Chicago Sun-Times dubbed a “shadow cabinet” include the chairs of McDonald’s Corporation and Northern Trust Bank, the retired chair of the Tribune Corporation, and the CEO of the Chicago Community Trust—a major corporate foundation.

In the absence of a hurricane to force half of the poor population out of the city, these corporate cronies have resorted to more commonplace gentrification. As Chicago Teachers for Social Justice have explained “Renaissance 2010 is not just a school plan. It is part of a much larger plan for gentrification and for moving out low-income African Americans and some Latinos from prime real estate areas, in fact from the city altogether. These are the areas where the proposed school closings are concentrated.”

Chicago has a long history of underfunding its public housing developments resulting in rotting infrastructure and chronic infestation by rodents and insects. Public housing was made into a last resort for the poorest of the poor. Beginning in the early 2000s the Chicago Housing Authority began using private contractors to tear down the public housing developments and put up new mixed-income developments that price most of the former residents out of the community. Closing down the underfunded public school in the area and opening a new charter school is the perfect way to attract a new wealthier and whiter population to the area. As Pauline Lipman, a progressive Urban Education scholar at the University of Illinois in Chicago writes:

As public housing is torn down and new condos and luxury town houses rise up, the city and the real estate developers are removing any traces of the people who once lived there. Closing the schools and then reopening them as new schools is a signal to future middle-class residents that the area is being “reborn.” This has been a frequent theme in business and school leaders’ statements in the press. When the agenda to “reinvent” Midsouth schools was first made public in the Chicago Tribune, on December 19, 2003, Terry Mazany, CEO of Chicago Community Trust and member of the planning team, described the connection between schools and development of the area this way: “[Bronzeville's] a great physical location, so close to the lake and downtown,” he said. “It’s a delicate balance to pull something like this off. You can’t do it just with the housing and retail development. You have to get the third leg and that’s the schools.

Before he became the education secretary, Arne Duncan was an enthusiastic advocate for the Commercial Club’s scheme, privatizing Chicago public schools at a rate of about twenty schools per year. Revealing his corporate-minded orientation to schooling, Duncan told a room full of businessmen at the Commercial Club’s “Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education” symposium in May of 2008, “I am not a manager of 600 schools. I’m a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I’m trying to improve my portfolio.”

Then, using the deficit he helped expand as an excuse, this savvy businessman announces that one-third of the public schools in your area will be sold off to private charter operators. To top it off, he sends every single teacher and staff member in the school district a layoff notice.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a teacher’s nightmare. This is the story of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) under the reign of Robert Bobb. In January 2009, Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed Bobb, who was president and CEO of LAPA Group, a consulting firm, as emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools (DPS).

Bobb, who was tasked with getting DPS’s fiscal house in order, is one of the many graduates of the Broad Residency in Urban Education who now holds a high-level position in urban school districts across the nation. The Broad training program is supported by an education foundation launched by billionaire real estate mogul Eli Broad. Since 1999, the foundation has spent $370 million with the mission to “transform urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition.”

The Broad Residency in Urban Education offers young business majors a full-time, senior-level management position in a large urban school district. For a few years, the Broad foundation pays half of their salary, and after that, the district is supposed to foot the bill. But in an interview with the Detroit News, Broad admitted he contributed $28,000 toward Bobb’s Detroit salary and moving expenses.

Detroit, which was a struggling city well before the current economic crisis, has been pushed over the edge in recent years. The Detroit News estimated that in 2009, when Bobb was appointed, Detroit’s broader unemployment rate–which counts not only the jobless, but those who can only find part-time work or who have given up looking altogether–was close to 50 percent.

A third of the city has been completely abandoned, prompting proposals by the mayor to demolish an estimated 10,000 buildings and turn largely abandoned neighborhoods into farmland.

THE SHOCK of the recession has provided the perfect political cover for a drastic reorganization of the city’s school system and a sharp attack on the DFT. Bobb’s neoliberal assault has received approval from Barack Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has called DPS “ground zero” for education reform, and has claimed, “Detroit is going in a much better direction thanks to Bobb’s leadership.”

Yet in his first year as emergency financial manager, Bobb’s “cost-cutting” measures added $113 million to the district’s deficit, one of the largest single-year deficits in the history of Detroit schools.

Bobb managed this feat in part by paying out over $40 million in taxpayer funds on a new textbook and testing system, and another $40 million to various corporate consulting firms that helped develop a reactionary privatization scheme. This plan proposes the closure of 45 struggling Detroit public schools and the opening of 70 new charter and private schools.

