Last year saw a wave of teachers’ strikes
across America, but mostly in red states where public education has
been starved of funds, putting teachers on starvation wages, subjecting
kids to dangerous conditions, and stripping schools of resources and
even putting schools on four-day weeks.
But on January 10th, the teachers who educate the 694,000 students of
the LA Unified School District (comparable to the entire student
population of the state of Oklahoma) are heading on strike, in a deep
blue city in a deep blue state. Their cause reveals the true, underlying
issue of the national teachers’ strikes: privatization.
The project to use public funds to pay for private schools has been a
darling of racists and religious cultists since Brown v Board of
Education, when the idea of “charter schools” was floated as a way to
legally exclude black children from publicly funded education. The
racist project found allies in among the grifters of Christian
fundamentalism, who perceived a way to merge state and church and
receive public funding for parochial schools where evolution could be
denied in favor of Bibilical superstition and the 5,000-year-old Earth
(this force also drove the British “academy” school movement). It was
the same devastating alliance that put Reagan in the White House: rich
crooks exploiting the fears of religious fundamentalists to seize power
and funnel millions in public funds into their own pockets.
The Democratic Party establishment fucking lovesRonald Reagan and firmly embraces the doctrine that says that state functions should be shifted to for-profit private hands – the main difference being that Democrats want a diverse oligarchy
where the makeup of the 150 people who own the world is representative
of the global population’s genders, skin colors, and origins
(Republicans want those 150 people to be white, Christian men).
Handing public money to underperforming, for-profit charter schools with
unqualified and underpaid teachers is the one issue that Democrats and
Betsy DeVos agree on. Why not? Merill-Lynch, speaking for the bipartisan
donor class has spent decades
trumpeting the investment possibilities in an education sector “that
views families as customers, schools as ‘retail outlets’ where
educational services are received, and the school board as a customer
service department that hears and addresses parental concerns.”
The philanthropic money laundry
has allowed billionaire ideologues to style their anti-public-education
crusade as an act of charity, turning poor, predominantly black areas
(Detroit, Louisiana) into laboratories where junk-science experiments
are carried out on racialized children, creating a wave of segregated, underperforming schools.
For grifters, these separate-but-equal schools represent a major
improvement over the Jim Crow of old: they produce shareholder
dividends.
The new leadership of the LA teachers union campaigned explicitly on
pushing back against the privatization of public education, helped by money laundering/election fraud scandals where dark money networks were caught hijacking control over the massive LA Unified School District.
Red state or blue, the issues that have galvanized LA teachers are the
same ones that sent teachers out last year from West Virginia to Arizona
and beyond.
Privatization of public utilities and services is always a bad idea.
If big corporations and the .01% actually paid their share of taxes, there could be adequately funded universal public education (not dependent on corporate gift$)
