Tag Archives: California

No Chase Scenes! Mostly Print! Remember March 4th!

Hand of Fate

Rouge Forum Update: No Chase Scenes! Mostly Print! Remember March 4th!

Read the full update here.

On the Little Rouge School Front This Week:

If I Boost Your Grade, Will You Please CARE About the Tests? “They’re bribing them with grades,” said Linman, an educator who helps professors improve their instruction at San Diego State University. “If we can’t make the ethical decision about what’s best for students, we have no choice but to say we’re not going to be involved….”reputations are at stake. Valhalla High Assistant Principal Sam Lund said that education has become a competitive marketplace where schools need good facilities and booming scores to draw families. Like it or not, Lund said, test scores matter. But critics argue they matter for the wrong reasons. “Raising our grades is much too drastic,” said Mitchell Winkie, a junior at Valhalla. “It seems like the point of all this is to make the school look better.”

Detroit Federation of Teachers Reacts to Recall Petition vs DFT President: “In interpreting its governing documents the Executive Board was doing exactly what AFT locals around the country and virtually all other unions regularly do. The membership does not have the authority to reject or overrule the decision of the Executive Board on constitutional questions. If the membership could overrule the Executive Board then the Constitution would have no fixed meaning. Rather it would mean nothing more than what a majority at any membership meeting, however large or small, would decide. The membership has the authority to amend the Constitution in accordance with the terms of that document. It does not have the authority to reject the Executive Board’s interpretation and application of that document.”

Reading Corps on the March in Detroit (Beware of Benevolent Missionaries and Their Books)

Inequality Booms In California Schools: * High-poverty schools were more than four times as likely (65.6% to 15%) as low-poverty schools to experience teacher layoffs.* 70% of principals reported that summer school had been cut back severely or eliminated. High-poverty schools were almost three times as likely (48.7% to 16.7%) as low-poverty schools to eliminate summer school.

San Diego Teachers Asked to Take 8% Pay Cut (can we smell the Detroit Rat?)

NYTimes on the End of Higher Ed (Class Struggle) in California: “In 1960, he added, the state created “the gold standard in high-quality, low-cost public higher education. This year, the California legislature abandoned the gold standard.”

Paul Moore on the Corptocracy of Education and Social Life

Fight Back Against Budget Cuts At California Colleges And Universities

Fight Back Against Budget Cuts At California Colleges And Universities

The Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association supports the California students, faculty and campus workers who are fighting against budget cuts, fee increases, furloughs, and firings. We encourage all MLA members to support the Californians’ fightback.

This year California cut more than $800 million from the University of California (UC) statewide budget, $500 million from the California State University (CSU) system, and $700 million from California Community Colleges (CCC). University and college administrators reacted by eliminating programs and support services, reducing enrollments, offering fewer courses, cutting staff and faculty salaries via furloughs, and laying off hundreds of instructors and non-academic campus workers. To make matters worse, UC and CSU have hiked their fees by 32%, placing the cost of attending college out of reach for many students from low and middle income families. As a result of California’s downsizing of higher education, CSU will cut its enrollment by 40,000 students over the next two years, and CCC will force out a whopping 250,000 students. Working-class families, already facing a 12.2% unemployment rate in California, will be the hardest hit. Since September 24 of this year, thousands of students, workers and faculty have organized teach-ins, rallies, demonstrations, marches, walkouts, strikes and occupations to stop the cuts. Even though university administrators claim that students have the right to “free speech,” protesters at various campuses have been beaten by the police and arrested..

The California budget cuts?and the fee increases at four-year schools?smack of racism because students of color will feeel the effects of these cuts the most. But the cutbacks are also racist in a more devastating political sense. Tragically, while CSU will reduce enrollment by 40,000 students next year, the state has approved AB 900, a law that allocates $7.7 billion to add 40,000 new beds for prison inmates?on top of the $12 billion a year the state spends on prison operating costs. By 2012 California will spend more on prisons than it does on education. There is a direct correlation between the lack of educational opportunities and imprisonment: 18-to-24-year-old male high school dropouts have an incarceration rate 31 times that of males who graduate from a four-year college. And California’s prison inmates are overwhelmingly Black and Latino. Every dollar cut from higher education increases the likelihood of young men of color being siphoned away from higher education and toward a racist prison system.

