Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts

WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 4 — Over 300 Howard University students, CHALLENGE readers and workers protested the administration’s plan to cut services and jobs, and hike tuition. Workers from SEIU Local 32BJ joined in the rally in support of the students and also demanded that the University stop its plan to contract out union jobs.

The Howard University Student Association (HUSA) raised 13 demands, including the firing of the executive leadership in the Office of Student Affairs due to their efforts to censor students; a public, transparent budget so students could see just how real the supposed deficit is; improvements in on-campus housing facilities; expansion and upgrade of the computer network; and a recycling plan to comply with the law and to reduce global warming.

Administrators refused to meet with the protestors, some of whom decided to march into the administration building to confront these bosses despite the HUSA leadership’s effort to stop them. The campus police shoved and kicked some of the students, including militant members of the Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC), to keep them out. Hard to believe that the new president’s slogan is “Students First!”

The economic crisis is hitting universities hard, and they in turn are hitting students and workers with big tuition hikes, cuts in services, layoffs, contracting out union jobs, and a more repressive atmosphere.  The source of the economic crisis is the capitalist system with its single-minded focus on maximizing profit at the expense of everyone else. The universities’ role is to actually serve these capitalist interests.

During the same week that the protest occurred, Howard University announced a $2.5 million grant program from the Director of National Intelligence to develop a curriculum that will feed a pipeline of students into the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. This effort to provide more agents for imperialism complements the existing Howard University ROTC programs. ROTC enrolls almost 200 Howard students per year by bribing them with scholarships to become the executioners of workers and students in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are waged so that U.S. corporations can continue to dominate world oil markets and pipelines and maximize their profits. Military officers and intelligence agents are hit men for U.S. imperialism!

The struggle that heated up this week must begin to join with workers and students around the world to eliminate the source of the vicious attacks they face from profit-hungry imperialists across the globe. A concrete step these students can take in this process is joining the PLP.

Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform

LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 14 — At the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) area union meetings last week, some teachers called for a strike against the attacks on students and teachers, showing that “education reform” is fascist and part of the rulers’ moves to prepare for wider war.

On August 25, the Board of Education voted to turn over up to 200 lower-performing schools and 51 new schools to charter school operators.  This is fascist reorganization of the local school system by a U.S. ruling class that is in an on-going war and an era-defining economic crisis. After years of neglect this school reorganization is a qualitative shift as the bosses attempt to create a school system that will produce technically-trained and patriotic young workers to join the military and future war production. PLP needs to work among these youth who are future workers and soldiers, key forces for revolution.

This school reorganization is also being pushed in Obama’s so called “Race to the Top,” where his education secretary Arne Duncan, has proposed a competition for $4.35 billion in  federal grants to carry out “school reform.” States like California, where teachers’ unions had won laws that prohibit tying teacher evaluation and pay scales to student test data (so called “merit pay”) will be ineligible for these funds. But Duncan was in Sacramento recently to help State Senator Gloria Romero’s bid to change the law to make California eligible. And the LA Board of education just voted to enter the “Race to the Top” competition, also agreeing to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. These tests emphasize patriotism. Tying test scores to teacher evaluations is a way to enforce teaching patriotic lies and allow administrations to get rid of higher-paid older teachers while hiring younger teachers for lower wages and benefits.

In the face of the current attack, UTLA leadership is urging teachers to write local proposals to do school reform themselves.  While the union pays lip service to organizing the Charter Schools, they are not even trying to organize all teachers, including charter employees, into the same bargaining unit. UTLA President Duffy, loyal servant of capitalism, calls on teachers to get involved in so-called grass roots school reorganization such as the innovation division, “i-design.”  Such reorganization would be done to meet the ruling class’s needs, but would have to be approved by the school board and probably require a corporate partner.  This is not grass roots; it’s doing the bosses’ patriotic work to remake the schools to better prepare students for war, to defend a system of exploitation, racism and war. Local school control means teachers working with students and parents to administer their fascist system.  We can’t unite with those who oppress us, exploit us and send us off to war!

