We have to learn how to fight

I'M A member of the union in San Francisco that represents teachers and paraprofessionals. I teach 4th and 5th grade. Before I talk about the attacks that are to come, I want to let you know what it's like already in our schools. Because since the collapse of the economy, the people at the top of society have done what they always do, which is let it rip on the rest of us.

I've been thinking about a couple people in my school. The first is a woman who works in our school, but has lost some of her extra tutoring and after-school hours because of the budget cuts from last year. We regularly see her in the morning in the cafeteria eating the free school breakfast, because that's the way she can afford breakfast--to get it at work.

I was also thinking about a student of mine who, a couple weeks ago, was asking to eat crackers in class, because his mom, who works in the building trades, hasn't been able to get work laying floors, and he hadn't had dinner in two days because she was saving up money to pay the rent. This is the way it is already.

I'm a teacher, and my job is very hard, but at the same time, it's one of the last good jobs left in this country. The government knows it. As public employees, we're paid by the government. They want to bring their labor costs down--and to do it, they're planning to create an education system in this country that is market-based, where they're not actually obligated to serve all children and provide a quality, free public education. We're under a ridiculous attack right now as public school workers, in this state and in this country.

I want to talk about where this attack is coming from. Part of it is comes directly from Sacramento. We have had 10 straight years of cuts to education in California; in the last two years, these cuts have totaled $17 billion. Last year, in California, more than 20,000 teachers and support staff were laid off. We're now number 47 in education spending. In California, we spend half what they spend per pupil in New York. This is because California refuses to tax rich people and corporations.

What that means in San Francisco is that we saw class sizes go up last year in K to 3, and also in 9th grade. They will only continue to increase. And last year was a good year, because we had a rainy day fund and stimulus money that came from the federal government. So while a lot of people lost their jobs in places outside San Francisco, we were able to stop layoffs here.

BUT THIS is only part of the picture. We're also under a national attack that's changing the face of public education, and will continue to do so until we're able to resist. You may have heard about "Race to the Top"--and if you haven't, you should, because it's going to change the way education looks in this country.

It's a $4.3 billion pot of money that the federal government is dangling out in front of states. Only about a dozen states will get the money, and if states want to be competitive for this grant, they have to do a number of things that are going to completely wreck what's left of public education.

You have to get rid of caps on charter schools in your state, so they can open up as many as they want, wherever they want. You have to sign on to accept national learning standards, so all states will have the same standards, and students will take the same test every year. You can draw that out and see that we'll be using the same textbooks and the same materials, printed by the same companies.

Their idea is that you can just put somebody in the classroom, straight out of college, 21 years old, as part of the Teach for America training program. You put a scripted curriculum in front of them, burn them out in five years and drive them out of the profession. So they want to have a revolving door that keeps the cost for teachers in the classroom very low.

In addition to opening up more positions for groups like Teach for America, which is notoriously anti-union, Race to the Top funds require school districts to open the door to teacher merit pay. The aim is to link teachers to student test data, and pay teachers according to their students' scores.

So aside from this deskilling of teaching--by reducing it to reading off a book--there's also, through merit pay, an attack on the unions. This is designed to make the education unions even more ineffective than they are right now.

Merit pay, of course, destroys seniority. It gets rid of anything like a salary scale in which your pay goes up the longer you work and more experience you have. Instead, merit pay ties your pay to the performance of your students and breeds competition between teachers and schools and education workers, rather than creating the cooperation needed to educate students.

This attack is being led by the Obama administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who touts mayoral control of school districts, closure of "failing" schools, the imposition of merit pay against teacher union resistance, and opening more charter schools.

This is happening already. State legislators are running to lift charter caps and remove any barriers to merit pay. It's happening all across the country. In Washington state, which has had a law against charter schools, the legislature is considering a law that would open things up for charters.

School districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles are under some form of mayoral control. Detroit and Milwaukee are lining up to be next. Advocates of mayoral control claim that this centralized power is more efficient, and that democratically elected school boards are an obstacle to progress. But mayoral control does nothing to counteract the impact of budget cuts.

In Hawaii, the irony couldn't be more sickening. Arne Duncan says the state has little chance of qualifying for Race to the Top grant money to help fund education. Why? Because it instituted a four-day school week, with Furlough Fridays, to close its budget gap. And Hawaii's teachers took an 8 percent pay cut on top of that.

This, unfortunately, is what capitalism does. The state budget crises are being driven by the collapse of the economy, and they're coming for the teachers--the 4 million teachers represented by the AFT and NEA, the largest unionized work force in the country.

It's being justified by strong ideological attacks from the top. After cutting our budgets, teachers get blamed for not being able to do more with less. After driving living standards down--we know that poverty has an impact on children's learning--teachers get blamed for not being able to erase the effects of poverty.

And unfortunately, this propaganda has been successful: 71 percent of teachers under 30 say that merit pay is a good thing for teachers who do more and work harder. Charter school support is widespread. And you can understand why, from a family's point of view, because our schools are a mess.

I was standing across the street from my school the other day, looking at my classroom on the second floor, with crumbling pieces of concrete that have fallen down from above the window onto the ground, wondering when the next piece of concrete is going to fall off and land on one of my students while they're out at recess. And there are some teachers who are burned out and demoralized, and not effective in the classroom because our situation has been driven so far into the ground.

IF OUR unions don't learn how to fight, this list of tragedies is going to continue to grow.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has collaborated with this Race to the Top. In her latest comments, she said, "The Department of Education worked hard to strike the right balance between what it takes to get system-wide improvement for schools and kids, and how to measure that improvement." She thinks the Department of Education has struck a balance.

So our message has to be very broad and bold, because there is a very broad and very bold attack being brought down on us. We have to say that the state and federal government has intentionally, deliberately and knowingly starved our schools--there is money in the prisons, the war budget and the pockets of the rich to pay for schools. There is no funding crisis.

It's the teachers and families in the schools, and not mayors of big cities, that should be controlling education. We have to educate the children in our classrooms based on the world and community they live in, and not by some standards to cover the entire country.

We have to learn how to fight. Right now, there's a tour going around the country--the Race to the Top tour--with Arne Duncan, Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton talking about how charter schools are the way forward for public education. They're using New Orleans--where the school district was destroyed in the aftermath of Katrina, and today most children are in non-union charter schools--as an example of the direction we need to be going.

We have to learn to fight. In San Francisco, where we have an annual budget in our city of about $350 million, the district is promising anywhere from $80 to $90 million in cuts over the next two years. We have to learn to fight, and to include the word strike when we're talking about fighting. Because in my union, they're very proud of the fact they haven't been on strike since 1979, and I think that's a problem.

We have to learn to fight because the other side is straight-up lying. If this were about social justice for African-American and Latino students, as advocates of charter schools and other "reforms" claim, they wouldn't be doing things like what they've done in Chicago, where they shut down schools and force students to travel clear across town to go to other schools that aren't any better. They wouldn't be letting charter schools just not accept special education students and English language learners so that test scores can be kept artificially high.

We have to learn to fight, because we want to be a model for the rest of the workers in this state and country, and also for the students we have taught who are now in the California State University system, on the University of California system and the community colleges. We have to draw a line and say we're not yielding on that line.

And we have to learn to fight because our leadership doesn't know how to fight. If we're looking for someone else to deliver a strategy to us that's going to win, it's not going to happen. We're going to have to figure that out among ourselves and do it together.

On March 4, I think we can begin to learn to fight, when students and educators across the state participate in a statewide day of action, and learn to fight the cuts, carry the fight forward so it can expand into a fight against the war, a fight for LGBT rights and a fight against racism.

We have to resist, and we have to draw a line.