NEW YORK CITY, February 22—When challenged by Progressive Labor Party and co-workers about the racist special education (SPED) speed-up at a Manhattan school meeting, the principal defended the school’s racist set-up.
At this high school where Black and Latin students comprise 70 percent of the population, Black and Latin special education students embody over 85 percent. This school has a higher-than-average graduate rate of 90 percent. But of the students who don’t receive a high school diploma, 91 percent of them are Black and Latin!
When confronted about this, the principal — fully aware of this racial breakdown — responded that this was an “acceptable” number. A PL’er exposed the principal’s racist view that these students were expendable — “the price of doing business.” The principal — though recently asked by the superintendent how he planned on raising the test scores — was clearly content with an education system set-up that failed students.
The PLP teacher is openly known in the school as a communist. He denounced the racism behind the administration’s cuts in special education services.
Teachers Overworked, Students Underperform
Over half of the SPED teachers in the school are teaching an extra class — the bosses’ shortsighted solution for the problem of too few SPED teachers on staff to provide the services our students need. A lack of services and overworked teachers are attacks that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of the school’s Black and Latin students. This is representative of an overall trend throughout the city for SPED.
Looking forward, the school’s incoming class of 9th graders next school year is expected to have the highest percentage of SPED students in need of extra services in the school’s history. With full knowledge of this, and the extremely high annual SPED teacher turnover rate (the rate at which workers leave and are replaced), the school bosses have no plans to hire the needed number of SPED teachers. In fact, at this meeting the principal boasted that understaffing the SPED department and cutting funding from desperately needed SPED services would be the “new normal.”
Cuts Are For War
This “new normal” spells out an escalating attack on students already beaten down by the school’s racist policies. These cuts in education reflect the U.S. imperialists’ real interests: oil and war. The U.S. war secretary Ashton Carter is seeking a $582.7-billion military budget for the fiscal year 2017 (reuters.com, 2/2/16). This number excludes other departmental military-related spending. In 2014, the total national “defense” spending was $613.6 billion (pogo.org). Meanwhile, education is allotted $100 billion, merely 2.7 percent of the budget (whitehouse.gov).
The PL’er said the high rate of SPED teacher turnover stemmed from overworking these teachers. The majority of the teachers who were coerced, required or intimidated by the school bosses to teach an extra course (in violation of contractual rights to decline teaching beyond the legal number of classes and work hours) are untenured (no permanent job), and so more subject to ill treatment. The United Federation of Teachers (the NYC teachers union) has sided with the principal on this, so the untenured teachers generally understand they have no rights and therefore live under daily stress and fear of the capitalist bosses’ seemingly unlimited power to exploit their labor.
Real Failure: Capitalism
Under capitalism, not every student is expected to graduate, and in fact the profit system doesn’t need or want every student to be “successful” in school. How will the bosses justify racist low wages and unemployment if they can’t blame working-class youth for the system’s own failure? How else will they funnel students into the military to kill for oil wars in the Middle East?
In reality, capitalist schools — through segregation, racist attacks, lack of funding, school-to-prison pipeline attacks on students, and anti-working-class curriculums — are what fail our young people.
The administration claims to work in students’ interests. What a lie! Actually, teachers must ally themselves with student interests. We teachers need to unite with students and parents in order to fight these education attacks. Understaffing means less time with students, and increasing a teacher’s caseload ensures that those students who need the most attention actually get less.
Clearly, capitalism doesn’t value working-class youth. Teachers, parents, students and school workers can help build PLP and collectively organize against capitalism’s relentless attack on the working class, and build a communist world.
Only in a communist society would all students, regardless of ethnic background and learning needs, be seen as worthy of the struggle to not only graduate, but to succeed in acquiring an education that not only meets the needs of an individual student but those of the entire working class.