The International Students for Social Equality is the student organization of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI publishes the World Socialist Web Site, the most widely read daily socialist publication in the world.
To find out more about the ISSE, and to help build a chapter at your school, contact us.
More than 200,000 prospective students in Britain have been denied a university place due to cuts in the higher education budget and government measures to limit numbers. This represents over a quarter of all applicants.
On September 17, the national body responsible for university admissions, UCAS, reported that it had received more than 685,000 applications, of which fewer than 450,000 had been successful. Last year, 158,000 applicants were denied a place, an increase from the 2008 figure of 120,000.
The superintendent of Boston’s public schools has proposed the closure of six more schools and the conversion of a seventh into a privately managed charter school. The move comes amid increasing attacks on public education in the US by federal, state, and municipal governments.
The cuts were announced by Carol Johnson, Boston Public Schools superintendent, at a meeting of the Boston School Committee on October 6. The announcement follows the firing in March of teachers at six “underperforming” Boston schools and a January 2010 state law that allowed a two-fold increase in the number of charter schools in districts with the poorest performance.
The proposed new cuts include the closing of three high schools in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood, along with two elementary schools and an early learning center.
The following statement is being distributed by supporters of the International Students for Social Equality at demonstrations in California against education cuts. For more information or to join the ISSE, visit intsse.com.
Students are protesting today against attacks on public education under conditions of mounting social distress for millions of young people. Whatever the talk of an “economic recovery,” the US and world economy remain mired in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Unprecedented budget deficits are leading to the shutdown of K-12 schools, rising tuition and fees for colleges and universities, and cutbacks in essential classes and programs. Students graduate today with a mountain of debt and no prospects for a decent job.
Recent weeks have seen the release of several documentaries attacking public education in the United States, part of a broader campaign involving the corporate-controlled media and the Obama administration. These include Teached, directed by former Teach For America member Kelly Amis, The Cartel, which focuses on New Jersey public schools, and The Lottery, which supports the growing charter school movement.
Waiting for Superman, which might be better described as a pseudo-documentary, given its tendentious and false character, is the most heavily publicized of these efforts. Written and directed by Davis Guggenheim, producer of the Al Gore environmental film, An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman opens with an interview of Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a network of charter schools in New York City.
The body of Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr., an elementary school teacher from an impoverished suburb of Los Angeles, was found far below a remote forest bridge on Sunday. It appears that Ruelas intentionally leapt to his death not long after he was labeled a “less effective teacher” by the Los Angeles Times.
On Wednesday, hundreds of people attended funeral services for Ruelas. Former colleagues and students spoke of Ruelas as an excellent teacher who went above and beyond what was required.
Ruelas, 39, worked at Miramonte Elementary, a school where each day of teaching requires a certain degree of heroism. The school is located in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, an area is plagued by violence, drug addiction, and the presence of criminal gangs. The challenges and dangers facing young people, as well as those who teach them, are immense.
On September 23, groups planning for a “day of action” against education cuts met in Berkeley, California to discuss preparations for an October 7 demonstration.
The course and outcome of the meeting mirrored a similar meeting in San Diego earlier in the month. Organizations involved in planning the demonstration, most notably the International Socialist Organization (ISO), worked to prevent passage of demands presented by the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) to break with the Democratic Party and carry out socialist policies. (See, “Planning committee on education cuts—the ISO supporters the Democratic Party”)
Diane Ravitch, a critic of President Obama’s Race to the Top program and the movement for so- called school reform, spoke at a forum sponsored by Wayne State University September 23 in Detroit. She is currently on a nationwide speaking tour to promote her bestselling book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
Several hundred people attended the Wayne State event, including large numbers of active and retired teachers. The turnout expressed the anger and disquiet among wide layers of the population over the assault on public education in Detroit, which is being carried out with the support and encouragement of the Obama administration.
On September 11, groups planning for a “day of action” against education cuts in California met in San Diego to discuss preparations for an October 7 demonstration.
The course and outcome of the meeting demonstrate the way in which the dominant organizations involved, and in particular the International Socialist Organization, work to derail any independent movement of the working class in opposition to the Democratic Party.
Plans for the October 7 demonstrations were initiated following the events of March 4, 2010, which saw mass protests by students and workers throughout California. The protests reflected widespread outrage over multi-billion-dollar education cuts passed by the Democratic Party-controlled state legislature and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The cuts have already led to sharp increases in tuition, mass teacher layoffs, and reduced class offerings.
Since September 15, parents and students and residents of the Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago’s south side have occupied a field house at Whittier Elementary School.
The building currently houses after-school programs and is the neighborhood’s community center. It is targeted for immediate demolition by the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) administration. CPS plans to raze the building and has said it will fill the space with a soccer field.
Residents are demanding that the building be renovated as a library, something Whittier sorely needs. Their action is a courageous step forward in defense of the public school system in the city and deserves the broadest support of the working class.
The following statement has been issued by the International Students for Social Equality, the student organization of the Socialist Equality Party, for the beginning of the fall semester in the US. The ISSE urges all students and young workers who agree with this program to join the ISSE and build a club at your school or campus.
