Decay, crisis, and renewed resistance
On April 22 2008, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings stood in Detroit to announce she would tighten the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act which serves the purpose of (1) regimenting the curricula around nationalist ideology and unspoken support for social conditions as they are, (2) uses racist and anti-working class high-stakes tests to nearly abolish the freedom of school workers to teach well and, simultaneously, sorts kids by class, race, and levels of subordination, (3) opens the school doors to militarization, thus fashioning a schools-to-war pipeline, and finally (4) sets up the advance of privatization in many districts, New Orleans being the prime example.
Abandoning any thought of education for critical citizenship, Spellings said, “”Over their lifetimes, dropouts from the class of 2007 alone will cost our nation more than 300 billion dollars in lost wages, lost taxes and lost productivity. “Increasing graduation rates by just five percent, for male students alone, would save us nearly eight billion dollars each year in crime-related costs.” School to Spellings is money plus nationalism: Capitalist schooling.
Spellings noted that the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) graduate but 25% of the students that enter the system, the basis for her demand to press down on schools. But what she left unsaid was far more significant:
*The DPS Board was seized by suburbanites promising extensive reform for five years prior to her arrival. No measurable academic advance of any kind was made during their tenure.
*During the takeover period, the Board frequently let out no bid contracts to cronies for building new schools and completely refurbishing existing schools in a time when the district was losing at minimum 10,000 students a year, a result of the collapse of industry coupled with harsh racist segregation.
*Now more than 30 of the new and refurbished schools are closed, and stripped, unusable, and a Detroit Free Press investigation shows that at least 200,000 (no misprint, that is two hundred thousand) books in those closed schools were never delivered to students in open schools. It will cost more than $3 million to demolish the closed schools.
*From 2005-2006 DPS officially lost 12,367 students, bringing the total down to 116,815. No close observer believes these figures (the total probably grossly inflated), just as the latest superintendent discovered that no on can believe the system’s financial claims. Should DPS drop below 100,000 a state law triggers that allows the advance of new charters.
*Detroit has lost more than 1 million residents in the last twenty-five years. The tax base evaporated. The entire city government, like others, is notoriously corrupt, the current Mayor under investigation for a $9 million payoff to cover up an affair with a subordinate. One former police chief remains in jail after a million dollars in cash fell out of his kitchen ceiling during a state police raid. The Chief responded, “How did that get there?”
*School workers wildcatted for “Books! Supplies! Lower Class Size!” twice in the last decade, fought the Takeover Board, and now must fight the new board and superintendent who plan, as a response to a very real crisis, to open “Small Schools,” in the city, using the failed Chicago model.
Those, like Spellings, who claim they will do school reform in the absence of social and economic reform are either wholly obtuse or dishonest. Given that many elite school reformers profit from both social decay and spurious shell-game reforms like “Small Schools,” dishonesty plays a key role.
From a more detached standpoint, we can see a series of attacks on whatever there has been of a social safety net going back thirty plus years, hitting the most vulnerable first, the mental health system, then working along to the welfare system, unemployment benefits, inflationary cuts in social security, all redoubled by color coding. This multi-dimensional decay, in part the result of the shift from industrial profiteering to the grab-the-next-dollar-fast finance capital, adds up, culminates in a society promising its youth perpetual war and meaningless jobs—hence making odd demands on schools.
Now school workers, among the last working people in the US with predictable wages and health benefits, find ourselves in the bulls-eye. In New York City, the American Federation of Teachers agreed to a merit pay system, offering bosses an excuse to divide teachers along the lines of kids’ test scores, slash wages and benefits. Across in California, the Governor ordered a slash and burn policy of 10% cuts in education meaning, for example, 913 teachers and 1200 support personnel in San Diego are notified of pending layoffs. At least one teacher of the year, and recipient of a pink slip, announced he would leave teaching.
In de-industrialized USA, school workers are centripetally positioned to make change, to resist with clear ideas and direct action. Schools are now the key organizing point of North American life, replacing the central role of industrial work places where, in the 1930’s economic collapse, the Congress for Industrial Organization and others won the 40 hour week, social security, child labor laws, and other victories now under assault. Today, it is not industrial workers, but 3.5 million school workers, who are the most organized people in the US.
Passivity is perhaps the best descriptor of US life post-1980, the shopping decades which bred greed, a loss of self, and indifference to others. With the apogee of economic crises and Enron-like fraud in mortgage debt, bank runs, national and personal debt peaks, gas/food/transport costs encountering the lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance appears to be rising. At issue is whether resistance will make sense and win, or deepen oppression in slightly new ways. Will education workers be able to fashion the solidarity and collective action necessary to mount a real fight-back, or will we too seek to defend ourselves one at a time, and lose collectively? Will we be able to demolish the divisions of race, nation, sex, and language among us, or will we see them used to demolish us? Will we be easily distracted and habituated to the defeats of unionism in the last 30 years, or will we use the ideas that can arise from education to determine we can grasp and change our world?
