As report shows
teachers spending hundreds of dollars on school supplies
Wave of US
educator walkouts hits North Carolina today
By Will
Morrow
16 May 2018
Tens of thousands of teachers and school employees are assembling
today in Raleigh, the state capital of North Carolina, for demonstrations to
demand funding for crumbling school infrastructure, wages, benefits and reduced
class sizes, and to oppose more than a decade of deep cuts to public education
spending.
The walkout, which has already forced the closure of at least 40
of the state’s 115 school districts at time of writing, is the latest in a wave
of teacher strikes and demonstrations across the US, in West Virginia,
Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and Colorado. It is part
of an international upsurge of working-class class struggle in 2018, which has
already seen strikes by transport workers in France, metal workers in Germany
and Turkey, and a growth in strikes and protests by workers across the Middle
East, Europe and Africa.
The rally follows yesterday’s release of a report by the National
Center for Education Statistics, based on a 2015-2016 survey, which found that
94 percent of teachers across the US were forced to spend their own money on
school supplies, including chalk, to cover budget shortfalls.
The median amount spent was $297 per year, and this number
increased in areas with higher levels of poverty. For schools where three
quarters or more of students qualified for government-funded lunch programs,
almost one in ten teachers spent more than $1,000 every year on basic classroom
supplies.
As in previous walkouts, the initiative for the strike has come
from rank-and-file teachers, not the union officials. The unions are opposed to
any extended walkout and are seeking to send teachers back to school after a
single day of rallying. The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) is
promoting the rally with the hash tag #itspersonal, calling on teachers to take
a personal day off school and pay $50 for a substitute teacher if their school
remains open.
The union is presenting the walkout as a run-up to the main action
of voting for Democrats in the November elections. NCAE president Mark Jewell
declared at a rally yesterday that “all of this will be fruitless unless we
take this energy and passion to the ballot box and change those who make this
policy.”
The reality, however, is that the Democrats, no less than the
Republicans, have overseen the assault on public education in North Carolina as
throughout the US. Former Democratic governor Bev Perdue oversaw the largest
cuts to school funding from 2009 to 2011, slashing more than $1 billion from
annual expenditure in current dollar terms.
Just six days ago, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled House and
Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper passed sweeping cuts to pensions for
teachers and public employees. New teachers will now be forced to work an
additional six years before retiring, while cost-of-living adjustments for
pension benefits have been frozen for two years. The previous Obama
administration spearheaded the assault on teachers, promoting charter schools
and rewarding schools that carried out teacher layoffs.
In North Carolina, Republican Governor Patrick McCrory and the
Republican-controlled legislature have continued this offensive over the past
six years. To enable school boards to carry out mass layoffs, McCrory limited
the duration of all new teacher contracts to one year. Since 2009, the number
of teacher support staff in the state has been cut by a third, or 7,500
workers. Over the same period, the Republican governor has repealed the estate
inheritance tax and slashed the corporate tax rate from 6.9 to 4 percent.
Ann, a North Carolina teacher who retired in 2017 after 18 years,
told the WSWS, “There isn’t enough money for after-school programs. There isn’t
enough money for supplies.” In 2016, her class size increased from 28 to 35
students. “I taught for two years in a trailer with mold falling on the desks
every day. There were 17 trailers at that school. I was sick almost all the
time. Kids were sick.” She added, “It’s completely about class. The income gap
just gets bigger every year. The government subsidizes the wealthiest
companies.”
While there is enormous determination among teachers to fight, it
is critical that they draw the lessons of the outcomes of the struggles that
have occurred so far. In West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona, the
strikes were betrayed and shut down by the National Education Association and
American Federation of Teachers without achieving any of their main demands.
The unions are continuing to isolate the strikes on a state-by-state basis and
prevent the development a nationwide strike.
