A Historic Day for Graduate Assistants!

Comment by Tom Raley

Just today, Graduate Assistant employees at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities delivered a request to University President Eric Kaler to file a joint petition for union certification. The Graduate Student Workers Union/United Auto Workers (GSWU/UAW) have been organizing a union drive on campus to organize the 4,500 graduate assistant employees, and upon obtaining a majority of signed union cards, are able to request a joint petition with the University for union certification. If the University rejects the request, the workers will move to hold a union election.

This is a historic step for graduate assistant employees at the U of M and illustrates how people all over the state of Minnesota, and the country, are beginning to realize that the best way to improve their working and living conditions is to work together towards shared goals. Despite the U of M’s union-busting tactics, the workers have remained strong and will hopefully soon have the benefit of collective bargaining.

Check out their press release here!

School Reform by the 99%

Comment by Chris Gray

Who’d have thought that education reform could happen without high-stakes testing and dismantling public sector unions?  While U.S. public schools are constantly compared to the successes of European, specifically Scandinavian, schools pundits of America’s corporate education “reform” neglect the fact that these regions were the scenes of massive working-class movements that won important social and economic gains from the ruling class in the post-war period.

The article What Americans Keep Ignoring about Finland’s School Success states “The problem facing education in America isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.”

By the way, 96% of Finnish teachers are unionized, and are no true charter or private schools in Finland.

While this is music to the ears of those asking serious questions about the problems facing schools, the article also falsely attributes misguided policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top to ignorant politicians, who seemingly if knew better, would avoid such disastrous initiatives.

In reality, the bi-partisan drive to privatize public education is not the result of uninformed politicians, but instead a well-planned attempt to commodisize knowledge, and drag our students into the private sector by turning schools into job-training centers.  For example, according to the Star Tribune, in California, IBM recently helped set up a charter school that specializes in teaching students the technical skills to gain entry-level employment at, you guessed it, IBM.  

In Minnesota, companies like Cargill and 3M have jumped at the chance to become involved in “coaching” principals, designing curriculum, and fund programming. One begs to question how Cargill will approach the topic of biodiversity and sustainable farming in its biology class, or how banks teaching “financial literacy” will talk about the financial crisis that is currently gutting the very communities that are being failed by our schools.

Likewise, students and their families cannot rely on benevolent politicians for help, especially from the two parties that brought No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, whose campaigns are funded by corporations like Cargill and 3M.  

Education has always been contested ground.  For the ruling class, schools provide the opportunity to prepare entire generations for arbitrary tasks, to follow orders and directions, and to train the next generation of exploited workers into menial jobs.  For the rest of us, an education is ground for liberation, where students learn the skills and abilities to think critically, solve problems, and shape their worlds.

At the moment, it seems these corporations understand how schools function in a capitalist system better than we do, but around the world the public is reclaiming public education.  Last year, millions of students took to the street in England protesting tuition increases, and in Chile students have taken over schools demanding free high quality public education.

If we want to solve the problems of education, we’ll need to start asking deeper questions.  We need to think of schools as part existing social and economic systems.  In order to make sure schools remain institutions for the public good, rather than extensions of corporate human resource departments, we must remember that our best defense lies in each other, and our ability to organize with teachers, parents, and students.

Against National Standards and National Tests