Photo: Sampling from a Progress Illinois video, Our Cities, Our Schools, Our Voices
As schools get ready to open this year, angry and frustrated parents and teachers stormed out of the latest hearings on Chicago’s austerity budget. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed 49 elementary schools this year. Then CPS cut the budgets of the remaining schools by $68 million, and then laid off at least 3,000 teachers and support staff. CPS also approved new charter schools and increased funding to charter schools. Corporate charter schools are replacing public schools.
Across America, all of the commonly-owned, public property of the American people is being transferred to the privately-owned, for-profit corporations. One of the last sectors to remain in the public domain is public education. The current privatization of pubic education is rapidly changing that.
Corporations set the guidelines for massive increases in testing, what schools get funding, who teaches and who benefits from elite education. Corporations also determine who are relegated to indoctrination rather than education, and who travel on the school-to-prison pipeline.
Education is the poster child for the merger of the government and the corporations, without any concern for the interests of the people. The “jobless recovery” of the current depression reinforces the fact that the system no longer needs as many educated workers to resupply the labor market. The latest government jobs report shows that in all sections of the labor market, jobs are being replaced by electronics. The corporations are not going to educate workers they don’t need.
The corporate government is restructuring society to insure profits for the corporations in this era of technological change. For example, American cities go into debt to Wall Street, and rather than refusing to pay legally dubious loans from Wall Street, they further cut working class programs, teacher pensions and privatize.
For funding, school districts rely on the property tax. Wealthy areas can provide more of a funding base. Poorer school districts cannot. No locality can solve this problem on its own. Only national, equitable funding can guarantee equal education for all. As long as the federal government refuses to fund quality education for all, as long as corporations dominate education, we will not be able to shape education in our own interests. Parents know this!
People are beginning to realize that the Chicago experience is not just ignorant policy. Xian Barrett, one of the teachers recently fired, wrote, “This was not those who run the Chicago Public Schools System failing in their mission; it was them succeeding.”
People throughout the country are struggling valiantly to hold their cities responsible for the education of the children. In the long run, for the struggle to be successful, we need to take our country away from the corporations and build a cooperative society. This is not a choice, but a necessity.
The first step is to hold every politician accountable, force each to show where he or she stands on equal funding for all schools and the guarantee of federal resources for a world class education in every neighborhood. Taking over the corporations, making their property public, will give the people the chance to build the education—and the entire new society—that we want and need.
