New York: Teachers, Parents and Students Organize Against Education Privatization

New York: Teachers, Parents and Students Organize Against Education Privatization

New York: Teachers, Parents and Students Organize Against Education Privatization
For the U.S. corporate elite, “education reform” – which means privatizing as much as possible of the school system and attacking the collective power of teachers – is a strategic task. To these people, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg and his henchman, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, are heroes. For eight years, NYC officials have relentlessly sought to tie school performance rankings as well as teacher evaluation and pay to dubious high stakes test data. They have closed 91 schools, overwhelmingly in Black and Hispanic working-class neighborhoods, and opened 100 privately-run charter schools, almost entirely in the same areas. They have allowed the charter operators to take space in public school buildings and to push out public schools, some of them very popular and successful. They did this in the name of helping kids succeed and had some public support for their policies, especially with many parents in poor neighborhoods desperate to give their children a decent future. But public opinion is beginning to shift against privatization, and resistance from parents, teachers, and students is starting to grow as people see through the hype. When Klein announced in December that he wanted to close 19 public schools, this provoked protests of hundreds outside individual schools and crowds of up to 900 at public hearings, overwhelmingly opposed to these destructive proposals. On January 26, thousands gathered to protest at Brooklyn Technical High School where the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), a rubber-stamp body with eight of thirteen members appointed by Bloomberg, was to decide the fate of the nineteen schools. What followed was nine hours of testimony full of raw working-class anger from parents, students, and teachers. People pointed again and again to the way a two-tier system is being established.