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.

The population of the coalfields region of eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia has hemorrhaged with the collapse of wages and jobs in the coal industry since the 1980s. At its peak in the mid-1970s, coinciding with a coal boom and an upsurge in militant strikes, the coalfields region experienced a population boom of 21 percent, more than double the national average growth rate, to more than 2.3 million residents.

The 1980s, however, signaled a devastating and international counteroffensive of capital against the working class. In central Appalachia, the coal companies, aided by the betrayals of the United Mine Workers and other unions against the workforce, succeeded in isolating strikes, forcing out the most militant workers, and replacing large sections of the workforce with machines manned by much smaller, highly exploited crews. Mining towns that at one time bustled with commerce and thousands of residents have stagnated and decayed.

The Detroit Public Schools, headed by its financial czar, Robert Bobb, is poised to implement a sweeping reorganization of the school district that will trample on the working conditions and democratic rights of teachers. In carrying out its policy, the district enjoys the complete support of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

At a recent DFT executive board meeting, it was announced that as many as 41 schools will be designated as “Priority Schools” for the 2010-2011 school year. An additional 10 schools will be affixed with this label the next year. The scheme is aimed at eliminating hard-won gains of teachers like job security and seniority rights, and is the first step toward transforming dozens of public schools into privately run charter schools, which will exclude children requiring the most attention and resources.

Students at Michigan’s community colleges are facing rising tuition prices, over-enrollment in classes, and declining jobs prospects upon graduation.

State enrollment in community colleges has increased by 20 percent within the last five years. Unemployed workers and working class youth are seeking job training and two-year degrees to better position themselves for work in a state that until last month had the highest unemployment rate in the country for the past decade.

Despite higher enrollment and the valuable role community colleges play, funding has declined. Property tax revenues help finance community colleges, but declining home values has seen this form of revenue plunge by 20 percent over the past two years. Federal funding to the state community colleges has also been indirectly cut due to a $72.1 million reduction in the job-retraining “No Worker Left Behind” program.

On Friday, Washington DC’s schools chancellor Michelle Rhee fired 241 public school teachers. Of the teachers fired, 165 were terminated after they received a “poor” evaluation, based on the districts new evaluation system that measures teacher effectiveness primarily from student performance on standardized tests.

Rhee is threatening to fire another 737 teachers at the end of the upcoming school year. These teachers have been rated as being “minimally effective” according to the same yardstick. Rhee justified the firings, cynically declaring, “Every child in a District of Columbia school has the right to a highly effective teacher.” Rhee added, in a further threat, “a not insignificant number of folks will be moved out of the system for poor performance.”

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch, Basic Books: 284 pp.

It is rare to find a book that provides a detailed picture of the wrecking job that has been carried out against the public education system in the US over the last three decades in the name of “school reform.” Diane Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, presents a summary of the assault waged by both Democratic and Republican parties against public education, from its origins during the Reagan era to the Obama’s adminstration’s Race to the Top.

Because of its well-informed exposures, her latest work has been read widely by teachers in the US and other countries and became a best seller a month after its release in March 2010.

Yonkers, just across the northern Bronx border of New York City, is the fourth largest city in the state of New York with a population of 200,000. It was a manufacturing hub on the Hudson River until the mid-twentieth century, with Alexander Smith and Sons Carpet Factory, Waring Hat Company, the largest hat manufacturer in the country, and Otis Elevator headquartered and producing there.

As the industries closed and moved away, the city’s population stopped growing and it became a more impoverished urban center. By 2008, one quarter of Yonkers’ children lived in poverty. Now, it is listed as the country’s sixth most indebted city, with a $300 per capita debt.

The following open letter by Zac Hambides, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for Kingsford-Smith and president of the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), was circulated at a students’ rally on Tuesday. The letter was issued in protest at the UNSW Student Representative Council (SRC) leadership’s refusal to include Hambides on the official speakers’ list on the grounds that it would be “impolite” to the other speakers.

SRC president Osman Faruqi grudgingly allowed Hambides to speak after ISSE members and supporters began distributing the letter among the assembled staff and students (See: “This fight is first and foremost a political struggle against the Gillard government”).

International Students for Social Equality

July 20, 2010

To Osman Faruqi

Zac Hambides, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for Kingsford-Smith and president of the International Students for Social Equality (ISSE) at Sydney’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), advanced the need for a political struggle against the Gillard Labor government and for a socialist perspective to defend education at a demonstration of students on Tuesday.

The rally was called in support of 70 staff who have been stood down by the administration for imposing work bans as part of an ongoing dispute over working conditions. Against the efforts of other speakers to cover up the decisive political issues at stake, Hambides explained that the university’s actions flowed directly from two central policies of the Labor government—its “education revolution” and its anti-strike laws.

With unemployment at the highest level since the Great Depression, millions of workers have sought to improve their job prospects by continuing their education. Since public universities have drastically slashed admissions, the main beneficiary of this process has been the for-profit college industry, which provides degrees to students at rates far higher than that of standard colleges.

These so-called “career colleges”—primarily online institutions like the University of Phoenix, Capella, DeVry, and Kaplan University—hold out the false promise of a secure future, telling students that a college degree will enable them to find work.

According to many estimates, New York State’s cumulative budget deficit is forecast to exceed $50 billion by as early as 2012, unless, according to Governor David Paterson, austere cuts are made to spending on health care, public education, salaries and benefits to public workers, and other programs that benefit working people.

Paterson, who only months ago praised the billions of dollars in bonuses paid to the same Wall Street bankers responsible for the economic debacle of 2008, and who more recently attempted to force tens of thousands of state workers to take unpaid furloughs, is now vetoing over a billion dollars in state aid to public schools. The result is already the loss of approximately 14,800 teaching jobs across the state in the upcoming school year alone. Predictions of cuts in 2011 and beyond paint a far grimmer picture.

The following statement is to be distributed at a July 20 student meeting called by the Student Representatives Council at the University of New South Wales, a university with more than 44,000 domestic and international students in Sydney.

The work bans commenced by academic and administration staff at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) on June 30, and the university’s provocative decision to stand down over 70 staff without pay in retaliation, raise crucial political questions.

The ISSE expresses its support for the stand taken by UNSW staff, and demands that all be reinstated immediately and paid in full for the period they have been stood down.

On July 5, Conservative Party Education Secretary Michael Gove announced the cancellation of the previous Labour government’s £55 billion school building programme. Hundreds of secondary and primary schools promised new buildings and refurbishments have seen their hopes dashed.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has suspended projects for 715 new schools and a further 123 academies will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.