Students Deserve Communism
LOS ANGELES, US, Dec. 12—United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is ready to strike for the “Schools Students Deserve.” They’re demanding—more urgently than a wage increase—lower class size, more support staff, less standardized testing, and community schools with lots of social service support in the areas where working -class students have been most impacted by capitalist crisis.
But capitalism is in crisis and can only get worse. It’s an illusion to think that the public schools can be islands that protect our young people in a sea of crisis.
Our students deserve a communist world, where we work together to feed, clothe and house the masses of workers. A world where no one lives in luxury while others are hungry and homeless. A world where, breaking down the divisions between old and young, between work and school, we learn from each other while we learn to protect the planet as we meet the needs of all.
Capitalist crisis impacts schools, teachers and students
Capitalist crisis, war and climate disaster have caused mass suffering around the world. The waves of refugees coming across the Mediterranean and north from Central America are the sharpest examples of the intense suffering that the crisis is causing our class. But the working class in the advanced capitalist countries is facing sharp racist attacks as well.
No capitalist reform, no strike, no election, will end these attacks. The only way to end them is by mobilizing the masses for communist revolution, to overthrow the bosses’ government and create a society that is based on meeting our needs, not on creating increasingly obscene profits for the few.
The US is a declining capitalist power, slowly losing its dominance to capitalist competitors in Russia and China. As a tiny elite increases its profits, working people are going under.
Union jobs are being outsourced to prison labor and nonunion subcontractors. Public resources, including the schools, are being privatized. Racist police terror and mass incarceration are devastating black and latino communities. And as the price of housing increases while wages remain stagnant, workers need to work two or three jobs to survive and many are forced out onto the street
These attacks on our class have a direct impact on our schools. Out of 640,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), 8000 are in foster care—most the victims of the epidemic of drugs and the policies of mass incarceration. More than 16,000 students—one out of 40 in the district—are homeless. And the uneven burden of racism means that these students are concentrated near Skid Row, in South Los Angeles, and other communities of color.
The public schools that teachers hope could serve as social support have been under attack by charter school operators for more than twenty years. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately-run, mostly by big corporations with names like Animo and KIPP. In the LAUSD, there are 187 charter schools out of eleven hundred total. Their impact is larger than their numbers
As the public schools struggle, parents who have the resources apply to charters. These schools require parent volunteer labor, strict codes of conduct, special uniforms, and very little help for kids with special needs. They suck resources away from the public schools, leaving the students most impacted by capitalism concentrated in schools without full-time nurses, counselors, psychologists or librarians.
UTLA is striking to return these resources to neighborhood schools and for better working conditions. Teaching is easier, more effective and more rewarding in a school with adequate student support and fewer students in the classroom. (There can be up to 40 students in the classroom in LA, and there’s no enforceable limit except the code imposed by the fire department.)
Teachers are also fighting to protect their jobs. More kids in charters means less job security for teachers, diminished ability to negotiate health-care and less investment in teacher pensions.
Teachers who care about their students should fight for communism
But even schools with smaller class size and a full-time librarian are capitalist institutions. They push patriotism, train our children and youth to follow orders, and may or may not teach them the skills the capitalists need them to have. (We explored this contradiction more in “The Working Class Deserves Communist Education” in our last issue and in our pamphlet Communist Education for a Classless Society.)
Only in a communist society without the divisions of social class will we be able to provide the education that students deserve, an education that develops their full potential as they work together to create a world that meets the needs of all.
To create the conditions for that kind of education will be a long, hard road. It will require mobilizing the masses, not for capitalist reforms, but for communist revolution. It will require a mass communist party with the teachers, parents and students who are now fighting for better schools mobilizing for a communist future. We invite you to join the International Communist Workers’ Party to help fight for that world.
Students in Soweto, South Africa rebelled in 1976 against racist schools. They raised the slogan Liberation before Education,” rejecting the lie that schooling creates better anti-racist fighters.
READ OUR PAMPHLET:
COMMUNIST EDUCATION FOR A CLASSLESS SOCIETY
AVAILABLE AT
Front page of this issue
