A Socialist Equality Party campaign team and members of the International Students for Social Equality have been campaigning at the University of Manchester campus on Oxford Road. The campus is in the Manchester Central constituency, where the SEP is standing its candidate Robert Skelton.

Many students and university workers have taken the SEP’s election manifesto. The team spoke to students, former students, prospective students and members of staff about the policies of the SEP.

On Tuesday, April 27, tens of thousands of students in New Jersey walked out of their classes to protest $820 million in education budget cuts being implemented by Governor Chris Christie. The protests were spontaneously organized on a Facebook group, and spread by text-message and word of mouth. The cuts will average 11 percent statewide, with mass teacher layoffs and severe cuts to athletic and arts programs.

Other walkouts across the state occurred on Wednesday and Thursday. Another Facebook group announced plans for a statewide school walkout on May 12.

The largest protests took place in the some of the poorest schools districts, notably in Newark. About 5,000 students rallied at City Hall, demanding to see Mayor Cory Booker, where “virtually every uniformed cop in the city was being called to control the crowd”, as nj.com noted.

A rally of close to 2,000 students, teachers and parents was held at Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland on Thursday during a one-day strike of teachers in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

The strike was called after the Oakland Board of Education ceased labor negotiations and imposed a no-raise contract on teachers—an action that is unprecedented in the history of the city’s public school system.

In order to address the budget crisis, the school district is demanding a freeze on teachers’ wages, an increase in class sizes, the closure of schools and programs, cutbacks in early childhood and adult education, and the layoff of dozens of teachers.

Many of the tens of thousands of students who walked out from their high schools on Tuesday to protest draconian cuts to education now face disciplinary action from school authorities.

The walkout, which was organized largely through Facebook, was called to protest the mass layoffs of teachers and steep budget cuts in school programs enacted by New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie. School districts will lose an average of 11 percent funding.

Christie responded to the walkout by trying to pit students against their teachers, saying that the protests made him wonder “why the students are protesting only against what the governor is doing, and not against what their teachers are doing.” He insisted that teachers were to blame for the cuts because they “have not stepped up to join the shared sacrifice.”

An agreement reached between the Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD) and the Capistrano Unified Education Association (CUEA) ended a three-day teachers’ strike in San Juan Capistrano, California on Tuesday morning.

While the details of the contract have yet to be released, the local National Public Radio affiliate, KPCC, reports that the deal includes a combination of pay cuts, furlough days and increases to employee health care contributions.

Teachers in Oakland are justifiably outraged by the decision of the school board to impose a no-raise contract, overwhelmingly rejected in January, which will also increase class sizes and pave the way for eliminating programs and laying-off dozens of teachers.

The unprecedented move by the school board must be rejected out of hand. It will mean a continued decline in the real wages of teachers, already among the lowest-paid in the region. Education for Oakland students will also be severely impacted.

At the same time, the proposal from the mediators―which the Oakland Education Association (OEA) union agreed could provide a “solid foundation” for resolving the dispute―is also outrageous. After noting that the cost of goods has increased 6 percent since 2007―the last year teachers received a raise―it went on to recommend that teachers get a paltry 2 percent raise…in 2012.

Tens of thousands of students from across New Jersey left their classes Tuesday to protest $820 million in education budget cuts by Republican Governor Chris Christie.

The budget cuts, averaging 11 percent across all districts, will result in the mass layoff off teachers and the destruction of arts and sports programs throughout the state.

This praiseworthy display of mass opposition among student youth was organized entirely by the students themselves. The movement developed on the social networking site Facebook, where an event announcing the strike accumulated more than 17,000 participants.

The demonstration tapped into growing opposition among students and broad sections of the working class to the attack on public education. Large protests took place in Newark and Camden, two of the most impoverished cities in the United States, as well as in more middle class districts.

Teachers, parents, students—and all those concerned about the fate of public education—are invited to attend a public meeting being convened by the Socialist Equality Party to discuss the Rudd Labor government’s historic assault on public education.

In January this year, Labor launched its My School web site. The web site ranks schools nationally, based on their performance in standardised literacy and numeracy tests (known as NAPLAN). The purpose of My School is not to provide “transparency and information for mums and dads”, as the Labor government claims. Its real aim is to unleash a divisive struggle between schools.

Hundreds of thousands of public school teachers across the United States are facing possible layoffs this coming academic year.

Confronting massive budget deficits, school districts throughout the country have been sending out notices (“pink slips”) to employees this spring, warning them that they are unlikely to have a job in the fall. The bloodletting is worst in California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey, but nearly every region in the country is affected.

Pink slips were sent out to 22,000 teachers in California, 17,000 in Illinois, and 15,000 in New York. The jobs of 8,000 school employees in Michigan, 6,000 in New Jersey, and 5,000 in Oklahoma may also be axed.

These numbers are expected to increase in coming months. Officials in Illinois report that as many as 20,000 educators could lose their jobs in the state. In California, an additional 4,000 people may be put on notice.

