From justinakers at cox.net  Sun Nov  1 07:28:22 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?Windows-1252?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 00:28:22 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] Report on the Decisions of the 10/24 Mobilizing
	Conference to Save Public Education & Call for the March 4
	Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
Message-ID: <DFB23523CBD94A25874A2C1A7EE37323@Justinscomputer>




    Report on the Decisions of the 10/24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education


    Intro


    Thanks to all of you, the Conference was a tremendous success! While we recognize that we stand in the beginning stages of our struggle and acknowledge that we have much work ahead of us, we are certain that the Conference on October 24, 2009 was a pivotal event in the building of a statewide movement to defend public education. More than 800 students, workers, and teachers from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education ? Pre K-12, Adult Education, CC, CSU and UC ? participated, discussed, debated, and democratically voted on how to advance the struggle to defend and transform public education in California.
    Here are the principal decisions of the Conference. Please share them with your member groups, General Assemblies and all those concerned with defending public education! Spread them far and wide!


    Solidarity With November Actions


    The Conference endorsed the UC and CSU strike and mobilization on Nov. 17th? 20th and decided to call for statewide solidarity actions on these days. On these dates, the University of California Regents will meet in UCLA to impose a 32% student fee increase and the California State University Board of Trustees will meet in Long Beach to begin the development of a list of programs to be eliminated in anticipation of major budget cuts next year. Throughout the state and across the different levels of education, we must act together against all attacks on public education. The conference calls for all activists and organizations to organize solidarity actions on Nov. 17th ? 20th.
    These November actions ? and other similar upcoming actions ? are crucial building blocks towards the united Strike and Day of Action on March 4th.


    March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education


    After much passionate discussion and debate, the conference democratically voted, as its principal decision, to call for a ?Strike and Day of Action that is inclusive of all different tactics, including: walkouts, rallies, march to Sacramento, teach ins, occupations, and all other forms of protests chosen by schools and organization. It starts on this day ______ and its up to each school and organization if and how long to continue it.?
    After passing this resolution, different dates were discussed and March 4 was overwhelmingly chosen as the date for the united Spring action.
    The call for the March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education is copied below and attached to the original email. Please send this out widely and get organizations and activists to endorse it!


    CALL:


    March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education


    On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education ? Pre K-12, Adult Education, CC, CSU and UC ? to "decide on a statewide action plan capable of winning this struggle, which will define the future of public education in this state, particularly for the working class and communities of color."
    After hours of open collective discussion, the conference democratically voted, as its principal decision, to call for a statewide Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. The conference decided that all schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics ? such as strikes, walkouts, march to Sacramento, rallies, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. ?  for March 4, as well as the duration of such actions.
    We refuse to let those in power continue to pit us against each other. If we unite, we have the power to shut down business-as-usual and to force those in power to grant our demands. Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services.


    We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations across the state to endorse this call and massively mobilize and organize for the Strike and Day of Action on March 4.


    Let's make this an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and educational segregation in California.
    To endorse this call and to receive more information, please contact march4strikeanddayofaction at gmail.com and consult www.savecapubliceducation.org


    Spring Statewide Conference


    The next Statewide Conference was called for Spring 2010 and will be held in Southern California. We hope that the upcoming Conference can move forward in democratically deciding on unifying demands, as well as build for the statewide actions on March 4. The exact location and date are TBA and will be sent out ASAP!


    Demands


    Throughout the day of the October 24 Conference, individuals and organizations had the opportunity to raise the demands they felt were most crucial to this struggle. All written and spoken demands are compiled in the document ?Demands 10/24/2009? attached to the original email. We hope that the upcoming Spring Conference can move forward in democratically deciding on unifying demands for the statewide actions on March 4!
    Coordinating Committee
    A volunteer coordinating committee met after the conference. To join the Coordinating Committee listserve ?  oct24coord at lists.berkeley.edu ? please contact oct24list at gmail.com if you would like to be added to the email list.
    We encourage other individuals and activists to join the coordinating committee. It is open to all!
    The next in person coordinating committee meetings will be on November 7th at 1pm. NorCal Location: San Jose State; SoCal Location: TBA by participants from the region. Details will be sent out ASAP!
     





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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov  3 23:38:13 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 16:38:13 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] Workers' Power,
	Student Power! ISO meeting this Thursday 11/5 6pm
In-Reply-To: <80136220911031520j1eec20aas4bbfe196bf7dd229@mail.gmail.com>
References: <80136220911031520j1eec20aas4bbfe196bf7dd229@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <SNT120-W33E578CBCA974D8F649BA1A1B20@phx.gbl>



 

  





The International Socialist Organization presents:
Workers' Power, Student Power!
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 6PM
City Heights Recreation Center
4380 Landis Street, San Diego
(Located at the corner of Landis & Fairmount, just east of the tennis courts)
There is a new movement arising that unites the interests of students and workers in the education system.  Join us for a meeting where we will discuss the current movements as well as the ways that we can build movements that exercise the power of both workers and students.For more information, call (619) 865-0621 or email isosandiego at yahoo.com.

Visit Socialist Worker online: http://www.socialistworker.org.
Join the San Diego ISO on Facebook: San Diego Branch of the International Socialist Organization



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From abel.macias at yahoo.com  Wed Nov  4 23:56:15 2009
From: abel.macias at yahoo.com (Abel Macias)
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:56:15 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Educationforall] Meeting Minutes From EFA 10-16
Message-ID: <822326.43647.qm@web82008.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the delay on these meeting minutes from our last meeting on October 16.? I included as much info as I could, however I am lacking notes on the second to last item addressing the structure of the organization.

