Chicago rank-and-file teachers win election victory

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8 Socialist Action july 2010 CHICAGO—The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) emerged victorious in the June 11 run-off election of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), defeating the incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC) in a landslide victory.

It had become clear, when the final counts were announced on June 12, that the UPC, headed by Marilyn Stewart, had suffered a total defeat. Karen Lewis, head of the CORE slate, won the CTU presidency, and CORE won all four top union offices, each garnering more than 12,000 votes to fewer than 8300 for each of the UPC candidates. CORE also won all nine citywide offices, all six of the vice presidencies for high schools, and all 17 vicepresidencies for elementary schools.

The CORE landslide is especially impressive in that the UPC had the benefit of incumbency and had no intention of playing fair. According to estimates by Substance News Online, the UPC supporters spent a quarter-million dollars to try to re-elect Stewart, if one includes the blatant “outrageously corrupt” use of staff time used in the effort, and spent over $100,000 on mailings alone. The UPC resorted to vicious attacks, including spreading lies and redbaiting, and collaborated with the Chicago Schools CEO, Ron Huberman, in trying to ban union election campaigning in the schools, which was ultimately unsuccessful.

CORE overcame these disadvantages by strong organization and the strength of its program, most of which is anathema to many leaders in the two national teacher unions. Key elements of its program are a real opposition to corporate attacks on public schools promoted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race to the Top (RTTT); a willingness to contest district budget cuts (which is currently in play as CORE’s first battle with the Chicago Schools CEO and Board of Education); a principled reliance on grassroots member mobilization and community coalitions as the primary tools of struggle; and a strong advocacy for internal union democracy, including the fostering of internal debate.

Building opposition to the attacks on public schools and unions was how CORE got its start, when two years ago it coalesced in response to Renaissance 2010, Chicago’s school reform plan. Ren 2010 used the notorious NCLB to aggressively close “underperforming” Chicago schools and replace them with charter schools, most non-union and run top-down.

With bipartisan backing in both houses of Congress, NCLB has set up a rigged, class-biased, national testing system. Under NCLB it is inevitable that many urban schools would fail to pass the tests, and by casting blame on the teachers, officials at every level could attack teacher unions and their hard-won gains. As schools closed and layoffs mounted in Chicago in the last few years, due process was ignored, a problem that is occurring in districts throughout the nation.

During the six-year term of the UPC, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) lost 6000 members due to school closings. In its election campaign, CORE faulted the outgoing UPC under Marilyn Stewart for not defending Chicago schools and teachers, a criticism that is applicable to the leadership of other locals across the country.

In response to the apathy of CTU leaders, CORE turned to the Chicago community to find allies. It organized the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a coalition that brought together 14 community organizations with CORE, to fight the school closings. Over the past two years, GEM vigorously challenged every planned school closing and successfully stopped the closing of 12 neighborhood schools. CORE showed that grassroots union mobilization, allied with community actors, could achieve success.

The national significance of CORE’s victory in the CTU, one of the largest teacher union locals in the AFT, is that it challenges the two teacher unions to oppose the attack on teachers. This is especially true given that President Obama—guided by CORE’s nemesis, former Chicago Schools CEO and the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan—has unleashed an attack on teachers that is more severe than even NCLB under Bush.

The heads of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Educational Association (NEA) content themselves so far with sniping from the sidelines, but in the main have continued to support the Obama administration rather than mount the needed mobilization to counter the measures.

In the next few years, the new CTU will have to confront two elements of Obama’s education policy: Race to the Top and his plan for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as NCLB under President Bush.

RTTT is a federal program, part of Obama’s stimulus bill, that will competitively award a total of $4.3 billion to states that have demonstrated acceptance of the administration’s educational priorities.

In deciding upon the cash winners, Secretary Duncan clearly favors those states that have lifted caps on the number of permitted charter schools and allow for teacher evaluation and pay to be tied to student test scores. Already, former Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan passed a version of merit pay in Chicago with support from outgoing CTU President Stewart.

Tennessee and Delaware won the first round of the race and were awarded $500 million and $100 million, respectively, but a second round is currently in progress, and states are again vying to win the cash allotments.

While some states dropped out of the second round, unable to secure the agreement of unions, numerous unions in both the AFT and NEA have nonetheless signed off on RTTT. Illinois is still in the running, having lifted its cap on charter schools from 60 to 115 with significant union support.

Leaders of CORE rightly argue against RTTT participation. Unfortunately, as Nate Goldbaum reported in CORE’s April newsletter, AFT President Randi Weingarten encouraged local unions to work with legislators in securing the grant money.

Besides RTTT, urban schools will also face Obama’s abysmal plans for ESEA reauthorization (known as NCLB under Bush). Now that the NCLB has already successfully attacked urban schools, Obama wants to get rid of the old NCLB bar whereby every school must demonstrate perfect student proficiency by 2014 or face corrective action, an impossible feat for almost any school.

Many applaud this supposed repudiation of NCLB, but Obama and Duncan know that NCLB’s absurdities would soon negatively impact almost all schools across the nation and face greater opposition.