Teachers from Oklahoma and Arizona have sought to warn teachers in
North Carolina to learn the lessons of these betrayals. A teacher from Arizona,
Matthew, posted on the North Carolina Teachers United, a Facebook group that
more than 38,000 teachers have joined in the lead-up to today’s rally, warning:
“You have to watch your supposed ‘allies,’ Democratic legislators begging for
votes, [and] your union who basically just wants to increase membership, stop
striking and vote Democrat in November... They will sell you out quick as they
can. Oklahoma and Arizona were both defeated the same way.”
In Arizona and Oklahoma, the unions relied on the services of
auxiliary Facebook groups, including Arizona Educators United, Oklahoma
Teachers United and Oklahoma Teachers Walkouts—The Time is Now. The
administrators of these groups, while retaining formal independence from the
teacher unions, served to prevent teachers from organizing independently of the
unions as the latter worked to betray the strikes.
To carry forward their struggle independently and in opposition to
the strikebreaking trade unions, teachers require new organizations,
rank-and-file committees of teachers and school workers, which would make a
powerful appeal to teachers and other workers across the United States and
internationally for a common struggle.
Such a movement must be developed in direct opposition to both
major parties, Democratic and Republican, which represent the banks,
corporations and financial institutions that dictate policy of every government
in the US and around the world. Any attempt by government officials to
introduce even moderate increases in social spending, including on public
education—which, in any case, they have no intention of carrying out—would be
met with an immediate act of retaliation by the financial institutions.
Last week’s pension cuts in Colorado followed a statement issued
by the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s (S&P) last November warning
that it would downgrade its credit rating on the state’s government bonds if
the pension fund’s liabilities were not reduced. In the course of the strike by
West Virginian teachers in March, government officials revealed that they had
been in regular contact with both S&P and Moody’s rating agencies, which were
demanding that the strike be ended.
The fight by the working class for its basic social rights—to
public education, health care, a secure retirement and decent wages—is
inseparable from the question of which social class determines the distribution
of society’s wealth: the working class, or a tiny layer of the corporate elite.
The reorganization of economic life on the basis of genuine social equality,
rather than profit, means the fight for socialism. This is the perspective of
the Socialist Equality Party.
Build
rank-and-file committees! Prepare a nationwide strike to defend public
education!
North Carolina and
the next stage of the teachers’ revolt
By the WSWS
Teacher Newsletter
16 May 2018
Thousands of teachers and their supporters are marching in
Raleigh, North Carolina today to demand decent wages and benefits and increased
school funding. The protest, along with one by South Carolina teachers on
Saturday, is part of a nationwide revolt by educators against the bipartisan
war on public education and school workers.
Over the past several months, hundreds of thousands of teachers
and support staff have engaged in statewide walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma
and Arizona, and other strikes and protests in Kentucky, Colorado, New Jersey
and many other states, plus the US territory of Puerto Rico.
This is part of an international struggle. Last week, 270,000
teachers carried out a nationwide strike in the South American country of
Colombia to demand improved pay and health benefits. On Tuesday, 2,100 school
bus drivers walked out in Montreal and across the Canadian province of Quebec
because they earn less than $15,000 a year.
Now teachers in North Carolina—which ranks 39th in the country in
teacher pay and per-pupil funding—are demanding the restoration of a decade of
funding cuts, pay raises for all school workers, the hiring of new nurses and
social workers, and a plan to repair crumbling schools and reduce class sizes.
Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has proposed to allocate less than $100 million
to increase teachers’ salaries this year, promising only that their pay might
reach parity with the national average over the next four years.
There is enormous support for a united struggle that will link up
teachers with all sections of the working class. Serving as a block against
such a fight are, first of all, the trade unions, including the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).
While claiming to represent teachers, the unions are, in fact, working
consciously to prevent a united movement and shut down any strikes that erupt
as quickly as possible.
The strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona were initiated
by rank-and-file teachers, not the unions, which are allied to the Democrats
and defend the capitalist system. In each case, the unions worked to reassert
control, strangle the fight and sign deals that ignored teachers’ main demands.