More layoffs and foreclosures are coming, so patriotic education reform will take on more importance for the bosses. A trade union response to this attack is totally inadequate. PLP calls on teachers, students and parents to organize a strike against the fascist reorganization of public schools.  Organizing such a strike, based on expanding CHALLENGE networks, builds the unity of parents, teachers, and students to prepare us for the struggle to get rid of the capitalist system and build a communist society.

Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System

Every September, parents send their children back to school in the hopes that they will learn, grow and prepare for bright futures. But the capitalists who run the public school systems have their own racist plans for our children. As the economic crisis deepens and inter-imperialist rivalry over the worlds’ resources expands, the capitalist bosses become more and more entrenched in their own problems. Desperate to bail out their crumbling financial system and to prepare for more military conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses spend billions. Shamelessly they continue to steal from the working class to save themselves and their system.

The current budget crises affecting U.S. school systems is a clear statement of capitalist priorities. These cuts are strangling a school system that was already failing our class’s children. In big cities where the majority of students are black and Latino, and families are already disproportionately suffering from unemployment and low wages, the cuts will be the worst.

In Los Angeles, classes will average 42 students. In NYC the school budget has been slashed by billions. This is forcing larger class sizes and cutting anything the Dept. of Education considers non-essential: art music, foreign language, sports, and after-school programs. In Chicago, where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honed his skills at cutting services to black and Latino students, many reading coaches, after-school and tutoring programs were eliminated. In San Antonio, schools full of black and Latino students are being shut down.

Washington, D.C, with a nearly all-black public school system, has been in the forefront of the bosses’ reform experiments, even as students continue to suffer. There, cuts are leading to layoffs of teachers as well as less money for vouchers and charter schools. While the schools are slashed, not a dime has been cut from the billions of dollars in interest going from the education budgets to the banks.

The attacks on working-class students are driven by the current crisis of the capitalists. In the 1950’s, the U.S. had emerged victorious from World War II and was launching the Cold War. U.S. bosses had the money to build huge factories that produced steel, autos, airplanes  and factory equipment. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the U.S. bosses drove to invest in education for the “Space Race.” Now the U.S. is a power in decline. Those higher-paying industrial jobs are almost all gone. And the school systems with working-class students, always the poorest, are being gutted.

Capitalists view our children only as fodder for the bosses’ system. To the extent the bosses do care about educating working-class youth it is to have a politically loyal, skilled workforce to exploit. Technical education and patriotism are being pushed for black and Latino students. The advocacy for technical education reflects the growing need the ruling class has for skilled workers like engineers, drill press operators, and machinists, jobs needed for war production. Developing curriculum for the schools to create a workforce prepared for war is often masked by rhetoric saying the U.S. “needs to compete” with international rivals.

President Obama’s speech to school children on September 8 urged them to “set high goals, knuckle down in their studies and persevere through failure.” (NYT 9/9/09)  Many parents embrace hard work and perseverance for our children but the subtext of the speech is that if children don’t succeed in life, it must be their own fault because they did not work hard enough. This idea ignores the reality of the capitalist world. No matter how hard school children work, they will not be allowed to all become doctors or lawyers. They will not even all have jobs. Capitalism relies on a pool of unemployed workers to keep wages low. In the current crises, unemployment is even higher; teaching workers to blame themselves prevents them from blaming the true cause of unemployment — capitalism.

Capitalist schools spend much time dividing students into different groups. Tests are designed to magnify differences and assign arbitrary cut-offs, so children get sorted into different programs from gifted and advanced placement to prison-like dumping schools. Capitalist schools prepare a select few to steer towards the elite professions. The majority of students are left to fight for low-paying jobs or join the military (see letter, p. 6).

“Tough Choices, Tough Times,” the report of the rulers’ New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, proposes that capitalism’s divisions be further entrenched in the schools by forcing students into a defined path after the tenth grade, either college-bound or vocational. Obama wants school children to knuckle down in their studies and persevere through a system that is failing and that fails to offer them the future they deserve.

