Charter Schools

Letter to the Editor:
Charter Schools and the Chicago Acero Strike

To the editor, Marxism & Education: I think a significant omission in our (Class Struggle Education Workers) CSEW coverage of the Acero charter school strike in Chicago weakens our political intervention and elides our line on charter schools generally. Of course, our propaganda must vigorously support the Acero teachers’ strike action and their demands; it is important to call for the wider CTU to bring the power of the union to the cause of this struggle and to organize the unorganized (¾ of charter school teachers in Chicago, for instance). But we are not only pro-union; we are also staunch defenders of public education. The charter school movement (supported by both capitalist parties and spearheaded by hedge funders and their parties’ “donor class”) is not only a union-busting strategy, it is also the cutting edge and most effective weapon – along with vouchers, tuition tax credits, etc. – in the concerted attack on public education.

Reading the article on the Acero strike one might think that our only objection to charter schools is that they are not union-organized. Certainly readers can find our views on charter schools expressed elsewhere, for instance in the article on the charterization of New Orleans (“Class Struggle Education Workers puts forward a program to fight the privatizing education deformers down the line”) and others. But the coverage of a work action at a charter chain should contain at least a bare statement of programmatic opposition to charter schools. When we say that, “Striking Acero teachers show that union-busting charter school movement can be fought with class struggle” what do we mean? Do we advocate organizing charter school teachers in organizations permanently separate from the public school system? Our coverage of charter schools should include our attitude of unflinching opposition to charters and the perspective that charter schools should be unionized and fully absorbed into the public school system, however flawed.

The story about the pastor and his assistant obtains: The assistant asks the pastor what will be the topic of next Sunday’s sermon. The pastor says, “The topic is sin.” The assistant asks, “What are we saying about it?” The pastor replies: “We’re against it.” We are against charters schools for good reasons. It is a pernicious myth that charter schools are public schools. The term “semi-private” is too anodyne a description of the political reality and reactionary aims of the charter movement. Charters operate private schools that drain the public trough of badly needed resources. School privatizers recognize their vulnerability in this regard, which is why Eva Moscowitz never misses an opportunity to declare falsely that her charter schools are public schools. Charters claim to be public when grabbing the billions to fund their operations, but assert their private character when seeking to avoid transparency and hide incriminating data.

The NLRB affirms their private nature as legal entities. Exposed as riddled with fraud and “creaming” selectivity, charter schools are a black hole into which governments have poured billions of taxpayer dollars. In urban settings they target mainly black and Latino students who because of residential racial segregation and poverty often attend underfunded and under resourced schools. They “cream” in selection and then push out students they find more difficult to educate thus weakening the educational opportunities of the communities where they exist.  And even with all of their advantages in funding and selection, they do not perform better than public schools.

While charter advocates call “school choice” the “civil rights issue of our time,” the NAACP, armed with the evidence that charter schools increase and deepen racial segregation, has called for a moratorium on charter schools, calling for “free high quality public fully and equitably funded public education” (my emphasis) for all children. This basic democratic demand cannot be fully realized under capitalism, of course, but it is part of our program that opposes the current capitalist ideological landscape of each family against all; we stand for working class-led social solidarity to support public schools.

Our disposition toward charter schools is informed by our Marxist understanding that debates about public schools are at bottom political struggles over how to organize society. We see the big picture. The explosion of charter schools is the most successful accomplishment in the decades-long privatizing campaign to destroy public education and subject schools and society to market-driven “reforms.” Only class struggle can mount an effective defense of free quality public education. Union organizing is indeed part of that class struggle and so is programmatic clarity. Our program explains how the defense of unions and the defense of public education must be joined in class struggle. If Marxism & Education means anything, we should not miss the opportunity to state our programmatic opposition to charter schools.

Charlie B., 31 December 2018

Marxism & Education replies: We thank Charlie B. for his corrective. Class Struggle Education Workers has from its inception in 2008 opposed these privately runs schools which pose a dire threat to public education. Our program states: “No to ‘Charter Schools’ as an opening wedge to privatization.” But, as comrade Charlie notes, the struggle to unionize the charters must link teacher and student rights with our fundamental opposition to these schools themselves.

For further reading, see, “Defeat the Capitalist Onslaught Against Public Education!” (The Internationalist No. 10, June 2001, reprinted in the special supplement Marxism and the Battle for Education [2nd edition, January 2008]); “Stop the ‘Charter’ Invasion of Harlem’s Public Schools” (Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter No. 2, October-December 2010); “What’s Behind the Rhodes II Charter Invasion?” (CSEW Newsletter No. 3, April-May 2012); and Marxism & Education No. 5 (Summer 2018) which includes the article, “New Orleans Schools: Test Lab for War on Public Education,” detailing how charters were used to destroy an entire public school system in the wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. The same issue reports on the struggle against charters in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.