The corporate attack on public education: A threat to human survival?
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
― Rachel Carson
About 70,000 years ago humanity appears to have faced its greatest challenge up to that time. According to genetic studies, the human population, never very numerous, may have dropped to as few as 2000 individuals worldwide. Some scientists link this population loss to the explosion of the Toba super volcano which they believe caused dangerous environmental changes. Others do not. But something took place that nearly wiped our species off the face of the earth.
As a species, we are not blessed with an immortality gene. Read more
Filed under: Education, Environment, Society and Economy
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Fred Wright: Labor Laffs for the Working Class
“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.” ― Erma Bombeck
Labor cartoonist Fred Wright was a radical artist who walked that thin line in a way that would impress any circus tightrope walker. The son of working class parents, Fred Wright knew the world of class warfare up-close and personal when he first began cartooning for the National Maritime Union (NMU) in 1939. He became staff cartoonist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) in 1949, a job he held until the early 1980’s.
Layoffs, industrial accidents, harassment of all types, discrimination, poverty wages, union-busting, exposure to mean bosses and other human tragedies were the basis for his humor.
Poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht once said,”The man who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.” Fred Wright was used to hearing terrible news. It was all around him. And like Brecht, Wright understood how tragedy can be the basis of humor; humor that can help people laugh in the face of adversity and then if possible, organize and try to prevent the same tragedies from happening again.
Filed under: Media, Unions, US politics
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Chicagoans prepare to take back their city: A view from the West Side
“Imagine what a community would look like that you and your children deserve and what are you willing to do to bring that to fruition.”—–Tara Stamps
Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) activist and West Side resident Tara Stamps repeated variations of that phrase in a packed community July 17th meeting held at LaFollette Park in the 37th Ward within the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s far West Side. Each time she said it, she spoke slowly and distinctly to catch people’s attention.
West Siders and allies gather in the LaFollette Park fieldhouse on Chicago’s West Side
With the expected announcement that CTU President Karen Lewis will run for Mayor against Rahm Emanuel, along with plans by the CTU and groups like the newly formed United Working Families to conduct massive voter registration and coordinate efforts by progressive aldermanic campaigns, meetings like this one at LaFollette Park take on a more urgent significance. It is a good example of the working class community organizing that is going on Chicago right now.There have been a number of similar meetings across the city in recent weeks.
Austin is Chicago’s largest neighborhood by physical area. Like much of the largely African American West Side, Austin has been hit hard by divestment, unemployment, low wage employment, foreclosures, street violence, and school closings, as well as school privatization through ”turnarounds” and charters.
The year 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the decision by the Board of Education under Arne Duncan to close Austin High School as a general high school for the community, instead putting three small schools (two of them charters) inside the cavernous building. Duncan’s attack on Austin (both the high school and the community at large) was one of the opening shots in the massive privatization and charter school plan that has unfolded in the decade since.
Filed under: Education, Unions, US politics
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Brown v. Board Of Education at 60: Will we ever achieve compliance?
“The night the 1954 Brown decision to desegregate schools was announced, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threw a party. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had worked on the case was reported to have said this, ‘You fools go ahead and have your fun, but we ain’t begun to work yet.”
In 1952 my kindergarten class at Pleasant View Elementary School was located in a wooded area of suburban Wheaton MD, a working class community just outside of Washington DC. It was a child’s garden of earthly delights.
Each day brought new wonders: new songs, new stories, new indoor projects, big kids showing off green snakes from the forest and visits to the school hatchery where I watched baby chicks emerge from eggs. I loved climbing to the summit of the jungle gym where I thought it might be warmer because it was closer to the sun. I was wrong, but the view was worth it.
Kindergarten at Pleasant View was the best educational experience of my 12 years in the Montgomery County school system. What I didn’t know at the age of 5 was that not far away, there were schools that didn’t look like Pleasant View at all.
