Chicago, IL – The resignation of the entire Chicago Board of Education on October 4 exemplifies a new phase of the fight for Chicago's public schools. Current contract negotiations are happening with a mayor who is a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, and amidst school board elections coming up on November 5, both of which are unprecedented in Chicago's history. The Black and brown and working-class people of the city have an opportunity to undo the damage done to the public school system by decades of systematic defunding under neoliberal mayors, and to take further steps towards community control of the schools.

“None of the members leaving the current board planned to continue onto the hybrid board, and none are running for election,” the outgoing board said in a joint statement with Mayor Brandon Johnson. “With the unprecedented increase in board membership, transitioning new members now will allow them time to orient and gain critical experience prior to welcoming additional elected and appointed members in 2025.”

The statement also highlighted areas of agreement between the outgoing board and the mayor, such as “shifting away from inequitable student-based budgeting, completing the change to a school safety model that does not rely on school resource officers and focusing on black student success.”

The main point of contention between Johnson and the school board is the job of CPS CEO Pedro Martinez. CTU Vice President Jackson Potter referred to Martinez as a “Lightfoot leftover” not simply because he was appointed by previous Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but mainly due to his commitment to neoliberal budget cutting policies typical of Lightfoot and every other Chicago Mayor since Harold Washington. His proposed budget for 2025, approved by the outgoing board, made no provisions for raises, new positions, programs, and other features of the new contract.

With federal COVID relief funds drying up in 2025 and the city already in a $500 million deficit, funding for schools is a complicated question, but there are clear differences between those who prioritize fully-funded schools and those who don't.

Johnson and the CTU have proposed various sources of funding including tax increment financing (TIF) development funds, short term loans, taxing “not for profit” university hospitals with billions of dollars in their endowment, and money from the state of Illinois. Martinez on the other hand favors layoffs and budget cuts to cover the deficit.

For decades, Chicago mayors have also preferred cuts and layoffs. From when career privatizer Paul Vallas was appointed by Mayor Richard M Daley as the first CEO of CPS in 1995, Chicago saw hundreds of schools closed and thousands of teachers laid off. Despite these cuts, neoliberal mayors still took out short-term loans which created the budget deficit inherited by Johnson.

The ire aimed at Johnson over his approach to the school board and budget is therefore not about loans or stability, as the same groups that are attacking him over education had no issues with loans or personnel changes under previous mayors. The agenda of groups like the Illinois Policy Institute and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools is to gut the public education system and replace public schools with charter schools, which are ultimately accountable to shareholders and not the students and communities they are supposed to serve.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools has pumped money into the campaigns of pro-charter school board candidates to oppose candidates endorsed by the CTU and allied organizations; those candidates include longtime defenders of public schools such as Aaron Jitu Brown and Reverend Robert Jones, who both joined a 34-day hunger strike to save Dyett High School from closure in 2013.

With election day less than three weeks away, the CTU is once again at the front lines of a fight between corporate power and people power. If candidates like Brown and Jones win, these historic elections will move Chicago towards a fully-funded school system where decision making power is in the hands of teachers, parent, and students, rather than corporations that own charter schools.

#ChicagoIL #IL #Labor #CTU #PublicSchools #Feature

Jacksonville, FL – Over 100 teachers and community members rallied at the Duval County School Board office over mass layoffs and school closures. The rally comes after Duval County Public Schools has threatened to lay off 11% of its workforce and shutter over a dozen schools.

“We need to save neighborhood schools. We say no to school closures and no to massive layoffs,” says Monica Gold, an organizer with Duval CORE.

After the rally, people went into to the school board meeting to oppose school closures and mass layoffs.

#JacksonvilleFL #PeoplesStruggles #PublicSchools

Denver, CO – On May 19, a Denver Public Schools Board of Education meeting was met with protest from students and community members who were outraged at the recent dismissal of beloved Chicano English teacher Tim Hernández.

Earlier that morning, hundreds of those same students had staged their second walkout in a week to protest the dismissal of Hernández. Now, they are taking their fight straight to the school board with clear demands: reinstate Hernández as a teacher, hire more Chicanos and oppressed nationality teachers, and implement measures to protect those teachers from the sort of repression that Hernández is currently facing.