This latest economic crisis and the quagmire of constant war have left the rulers in a political bind. Individualism is a cornerstone of capitalism and since the anti-war and anti-racist rebellions of the 60’s the U.S. bosses have championed the politics, the art, the music and the philosophy of “me-first.” Schools collaborated with a curriculum rich in the stories of individual success and national progress as the result of individual “can-do” spirit or single-minded pursuit of individual success in the face of great odds.

The fact that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet communists has been written out of history books. The bosses rewrote the truth of racism in the United States as the fiction of enlightened individuals struggling to champion the ideals of individual freedom. Slavery became an unfortunate “mistake” rather than the conscious policy of 250 years of racist rule codified in colonial law and the Constitution and enforced with ruthless violence that continues to define U.S. society today.

Obama tried to shift the message of individual success when he told students, “Don’t give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.” National service has been a part of the Obama campaign since the beginning and now Obama is calling on schools to teach children to serve their country and to be inspired to sacrifice for the good of the nation. But it’s not “their” country, it’s the bosses’.

Obama and the rest of the ruling class know that the schools have been failing our children for a long time. They cynically use their own failure to meet workers’ needs as a rallying cry for reforms. Many of these reforms have won the support of parents and teachers who hope that they will improve education; but none of these reforms will change the fundamental problems of a system that doesn’t care about working-class children.  After years and years of education reform plans, 39% of children in the U.S. live in families earning less then the amount needed to meet their basic needs. (Center for Children in Poverty) Capitalism cannot educate the majority of children, and for the bosses it is not a principle whether students learn to accept inequality in a large school or a small one.

Reading CHALLENGE in the last few years, one can see many examples of fighting against anti-working-class attacks in the schools: from high school students protesting budget cuts and walking out against police brutality, to college students demonstrating against a pro-torture professor  and developing a Freedom School when summer session is cancelled. The Progressive Labor Party is not training students to calmly accept the life capitalism has in store for them. We want students to learn real history and real skills, to learn to organize, to learn to fight back and to learn to serve our class by building the fight for communist revolution.

Fight ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State

LOS ANGELES, August 5 — “Banks got bailed out, we got SOLD OUT” chanted the crowd throughout their Cal State University (CSU) campus to students passing by. Despite the small summer attendance due to decreasing class offerings and increasing fees and unemployment, a good turnout fought back against the worsening conditions students and faculty are experiencing across the CSU system, the State’s educational system and in the economic crisis in general.

Students received CHALLENGE and leaflets calling on students, faculty and workers to strike against these attacks and to join the long-term fight to eliminate the racist capitalist system which attacks the working class, wages imperialist war and bails out the banks. This campus demonstration followed the Board of Trustees’ meeting where it voted for a fee hike for students, raising the total increase by 32% in one year! (See CHALLENGE, 8/12).)

As community college faculty in Los Angeles were forced to choose between layoffs or furlough days, CSU faculty face the same “choice” — 24 furlough days a year or layoffs. Many faculty, and even students, albeit from good intentions, see the furloughs as a lesser evil of this “choice,” but in reality furloughs put the bosses’ crisis on the backs of working-class faculty, staff and students. It amounts to a 10% wage-cut.

Through conversations with students, as well as various working-class people during PLP’s recent Summer Project, it’s clear that this crisis is an all-out attack on the working class, regardless of occupation, while hitting black and Latino workers and youth the hardest.  In the schools, professors, teachers, staff and K-graduate students are all affected by the budget cuts in apparently different but essentially similar ways. As these attacks on the working class sharpen, we must participate in these struggles in order to fight for the only solution to this crisis: communist revolution.

Boston Teachers, Students and Parents Unite to Fight Budget Cuts

BOSTON, MA, May 19 — Chanting “Bail out schools, not banks” and “Money for schools, not war,” Boston teachers, students, parents and supporters rallied at the State House and marched to City Hall. We demanded no cuts in public school programs and full funding for community colleges and public education.

This was the first mass action of Boston teachers against budget cuts since layoffs were announced in December. Teachers attacked cuts in their own schools. A Haitian community leader spoke against cutbacks, pointing to rising immigrant dropout rates. A Roxbury Community College student attacked underfunding at state colleges. A parent explained how cuts in inner-city schools are racist. A school bus driver opposed the Superintendent’s plan to further segregate the Boston public schools by creating five zones and restricting school choice to within these zones.