A local civil rights leader named Romeo Horad spoke to the Montgomery County government about these segregated African American schools saying conditions were “deplorable”:
He told the Commissioners ‘not one Negro school in the county compares favorably with any white school’. He charged [that] the county government ‘disregarded’ conditions at Negro schools which he said include no running water, outdoor privy toilets, schools located far from Negro population centers, some near railroad tracks. All Negro schools, he said were overcrowded.”—- from a 1948 Washington Post article
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, US politics
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Community groups charge possible conflicts of interest in Chicago school turnarounds
“We have asked the Inspectors General for CPS and the US Department of Education to examine the last votes to turn over 3 schools to AUSL for turnaround to determine if there were any conflicts of interest among board members and AUSL; to analyze the relationship–if any– between political contributions to Mayor Emanuel from AUSL board members and the significant increase in the number of Chicago Public Schools turned over to AUSL on a no bid basis…”— Valerie Leonard of the Chicago Citizens United to Preserve Public Education (CCUPPE)
In the wake of the latest Chicago school “turnarounds”, a broad alliance of community groups called Chicago Citizens United to Preserve Public Education(CCUPPE) has come together to call for a moratorium on future school actions (the Chicago term for privatization efforts) and to reverse the decision to turn over Gresham, Dvorak and McNair to the private Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL). All three schools have predominately African American students living in low income neighborhoods.”
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, Society and Economy, US politics
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Fight for $15 in Chicago: Revolt in a Global City
“I am here to remind America that it is a crime to live in this great nation and to receive starvation wages. At McDonalds $8.25 an hour, what I make is about $400 every two weeks. With that salary I have to choose between rent and food. Rent and light…but this isn’t just about me This about my grandkids and my great grandkids. If McDonalds has its way, my great grandkids will make $8.25 in the year 2050”—- McDonalds worker Doug Hunter
It was a chilly drizzly, 5:30 am in Chicago as a handful of WOCC (Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago) activists loaded batteries into bullhorns, sorted out picket signs and made sure the now familiar Fight for $15 red plastic rain ponchos were ready. WOCC is the organization for the Fight for $15 movement in Chicago. They were preparing for the planned 6 am rally at the Rock and Roll McDonalds, the city’s flagship store.
It was May 15, 2014, the day of a global strike and protest against the McDonalds Corporation for its selectively applied exploitative labor policies. In countries with strong unions and a high level of working class solidarity, a job at McDonalds means reasonably decent wages and benefits. But not everywhere. And definitely not here in the USA.
WOCC members are acutely aware of this which is why they say “Fight for $15 AND a union.” Victories won can be taken back again without strong worker organization and constant vigilance.
Soon, a sizable number of people were gathering within the small plaza in front of the Rock and Roll McDonalds. Located in the trendy Near North tourist area close to the Hard Rock Cafe, it is an unusually large and architecturally unique McDonalds.
Although named after a music born of youthful rebellion, it is run as a tight fisted dictatorship. One Rock and Roll McDonald’s worker said they treat the employees there like “animals.”
At first McDonalds security feigned friendliness and told people they could stay in the small plaza as long as they did not carry signs. Those could only be carried on the public sidewalk in front of the store.
But when a smiling mariachi band tried to play for the growing crowd carrying nothing but their instruments, McDonald’s security pushed them and everyone else on to the now crowded public sidewalk. Fortunately the overhang over the plaza extended to that narrow public space, giving the strikers, their allies and the media partial protection from a now wind-blown cold heavy rain. Spirits remained high as workers sang and chanted.
Forcing the media to cover themselves and their equipment against the elements was probably not the best way for McDonalds Corporation to get sympathetic coverage. Neither was the disingenuous official statement from their Oak Brook Illinois HQ:
“…The events taking place are not strikes. Outside groups have traveled to McDonald’s and other outlets to stage rallies.”
Calling their own striking workers part of an “outside group” was both disrespectful and untruthful. But the bad weather and the now unsmiling McDonalds security did not deter McDonald’s workers like Adriana Alvarez from speaking out at the early morning press conference:
“We’re here to show to show McDonald’s and everyone else that we are not going to put up with it anymore. This is global. Not just in the United States. Not just in Chicago. Everywhere. 100+ cities and 30 countries. We’re ready. I’m here because I have a 2 year old son. I want to give the world to my son but I can’t on today’s minimum wage so I need a living wage of $15 an hour.”
Chicago: A tale of two global cities
“I am proud to see A.T. Kearney has recognized the City of Chicago has a top global city of today and tomorrow….With our access to international transportation, central location between the coasts and pool of skilled workforce talent, businesses across the world realize all of the extensive opportunities Chicago has to offer as the city continues to shape the direction of the world in the coming years.” —Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Chicago is often called a global city and as Mayor Rahm Emanuel is fond of saying, a “world class” one at that. Rahm’s vision of Chicago as a global city is a greatly enhanced version of a downtown that already exists—- only with more glittering office towers and luxury condos. Where even more expensive cars cruise streets bordered by ornamental shrubs and colorful flowers. Where still more smartly dressed affluent mostly white people peruse the fancy shops lining the Magnificent Mile and its side streets. Where armies of business leaders and well-heeled tourists from across the planet will come to marvel at this Emerald City on the Lake.