The financial problems of colleges and universities are directly linked to US capitalism’s current economic crisis?the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. With the collapse of the banking system last year, predatory banks and speculators wiped out vast amounts of capital, including capital used to sustain colleges and universities. While the federal government has spent billions to bailout banks and corporations, it has invested only a pittance on bailing out schools and colleges. In an exposé of capitalist greed, the California Budget Project has shown that California’s 1993 tax cuts benefiting corporations and the wealthy cost the state $11.7 billion in 2005-6 and $12 billion in 2007-2008. Had the state continued taxing at rates equal to those fifteen years ago, there would be no budget crisis in California—or at least it would be far less severe. What’s more, the economic crisis is bound up in a larger global crisis involving imperialist occupations and war. The US spends close to a trillion dollars a year on wars to dominate oil production and pipelines in the Middle East and Central Asia. Obama’s recent escalation of the wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan (at $30 billion and counting) and the continued occupation of Iraq make clear that this president plans to continue Bush’s policy of overspending endlessly on wars.

The struggle against budget cuts at UC, CSU and CCC is a political struggle: a fight against the decision of the state to make students, faculty and workers pay for the profit losses of capitalist corporations. MLA members should support the movement of students, faculty and workers in California because their fight is our fight. We support a second federal stimulus bill to fund higher education nationwide. We support Californians’ fight to abolish racist prisons and increase state funds for higher education: “No cutbacks! No fee increases! No furloughs! No firings!” We don’t want pie in the sky. We want to restore the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education in which public colleges were free for all and which guaranteed a place for all California students who wanted to go.

CALL: March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education

On October 24 more than 800 students, teachers, and other workers met to plan how to advance the struggle to defend and transform public education in California and beyond.

The 10/24 conference endorsed the U of California and California State U strike and mobilization on Nov. 17th– 20th and decided to call for statewide solidarity actions on these days.

In addition, Conference participants also called for a “Strike and Day of Action that is inclusive of all different tactics, including: walkouts, rallies, march to Sacramento, teach ins, occupations, and all other forms of protests chosen by schools and organizations.”

CALL: March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education

On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education – Pre K-12, Adult Education, CC, CSU and UC – to “decide on a statewide action plan capable of winning this struggle, which will define the future of public education in this state, particularly for the working class and communities of color.”

After hours of open collective discussion, the conference democratically voted, as its principal decision, to call for a statewide Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. The conference decided that all schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics – such as strikes, walkouts, march to Sacramento, rallies, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. – for March 4, as well as the duration of such actions.
We refuse to let those in power continue to pit us against each other. If we unite, we have the power to shut down business-as-usual and to force those in power to grant our demands. Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services.

We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations across the state to endorse this call and massively mobilize and organize for the Strike and Day of Action on March 4.

Let’s make this an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and educational segregation in California.

To endorse this call and to receive more information, please contact march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com and consult www.savecapubliceducation.org

Rouge Forum Update: The good and bad resistance and More!

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is up and updated at www.rougeforum.org.

Remember, nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee can be made to Community Coordinator Adam Renner by August 15.

On the Capitalist Education for War and Inequality Front:

Obama to Schools: Change Tenure Laws or Else: The Ed Stim is Merit Pay

UC System Demands 9% Tuition Hike and 8% Pay Cut While Class Size Booms

CSU Boss Wants 20% Tuition Hike

Substance News carries the wrap up of the National Education Association Rep Assembly

Linda Chavez, a top aide to the American Federation of Teachers’ Albert Shanker, testifies against Sotomayor

On “The Depression can only be a passing fancy” Front:

Paul Craig Roberts: “This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents.”

Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs and the Great American Bubble Machine

Chart on the Waves of California Jobs Lost

Reuters: Foreclosures Hit Record High

The International War of the Rich on the Poor Front:

The Bushamagogue Assassination Schemes

Michael Klare’s Shocker: Iraq as the New Oil Pump

And the Resistance (bad example/good example) Front:

So Long EFCA: Union Bosses Can Deliver—nothing

UK Public Worker Strikes Rise

The many crises grow around us apace. Unemployment and foreclosures mean an eradicated tax base, meaning more demands for cuts on education and services, increased taxation of those who have a little, more PR to crush hope in the sense that nothing can be done, more police activity to raise funds and tamp down resistance, and more spectacles. On the war front, more war—for oil, regional control, that is, profits, using the children of the poor to fight the children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands.

What stops the madness? Understanding that the core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded inequality to the potential of mass class-conscious resistance. That has been the project of the Rouge Forum, connection reason to power, for more than a decade. Please join us and help lead the fight-backs that will come.

Thanks to Bob, Al, Sean, Amber, Tony, Kino, Marisol, the Dean, Candace, Sally, Sheri, Barb and Ken (yes, that is right), Donna, Brian, Adam and Gina, Koli, Jesus, Ashwana, Bill, Joe, Dariah, the Susans, and Ann.

Good luck to us, every one.