Dear Friends,
The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil page is updated.
There you will find the latest details about the Rouge Forum Conference, March 14 to 16, in Louisville. It promises to be our biggest and best ever. Thanks, especially, to Adam Renner.
For those who cannot attend the conference, we urge your participation in the many community demonstrations that will take place that weekend and the coming week against the continuing oil wars. Following those demonstrations we believe educator groups and anti-war groups need to convene together to examine the analysis, strategy, and tactics of what is, sad to say, a pair of movements in need of new life. Rouge Forum members have been critical participants in the many anti-war coalitions, as this piece shows. When the anniversary of the war is over, and the demonstrations had, we need to make new and better plans.
Puerto Rico’s school workers are still on strike for wages, benefits, smaller class size, supplies, and in opposition to the privatization of their schools. According to strike leaders quoted today, about 84 percent of children are not attending classes. About 23,000 educators are honoring the strike, 8,000 scabbing. More than half the nation’s schools are closed. Police have repeatedly attacked striker demonstrations but have not been able to halt the massive job action which not only must take on the government but also the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition, the two US labor federations that are, not surprisingly, trying to help smash the strike, in line with their entire histories.
The Puerto Rican teachers’ union plans a major demonstration tomorrow, Tuesday.
Check this LA Times story on massive school cuts projected in California and this current AP story showing there is going to be no pullback in Iraq, in fact the troop numbers will be higher than before the surge began.
As the impact of the empire’s wars comes home in the form of $100 a barrel gas, stagflation, and a massive debt crisis, and school cutbacks, the sanctions set up by NCLB will ratchet up the consequences for school workers, kids, and communities. While it is common for politicians to hype coming school cutbacks in order to set the stage for regressive taxes (as those supported now by the California AFT), the cuts will come and it is reasonable to foresee the collision of booming class size (and the absence of books, supplies, aides, etc) and the NCLB’s preposterous demands for rising test scores.
It is surely possible that government will turn a blind eye to the NCLB sanctions, or a selective eye, when it becomes clear that far too many schools are under the gun, including schools in wealthier areas, but it is equally possible that teachers will be targeted for layoff based on kids’ test scores, simply by closing schools and churning the work force. And, we know in New York City, the AFT already agreed to pay-for-test-scores plans.
The upshot of that over time will be a more divided, and less powerful, work force. Teachers in rich areas will do ok, teachers in poor areas will not. And, as the AFT and NEA both refuse to recognize that an injury to one only goes before and injury to all, school and government bosses will simply slice away until all teacher health benefits are evaporated.
What can be done? Well, surely it is now easy to see a connection between imperialist war and the blowback on the empire’s workers, including its school workers who, for the most part, sold their consciences to NCLB and collaborated actively with the child abuse that it is.
And it is equally easy to see the role that the union leadership played in supporting the wars, and the NCLB. Perhaps now, as the effects of war and the regimentation of knowledge hit people’s pocketbooks, action will be more possible.
However, no one can suggest that the union leadership, mired in the racism, hierarchy, and opportunism that structures the unions, is going to play a progressive role. The best thing the union leaders could do would be to initiate targeted, rolling, strikes during test season, and set up freedom schools to serve the kids who could actually learn something important in a freedom school.
That, of course, will not happen. The unions could demand that no administrator’s salary exceed, say, the top teacher pay—and demand cuts accordingly. But they will not do that. Nor will the unions adopt a plan that their early founder, Dorothy Healy, described as “tax the rich, tax inheritance, tax profits.” Late in life Healy said she did all she could but did not take class war seriously enough. Almost a hundred years later, we should learn from her.
One thing that can be done is to simply nullify the test scores by boycotting, opting out of the tests. Calcare and the Rouge Forum are calling for those opt outs which are hardly premature, but long overdue. We have experience in opt outs in Michigan, Florida, and around the USA. One thing people can do to build awareness is to go to school board meetings, in groups, and speak openly in support of the legal and reasonable right to opt kids out of these tests. Walk away. As in the military, nearly nothing is being done to awols.
But justice demands organization. Let us try to see one another, face to face, friend to friend, in Louisville.
Thanks to Sean, Wayne, Gina, Collie, Duke, Tommie, Bob, Susan(s), George and Sharon, JK in Chicago, Dennis C., Sandy and Sally, Candace, Evan and Ethel, John D (write the book), Alan S, Amber, Perry, Kev, Steve F, Ido and Ofira, Jan Cadwell, Kathryn, the Carlsons, Dennis B., Gil, Alfie, Joe Cook, Isa, Bill, Greg, and Connie Lane.
all the best,
r
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