You can read about this vision in A Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs a report commissioned by Mayor Emanuel himself. Buried deep within its 58 pages is this astonishingly frank statement:
”While the Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs will contribute to increased opportunity for individuals and more investment for communities, it is not a plan for poverty elimination and community development.”
No kidding, Mr Mayor. Eliminating poverty is not on your agenda. Neither is fair-minded community development. But what else could we expect from a “leader” whose actual constituency consists of high rolling hedge fund gamblers, gentrifying real estate speculators, shady mortgage lenders and predatory multinational corporations like McDonalds who ply their money-making trades with a coldblooded intensity that even Ebenezer Scrooge couldn’t match. Poverty wages are just too damned profitable. The skyrocketing wealth inequality which the McDonalds Corporation and the rest of the Chicago elite favors is dependent upon the continued existence of poverty.
The MacDonalds workers who went on strike May 15 have a different vision for the global city that Chicago could become, one that is widely shared by other low wage workers. While aimed specifically at McDonalds, the strike also send a message to other large corporations as well as government. It’s time for poverty wages to be raised to a living wage
The demand for a living wage is literally a fight for life. Poverty can kill, sometimes swiftly with a hail of bullets in the shadows of lonely street; sometimes slowly as stress and constant worry wears down an immune system, inviting multiple health problems that overwhelm the body and the city’s inadequate public health system.
Are you listening Ronald McDonald?
Chicago’s chronic and terrifying street violence is largely confined to the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods where unemployment, low wages and racism combine into a perfect storm of social distress. Raise wages. Cut the violence.
Are you listening Ronald McDonald?
Poverty can wound the mind as well, which is why the Chicago Teachers Union teamed with WOCC to help produce a report called “Fight for the Future: How low wages are failing children in Chicago’s schools”. From the report:
“Students living in or experiencing childhood poverty are much more likely to face significant unaddressed obstacles to classroom learning than their middle- and upper-income counterparts, and this impacts educational outcomes. In fact, data shows that family income is now the most significant predictor of academic success among students in the U.S.”
Are you listening, Ronald McDonald?
A living wage and the ability to organize a union without fear, as well fair minded investment in distressed communities would go along ways toward eliminating the poverty that is the root cause of so many human tragedies in Chicago.
Referring to a recent partial victory for the $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle, Jamie, a McDonalds worker from Rockford said:”
We’re coming together with our coworkers, and we’re fighting for the right to join a union and $15 an hour…If they can get it in Seattle, we can get it in Chicago.”
The workers of Fight for $15 want not only better wages and benefits, but work schedules which are arrived at through honest negotiation, schedules that would enable them to have more time with their families; more time for relaxation; more time for personal goals and interests; more time to improve their neighborhoods; more time to live a rich and fulfilling live.
They want a global city of safe neighborhoods, good schools, clean well maintained parks, decent housing, affordable health care, access to nutritious food and all of the social amenities that come with a living wage enforced by a union contract.
They know such things are possible because they see people in more affluent communities having them at their fingertips.
Their vision of a global city comes with a global working class consciousness, an understanding of the power that working class people have if they unite across racial, regional and national boundaries.
You could see the fierce pride in the eyes of McDonalds worker Jessica Davis as she said:
”Just months ago we were just a few workers in a couple of cities. They thought we were crazy. Now we’re global. We’re 100+ cities and 30 countries. We are showing McDonalds that we are a force and they can’t ignore us any more”
This is not the globalization that Rahm and his wealthy friends have in mind.
Fight for $15: This is what solidarity looks like!
All day long individuals and groups came to show their support. With rain still falling in the morning, Action Now! a community organization with branches on the West and South Sides came clad in their characteristic blue t-shirts. They brought an enormous blue fist, their bullhorns and their chants as they joined Fight for $15 and marched around the block where Rock and Roll McDonalds is located.
There were people from the United Auto Workers, Chicago Teachers Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, International Association of Machinists, Service Employees International Union, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Brighton Park Neighbors and Albany Park Neighbors.
Representing one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city, the Albany Park contingent proudly marched up Clark Street with the flags of nations that were participating in the global strike action. The flags also represented the many nationalities who live in that North Side neighborhood.