As the new school semester begins in the United States, students and young people are confronted with the worst economic and social crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Everywhere, conditions of life are going backwards. The jobs crisis is dire, with an official unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, and youth unemployment is nearly 15 percent. Poverty is soaring, wages for young workers are abysmal, and students graduate from college, burdened with debt, only to find that there are no jobs to be had.
The ISSE is holding public meetings to discuss the unprecedented crisis that has resulted from the August 21 federal election and the vital political issues now confronting the working class and students.
Not since 1931 has a first-term government failed to return to office with a majority of the vote, and not since 1940 has there been a hung parliament. Under conditions of the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Labor/Liberal two-party system that has defined parliamentary rule in Australia since World War II has broken down in the face of mass alienation from parties that serve only the interests of a wealthy financial and corporate elite.
Two months ago, the political coup that ousted Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd cast a revealing light on the forces that exercise real power behind the facade of so-called parliamentary democracy.
About 600 public school teachers and staff in the city of Danville, located in east central Illinois, went out on strike on Monday morning after federally-mediated negotiations between the Danville Education Association (DEA) and the Danville Consolidated School District 118 Board of Education failed to resolve differences between the two parties.
Teachers are demanding modest wage increases and that the school move to rehire teachers and school nurses laid off as a result of recent emergency budget cutbacks. DEA members voted overwhelmingly to authorize the strike, the first among teachers in the city since 1977.
Over the past weeks, the Obama administration, with the full-throated support of the corporate media, has launched a campaign against public school teachers, blaming them for the failure of the US education system.
This propaganda campaign has as its principal objectives the justification of mass layoffs of teachers, various privatization schemes, and broad cuts in spending cloaked by “incentives” as part of the so-called “Race to the Top” program.
The Obama administration, having squandered trillions on war and Wall Street bailouts, is determined that the working class should pay for the economic crisis, including by reductions in public education.
Since June of this year, 2,000 teachers and staff in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have been laid off. The mass firings are part of an effort to use the state’s education budget shortfall, estimated at $370 million, to privatize the public schools.
WSWS reporters attended a job fair held on August 24, one of two this year open only to Chicago Public Schools teachers laid off in 2010. The fair was described by several teachers who attended as little more than a stunt and a show for the media. Teachers expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the job fair and the meager offerings. Many of those who left the fair’s morning session early told WSWS reporters that very few schools even participated. Furthermore, no one they had spoken with had been offered an afternoon interview.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis of the “effectiveness” of city teachers, ostensibly based on student test scores, as part of an intensifying campaign to blame teachers for deteriorating conditions in the public schools. The newspaper is one of the first media outlets in the nation to publish this information, raising serious concerns about the privacy of teachers under the new testing regime.
For its report, the LA Times analyzed data that had been gathered by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest district in the country. Later this month, The LA Times will make public the entire data set, which contains information on over 6,000 Los Angeles teachers.
BPP, a private company that possesses 14 sites around the UK providing law and business degrees, was granted “university college” status in July, creating the first private university in the UK for 30 years. The decision signals the coalition government’s drive to privatise higher education.
Massive spending cuts brought forward by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government, combined with rising youth unemployment, has seen 200,000 students denied a university place this year. It is in this context that calls have been made to privatise higher education.
Until now university college status has been typically reserved for publicly owned institutions that provide a limited range of degrees and qualifications. Before the BPP granting, the University of Buckingham has been the only official private university in the UK, which was granted degree-awarding powers in 1983.
President Obama’s initial 2009 pledge of $12 billion in stimulus funds—in itself an insultingly low number—to help the nation’s community colleges through the recessionary crisis was slashed to $2 billion for job training and education in March of 2010. On July 29, Obama signed the $59 billion emergency war supplemental spending bill; one can readily see where the Obama administration’s interests lie.
This drastic cut in federal stimulus funding comes at a time when state funding for higher education is expected to fall even further. But even this drastic cut in stimulus funds fails to tell the whole story. At a time when community colleges across the nation are bursting at the seams with high school graduates who can’t afford skyrocketing tuition rates at many four-year schools, as well as with returning students seeking new skills, the majority of stimulus funds are going to for-profit institutions instead of community colleges.
The new stage of the world financial crisis is driving a turn from economic stimulus policies to austerity measures and a deepening assault on the social position of the working class in every country. It has reverberated in this part of the globe, in the backroom political coup that saw Julia Gillard installed as Australian prime minister at the behest of the mining conglomerates, and in the National-led government’s fresh assault on working people in New Zealand.
On July 23, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Board of Education fired 600 educators and staff employees as part of an ongoing, statewide effort to close a massive budget deficit on the backs of state workers across Illinois. It is widely expected that up to 1,400 more CPS teachers and school workers will be laid off within the next two weeks, before the new school year begins.
At $11.5 billion, Illinois currently faces one of the largest state budget deficits in the country. On July 1, Governor Pat Quinn announced budget cuts of $1.4 billion, $241 million of which are to come from state funding for primary and secondary education. Illinois already ranks a dismal 47th in the country in the amount of state money given to school funding and 29 schools are presently on “state financial watch,” at risk of being shut down.