The current election spectacle, a hothouse of nationalism, racism, superstition, and opportunism, remains a significant diversion. Those who believe life changes in the voting booth will find, say in one year, that the structural crises at hand are not resolved by a kinder personification of capital in the White House.
The school unions whose leaders will make $450,000 (Reg Weaver of the National Education Association) and $600,000 (Randi Weingartern soon to lead American Federation of Teachers) will pour millions of dollars and tens of thousands of volunteer hours into the campaigns, best portrayed by a former Political Action Director in NEA: “If voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
The California Federation of Teachers in March demanded a regressive sales and auto tax hike to pay for education, splitting the potential unity of educators and working people who easily see they will, again, be handed the bill by an unjust tax system, the payroll system for US democracy.
It is imperative for us to interrogate democracy as it appears, and as it could be. Capitalist democracy is but a perversion of democracy, shifting with degrees of class antagonism, but always the government serves to guarantee, utmost, the accumulation of capital, as an executive committee working out differences of the rich, and their armed weapon. Public schooling in the US is as much as Spellings describes, capitalist schools, as it is democratic. It follows that school workers, who have more freedom than most workers can choose to serve witlessly inside missions for capital, or teach by swimming upstream, to transcend a system of capital that has reached a dead, literally, end.
Resistance from the rank and file in the form of direct action is surfacing. In San Diego, rank and filers from Hoover High called a demonstration against the cutbacks on April 19th and with little support from the SDEA, drew 800 marchers. Students at Mission Bay High walked out of school on April 11, marched on a local recruiter station in opposition to the militarization of their campus. On April 22, SDEA called a demonstration and drew at least one thousand school workers, parents, kids, and anti-war activists who sought to connect the reality of education and warfare.
In March, the Rouge Forum, which for a decade has insisted on linking capitalism, racism, nationalism, war, and education, drew 200 people from 11 states and four countries to the eleventh annual conference debating “Education: Reform or Revolution?’ in Louisville. The conference included one workshop led by a Michigan high school teacher who demonstrated how he got the power to keep his ideals and still teach–the critique of the capitalist system. An elementary teacher presented about how it was she took a class of fifth graders whose NCLB-inspired mantra was, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” built a community of scholars, and restored their curiosity, their love of meaningful inquiry (but it took a full year, she looped most of the class through 5th and 6th grades). Another educator described how she found ways to promote and support test boycotts, yet keeps her job.
Organized primarily by a committee led by Adam Renner and Gina Stiens, The conference united professors, cultural activists, scientists, classroom teachers, students, and community activists debating the linkages and disconnects between reform and revolution, with Wayne Ross demonstrating the role of moral choice in forging the future. Friendship arches over political differences inside the Rouge Forum, a key bond of trust. And cultural events, like the band The Uprising and poetry readings from middle school kids, always have a vital role.
Education professor Doug Selwyn now teaching in rural upstate New York commented on the conference, “ I found plenty of wisdom and support, workshops offering perspective and theory, dialogue offering experiences and understanding, wonderful conversations, new connections, and a feeling of community, essential to carrying on this sometimes isolating work–inspiring and energizing and immediately carried over to my teaching...”
The Chavez Conference followed on March 28th in Fresno, CA in an atmosphere where 96 state school districts face severe NCLB sanctions. Some administrative responses can be summed up as madness. The superintendent of a southernmost county, San Ysidro, announced his plan to transfer every middle and high school teacher–the sum total of his scheme. Another superintendent “re-classified,” four black students as “mixed race,” in order to dodge the NCLB bullets. More than 250 school workers attended the Chavez conference, led by language and literacy specialists whose whole language desires are made nearly illegal by NCLB. There, Susan Harman, organizer for Calcare, led workshops on the why-and-how-to of test boycotts and described an atmosphere of authoritarianism and fear where educators are afraid to exercise their legal right to inform parents of the possibility of opting out of the exams.
Then, in April, Seattle teacher Carl Chew refused to administer the state WASL exam on the grounds that, “it is bad for my kids.” He was quickly suspended for two weeks without pay for insubordination. In the future, resistors need to know that a refusal to obey a direct order that threatens the health and safety of yourself or people in your charge, or is demeaning, is defensible.
These conferences and the related direct action offer the chance to see what democracy could be in new ways.
As the wars, the economy, the sheer barbarism that propels national leaders, all push down on working people, it may be that we are preparing to push back, going past the stage of getting ready to be ready, but in real resistance. Surely we can see that we must reject concessions in any form. Concessions, like feeding blood to sharks, only makes bosses want more. Instead, we should recognize our latent power and fight on the side of our kids, parents, and our communities, united by the fact that an ethic of equality and solidarity is the wellspring of our strength.
Adam Renner, Wayne Ross, Doug Selwyn contributed to this article. Video, photos, and papers from the Rouge Forum Conference are online at Rougeforum.org.
Rich Gibson is a retired professor emeritus, San Diego State University, California. This article originally was published in the May 2008 edition of the print edition of Substance. Copyright 2008 Substance, Inc. All Rights Reserved. See our Statement of Policies regarding how to cite this article in reprints.
