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.
New York City’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last month that 6,100 teachers will be laid off in the largest part of 10,300 city worker layoffs by 2012. This comes on top of the elimination of 4,000 teacher positions over the last two years by not replacing instructors who retired.
The layoffs are part of the restructuring of the school system, which includes the promotion of charter schools, privatization and other “market” principles favored by major corporate interests and supported by the Obama administration and its education secretary, Arne Duncan.
The repression of students, lecturers, school pupils and others protesting against the British Conservative-Liberal Democrat government is the worst seen in decades.
Since the first protest of more than 50,000 students in London on November 10, ever larger squads of riot police have carried out increasingly violent assaults. Beatings and mass arrests of hundreds of students have taken place. These arrests have been made during and after demonstrations held in London and in towns and cities nationwide—many resulting from intelligence operations carried out by specialised units dedicated to counter-insurgency operations.
The level of police violence is on a scale not witnessed since the 1984-85 miners’ strike. The latest onslaught, carried out against the “Day X 3” demonstration in London on December 9, was the most brutal yet. Some 2,800 police were mobilised against a demonstration numbering around 20,000 people.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to students involved in the London protest.
Becky Gardner is studying at the University of Portsmouth. She said, “They are treating us like we don’t understand what we are opposing. They keep saying, ‘It’s OK as you don’t have to pay it back when you earn £15,000, but at £21,000’.
“But we are going to pay it at commercial rates of interest, which means the longer you are not paying it back, the more you are going to have to pay. So if you are poor and you do make it through and have to pay all those fees in the first place, you will have to pay more than if you are rich.
Alfie Meadows, 20, a student at Middlesex University, has suffered bleeding to the brain after being batoned by police during the December 9 tuition fees protest in London.
Meadows was hit on the head as he tried to leave the Westminster Abbey area after being “kettled” there by police along with thousands of others. Kettling refers to the police tactic of surrounding and penning in protesters in small areas for hours on end without access to food, drink or toilet facilities. It amounts to the forced imprisonment of demonstrators without due process.
Meadows was attending the protest with friends, including two lecturers, Nina Power, his mother's colleague, and Peter Hallward, a philosophy lecturer at Kingston University, the BBC reports.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has for the third time in a single year made it possible for several of its new and existing schools to be converted into charter and other semi-private institutions.
In total, 48 outside bids were received last week for 13 schools, and the district board is set to vote on the proposals next February. The district is the largest in the state of California and the second largest in the country, serving more than 694,000 students at 730 schools.
In the time elapsed since the state passed the Charter School Act in 1992, 183 schools serving approximately 78,000 students have been constructed as, or converted into, charters. The problems faced by such a large district, which has experienced mass layoffs and multibillion-dollar cutbacks in recent years, are being exploited to push for expanded charter schools under the guise of education “reform.”
Parliament voted to triple university tuition fees yesterday, as police brutally attacked student protesters they had trapped outside. Students outside parliament were subjected to repeated charges on horseback and large numbers were arrested. Protesters were detained well into the evening, as skirmishes broke out across central London with students trying to escape the police cordon.
It was the fifth day of action held by students against the hike in fees—much of it directed against the Liberal Democrats who, before the general election, had signed a public pledge to scrap tuition fees. This promise was immediately ditched by party leader Nick Clegg on entering the coalition government with the Conservatives. Liberal Democrats have now signed up to raise fees to £9,000.
In the largest set of personnel reductions this school year, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) laid off just over 1,000 non-teaching staff on December 1. An additional 1,600 had their pay reduced, and 2,040 were transferred to different sites at the same pay grade. In total, almost one in six non-teaching employees have been affected by this reorganization.
The cuts are a continuation of prior layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, and a shortened school year made by the district in an effort to cover its growing budget deficits. The most recent cuts target school nurses, librarians, plant managers, assistant principals and other workers responsible for maintaining a safe and effective environment for students.
A day of action by student protesters was held Wednesday, ahead of today’s parliamentary vote to raise tuition fees.
The Conservative/Liberal Democrat government’s move to lift the cap on tuition fees, currently set at £3,000 per annum, will see them triple to £9,000.
Crowds of several hundreds gathered in Birmingham, Manchester, Bournemouth, Bristol, Coventry, Exeter, Gloucestershire, Leeds, Sheffield, Worcester and Warwick. Protests were also held in Glasgow and Edinburgh, while in London, students staged “teach-ins” outside universities.
Occupations were under way at 23 universities and there were reports of sit-ins at the central London branch of HSBC bank and a branch of Santander bank at a Leeds campus.
The British Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition’s Education White Paper is a frontal assault on teachers, the right of children to a decent education and the state provision of education.
Far from increasing the number of fully qualified teachers, improving the resources available to them, and reducing class sizes, the government is to deskill teaching and turn to unqualified staff.
As outlined in The Importance of Teaching, the white paper published November 24, the government is to tear up the present arrangements requiring teachers to have a one-year postgraduate qualification with predominantly university-based education and training, in favour of school-based training on the job. It means that children will be taught by trainee teachers.