There were the usual friendly waves from passerby, the raised fists and the horn honking. Tourists snapped pictures from their tour buses and from the sidewalk. I decided to take a break around midday from note taking and photography and held up a Fight for $15 sign on the corner. A pair of tourists asked to borrow my sign so one could hold it up while the other snapped a picture for their Facebook friends.
By the time the protest ended at 6 PM, several hundred people had participated. It was a long day, but spirits were even higher when the rally closed and the group briefly occupied the Rock and Roll McDonalds plaza in a final act of defiance.
No one underestimates the difficulties that lie ahead within the corrupted political economy of Chicago, where the vast fortunes controlled by global corporations compete with the cry of the people demanding a better life.
Chicago needs more working class people in union meetings, in the streets, and on the picket lines. We also need more volunteers in insurgent electoral campaigns. Independent-minded elected leaders such as Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington and Marc Elrich in Montgomery County, Maryland have been instrumental in the fight toward gaining a living wage.
We need to exercise both economic and political power.
Jorge Mujica, an independent socialist candidate for city council who was on the picket line with the McDonalds strikers throughout the day, sums it up pretty well:
“We live in a working class city. It is our labor, our skills, our ingenuity, and our pride that built this city and that keep it running every day. Yet most of us are overworked and underpaid. We face a real crisis–not one of resources or possibilities, but of priorities. Until we create our own political voice, working people will remain locked out of political power.”
Whose global city? Our global city!
Bob “Bobbosphere ” Simpson is retired teacher and a member of Action Now!
Sources Consulted
Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago, a tale of two cities by Kevin Coval
Fast-food workers put their issues on the table by Elizabeth Schulte
Chicago’s world-class city complex by Jake Malooley
A Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs by the World Business Chicago (Chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Chicago Named Top Global City in A.T. Kearney Index by the World Business Chicago (Chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel
Filed under: Society and Economy, Unions
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School turnarounds in Chicago: Turning against racial justice
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) leadership is doing exactly the opposite of what both community activists and researchers have shown to be the most effective ways of improving public schools. School “turnarounds” are a racist privatization scheme damaging to quality education.
Tears welled up in the eyes of Angela Gordon, Local School Council President of Dvorak school as she composed herself to speak her allowed 2 minutes in front of the Chicago Board of Education on April 23, 2014.
Her school, along with McNair and Gresham schools, was about to have its entire staff fired, from the lunch ladies to the principal and then reorganized by a private management company called the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL)
In Chicago this is called a “turnaround”.
Gordon tossed aside her prepared remarks and pleaded for the Board to postpone the decision. Her voice filled with emotion, she told the Board they are ”all about the numbers” explaining that she was there for the students as human beings, not as statistics.
Surrounded by Dvorak parents and children she concluded by saying.”Do not turn us around through AUSL! Give us the resources so WE we can give the students what they need!”
Representatives of the other two schools also spoke in behalf of their students.
Supporters of McNair await their their turn to speak at the April 23 Board meeting
A couple of hours later the Board went ahead and issued orders to fire everyone at all three schools and replace them. But that had been decided long before the meeting even began. The entire morning was as one observer said,”Just a game of charades.” Read more
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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Hi-Stakes Testing: The new child labor
“Exploited without regard to their tender years, countless youngsters were working under conditions constantly fraught with danger to life and limb…The blight of child labor was widely prevalent, in dust-laden textile mills and pitch-black coal mines, in sweltering glass factories and fetid sweat-shop lofts, in filthy canneries and blazing hot tobacco fields. No industry, no region was without its “tiny hostages to rapacious capitalism.” —- from Child Labor in Textile Mills by M.B. Schnapper
“I walked past my daughter. She looked up at me, her face red from crying, I could see that tears had been collecting at her collar ‘I just can’t do this,’ she sobbed. The ill fitting headsets, the hard to hear instructions, the uncooperative mouse, the screen going to command modes, not being able to get clarification when she asked for it…Later on when I picked her up after her long seven-hour day, she whispered into my shoulder ‘I’m just not smart, mom. Not like everyone else. I’m just no good at kindergarten, just no good at all.’”———-Claire Wapole, a Chicago mom who volunteered as a MAP test proctor in a Chicago Public Schools kindergarten
Look how far we’ve have advanced in the use of child labor? Corporate USA doesn’t send US children to choke out their lives in the black dust of the coal mines or the brown dust of the textile mills. After long and intense opposition to that kind of child labor, Corporate USA was forced to allow working class children to attend school.