A PLP speaker called for an end to the system of capitalism that created the economic crisis.  PLP leaflets calling for communist revolution were distributed.

To organize this rally inside the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), teachers had to fight the BTU Executive Board for months. The Board overturned the vote of the BTU membership to sponsor the rally, disgusting many members. The Board is calling for more taxes on working people, and for lobbying “friends” in the government. But many teachers followed the call to hold the rally anyway!

Teachers are skilled workers. But, like all workers, they are under attack by the bosses. Therefore, they must unite with working-class parents and students to fight against the bosses and their budget cuts. Otherwise, other workers may view teachers as “greedy and selfish.” By fighting to improve the education of working-class students and against racism, imperialism and war, teachers can fight for the needs of the whole working class.

The Progressive Labor Party tries to give leadership to the anger of the hundreds and thousands of teachers, parents and students and turn the fight against cutbacks into the fight for communist revolution.

Racist LA School Cuts Sacrifice Students, Not Bankers’ Profits

LOS ANGELES, June 15 — Students at high schools across this city walked out against racist budget cuts, carrying picket signs teachers had put up on their classroom doors, to protest the rulers’ Board of Education’s layoffs and increase in class size.

Obama called for “shared sacrifice” in his inaugural address, and lauded “the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job.” On May 27, LA Mayor Villaraigosa said, “Given the unprecedented economic downturn in California, everyone must share in the responsibility and sacrifice to bridge this budget deficit.” But neither of these bosses’ servants said the bankers must share their profits.

This idea isn’t new. For years, autoworkers were told a pay cut would avoid job losses. They’ve taken pay cut after pay cut, and then lost their jobs as well. That’s the way a profit system works.

Given the state budget crisis and virtual collapse of the union leadership in the wake of the May 15 injunction, teachers may be forced to take a pay cut “to save teacher jobs and class size,” but will probably wind up with both a cut and layoffs.

The fight continues with picket lines, community camp-outs and other actions. But the reluctance of teachers to strike against the injunction indicates our class must gain the confidence to defy the union leadership. The teachers and students fighting together against the cutbacks has been an inspiring example of working-class unity. Most important is the increase in CHALLENGE readers, five youth joining PLP, more meeting with the Party and distributing CHALLENGE. In this crisis, the working class’s main victory is the growth of the communist movement.

We communists believe in sharing scarcity as well as abundance, and we believe that the working class can be won to this communist idea. While the willingness of many teachers to take a pay cut in the belief they will save jobs and prevent class size increase might be an example of the collective spirit of the working class, under capitalism “shared sacrifice” is a lie and a trap.

Workers’ militancy should be used not to negotiate their wages and conditions down but to fight to up the ante of class struggle. The hypocrisy of a system that gives $750 billion of workers’ taxes to super-rich bankers while they squeeze predominantly black and Latino students into larger and larger classes must be exposed. Then they cut teachers’ wages to boot! In this capitalist class society, it’s always the working class who sacrifices and the rich who live off that sacrifice.

The German poet Bertholt Brecht wrote in “A German War Primer” in 1938:

“Those who take the meat from the table preach contentment.

Those for whom the taxes are destined demand sacrifice…

Those who lead the country into the abyss call ruling too difficult for ordinary men.”

Capitalism is in a deepening crisis. The U.S. is isolated internationally, fighting an imperialist war on at least two fronts, leading the international global market into decline and attacking workers to pay for this crisis. Millions are losing their jobs and homes. The only government expenses not being cut are their war expenditures, the police and the prisons — the infrastructure for the war and fascism which is the capitalists’ main hope of surviving this crisis.

Clearly capitalism cannot provide a decent life for the working class. It must and can be overthrown and replaced by a communist system based on collective work, collective planning, and real equality (not socialism which retained money, banks, and wages, with the latter’s differentials splitting the working class). Eliminating the exploiter class which lives off the profits it squeezes from workers’ labor will release the potential for workers to reap the full fruits of the value that they, and only they, create.