Boston Public Schools (BPS) Superintendent Carol Johnson announced a new round of school closures to a packed meeting December 2 at Jamaica Plain’s English High School. The latest version of Johnson’s “Redesign and Reinvest” strategy includes the closure of nine schools, the merger of 10 existing schools into five, and the transformation of three others into charter or “innovation” schools.
Parents, teachers and students filled the auditorium of America’s oldest public high school to overflowing, outraged over the escalating attack on public education being mounted by Johnson and the Boston School Committee. About 30 people who were not able to fit into the auditorium were shunted to the school’s gym to watch the proceedings on TVs.
Students and school pupils continued to protest nationwide in their thousands to oppose the government plans to raise tuition fees in England to £9,000 per year, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, and other education cuts. Once again, the police have responded with brutality and measures aimed at criminalising dissent.
Protests were held Tuesday in London and other towns and cities throughout the UK, including Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Cambridge, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bath, Belfast, Brighton, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Events were held in around 40 places nationwide, including many where student occupations of universities had already been under way since the previous protests.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to students participating in the demonstrations in London and Leeds protesting the education cuts.
Raisul, a sixth former from east London, said, “People need to come to these protests to get active. The younger generation need to get involved. We can make a difference.
“Our voices are not often heard. A lot of us can’t vote and there’s a lot of anger building up. People need to get involved in politics; kids need to get involved and educated.”
Speaking about the government’s austerity programme, he said, “They use these excuses like the deficit and all that, like it’s our fault and the public sector is paying for it. Whereas when you look at what actually happened, we’re the ones who bailed out the banks.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to students participating in the demonstrations in London and Leeds protesting the education cuts.
Raisul, a sixth former from east London, said, “People need to come to these protests to get active. The younger generation need to get involved. We can make a difference.
“Our voices are not often heard. A lot of us can’t vote and there’s a lot of anger building up. People need to get involved in politics; kids need to get involved and educated.”
Speaking about the government’s austerity programme, he said, “They use these excuses like the deficit and all that, like it’s our fault and the public sector is paying for it. Whereas when you look at what actually happened, we’re the ones who bailed out the banks.
As colleges throughout the United States slashed admissions, laid off staff, and raised tuition, pay for college presidents continued to soar.
A recordbreaking thirty presidents at private colleges were paid over $1 million each in 2008, according to a report released by the Chronicle of Higher Education in November. The figures are based on the 2008 tax records for over four hundred colleges. In 2007, there were 23 presidents that earned $1 million or more. Before 2004, no college president had ever earned over $1 million dollars per year.
Salaries made up less than half of total remuneration received by those on this list, with deferred compensation and other perks, such as complimentary cars and houses, making up the majority.
On November 26, Jean Shaoul, a member of the Socialist Equality Party and professor at the Business School of the University of Manchester, was invited to speak to students occupying Lecture Theatre B in the university’s Roscoe Building. She was one of several lecturers invited to speak about the economic crisis and its implications as part of a “teach-in”.
Some 90 to 100 students attended the lecture given by Shaoul, a regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site, specialising in Middle Eastern politics.
Around 50 students at the University of Manchester began the occupation of the lecture theatre on Wednesday, coinciding with a nationwide protest against cuts and a fee hike.
As students and school pupils in Britain organise a third day of action against the brutal cuts in education, it is necessary to review the experience so far.
The November 24 student protest in central London was the second such event to be targeted for a pre-arranged state assault. Demonstrators had planned a rally at Downing Street to mark the end of the protest and received prior approval from the police. This was arbitrarily overturned, as police moved in to trap the march as it was making its way down Whitehall. Over the next several hours, officers attacked peaceful demonstrators, some as young as 13.
On Saturday, December 4, the Socialist Equality Party will hold its first ever public meeting in Vancouver, Canada’s third largest city.
The national secretary of the SEP (Canada), Keith Jones, will speak on “The breakdown of world capitalism—a socialist perspective for the working class.”
Recent events, including the EU “bailout” of Ireland and the rumblings of an international trade and currency war, underscore that the world capitalist system is ensnared in its greatest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The financial turmoil that began in September 2008 with the sudden failure of Wall Street icons has metastasized into a global economic breakdown.
Around the world, workers now confront the drive of big business and its hirelings in government to make them pay for this crisis through job and wage cuts and the dismantling of public services.
This has provoked militant resistance including in Greece and Spain.
Tens of thousands of university and college students, as well as school-aged youth demonstrated across the UK on Wednesday, in opposition to higher tuition fees and cuts in further and higher education.
A protest of around 10,000 was held in London and marches and demonstrations were held in many other towns and cities including Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bournemouth, Glasgow and Cardiff.
The Socialist Equality Party is convening a series of public meetings, as the basis for instigating a politically independent mass social movement against austerity.
The public spending cuts of £83 billion being imposed by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government will devastate the lives of millions. At stake are the destruction of social provisions and the onset of mass unemployment, poverty and homelessness on a scale not seen since the 1930s.
The claim that austerity is the price to be paid for returning Britain to “prosperity” is a fraud. The cuts are a direct result of the £1.5 trillion bailout of the UK banks that was carried out in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash—the equivalent of Britain’s entire annual GDP.