NEW YORK CITY, March 13 — Students and teachers took to the streets last Thursday once again to protest the Department of Education’s (DOE) proposal to collocate a charter elementary school into the Tilden campus building. It already houses three high schools. This time the struggle was taken to the steps of Tweed, the DOE’s headquarters in Manhattan. Students from Brownsville Academy, who recently won their collocation, fight joined dozens of students and staff from the Tilden campus. Despite the cold and rain, spirits were high as students picketed and chanted. Many received CHALLENGE.
Collocations and school closings are the order of the day for thousands of predominantly black, Latino and immigrant schools citywide. Under capitalism these attacks will continue because the bosses cannot afford, and has no interest, to educate all children. Capitalism needs millions of working-class youth to settle for being the next foot soldier, prisoner, low-paid worker or part of the unemployed.
If students blame themselves for failing the tests required to graduate, the bosses don’t have to worry about them questioning this racist system. Budget cuts, large class sizes, and the instability caused by these collocations and school closings are just some of the racist attacks students face every day they make focusing in the classroom, and passing standardized exams more difficult.
After some chanting, students gave passionate speeches about the need to fight the collocation. The Tilden students gave a perseverance award to the Brownsville Academy students for their successful struggle against a DOE proposal to collocate their school and for their solidarity with the struggle at the Tilden campus. Students marched into Tweed to deliver a “math award” to the DOE’s office of space planning for figuring out how to fit over 300 students and staff into 12 classrooms! The cheering crowd then marched to City Hall to deliver a “disrespect award” to Mayor Bloomberg.  More chants and fists in the air ended the day’s rally.
The fight against this collocation will continue. Angry workers, parents, and students organized against the proposal to shut down 22 schools. The Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), Bloomberg’s cronies, voted to pass it. In fact the PEP has always voted in favor of the DOE’s proposals. It is clear that workers do not live under a democracy, but rather a ruling-class dictatorship. The capitalists and their government appointees will continue to attack us until we realize that the international working class has the power to shut their system down!