Every struggle must have the long-term strategic goal of building the communist movement that can seize power from the bosses. The class struggle has crucial lessons to teach us how to get there. Three wildcat one-hour work stoppages built the unity, militancy and resolve of teachers, students and parents, independent of the union leadership. Student walkouts throughout the district, fighting for their own and their siblings’ education, build their potential to fight for the working class.

This is a victory the Board of Education can’t take away — the unity of parents, teachers and students; the experience of confronting the district, the Mayor and the banks; seeing our potential to unite against the bosses and their racist system; and the growth of PLP.

Read CHALLENGE. Participate in our PLP Summer Project, where students and teachers, soldiers and industrial workers will reach thousands with our newspaper and spread communist ideas.

No Debate About Bosses’ Crisis Causing Cuts

BROOKLYN, NY, January 9 — During a high school debate tournament here, a “speakout” of over 100 students and teachers was organized against the budget cuts. While awaiting the final awards ceremony, debaters described how the budget cuts affected them and their schools. Usually this time is spent just hanging out but coaches city-wide responded well to PL’s call to push debate from talk to action.

Initially it seemed interest in the speakout would be low, but as the ball got rolling and some stated they lacked books in class and others stated that they had no lunchrooms, a hush fell on the room. Scores of teens listened intently to each other, and applauded more vigorously than for awards later on. Many made direct connections to the war in Iraq.

A PLP’er and debater attributed the budget cuts to capitalism, accusing the bosses’ government of shelling out $700 billion to save Wall Street and then attacking workers by making us pay by cutting our school and hospital budgets and laying us off. She also advocated organizing fight-backs and described a walk-out the year before on May Day against budget cuts and the immigration raids.

Another ex-debater, now a college student, championed the need to fight racism and other divisions existing under this system. She focused on the importance of shaking hands after a debate round, remembering that we are one community, not each other’s enemy.

Then teachers spoke up, relating the hardships in their schools caused by the cuts and being inspired by students taking a stand at this speakout. Others declared that more than a speakout was needed, calling for actions and demonstrations against the budget cuts and environmental injustice, a topic relevant to this year’s debate.
The speakout must have hit a nerve because at the end the leader of the debate organization said that while our talking about issues was good, we need to complain to our political leaders, especially now with Obama’s election. He said that he kept hearing students blame “them” (the government) for these problems. We in PLP applaud the indictments of the rulers by the youth at the tournament but this “leader” advanced  his rotten liberal line — “we all need to take responsibility” for a degraded environment, racism and a collapsing economy.

He didn’t want us joining together and proposing action to find a solution. It was good to see him exposed in his closing remarks; the applause for him was minimal.

After the tournament, students and teachers showed their openness to communist ideas, taking over 100 CHALLENGES. Some coaches have also agreed to take subscriptions and use them with their debate teams.
The bosses’ economic crisis and Mid-East invasions will intensify in the immediate future. Today’s debaters will be tomorrow’s national service “volunteers” and draftees. We must continue to organize workers and youth to reject liberal misleaders who try to deflect our righteous anger away from the billionaires, their politicians and their system and to win them to embrace the communist PLP.

Obama’s Racist Education Secretary Wrecked Chicago’s Schools

On December 16, Barack Obama presented Arne Duncan as the new Education Secretary at a press conference at Dodge School. The claim was that this school exemplifies his “Chicago miracle”—low-performing, low-income African American or Latino schools with rising test scores. Students, teachers and parents who dominated the Board of Education meeting the next day knew better. In Duncan’s seven years as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), he has intensified racist stratification, privatized 10% of the schools (with plans for more), and militarized CPS with the complicity of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Duncan, friend to Chicago’s Business Roundtable, Mayor Richard Daley, and Obama, is no friend to the majority of Chicago students. Duncan (and Daley’s) signature plan, Renaissance 2010, closed 19 schools, mostly in formerly black or Latino neighborhoods now being gentrified. With the working-class students in schools far from the neighborhood, Duncan then built “Renaissance” schools for the wealthier families. Daley’s plan to bring middle- and upper-income families into the city (while driving out the poor by tearing down their housing) depended on having schools for their children.

