Despite the successes of the March 4th Strike and Day of Action, the cuts to public education continue to intensify both on the national and local levels.
In early May, the American Association of School Administrators announced that 2010-2011 would bring nearly 250,000 layoffs nationwide to teachers alone, with thousands of additional layoffs to education-related staff and workers. These layoffs are only one facet of a larger project of restructuring of public education towards increasing privatization that is being pushed by the Obama administration on a national level. However, this project is being implemented unevenly across the country as local administrations seek to resolve their crisis-induced budgetary deficits through massive structural adjustment and sweeping educational reforms. This corresponds as well to an uneven development of resistance and to its, as of yet, regional character and demands.
The Chicago public schools have been hit particularly hard. The local administration is pushing through massive cuts in an effort to resolve an over $700 million educational budget deficit through teacher and staff layoffs: by the end of March, they had handed down approximately 9,800 layoff notices for teachers, while at the same time freezing hiring, leaving 1,600 positions left vacant by retiring teachers unfilled. They increased maximum class sizes in the K-12 sector to 37 students and the total statewide teacher and school personnel layoffs were projected to be over 20,000. On May 25th, 4,000 Chicago teachers, students, and parents, and 1,200 laid off transit workers protested in front of city hall in order to express their frustration and to demand an end of the layoffs and budget cuts.
The cuts to public education have not only taken the form of layoffs and aggressive attempts to curb workers’ power in the form of weak contracts and unsustainable working conditions, but have also focused on deep institutional changes to what students are taught in school and how they are taught. In an unprecedented move close at the heels of S.B. 1070 – a bill criminalizing the failure to carry proper documentation of citizenship, which paves the way for racial profiling by increasing police power and incentive to stop and detain individuals who do not have papers or identification that show their legal ability to be in the United States – Arizona passed two educational initiatives in a three-part effort to target, penalize, and marginalize people of color at the statewide legal and educational levels. The state has now banned all courses in public education that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people . . . are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group . . . and advocate ethnic solidarity” – a move which most prominently targets Ethnic Studies classes – and the state’s Department of Education passed a resolution forcing districts to remove teachers who speak with accents from classrooms despite the presence of more than 150,000 public school students who are identified as English Language Learners.
The triangulation of these initiatives shows a concerted attempt to eliminate both the physical and historical presence of people of color from textbooks, classroom discussions, position of influence in education (teaching positions), and the state. Indeed, the three-pronged approach not only eliminates the places, spaces, and tools within the Arizona public education system that would offer students the chance to engage in critical discussions about repressive and racist policies such as S.B. 1070, but it also physically removes from classrooms and positions of intellectual influence the very people who would be at risk of S.B.1070 racial profiling and whose histories are to be cut from public education due to the ban on Ethnic Studies – teachers of color, themselves.
These changes were met with widespread resistance on a national level and inspired massive protests across the country both on May 1st as well as on May 29th in Phoenix, Arizona. Rallies and marches numbered in the tens of thousands, with students at different universities and schools taking more direct and militant forms of action. UC Berkeley students went on a 10-day hunger strike to protest the passage of S.B. 1070, with some strikers going on a nearly 48-hour dry strike (no food or liquids) after 7 days without food; four undocumented students occupied Senator John McCain’s office; eight UCSB students and a professor were arrested for blocking an intersection to peacefully protest the bill; and nine students chained themselves to the Arizona Capitol’s doors a mere three days before S.B. 1070 was passed.
These mobilizations have forced Obama’s administration to finally respond by imposing a lawsuit on Arizona. However, until undocumented workers and students are given papers, attacks on the undocumented will keep coming.
The University of California: Testing Ground for Privatization
The spring semester at the UC has seen the continued attempts from the administration and management to redefine public education and to diminish workers’ rights in the form of large-scale systemic and institutional changes. In addition to subjecting all senate faculty and staff to mandatory furloughs this year, the administration announced significant proposed changes to the UC retirement plan, including the creation of:
1) a two-tiered benefits system under which new employees would be offered different plans than current employees with reduced benefits;
2) the option of joining a defined contribution plan, which would not only hold individual employees rather than UC management accountable for managing their own pensions and force them to invest in private stocks (thereby putting their retirement savings at more risk than in the UC Retirement Plan’s defined benefit plan) but would also arguably reduce the number of employees who contribute to the UC Retirement Plan;
3) the use of Pension Obligation bonds with which to cover the UC Retirement Plan’s unfunded liability.
While these seem to be concerns specifically for UC career employees, the administration’s proposals will in fact significantly affect students as well: should UC be unable to pressure the state to fully fund UCRP’s liability and pay its share of employer contributions, departments will be asked to use money from their budgets to cover the cost of employer contributions, thereby resulting in layoffs and cuts to classes, and the administration will also turn to student tuition increases, including the 15% increase in January 2011, in order to fund the restart of employee contributions to the pension fund.