But in our Brave New World of neoliberal capitalism, Corporate USA, as represented by companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill, have turned schools into testing factories. They generate mega-profits by having kids hunched over their writing desks or their computers for hours and even days at a time. Education is a big business, some estimates I have seen place it at as high as 1.3 trillion dollars.
Photo by Leah-Anne Thompson
If the White House and Wall Street have their way, this big business will get even bigger. There’s gold in dem thar’ tests, along with the ancillary material, the training manuals, the test prep guides and the scripted curricula that goes along with the whole package. Standardized tests have been weaponized and used as an excuse to close schools and privatize education while firing experienced and beloved teachers. Teachers? Who needs teachers? If the trend continues, a computer network technician who can read instructions in a clear voice will be all that is necessary. Think of the cost savings in salaries and benefits.
But the real mother-load will be the data collection that requires monstrous server farms, upgraded multi-state digital networks, endless software and hardware upgrades, technical support and…well you get the picture. And by the way, what do they plan to do with all of this highly personal data? Read more
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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Stop the abuse of women workers at McDonalds and Whole Foods: Fight for 15!
“Unlike nations which have rational labor policies like sick leave, paid parental leave, affordable childcare, vacation time, generous retirement and which protect the right to organize a union, the USA has chosen the opposite course. This has led to some of the worst inequality in the developed world, which because of our rampant gender and racial discrimination, falls heaviest on women, particularly women of color.”
International Women’s Day (IWD), March 8, was originally inspired by the historic 1909 “Uprising of the 20,000”, a garment workers strike of women in NYC, many of them immigrants. They demanded better pay, better working conditions and the right to join a union.
So it made sense that the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC), which leads the Fight for $15 campaign in the city, should celebrate International Women’s Day by standing up for the rights of women workers in 2014.
A Chicago McDonald’s worker named Carmen Navarrette had been told that she “should put a bullet through her head,” because she had requested permission to go home after become very ill at work. She is a diabetic and had just been released from the hospital.
As a result, dozens of WOCC members and supporters marched into a North Side McDonald’s on International Women’s Day to demand an end to this kind of discrimination and verbal abuse.
On the morning of March 8, a smaller group of WOCC members and allies picketed a North Side Chicago Whole Foods and demanded the reinstatement of Rhiannon Brochat. She was fired after she stayed home with her special needs child when Chicago schools were closed on the worst day of the Polar Vortex.
McDonald’s and Whole Foods may seem like very different companies, but their attitude toward women workers is remarkably similar.
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Chicagoans join together to ice the ISAT standardized test
“Standardized testing encourages rigid scripted teach-to-the-test curricula devoid of educational exploration. The human element that makes great teaching and engaged learning is ruthlessly crushed like so much scrap metal in a junkyard compactor. No student was ever motivated to become an eager life-long learner by taking a mind numbing battery of tests. Now they are even being inflicted on Kindergarten and Pre-K children. Have we lost our minds?”
Across the wide 24th Boulevard in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood you could hear the chants: “Let us teach…Let us teach…Let us teach!”
It was the frigid late afternoon of February 28 and the sounds were coming from the steps of Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. Parents, teachers, students and community allies had gathered to support Saucedo’s boycott of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT).
Students dismissed from school gather before the rally
Earlier that week Saucedo teachers, with the urging of school parents, had voted unanimously not to give the test. The endless procession of standardized tests that take up valuable instruction time had pushed the Saucedo school community past the limit of its patience. Teachers didn’t want to go to work and follow a regimen they knew was harmful to children. And parents didn’t want that either. A natural alliance came into being.
The late Maria Saucedo was a highly respected bi-lingual educator working in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood who was active in groups like Casa Atzlan and Mujeres Latinas. As an honors student at Northeastern Illinois University, she helped found the Chicano Student Union. She was killed in a fire in 1981.
The Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy community is carrying on her life’s work of social and education justice.
Saucedo special education teacher Sarah Chambers opened the rally by announcing that Saucedo did not stand alone:
“ We’ve received e-mails, photos, calls from Montana, from California, from New York, from all over the country. We have people supporting us for taking a stand.”
The rally was part of the general revolt against testing abuse in Chicago and across the nation. Spirits at the Saucedo rally were buoyed when word spread that Drummond Montessori on the city’s North Side had joined the boycott. This was in addition to the 67 schools where parents were opting out of the test on an individual basis. Read more
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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