Education in the US

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.

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 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.

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.