It was announced in early May that Hernández, the only Chicano teacher in Denver’s North High School’s English department, would not be allowed to return next year and would be placed on administrative leave for the remainder of this year. The student body at North High School is 67% Chicano.

While the administration claims that this is because of a bad interview, Hernández and his supporters believe that this move is in retaliation for his repeated challenging of the administration on “issues of equity and anti-racism.”

They expressed concerns as to why he was required to interview for a job he already had and had shown great aptitude for. North’s principal, Scott Wolf, who is in his final year as an administrator at the school, says that these interview processes are “equitable” and “the same for all candidates.” However, white teachers, such as Elizabeth Campbell, claimed in their public comment to the Denver Public Schools (DPS) board that they were never required to go through such a process. “Admins have lied to students and staff about their rights,” said Campbell. Another former teacher, Michael Diaz-Rivera said in his comment “The suppression of powerful Black voices by this district is nothing new.”

The demonstrators faced a great deal of repression in order to have their voices heard at the supposedly “open to the public” board meeting. Coordinated efforts by armed security, police and the DPS administration to deny entry to the meeting – on verifiably false claims of being beyond capacity – were successful in preventing members of the community, the press, and even Tim Hernández himself from entering the meeting in person.

Despite this blatant attempt to bar the public and press, public comment ran for several hours. For most of the evening, Hernández was on the hot sidewalk in front of the Emily Griffith building where the meeting was being held. He huddled around a phone with friends, legal counsel and his union representation to listen to the meeting on Zoom under the watchful eye of a Denver police officer just a few feet away.

When asked why Hernández and several other members of the public and press had been denied entry to a public board meeting, Executive Director of Communications for DPS Will Jones had only this to say: “It was an administrative decision made by Denver Public Schools.”

The statements of students seemed to be the most impactful. One such student told the board “the only safe place I had was with Mr. Hernández.” He then when on to say, “We still have a lot more to do and I will be there for all of it because Mr. Hernández is my community and Mr. Hernández is North.”

#DenverCO #ChicanoLatino #AntiRacism #PublicSchools

Gainesville, FL — Students at the University of Florida successfully advanced their campaign of tuition equity for undocumented students. Leading student organizations joined together to pass a resolution through Student Government in favor of tuition equality.

Currently, an undocumented immigrant student who grows up in Florida must pay out-of-state tuition to take classes at the Florida institution, despite graduating from a Florida high school. Out-of-state tuition costs three times that of in-state tuition, a hefty price to pay.

University of Florida Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members joined by members of CHISPAS, Hispanic Student Association, Asian Student Union and Black Student Union all spoke on behalf of the resolution during public debate.

Conor Munro, a lead organizer of SDS and author of the resolution, spoke persuasively to the student senators on the issue, “These students have worked just as hard as any student graduating from high school, they deserve the chance to continue to seek higher education.”

The resolution passed with an overwhelming 73-3 vote count.

With student support on their side, UF SDS now looks forward to approaching the Board of Trustees, with the power to change tuition policy and make it fair. SDS plans to mobilize for the Board meeting, demanding, “Tuition Equity for Undocumented Students!”

#GainesvilleFL #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #Capitalism #PublicSchools #UniversityOfFlorida #TuitionEquity

Students and Youth Hit Hard

One of the groups hit hard by the economic crisis is college students and youth. The crisis led to class cuts and tuition hikes at public colleges and universities across the country. While the pace of budget cuts and tuition increases slowed with the economic expansion, they still continue today. One example is the growing threat to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), many of which are seeing dramatic and dangerous drops in enrollments because of cuts in federal student loan programs.

Double Whammy

Youth who do manage to graduate from college, which is taking longer and becoming more expensive than ever, face a double whammy. On one hand the economic crisis sped up the restructuring of the labor market. Over the last 30 years millions of manufacturing jobs were automated away, off-shored by multinational corporations, and/or workers’ wages and benefits were cut. Now, government is one of the last remaining sectors with decent paying jobs, benefits and union representation. However, this sector has been hit harder by the Great Recession of 2009 than any other recession since the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of local and state jobs are being lost, while government workers face wage and pension cuts and loss of union protection. Republican politicians are taking away hard-earned bargaining rights in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

Restructuring Youth: Low-wage, Part-time and Temporary

In addition to the loss of jobs that pay a living wage and benefits, more and more permanent, full-time jobs are being replaced by temporary and part-time jobs. Today about half of all recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed, with part-time or temporary jobs, many of which don’t even require a college degree.

