Dear Friends,
Restored to life!
Welcome back to school and the Rouge Forum. Our web page is fully updated.
Our Steering Committee will meet in Detroit on the weekend of September 27, setting our agenda for the coming year. If you would like to attend or add agenda items, please let me know.
Rouge Forum members will help lead teach-ins about schools and the war around the US this fall. Information is on our web site.
Some items of interest from the summer:
Let us remember that both Obama and McCain insist they support merit pay as does Democrat George Miller and Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, the Democratic delegation at their recent Denver convention routinely showed contempt for leaders of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, together representing the largest bloc on the convention floor, NEA alone with 210 delegates. The unions both endorsed Obama nevertheless and will pour millions of dollars into the current election spectacle, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours. NEA, in addition, proudly claims a million Republican members, of 3.2 million nationwide.
Why would NEA and AFT executives endorse politicians who attempt to enforce merit pay, a vital choke point for those who seek to sort children, educators, and knowledge itself, by class and race? The usual official argument is, “lesser of two evils.” The reality is that presidents of both NEA and AFT earn well over $450,000 a year. That alone means they do not live like school workers, do not shop where we shop, do not work where we work, do not witness our struggles and, since they have lived like this for more than a decade, their viewpoint is from the other side.
Worse still is the fact that of the ten executive officers of NEA (including the top executive, John Wilson), only two are from states that have collective bargaining in the law, meaning eight never could have bargained a contract, and the two remaining never bargained a contract anyway, and none of them has ever directly managed a strike—the most important weapon educators have. The memory of how to resist, from officialdom, is nearly gone.
Both NEA and AFT actively supported the development of NCLB, working in tandem with the US Chambers of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Broad Foundation and others. Executives of both unions, from time to time, hint about problems with NCLB, its high stakes exams and regulated curricula, but the union bosses actually attack those who try to do something about NCLB—like Susan Ohanian—and they never opposed the military invasion of schooling that is an important part of the law.
UTLA, the largest school worker union in California, still insists it will back merit pay on “a cold day in hell,” according to a past president. But the coming trends, and the war-based budget collapse, show that educators have a fight ahead—for pay, benefits, and the freedom to teach well and the very lives of kids who, this year, arrive homeless, foreclosed. Bankers, though, get bipartisan bailouts.
San Diego’s Education Association fought massive layoffs for 9 months. Still 194 teachers are laid off and the superintendent, Terry Grier, continues to insist on injecting merit pay into contract negotiations.
Denver teachers in the American Federation of Teachers will likely ratify a contract that extends their existing merit pay program.
In collapsing Detroit, dozens of schools will be closed and hundreds of school workers laid off. The district’s new superintendent, Connie Calloway who previously administered a district smaller than 5,000 kids, just discovered a $408 million dollar deficit.
Calloway also discovered thousands of textbooks sitting unopened in a warehouse, new from last year, full of mold, never delivered. The Detroit Federation of Teachers President, Virginia Cantrell, suspended the Executive Vice President, Greg Johnson, for insisting that educators need, “books, supplies, lower class size,” at a union rally where Cantrell gave the podium to superintendent Calloway to make a pitch for concessions.
Washington DC teachers, though divided, will likely endorse a merit pay program introduced by Teach for America grad, Michell Rhee, a favorite of NPR and PBS. The VP of the DC local is currently suing the president.
We should remember this quote about NPR from William Blum, author of Killing Hope:
“The president of NPR, incidentally, is a gentleman named Kevin Klose. Previously he helped coordinate all US-funded international broadcasting: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Central Europe and the Soviet Union), Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Marti (Cuba), Worldnet Television (Africa and elsewhere); all created specifically to disseminate world news to a target audience through the prism of US foreign policy beliefs and goals. He also served as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Would it be unfair to say that Americans then became his newest target audience? All unconscious of course; that’s what makes the mass media so effective; they really believe in their own objectivity. Not to mention the conscious propaganda.”
Note, though, that the former DC teachers union president and other officers are in prison for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dues dollars.
New York City teachers endorsed an expanded merit pay system over the summer.
Miami Dade teachers went back to work with a contract but the district refused to pay the negotiated raise. The union, whose past president of twenty plus years, Pat Tornillo, was convicted and jailed for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dues dollars, urged the teachers to sign a petition, and work.
The Chicago Teachers Union, AFT, continues to sport a merit pay project initiated by a federal grant in 2006. CTU’s President also suspended it’s Vice President for dissent.
Six years ago, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers resoundingly defeated a move to continue a merit pay system in their schools that had, in their experience, failed. AFT presses on with one sellout after the next. Later, AFT leaders in Cincinnati wheedled a contract that has teachers evaluating teachers for merit pay, a high point of educators becoming instruments of their own oppression.
Clearly, the urban American Federation of Teachers leads the charge toward merit pay, as they have led nearly every retreat of the labor movement since Al Shanker declared in 1975 that he stood for the unity of union bosses, superintendents, business, and government, “in the national interest.” Shanker began concession bargaining, never learning that making concessions is like giving blood to sharks—they only want more.
AFTs’ betrayals of its own members are, as we see in San Diego, going to appear on NEA bargaining tables everywhere. Given NEA’s history, and their adoption of Shanker’s collaborative outlook, it is quite possible that absent rank and file action, merit pay based on test scores will appear in NEA contracts nationwide. Then, educator pay and benefits will reflect the income of the parents of the kids in the classroom. This will materially divide the work force even more, weakening solidarity, making it easier still to manipulate education in the interest of war and inequality.
A 2007 study by a University of Florida Economics professor, David Figlio, now seeks attention as academic proof that teacher merit pay improves student test scores, a fetish among politicians, NPR, Ed Week, and many people in the public. What goes unnoticed by many educators is that about 16 percent of US schools are already working with merit pay.
With Governor Swarzenegger declaring a $4.8 billion dollar budget deficit and the budget long overdue, given our current social context of an international war of the rich on the poor, inter-imperialist warfare (costing the US taxpayers $3 Trillion), the collapsing banks (Bear Stearns bailed out), the mortgage crisis (Fannie and Freddie Mac bailed out to the cost of untold trillions)—i.e., the use of government to privatize profits and socialize loss, using the state as an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich—school workers (parents and kids) can expect fights ahead on many fronts.
At issue is whether or not we wisely hunt down the root source of our problems, from inflation to layoffs to health care and pay cuts, to merit pay to pension cuts and rising class size, and the systematic attacks on our kids through regimented curricula promoting little more than technical expertise and witless nationalism, high-stakes racist exams, and the militarization of working class schools: will we see these problems have common beginnings and fight together, parents, students and kids; or will we allow ourselves to be picked off one by one—as is happening with thousands of wrongly foreclosed families right now?
What is the source of our problems? The system of capital, its wars, and the class war we find ourselves in today. Should we miss that reality, or believe we can vote ourselves out of it when both the Democrats and Republicans have conducted open, bipartisan war on the schools through the NCLB–as well as promising endless war on the world–if we fail to see that nobody is going to save us but us, we are in for dark days in education, and the very struggle for reason.
We have mounted a resistance based on direct action and an ethic of equality that says, “you are what you do,” for more than a decade through Substance News, The Rouge Forum ( www.rougeforum.org ), Susan Ohanian’s web site, and Calcare on the Resist list. Please spread the word.
There is always hope in kids.
All the best for a good school year.
r
ps: Here is an early look at a piece in the October Substance
Take a look at the newly designed Substance web site at
www.substancenews.net and please, please subscribe to the hard copy version or send a donation to the only print source of education activism in the US.
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