As the U.S. military involvement abroad deepens, Chicago has JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corp) programs in 31 high schools and 21 middle schools, 7 military “schools within a school” and 5 Military Academies. Next September, when the Air Force Academy opens, Chicago will have the distinction of being the only city with an academy for every branch of the Armed Forces. Duncan calls this militarization “choice.”

Also under “Ren 2010,” 75 new charter schools have opened. Charter teachers are not allowed to join the union. Their salaries are capped at ¾ that of senior union teachers, and they work longer hours. Charter schools are not about better education. They are about saving money, destroying unions and turning control of schools over to private companies.

Duncan’s new “turnaround” fires all the teachers in poor black schools and turns them over to private enterprises. The racist result has been that most of the experienced African-American teachers at these schools are replaced with inexperienced, predominately white ones. There are 2,000 fewer black teachers in CPS now than in 2002, a significant reversal of the hard-fought struggles of the 1960’s and 1970’s to integrate Chicago’s teaching staff.

Duncan and Board president Rufus Williams tried to intimidate students who spoke out at the Board meeting against Ren 2010, claiming “someone is feeding you wrong information,” but the students held their ground. Students and teachers described the harmful effects of a CPS policy which refuses to staff new teachers until October, while students sit in overcrowded or teacher-less classes. Those subject to this attend schools in neighborhoods ravaged by capitalism, where low-paid jobs and a myriad of housing and economic problems force them to move around. Duncan and his cronies know this, but deliberately refuse to staff schools based on predicted fall enrollment.

Under Ren 2010 (now extended to Ren 2015) a number of schools were shut down and replaced with smaller, more selective schools with adequate numbers of teachers and renovated buildings. Such was the case with Dodge School. As one parent activist said, the “rising” test scores occurred among completely different students than the ones attending the old Dodge. Other parents, teachers, and students exposed the Board’s racist “shell game” where higher performing students are moved into a building and Arne Duncan is given credit for “increasing test scores.”
PLP members are playing an active role in the struggle against these attacks on students. Many of the teachers, students and parents involved in struggle understand that capitalism equips students only with the knowledge and skills needed so the system can exploit them. The system “trains” many to be unemployed or cannon fodder by providing no education and then blaming the students themselves for their lack of knowledge, or indoctrinating them through military presence in the schools (and in many other ways as well). PLP is winning students, parents and teachers to a different vision of the future: one where young people will be cherished and active participants in the building of an egalitarian communist society.

The Decision of a Lifetime

“How do things change?” a comrade asked in the summer project study group.
“It takes power,” I answered.

The idea is to unite the working class and overthrow the bosses. So here I am, rushing between cars on the parking lot of Atomic Denim, a garment factory in South L.A, to sell Challenge/Desafio. “I need more Challenges!” I yell to my fellow comrades. Workers consistently take the paper while moving quickly past us to get to work.

The boss and the secretary come out and yell as they snatch the Challenges out of two workers’ hands and throw them on the ground. “TRASH IT!” the secretary yells. A worker then whispers to a comrade, “Maybe you guys can bring little pocket cards with your message and contact info, so the bosses can’t see.”
I am really excited to see the workers accepting the literature as I watch them walk into the factory with their eyes glued to the Challenges.

We left Atomic Denim with about 150 Challenges and leaflets in the workers’ hands. We left with two police cars called on us because we were trying to organize the workers. We left with the bosses angry and most of all, I left feeling accomplished in my goal of reaching out to the working class.

So I think to myself, how can I break these imaginary walls that are separating my commitment from the Progressive Labor Party. How can these walls be broken? I’m thinking over and over.

I am fighting for the working class. I am sick and tired of the bosses exploiting the working class. I am revolutionary. I am an advocate of equality. Am I in full agreement with the PLP’s beliefs about communism? Am I willing to dedicate my life to PLP at this moment? The question has not yet been answered. I often hear of party members joining and then dropping out. One thing for certain, when it’s time for my commitment, I’ll be here, and here for good!