The Bain Operational Excellence team – a private consulting group hired for $3 million by Chancellor Birgeneau to find ways to save money at UCB – released its initial report to the campus in May. Among their findings, Bain recommended that UCB eliminate or severely reduce some student services that students found “least important,” including ethnic residential theme programs, on-campus childcare and family care programs, tutoring services for student athletes, summer programs that prepare traditionally students of color from under-resourced high schools for UCB (Summer Bridge), and the international office.
On top of this, the Education and Curriculum Working Group for the Gould Commission on the Future of the UC proposed deeply concerning changes to undergraduate education that have the potential to severely compromise the educational experience of UC students. In light of the decreased funding from the state and concerns that the UC is becoming less accessible to the public, the working group unveiled their new proposal for a tenth UC campus — a cyber-campus staffed by a “squadron of GSIs” and lecturers serving on the “frontlines” that, according to Chris Edley (chair of the Education and Curriculum Working Group) would exponentially expand student access to the UC by allowing non-traditional students to “attend” UC and by allowing undergrads to complete their degrees more quickly (which happened to be another proposal of the working group). The proposal envisions offering 25 entry-level courses, including reading and composition classes that would serve over 30,000 students; introductory physics and chemistry classes that would serve nearly 40,000 students each; introductory Spanish classes; and math classes (calculus slated to serve nearly 50,000).
The proposal for a cyber-campus was met with extremely harsh criticisms, including critiques from faculty and graduate students who were concerned about an online campus’s potential to diminish the quality of education; to increasingly exploit the lecturers and graduate students who would teach the courses; to separate senate faculty and their research from the majority of undergraduate entry-level classes; and given Edley’s decision to charge online students the same price as residential students, to continue barring access to public higher education under the guise of increased educational access and opportunity.
Even without the problems that a cyber-university would create for them should it become a reality, the teaching and living conditions of Academic Student Employees (readers, tutors and GSIs) and lecturers are under a daily, constant attack by the UC administration. The UC Berkeley administration’s recent restructuring of the labor force for teaching reading and composition classes is a case in point. The administration recently introduced a new program, funded through student tuition increases, to offer jobs to grad students and lecturers. These jobs are time-limited appointments teaching 2 years of additional reading and composition classes. In essence, they create a cheap, temporary, exploitable labor force – a convenient and “legal” way for the university to avoid having to hire these lecturers as full-time or continuing employees in the future.
UAW (the Academic Student Employee union) began contract negotiations in May, but saw management walk out of negotiations over UAW’s attempts to secure a decent healthcare program for its workers. Moreover, the UC management’s initial proposals for bargaining, which include “clarifying the University’s right to determine what constitutes academic ineligibility,” “enhancing the University’s right to remove appointees who are declared academically ineligible,” tying ASE wages to the state budget with the possibility of decreasing wages, and eliminating an ASE’s right to observe a picket line, send a clear message that the administration is looking to exert more control over the conditions under which ASEs are hired and work, and will attempt to curtail the political activity of ASEs.
What’s Next? Learning the Lessons and Preparing the Mobilization of the Fall
The Challenges and Potential Facing Our Movement
The March 4th Strike and Day of Action represented a key juncture for the public education movement. In its aftermath, it is critical that we consciously identify and respond to the challenges and possibilities we face. Through our mobilizations, we are setting the conditions with which to begin building a mass movement to defend public education and other services.
On the one hand, March 4th demonstrated the enormous potential that students and workers have when they collectively fight to mobilize popular resistance on a national and even on an international level. Further, it clearly showed the incredible possibility for massive, militant actions and for the democratic, independent organization of our struggle. The combination of democratic organization and militant action, in turn, provoked a new surge in campus mobilizations by radicalizing a new layer of activists.
On the other hand, the events since March 4th remind us of the uneven and fragile development of struggle across sectors and places. Movements cannot be built from above by coordinating bodies without having real mobilization at a local level. We can only build a strong base to sustain and push forward mobilizations through disciplined and committed work within each campus and worksite. Since March 4th, we have seen a rapid demobilization in many schools, even where the organizational base among a broad mass of students and workers was seemingly well-developed. The independence and democratic structure of the movement has come under increasing pressure as bureaucratic structures, which sometimes include the entrenched union leadership and some student governments, have sought to control the direction and political content or organization and mobilization efforts. One of the main dangers as we near election season is that these two sectors are likely to attempt to funnel the new wave of mobilization into electoral politics and the support of the Democratic Party, at the expense of independent militant mass mobilization.
