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Save Our (Public) Schools: The Time
for Revolt is Now
By Marcus B. McArthur, UFT Executive
Board, City As School HS
On March
22nd at the Panel for Education Policy Meeting (PEP), the DOE Chancellor and
other appointed cronies, sat doe-eyed as teachers, alumni, parents, and
community members spoke out against Central Park East 1’s wrecking-ball
principal and the unjust closing of J.H.S. 145. A neighborhood zoned school in
the Bronx, J.H.S. 145 occupies the same building as a Success Academy charter
school, the test-prep suspension factory run by Eva Moskowitz, leading Wall
Street’s charge to colonize our schools. J.H.S. 145 was designated a “renewal
school” in need of resources and institutional support to meet the needs of the
children served by their community. They were promised resources. They were
promised three years to right the ship. The resources never came. The DOE cut
their turn around time by a year.
One more betrayal and counting...
The
Chancellor offered little beyond the absurd declaration that these decisions
were made “with the best interests of the kids at heart.” Translation: Eva and
her hedge fund backers want more space and rather than paying rent for a
political rival, we prefer to throw under the bus an under resourced school
serving a politically expendable community. I have news for our elected
officials.
Expendability will no
longer be tolerated!
At the UFT
Executive Board meeting two days before the PEP, MORE and New Action urged the
UFT leadership to shorten the March 22nd Delegate Assembly to rally delegates
and chapter leaders at the PEP against these betrayals of our public school
system. I argued that we live in extraordinary times that require extraordinary
responses. Normal protocols and rules of political engagement no longer apply.
Our “elected officials” do not respond to our congenial ‘seat at the table’
politics, where our mayor accepts our endorsement with one hand, while his
Chancellor stabs us in the back with the other. Take note that our leadership
voted down our call to action.
Make no
mistake about it, every neighborhood public school, serving every working-class
racial, ethnic, and religious community that populates our city, is threatened
by the proliferation of segregated, Wall Street backed, union busting charters.
Furthermore, the enduring culture of dictatorial leadership fostered by the
Bloomberg era DOE, has bred a new generation of catastrophic principals that
are destroying democratic school communities across the city. Fifty-seven years
ago, after enduring years of egregious injustice in the workplace, our union
drew a red line and said no more. This is our generation’s opportunity to do
precisely that.
The
democratic pageantry of PEP meetings, where we implore unelected bureaucrats to
represent the will of the people, must be recognized for the colossal sham that
they embody. The bureaucrats attend simply to maintain appearances—the guise of
democracy in the midst of an oligarchy. Their body language and
unresponsiveness communicates their disdain louder than the few words they may
muster the energy to utter. PEP meetings exemplify the farce of mayoral control
where the voice of parents, teachers, and students can be ignored unchecked.
With each school closure, co-location, and rogue administrator run amok, our
union leadership’s support of mayoral control becomes more absurd by the day.
In 1857 in
front of an audience of American Abolition Society members and allies,
Frederick Douglass offered a prescient message that we, union members and
teachers, should heed:
“Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out
just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact
measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will
continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The
limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress...Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are
men who want crops without plowing on the ground; they want rain without
thunder and lightning.”
Have our
political elites yet breached the threshold of injustice and wrong to which we
quietly submit?
Have we yet
recognized that those who profess to represent our interests, but attempt to
pacify us, want rain without thunder and lightning?
Have we yet
devised a set of cogent demands that will trigger genuine resistance?
The time
for revolt is now.
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