Daddy’s Girl

Bosses Turn Education into Schools for Imperialism

From metal detectors, cameras and police presence to eroding union protections for teachers, trends in education point to a tightening control that is part of a growing fascism in society. Workers and youth organizing in movements to oppose an accelerating cascade of budget-cut assaults will come up against these physical and coercive elements of the police state. Through sharp, vigorous and patient organizing inside such movements, communists can win masses of workers and youth to see growing fascism not only as cause for despair but as cause for revolution.

Capitalist education always serves to teach the big ideas needed so that the ruling class can pursue its aims with minimal resistance from the workers. The Cold War education of the 1950s produced a society that mostly accepted a vicious anti-communist war in Vietnam at considerable cost in lives and absorbed its costs for ten years. As the Cold War heated up again under Reagan in the 1980s, brutal wars in Central America and huge cuts in social spending ensued. A U.S. population won to anti-communism tolerated these attacks. The (unexpected) reward for U.S, imperialism was the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main competitor. During the Cold War U.S. schools taught young-people anti-communism so they would not protest the rulers’ war plans.

Today U.S. imperialism faces a situation that is both similar and different. New competitors are rising, and as CHALLENGE has emphasized, control of Mid-East oil is key to dominance in the coming period. What teachers are asked to teach about the Mid-East matters. The ruling class needs U.S. schools to win over future workers to U.S. imperialism.

In New York State all high school students must take Regents exams in several subjects to graduate. In Global History students have been asked to write about the “positives and negatives” or the “differing viewpoints” on imperialism. These topics do more than force thousands of students to argue for imperialism on test day. Because topics tend to be recycled, these questions also exercise enormous influence over teachers who care deeply about preparing their students for examination and graduation. Teachers frame their treatment of imperialism in similar terms. Teachers are pressured to avoid teaching imperialism as the racist and genocidal system that it is. Like slavery and the Holocaust, imperialism has no positive characteristics. This moral stance is impossible when teaching to the test.

This past June, question #41 reads:
“In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The United Nations response led to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This response is an example of:
Détente
Empire building
Totalitarianism
Collective Security

In classrooms, where the struggle for literacy is desperate, teachers tempted to speak about U.S. imperialism are discouraged by such a question. The “correct” answer was choice #4. The test’s writers want Americans to understand Desert Storm not as an exercise in U.S. imperialism but “collective security.” But even more alarming than the right answer is the wrong one, specifically choice #2. Teachers who focus on actual history are in trouble. The history is clear:

The U.S. developed relations with the Saudis after World War II, calling the oil reserves of the Mid-East “a stupendous source of strategic power and the greatest material prize in the history of the world” Carter proclaimed his doctrine of U.S. dominance in the Mid-East in 1980 and created a “rapid-reaction force” designed to invade the area. Reagan transformed this force into Centcom, which has grown under every president and directed three major wars in fifteen years.

This history points to choice #2, imperialism. Teachers who speak in terms of U.S. imperialism run the risk of “confusing” their students and maybe even costing them the one point they need in order to graduate. The prospect is terrifying enough, especially to new teachers, to dampen a real critique of U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, the teacher-training taboo of never “sharing your view” finishes off many a good lesson about the true role of the U.S. in the world before it ever begins. No doubt the rulers have the good old-fashioned witch-hunt in their arsenal for teachers who refuse to toe the line of U.S. patriotism in class, and they will use it again as they have in the past. Next to these exams, however, the Cold War persecution of teachers was crude and perhaps even less effective in terms of the levels of conformity achieved.

Luckily, working class students can and do respond to real history teaching. Facts, a veteran PLP member used to say, are stubborn things. Several students informally surveyed on this question after the exam knew to stay away from choice number two even though they knew it was correct. In class, the teacher led discussions to ensure they understood the purpose of the test and what the testers were looking for. In fact deconstructing an exam this way actually makes test prep easier: “always pick the choice that makes America look good.”

When the “positives-of-imperialism” question reas its ugly head, we have an opportunity to raise important ideas among teachers and students about growing fascism, the role of education and the needs of U.S. imperialism. This article was discussed with several teachers and students in the base of PLP at a school where we’re active for suggestions prior to publication. We must take every chance the rulers give us to build our movement for communist revolution.