Hundreds of students demonstrated outside Lincoln High School in Warren, Michigan Tuesday to protest the firing of their principal, Patrick Victor. The previous night the local school board voted 4-3 to not renew the contract of the popular principal.

Van Dyke Public Schools Superintendent Kathleen Spaulding recommended to the board that it not renew Victor’s contract for performance-related reasons. He has been placed on administrative leave for the remainder of the school year.

According to students interviewed by the World Socialist Web Site the rationale for the dismissal centered on inadequate test scores. The expanded use of student testing to target “failing schools” which are subject to sanction is a central feature of the Obama administration’s reactionary Race to the Top program.

Last week the Detroit News published a front-page story with the banner headline, “Electricity theft rising in Detroit.” The article, written by the newspaper’s editorial page editor, Nolan Finley, is a shameless and crude defense of DTE Energy, the local utility monopoly whose ruthless utility shutoff policies have led to a rash of deadly house fires in Detroit.

The article appears as public outrage mounts against DTE. Finley, who is known for his right-wing and pro-business columns, runs to the aid of the company by asserting that the victims of the fires themselves were responsible for the tragedies.

Less than four months after University of Western Sydney (UWS) academics, including non-union members, voted by 66 percent in a postal ballot to reject an enterprise agreement, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has negotiated a revised deal that delivers most of the key measures sought by management.

After December’s vote, NTEU national secretary Grahame McCulloch intervened to take charge of the negotiations and is leading the union’s efforts to push through the agreement via a new postal ballot.

If approved, the deal will set a benchmark for other universities across Australia where managements are demanding far-reaching concessions in new three-year agreements. The UWS draft dovetails with the federal Labor government’s restructuring of tertiary education, based on a new market-driven funding model that forces universities to compete for students.

On March 31 and April 1 thousands of students at the University of Liberia (UL) in Monrovia—the nation’s highest institution of learning—protested against the hiking of tuition fees by 148 percent. The first day of the two-day protest saw a sit-in lasting four hours in front of the Cassel Building (which houses the offices of the university president and other administrators).

Students chanted slogans and carried placards, including ones that read: “Don’t Privatize the UL,” “UL is not a profit-making enterprise but a center of learning,” “Stop the attack on education.”

The Harlem School of the Arts, founded almost 50 years ago as a non-profit institution to provide free or low-cost arts education to mostly black and Hispanic students, has closed its doors after being unable to meet its expenses.

The school’s interim director was quoted in the press last week as saying that “we are virtually out of money, with no clear sources ahead of us.” The board of the school has said that it is still searching for at least $500,000 in funds to stay open through the end of the current academic semester, but it appears less and less likely that this will take place.

In a crude effort to pit teachers against the communities they serve, New York Governor David Paterson and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have offered to grant additional state funds to school districts whose teachers’ unions cooperate in wage freezes and other concessions.

According to the Buffalo News, the New York governor said, “It’s certainly apt, I think, that we would be trying to reward the districts where those who make extra sacrifices, so that’s certainly a conversation we’d be willing to have.”

Paterson put forward the New York version of the plan only a week after he delayed for a second time $2.1 billion in state aid to schools districts thoughout the state. The delay will cause real hardship for some upstate districts.

The Australian Education Union (AEU) national executive on Monday voted to impose a moratorium on the federal government’s National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) exams scheduled for May 11-13. The ban, however, is a hollow threat. The union has already made clear that it accepts the entire framework of Labor’s pro-market education reforms, including the compulsory student tests that are used to rank schools.

Less than an hour later, education minister and deputy prime minister Julia Gillard responded by again declaring that she would call on parents to help administer the NAPLAN tests if teachers proceeded with the national boycott. Gillard also warned that teachers who refuse to supervise the exams face heavy fines under state industrial laws.

The Socialist Equality Party urges teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District to reject proposed contract revisions that would cut five days from the current school year and seven days next year. The changes will reduce teaching time for students, create greater hardships for parents, and amount to a significant pay cut for teachers.

The LAUSD, the United Teachers of Los Angeles union, and the political and media establishment are lining up to convince teachers that they must accept these cuts in order to save jobs. Teachers are told that some cuts are necessary to balance the $640 million budget deficit, and cutting school days is the “better option.”

The following letter was sent to the World Socialist Web Site by a parent of children in the Ypsilanti, Michigan public school district, which recently approved the closure of two schools.(See, “Ypsilanti, Michigan, board votes to close schools, impose layoffs”)

The school board in Ypsilanti recently voted to close two of our schools (East Middle School and Chapelle Elementary), on the grounds that we have too many school buildings open for a declining student population in the city.

I am writing as a parent of public school children in Ypsilanti who has seen the impact of the budget-cutting firsthand. I’m in complete agreement with the position of the SEP on what is being done to the schools. One looks in vain for any other political organization with a plan, let alone a desire, to defend public education as a democratic right.