Skyrocketing Student Debt

There is an explosion of student loan debt, which totals as much as $1.2 trillion. Student loan debt is now the largest form of consumer (non-mortgage) debt, about 40% of the total. Caught between rising tuition and the cost of living on one hand and stagnant grants and wages, college students and their families have been borrowing more and more to pay for college. This student debt is a growing burden on youth, especially those who were not able to graduate or find a full-time, permanent, decent paying job.

Boom then Bust, Repeat

The boom and bust cycle under capitalism is not an accident – it is part and parcel of a capitalist economy. Wages are pushed down to grow profits, and this limits workers ability to spend. Then the profits are reinvested in expanding production, thereby increasing the ability to produce more, but the workers cannot buy all that they produce, and a periodic crisis of overproduction, or what we call recessions occur.

Crisis upon Crisis

On top of this, the build up in debt and deregulation and expansion of the financial sector following the end of the post-World War II economic boom in the 1970s led to growing financial crisis in the U.S. From the Third World debt crisis and Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s to the Asian Economic Crisis of the 1990s, and most recently to the financial crisis in 2008, these crises have grown and become a greater and greater threat to the economy as a whole.

People Over Profits

The government is turning away from stimulating the economy to policies of more and more austerity – higher taxes on working people and cuts to programs that serve the people. The spending cuts are really felt at the state and local levels, hurting education funding from Head Start through university level. With financial regulation blocked by the power of Wall Street, it is more and more clear that the government, along with both political parties, are bought and paid for by the rich. They offer no real hope for working people and college-aged youth. Only a socialist economy, one based on people’s needs and not profit, can offer an alternative of expanding access and affordability to higher education, while creating jobs that pay a living wage.

Masao Suzuki teaches economics at a community college in California and is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).

#SanJoséCA #crisisOfCapitalism #recession #PublicSchools #economy #corporateProfits #tuitionHikes

All roads lead to Wall Street. Both predatory lending and closings of public schools are due to Wall Street’s plunder of every human need in order to seize money for its profits.

Both predatory lending and school closings are particularly aimed at communities of people of color. Essex County, New Jersey, in which the cities of Newark and Irvington are located, has the highest foreclosure rate of any county in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut region. Irvington and Newark are among the hardest hit in Essex. Both have high concentrations of Black and Latino people. Also, more than 20 Newark schools have been closed in the last three years. All but one are in areas that serve African American neighborhoods.

Also, combined struggles on more than one front strengthen every area of the people’s struggle for economic justice. The battles for a real national health care system for all, a good quality public school education for all, full employment in good-paying jobs, and others, are closely linked.

For several years there has been a huge uproar in Newark against school closings. Thousands have turned out at public meetings to oppose the actions of the dictatorial Trenton-imposed administration.

Annette Alston of the Newark Teachers’ Association said students find themselves suddenly forced to attend charter schools far from where they live. There is a new teachers’ evaluation rubric that is either not understood by administrators or abused by them. Teachers are forced out of their jobs and careers for no good reason. A recent study found charter schools in Newark outperform public schools. However, the study did not take into account that charter schools select students from households with high parental involvement; they expel others they do not want, and so forth. It is only being done to save money on public schools. Years ago women were attacked for being witches, she said. Now teachers, who are mostly women, are being attacked. It also appears that a large proportion of affected teachers are black.

Kathleen Witcher of the Irvington NAACP, and a retired educator, gave an evaluation of charter schools based on her family’s experience. Her children went through Newark public schools and went to colleges like Stanford, Rutgers, and USC; one has a PhD. She has grandnieces in charter schools. Her monitoring turned up things she called horrendous. Students are not taught mathematics from axioms but from ditto sheets – just plug in the numbers and keep going. A grandniece won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school but couldn’t write essays because they had not been taught in charter school. Meanwhile the state of New Jersey is being allowed to shortchange public schools.