Detroit currently has nearly 70 percent of its student population in public schools and 30 percent in charter schools. The new Excellent Schools Detroit initiative calls for a radical redistribution of Detroit’s school-going population, setting a goal for 2015 that only 25 percent of students will still attend Detroit public schools and 75 percent will go to charter schools.

If this plan implemented, Detroit would surpass New Orleans as the city with the highest percentage of students attending charter schools, and public high school class sizes could increase to 62 students per class.

Bobb’s primary attack has been directed at the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT). In December 2009, Bobb helped negotiate a controversial contract agreement with Detroit teachers that required union members to defer $10,000 in pay over the following two years.

The contract was ratified by the membership after a campaign led by DFT president Keith Johnson and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who claimed the agreement was the best that could be negotiated given the district’s deficit. In a recent press release, Weingarten called the contract “groundbreaking” and claimed that it represented “a shared commitment to transforming Detroit schools.”

But even those unprecedented concessions weren’t enough for Bobb. On April 15, he escalated his assault, issuing 5,466 layoff notices to every teacher and staff member in the district.

While the notices are not final decisions and many Detroit teachers and school staff may keep their jobs, there’s uncertainty about whether Bobb will respect seniority rights or simply fire teachers he deems ineffective. Weingarten, who had earlier trumpeted the union’s partnership with Bobb, declared that his plan is “shocking and disregards a commitment he made just 16 months ago to transform schools collaboratively.”

After passing further cuts to K-12 and higher education, the Michigan legislature, following the lead of the state’s new Republican governor, Rick Snyder, passed Public Act 4, which gave emergency financial managers like Bobb sweeping new powers. Emergency managers can now sell off public assets, privatize public services and unilaterally terminate or modify existing union contracts. Referring to his expanded authority, Bobb proclaimed to the Detroit Free Press after the mass layoffs were issued, “I fully intend to use the authority that was granted.”

Bobb claims the mass layoff notices were necessary “in anticipation of a workforce reduction to match the district’s declining student enrolment.” But as the Detroit Metro Times reported in October 2010, “since Bobb has been in charge, the district has lost about 20,000 students,” a much worse attrition rate than the previous three years. It should be no surprise that when you treat students and teachers like dirt and callously close schools, many families choose to leave the district.

Unfortunately, in the midst of this unprecedented attack, the DFT is wrestling with internal controversy. In January, DFT activist Steve Conn of the organization By Any Means Necessary ran against incumbent DFT President Keith Johnson. Initially, the election committee, which many claim is controlled by Johnson, declared Johnson the victor by a margin of 40 votes. But as Conn points out, 178 ballots were never counted.

Outraged, the membership voted 184 to 49 at the following union meeting for a hand recount. Johnson, however, has appealed the decision to AFT leader Weingarten, and the local union is waiting for her ruling.

Meanwhile, Johnson used his authority as president to suspend Conn on what appear to be extremely dubious charges of “imposing himself” on Michigan Federation of Teachers President David Hecker during a general membership meeting.

It is hard to believe these allegations are anything more than a pretext to prevent Conn from becoming president of the local. The suspension, instituted at the end of February, bans him from holding any union position and from attending union meetings for six months.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

THE POTENTIAL to involve the broader community in the fight to save Detroit’s schools was evident on April 15, the same day Bobb sent out mass layoff notices, when eight students and several faculty members and supporters occupied their school after learning it was slated to close later that year. The school, Catherine Ferguson Academy, is a nationally recognized school serving pregnant teens and young mothers. During the occupation, hundreds of supporters rallied outside the school, but after a few hours, police removed the occupiers.

While insufficient to meet the scale of the attack, the occupation of Catherine Ferguson Academy and Conn’s election challenge are important steps to building a movement that can halt the complete destruction of Detroit’s public schools. Another encouraging sign are the recent large protests at Michigan’s Capitol building. Inspired by the fightback in Wisconsin, union members and supporters rallied against budget cuts and the enormous expansion of authority granted to emergency financial managers like Robert Bobb.

It will be up to community and teacher activists to build off these struggles. We can no longer allow CEOs like Bobb to run our schools. The business approach increasingly shifts responsibility for educational improvement onto teachers while simultaneously giving teachers less control over pedagogy and curriculum–all while starving schools of much needed resources.

Why are teachers increasingly blamed for the problems of our public schools while those with the real power are never held accountable? It is time to send Robert Bobb his layoff notice…with 5,466 signatures.