Repeating the same line of the unions in other states, the North
Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) claims teachers’ demands can be won by
limiting action to a one-day “lobbying” campaign of the state legislature and
electing “pro-education” Democratic politicians in November. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
Both parties represent the corporate and financial elite that
rules this country, not the working class. While the rhetoric of the Democrats
may differ from the right-wing rants of Republicans like state Rep. Mark Brody,
the Democrats have waged a decades-long attack on public education too.
Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, expanded
for-profit charter schools and scapegoated teachers for educational problems
caused by poverty and underfunding. Last week, Colorado’s Democratic governor and
state House imposed sweeping cuts to teacher and public employee pensions,
including raising the retirement age by six years for future teachers, freezing
cost-of-living raises and increasing worker contributions for their retirement
benefits.
In every state, politicians from both corporate-controlled parties
claim there is no money for raises, new textbooks or other essential needs. At
the same time, the giant banks and corporations are sitting on a $2.2 trillion
cash hoard—nearly four times what the federal and all state governments spend
on public education each year. After the windfall from Trump’s tax cuts,
Charlotte-based Bank of America saw its first quarter profit rise by 30
percent, to $6.92 billion.
Instead of using these vast resources to meet society’s needs, the
corporations have spent at least $158 billion in stock buybacks in the first
three months of 2018 and are expected to spend a record $1.2 trillion by the
end of the year. The money squandered so far this year on stock buybacks, which
benefit only the richest shareholders and executives, is enough to give a
$49,000 bonus to all 3.2 million full-time teachers in the US, or increase
per-pupil spending by more than $3,000 for each of the country’s 50.7 million
public school students.
The lessons of the strikes so far this
year must be learned and made the basis for a new organizational and political
way forward. The Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS Teacher
Newslettercall on teachers to:
· Elect rank-and-file workplace
committees. Teachers and school workers must form rank-and-file
committees in every school and community to take the conduct of the struggle
out of the hands of the unions. Instead of making fruitless appeals to
corporate-controlled politicians, these committees should appeal to every
section of the working class—public employees, manufacturing, warehouse, health
care, technology and office workers—to unite in a common fight for decent
living standards and to expand public services.
· Prepare a nationwide strike to
defend and vastly improve public education. The banks and giant
corporations like Bank of America and Amazon operate on a national and
international scale, shifting operations to whatever locale offers them the
lowest taxes and cheapest labor. Teachers cannot fight on a state-by-state
basis, but must unite their forces and build support for a nationwide strike to
fight the assault on public education.
· Break with both big business
parties and build a powerful political movement of the working class against
the dictatorship of the banks and big business. The
Socialist Equality Party is fighting to build a political movement of the
working class whose aim is the establishment of a workers’ government and the
reorganization of society to meet human needs, not corporate profit.
· For a sharp increase in taxes on
the corporations and the rich , and the
expropriation of the ill-gotten gains of the financial
oligarchy. Immediate measures must be taken to promote
social equality and a radical redistribution of wealth, including a progressive
income tax that places the burden of taxation on the rich and corporate
profits, while lowering taxes for the vast majority of the population. At the
same time, workers must take hold over the wealth that they collectively create
by nationalizing the banks and giant corporations and transforming them into
publicly owned and democratically controlled enterprises.
Nothing the working class has ever achieved was won without a
determined struggle against its class enemies and their political representatives.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the textile workers of North and South Carolina waged
heroic struggles in Gastonia and other mill towns against sweatshop
exploitation and to end the scourge of child labor. Now Trump is overturning
prohibitions on child labor established in the 1930s and the ruling class
foresees a dystopian future where working class children are condemned to hard
labor while only the sons and daughters of the well-to-do have quality
education.
Workers in the United States and around
the world are returning to the road of class struggle. To take this forward, a
new leadership and perspective is needed. The Socialist Equality Party and
the World Socialist Web Site Teacher Newsletter urge
teachers in North Carolina to contact us to help form rank-and-file committees
and mobilize the broadest support in the working class for this fight.
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