In its place, Obama has called for the “turnaround” of the lowest-performing 5% of schools in a state, where turnarounds can include school closure, charter takeover, removal of staff, and work requirements that could be imposed with(continued on page 9)

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Fourth International debates party-building strategy More than 200 delegates, observers, and invited guests from some 45 countries attended the 16th World Congress of the Fourth International (FI), Feb.

23-28 in Belgium. The FI is the world socialist organization founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky with the help of cothinkers worldwide, including James P. Cannon, the pioneer of American Trotskyism.

The draft reports prepared by the FI leadership to initiate the pre-World Congress on-line discussion appear in the International Viewpoint website under “Documents of the FI.” A critical assessment of these texts, entitled, “Socialist Action USA: A contribution to the preWorld Congress discussion,” appears in the same place.

Three main resolutions were presented for discussion and debate. The first two, on “The World Political Situation” and on “Capitalist Climate Change and Our Tasks” were accepted with little dissent and accompanied by a generally rich and productive discussion.

But there were sharp disagreements with regard to the third report on “The Role and Tasks of the FI.” Socialist Action cast its fraternal vote in favor of the first two resolutions and against the “Role and Tasks” text.

Reactionary U.S. legislation bars Socialist Action’s formal membership in the FI. Its delegates therefore participate in a fraternal capacity only.

“The World Political Report” contained a description of the terrible effects on the world’s working classes due to the international capitalist economic crisis, a crisis that was properly judged as flowing from fundamental structural flaws in the capitalist system itself.

The second resolution and reports on the world climate crisis represented an important theoretical advance, as well as an important contribution to the world workers’ movement more generally. The text on climate change combined a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis with the science of ecology, a wealth of factual material, a rejection of a “productivist” (capitalist or Stalinist) way out, a series of transitional and immediate demands, proposals for united mass actions, and a broad appreciation of the magnitude and importance of the climate crisis issue.

The resolution began with a clear and unequivocal statement of the magnitude and importance of the issue: “The climate change that is underway is not the product of human activity in general but of the productivist paradigm developed by capitalism and imitated by other systems that claim to be alternatives to the former. Faced with the danger of a social and ecological catastrophe which is without precedent and is irreversible on a human timescale, the system, incapable of calling into question its fundamental logic of accumulation, is engaged in a dangerous technological forward flight from which there is no way out.”

Debate on “Tasks” resolution The third resolution debated at the World Congress, “The Role and Tasks of the Fourth International,” drew serious criticism from a number of delegates. The text expressed the view that the priority of the FI today must be the construction of “broad anti-capitalist parties” everywhere—as well as a “new international based on such parties.”

The FI’s primary objective since its founding has been to build mass revolutionary Leninist parties worldwide aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies among the oppressed to take political power and construct socialist societies. Unclear in the resolution was whether its call for “broad anti-capitalist parties”

was meant to supplant the FI’s historic party-building strategy.

The debate also concerned the role of FI parties that would participate in these “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Were they to organize as a tendency, caucus, or (continued from page 8) out contractual negotiation.

School performance will be based upon the same NCLB-mandated tests, a corporate practice that will guarantee that there will always be schools facing punitive action (again, most likely those schools educating disadvantaged students in urban centers like Chicago).

At least at the start, the CORE-led CTU can expect little help from its national union leaders. The AFT leadership nationwide and in many locals is reluctant to contest turnaround efforts. In Chicago, for example, the CTU had not contested one school closing prior to CORE’s efforts.

In a New Jersey case that received national attention this year, AFT teachers at Central Falls High School did contest a turnaround requiring the district’s one-sided imposition of work requirements. The district summarily fired the teachers, and signaling which side he was on in the struggle, Obama supported the firings.

Although Randi Weingarten publicly defended the teachers, she did so incompetently in most media venues, losing the opportunity to educate the public on what it means to be designated a “failing school,” which is due to the lack of validity and class bias of NCLB’s assessment measures. In the end, the teachers were rehired only when they capitulated to every district demand.

After the Central Falls debacle, the retreat of the AFT is apparent everywhere. some such formation designed to win new FI members to a clear revolutionary program and party—or were they to become absorbed into such parties without a clear revolutionary program and Trotskyist identity?

This issue was particularly relevant in light of last year’s dissolution of the French section of the Fourth International, the Revolutionary Communist League, into the New Anti-Capitalist Party, and the absence of any organized FI current within the organization. Was the NPA to be the new model for revolutionaries as opposed to building a Leninist party?

The text had been prepared by the FI’s International Committee after deliberations over the course of more than a year. Some 72 comrades took the floor to express a wide range of views on the resolution.

As the discussion proceeded, it became obvious that there was little agreement among the delegates as to the meaning and purpose of “broad anti-capitalist parties.” Neither the ambiguous language of the text nor the reporter explained whether these parties were envisioned as an alternative to building revolutionary parties based on the historic program of the FI or even whether these parties were to be socialist at all.

