By RANDY CHILDS
IN A surprise maneuver, Green Dot Public Schools announced on May 9 that a majority of teachers at Locke High School in Watts had signed a petition supporting conversion of their struggling school into ten small charter schools run by Green Dot.
This move, combined with the victory of two candidates supported by Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in the May 15 school board elections, has prompted the local ruling class to declare open season on United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), the union representing the 48,000 teachers, counselors, and health and human service professionals who work for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).
Green Dot CEO Steve Barr was in close negotiations with LAUSD officials on a “partnership” deal over managing Locke. When district officials balked at Barr’s demands to ignore the UTLA contract, Green Dot chose the end-around tactic of the petition. Part of Green Dot’s plan is to force every Locke teacher to reapply for her job, eliminate the retirement benefits that UTLA members receive, and impose work rules that would force teachers to do hours of extra, unpaid labor each week. In a local radio interview, Barr essentially admitted that Green Dot plans to discriminate against veteran teachers (whose salaries he claims Green Dot cannot afford.)
The May 17 lead editorial of the Los Angeles Times, titled “LAUSD’s opportunity,” urges the district to “take on the teachers’ union,” which the editors call “the most regressive force” in the LAUSD.
The Times wants blood. “The board should be ambitious,” the editors argue, “It needs more flexible work hours and duties—such as teachers supervising kids during lunch hours and after school to make campuses safer. It should push to soften tenure rules so that bad teachers are easier to fire and good teachers are easier to reward, and insist that students’ needs, not teachers’ seniority, guide job assignments.”
This argument is based on myths about public school teachers: students are suffering because teachers just don’t work hard enough and union seniority rules only protect “bad teachers” and hurt students.
The reality is that public school teachers are massively overworked, which is why UTLA has fought to defend contractual language freeing teachers from supervisory duties during meal breaks and after school. (Sooner or later, everyone has to pee.) If the LAUSD bureaucrats or the Times editors truly cared about “safer campuses,” they would push for money to hire more campus supervision aides at our overcrowded schools.
And attacks on teacher seniority are less about serving “student needs” and more about giving administrators power to squeeze out experienced teachers and replace them with new teachers who are cheaper and easier to intimidate. Students are actually hurt by the fact that terrible school conditions and hostile administrators drive quality, experienced teachers out of our schools in droves.
These smear attacks on teachers’ unions are about promoting an ideologically driven free-market model of public school “reform.” Charter school advocates claim that by forcing public schools to “compete” with charter schools for students and test scores, it will drive all schools to get better. Also lurking in the shadows behind the charter “movement” are the reactionary proponents of school vouchers, who want to rob money from the already underfunded public school system to give to private schools (including religious schools and schools run by for-profit corporations).
The rarely-mentioned reality is that most charter schools “cherry pick” their students. Charter schools like Green Dot typically have an application process to get in, parent and student “contracts” to stay in, much lower populations of special needs students and English language learners, and get to kick out kids with discipline problems.
Then when the kids at the mainstream public schools (kids who Green Dot doesn’t want to teach) have lower test scores and graduation rates, the charter school advocates gush over this “proof” that charter schools work.
Another major selling point for charter schools is that they are granted more autonomy over curriculum and staffing than mainstream public schools. Autonomy from the notorious LAUSD bureaucracy is what all teachers and schools want. This was the main reason Green Dot was successful in convincing many Locke teachers to sign the petition. Zeus Cubias, a math teacher at Locke who was interviewed by the Times, said that many teachers who signed the petition favoring the charter conversion remained dubious of Green Dot’s plans, but “feel like there isn’t any other option.” The vote at Locke was motivated at least as much by teachers’ desperation for any kind of change as it was any belief they might have had in Green Dot’s program.
But why would a school need to be taken over by Green Dot in order to get rid of LAUSD bureaucracy? In fact, there is absolutely no logical reason that a school has to go charter (and rip up the teachers’ union contract) in order to have autonomy. Politicians and district bureaucrats secretly know that their top-down mandates don’t work, yet they only grant autonomy from these rigid rules to semi-privatized charter schools. This creates a deliberately uneven playing field for the “competition” between charters and traditional public schools. The goal is to discredit public schools, scapegoat teachers and their unions, and pave the way for the further privatization of education.
Charter schools and vouchers are no more about “school choice” and “fair competition” than neoliberal measures like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were about “free commerce.” Both are strategies in a class war. NAFTA battered down the doors to markets in Mexico for heavily subsidized U.S. consumer goods, displacing thousands of Mexican farmers in the process. It was a strategy for the U.S. government to press its economic and political advantages to grab greater market shares across the continent for Corporate America.
Charter schools and private schools use artificial advantages like autonomy and selective enrollment to batter down the defenses and depleted resources of public education. The ultimate goal is to free capitalism from the “burden” of paying for a public education system based on the principles that society bears a responsibility to educate every child and must respect the rights of teachers who do this challenging work.
Randy Childs is a member of United Teachers Los Angeles.