Sharon Smith of Parents Unified for Local School Education (PULSE) quoted Dr. Martin Luther King who spoke of people who sleep through a revolution. She said we are in a revolution now and must find new responses. Public schools are destroyed by the lack of resources while charter schools get all the latest equipment, for instance. On Jan. 9, people from 18 cities concerned with a “new mode of education that is destroying our children” went to Washington to meet with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

There is no sustainable, positive change coming from charter schools. It all stems from Wall Street demands for profits. The group filed a Title 6 complaint (civil rights violation) against school closings. The group won a federally-supported grass roots tour of affected school districts and a federal hearing on school closings. Also, six schools in Newark named for closing remain open.

Still there is no new investment in affected school districts, with wholesale firing of teachers. Potentially 185,000 students are in danger of having their schools closed. PULSE is planning a “Journey for Justice” to keep schools open.

The evening was a definite step toward building a broad front of unity in the people's struggle for economic justice. The linkage of issues went a long way toward showing the problem is capitalism itself.

#IrvingtonNJ #PoorPeoplesMovements #WallStreet #EducationRights #Capitalism #PublicSchools #CoalitionToSaveOurHomes #HomeForeclosures

Chicago, IL – On Sept. 10, Chicago Teachers Union Local 1 went on strike after ten months at the bargaining table. They tried to use negotiations with the Chicago School Board to defend their jobs and the interests of their students. When the Chicago Public Schools refused to back away from their corporate agenda, CTU members had no choice but to strike.

Picket lines were formed at over 600 schools and anyone driving the streets of Chicago on Monday morning could see that the pickets were strong.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel told parents he would have their children in “contingency plan” schools. One parent said the contingency school in his area was supposed to receive 1000 students, but instead only 60 showed up. According to Sarah Chambers, a teacher at Saucedo School and a member of the CTU bargaining committee, “The contingency plan schools were a colossal failure. The fact that almost no students showed up at these schools displays the parents’ complete mistrust for the CPS' board of education and CPS' ability to provide a safe place for the children of Chicago.”

Battle with the city; battle for public opinion

Emanuel and the media tried to make it appear that the CTU is unreasonable. According to School Board President David Vitale, the school board made major concessions. He claimed in the press that the teachers were overpaid and yet he was offering them big raises. But the school board violated the binding contract with the teachers when it refused to honor the 4% raise in the last year of the old agreement. The measure of his generosity has to subtract the wages lost when he violated the contract last year.

The real story in this conflict is that public education has been under attack by corporate-backed politicians like Emanuel. Teachers unions are facing the fiercest assaults by both the Republicans and the Democrats because they are the only strong defense that students have. “There were more kids on our picket lines than in the Mayor’s contingency schools,” noted Chambers, indicating more parent support for striking teachers than for the CPS.

Parents support the CTU because the union fought for both their jobs and the kids. The strength of the union defeated plans to make teachers work longer work weeks than the current 58 hours; they defeated Emanuel’s plan to have them get pay raises based on improvements in test scores; they won back math, science, music and art classes, and recess for their students. Only when they couldn’t stop the attacks through bargaining did they call a strike in order to continue the fight.

20,000 march on school board headquarters

After the 30,000 union members picketed all day, 20,000 of them and their community supporters marched on the headquarters of the Chicago Public Schools in downtown Chicago starting at 3:30 p.m.

Standing outside her school, a tired but determined Chambers said, “The solidarity of the teachers and the parents in the community, united and fighting for their schools – it’s amazing. Spirits are high on the picket line. Teachers are prepared to fight for their kids and a fair contract.”

#ChicagoIL #PublicSchools #ChicagoTeachersUnion #education #RahmEmanuel #teachersStrike #Strikes #TeachersUnions

Los Angeles, CA – Garfield High School parents, students, teachers and community groups led a protest here, in predominately Chicano East Los Angeles, Aug. 21 to show their opposition to the LA Unified School District’s move to bid out over 50 new and existing schools. The angry Garfield High School parents and students oppose the plan to privatize their school and other schools.

The community is mobilizing to oppose the resolution brought forth by board member Yolie Flores that calls for outsourcing the 50 schools. A vote is set for Aug. 25 at LA Unified School District’s Board meeting at 1:00 p.m..

#LosAngelesCA #StudentMovement #ChicanoLatino #GarfieldHighSchool #Privitization #PublicSchools