In Socialist Action’s view, a tactical decision as to what kind of formations revolutionary socialists participate in must be subordinate to our strategic objective—the construction of revolutionary parties aimed at the organization of the working class and its allies in the struggle for socialism. Of course, party-building can take many forms, from participation in reformist or social-democratic parties, to principled fusions, or unifications with currents with whom we find major ... A new Depression?

(continued from page 6: “Has the U.S. entered its Third Depression?”)

“America Speaks,” funded by Peterson. The sessions, designed “to preach about the dangers of the deficit,” were in fact, said the Federation, “nothing more than efforts to soften up the public to accept Medicare and Social Security cuts.”

Thanks to their attendance, unionists and friends at the meetings burst through the scripted questions. You can be sure, though, that the results will be misreported by Peterson’s group and misinterpreted by Obama’s commission, as was the case when results of town hall meetings organized by Bush on health-care reform were ignored after they expressed support for single payer.

Are the liberals right?

While Krugman et al. advocate spending policies that would at least slow the pace of job loss, we should be clear that their argument with the “deficit hawks” is over timing and style, of how best to preserve the very system that has plunged us into this inevitable crisis.

What liberals miss (or won’t say publicly for fear According to a feature in The New York Times Magazine, “The Teachers’ Unions’

Last Stand” by Steven Brill, in last April’s contract negotiations in Washington D.C., AFT head Randi Weingarten helped to negotiate away tenure and seniority rights—making it possible for Chancellor Rhee to fire a tenured teacher if deemed ineffective by her and her staff—and agreed to teacher merit pay tied to student test scores. In Colorado, Weingarten endorsed teacher evaluations tied to test scores as the state geared up for RTTT.

The CORE-led CTU has an opportunity to present its alternative union philosophy in the AFT National Convention, held in Seattle, July 7-11. Many locals in both the AFT and NEA do not promote demoPetros Giannakouris / AP In the current capitalist crisis, resistance to the attacks on the world’s working classes has been limited. But workers in Greece are showing the way forward: (Left) March in Athens, June 28, against government plans to privatize power plants. Banner reads, “We resist.”

programmatic agreement and with whom we find ourselves working together toward the same goals in the mass movement.

Indeed, the struggle to unify the working class in united-front mass actions that challenge specific polices of the capitalist class (such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or attacks on immigrant rights) is a central tool of revolutionaries throughout the world to advance our common cause and simultaneously win the best fighters to socialist politics.

Build the Fourth International!

While the “Role and Tasks” text was approved by the great majority of the delegates, the vote was not without major reservations and also reflected a view that the discussion would be continued.

It was clear from the concluding remarks of the reporter for “The Role and Tasks of the FI” text that the sharp World Congress debates had an important impact on the FI leadership. The reporter essentially accepted an amendment to the text indicating that the disparate views were far from resolved and that the debate would continue at future FI meetings.

A significant number of World Congress participants were enthusiastic, serious, and well-informed youth, an indication that FI sections have been able to assemble a layer of young fighters to replace the older cadre in the years ahead.

The World Congress took place at a difficult time for revolutionaries throughout the world—a time when the attacks on the world’s working classes have taken a great toll while resistance has been generally limited. These defeats undoubtedly weighed heavily on the Congress deliberations, leading some to look for shortcut solutions that ignore the rich lessons of the past.

It became increasingly evident during the World Congress that the critical need to build the Fourth International, based on the construction of revolutionary socialist parties of the Leninist type, will remain central to the FI’s future discussions and debates. n workers might be listening) is that the savviest and most powerful deficit hawks don’t really believe their own rhetoric about short-term tax hikes and spending cuts leading to short-term private investment that could lead to a recovery. What they’re really aiming at are the kind of mammoth, savage long-term cuts, at workers’ expense, required to reverse decades of profit-rate slide.

And the liberals’ only concern is that such a program be implemented slowly and slickly enough to blunt workers’ resistance. They recognize, correctly, that if every company, every country, simultaneously carries out massive cutbacks, the mutually reinforcing effect would lead to the kind of catastrophic misery seen in Great Depressions—misery that eventually restores profitability, but only if workers endure without complaint decades of destruction of resources as the system cleanses itself of “excess” capacity. And the liberals remember with fear and hatred the kind of radical movements that arose from such conditions in the last two giant Depressions (1870s and 1930s).

In counterposition to the liberal program, labor needs one of its own, and a plan of militant action to fight for it. n cratic debate in the union, and leaders in the bureaucracy are able to continue with an ineffectual program of collaboration with district officials and Democratic Party politicians. But without a real struggle from the rank and file, teachers will continue to suffer as successive defeats turn into an historic crisis.

We need a fighting union that stands up for students and teachers, presents a view of education as a collaborative social effort that contributes to the flourishing of the individual and society, and works to change society in ways that contribute to that flourishing. For that reason, teachers need rank-and-file caucuses like CORE in every union local, whether AFT or NEA. n Socialist Action july 2010 9

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Lisa Luinenburg / Socialist Action Lisa Luinenburg / Socialist Action