Defend Public Education! Defeat Obama’s RaTTT Plan!

This Thursday, March 4, young and working people will be gathering across the country for a national day of action to defend public education.

The protests, originally called by a coalition of student groups in California, were meant to highlight the massive budget cuts and tuition hikes in the public University of California system (see “Class War 101,” by John Luther).

But with the recent attacks on public school teachers in Detroit and Central Falls, R.I., all carried out with the support of the White House, defense of public education and the right of young people from the working class to quality education has become a central focus of the class struggle today.

While the Workers Party in America has not formally endorsed any of the coalitions organizing the Mar. 4 day of action protests, we support the fight to defend public education, but participate in these events under our own slogans and banners, presenting our own perspective and platform of action.

Below we print the text of the leaflet prepared by the Central Committee of the Workers Party for the Mar. 4 protests. Party members across the country will be distributing this statement and marching in support alongside our brothers and sisters.

Brothers and sisters! The Workers Party is proud to join with you today in this day of action to defend public education. These protests and actions could not have come at a more crucial time.

While today’s events were originally called in response to budget cuts and tuition hikes affecting working-class students at public colleges and universities, they have taken on a broader and more urgent concern.

The recent attacks on public school teachers in Detroit and Central Falls, R.I., have brought into focus what Obama’s White House means by education “reform.”

Obama’s “Race To The Top” (RaTTT) plan, sold by the White House and corporatist media as a way to improve public schools and rekindle young people’s interest in learning, is in fact a brutal blueprint for dismantling public school districts, privatizing and selling them off for charter schools.

Part and parcel of this RaTTT plan is the breaking of the back of organized public school teachers and workers. As both the Detroit and Central Falls cases have shown, Obama’s so-called “race to the top” is in fact a race to the bottom for working people.

Indeed, Obama’s not-so-backhanded support for the attacks on public school teachers in these two cities is the most blatant support for unionbusting coming from the chief executive of American capitalism since Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking PATCO air traffic controllers in 1981.

Across the country, from Central Falls to Los Angeles, New York to Chicago, Detroit to Oakland, public schools at all levels are coming under attack. Like all other workers, young people from working-class backgrounds are being forced to pay for the mismanagement and clean up the messes of the exploiting and oppressing classes.

While states cut billions of dollars from K-12, community college and public university funding, affecting millions of working people of all ages and their futures, billions more are freely handed out in the form of tax breaks, incentives and corporate welfare.

On top of this, Washington continues to pour billions of dollars into its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, bribes Wall Street with “stimulus” and “bailout” money, and keeps “middle class” professionals, managers and business owners afloat with subsidies and other artificial financial support.

In other words, working people are expected to subsidize and prop up the exploiting and oppressing classes of corporatist capitalism at the expense of their own futures!

This is an especially brutal and callous agenda, given the current economic crisis.

Working people have a right to quality education, free from interference by private capitalist interests. The Workers Party advocates the abolition of all privately-run educational institutions, including the so-called “charter” schools that have proven to be a failure as an alternative to public education.

In addition, we support abolition of all tuition and fees at all publicly-funded educational institutions, full stipends for all students and nullification of all existing student loan debts, as well as the inclusion of occupational and vocational training in all academic curricula, in order to give young people the practical skills needed to put their education to use for the good of society.