If anyone has further notes on this item please feel free to bring it up at our next meeting on Friday in room R115.

I also apologize if I misspelled peoples names, or who you were affiliated with.

Thank you,

Abel Macias
Chicano Studies
SDCC



      
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From larteaga75 at yahoo.com  Thu Nov  5 03:54:25 2009
From: larteaga75 at yahoo.com (Luis Arteaga)
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 19:54:25 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [Educationforall] Just a concern
Message-ID: <207437.6687.qm@web59201.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

Something that was brought into my attention is some flyers should?start?to be made if we want students to be joining our?struggles and if we need more opinions. Well hope?we?keep the struggle moving and we cant stop we have to keep fighting thanks.
?Companero,
Luis Arteaga
larteaga75 at yahoo.com 


      
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Thu Nov  5 05:01:14 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 22:01:14 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] FW:  Just a concern
In-Reply-To: <207437.6687.qm@web59201.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References: <207437.6687.qm@web59201.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <SNT120-W6763C366DFEEBD5374B71A1B00@phx.gbl>



Luis, thanks for bringing this up because I feel the same way. I think we need to grow EFA and make that a priority, especially amongst students. The more participation the better this growing movement will take shape and the better chance of wining this struggle. We should definetly discuss this at the next EFA meeting this friday. See you then.
 
Marcos


Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 19:54:25 -0800
From: larteaga75 at yahoo.com
To: Educationforall at lists.aktivix.org
Subject: [Educationforall] Just a concern







Something that was brought into my attention is some flyers should start to be made if we want students to be joining our struggles and if we need more opinions. Well hope we keep the struggle moving and we cant stop we have to keep fighting thanks.
 Companero,
Luis Arteaga
larteaga75 at yahoo.com 




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From justinakers at cox.net  Fri Nov 13 05:30:09 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:30:09 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] education for all flyers
Message-ID: <FBA7046E19F74CDB9981840918D3B526@Justinscomputer>

Hello all--

Is there a flyer ready for next week's meeting?

Jim Miller has said he will give a presentation on tax talk.

We really need to get this going so we can involve new students and faculty.

Saludos,

Justin
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From justinakers at cox.net  Fri Nov 13 18:42:43 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:42:43 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Sunday: Students set to rally at UCSD to protest
	cuts
Message-ID: <9C40D309AFF14480ACBA51F70FB51846@Justinscomputer>

Does anyone have any contacts with this group of students? Can anyone attend to show solidarity?

Justin



  

Students set to rally at UCSD to protest cuts 

LA JOLLA: Students from across the state are planning to gather at the University of California San Diego on Sunday to protest recent budget cutbacks in the UC stem. 

The gathering, part of the Students of Color Conference on campus, is expected to include speeches and a march. Organizers said about 1,000 students will participate. 

The protest, scheduled to start at 1 p.m. at the Geisel library, is aimed at cuts in state funding that have led to enrollment reductions and fee increases. 

"This is an action that symbolizes our solidarity with each other across diverse lines including those of ethnicity, socioeconomic class and education," said Leslie Manjarrez, a UCSD student and one of the event's organizers. 

At the end of the rally and march, balloons will be released to "symbolize students of color and other disadvantaged communities who have been blocked from the UC system," the coordinators said in a statement. - J.W. 

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/nov/13/tentative/



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From justinakers at cox.net  Sun Nov 15 20:50:14 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:50:14 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Kansas Schools: Lawsuit better than cuts
Message-ID: <8A7FD4B43BE94B6EA3711DAE6794D355@Justinscomputer>

Posted on Sun, Nov. 15, 2009
Schools: Lawsuit better than cuts
BY LORI YOUNT AND JEANNINE KORANDA
The Wichita Eagle
Schools are gearing up for a legal battle against state legislators - a battle that lawmakers say Kansans can't afford. A coalition of 57 districts met last week to discuss suing the state because of cuts to education funding that they said could leave schools short on money for years to come.

The Schools for Fair Funding coalition, which has recruited 44 members since July, said it wants to encourage even more districts to join before they meet in December, when it could decide to take legal action.

"They see (litigation) as the lesser of two evils," said John Robb, who has served as the lead attorney for Schools for Fair Funding since 2006. "It's better than the other options. They could take budget cuts, harming kids, or stand up for their rights in court."

More than half of the state's budget goes to public schools, which have weathered two rounds of budget cuts since January.

Districts say they are owed another $100 million this school year because of an increase in enrollment and an increase in low-income students. But the state may withhold that money because of the budget shortfall.

A decision by the governor is expected in the next 10 days as the state tries to balance the budget with dismal tax revenue, Robb said.

A lawsuit - or threat of one - won't provide short-term relief to schools during a recession, legislators said.

"It's just not the time when people are hurting to take our tax dollars and file a lawsuit in the court just because they don't get their way in the Legislature, because we are doing our best," said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, who sits on the Senate Education Committee.

A lawsuit proved successful for Schools For Fair Funding the first time around, though.

As a result of the lawsuit, the state has put $600 million more into kindergarten through 12th-grade education since 2005.

With the economic downturn, that was cut by $135 million in the current budget, Wagle said.

But school leaders said it's not about the economy. It's about holding the state to a long-term commitment to funding schools.

K-12 education should be the state's first priority, they say, even if it means raising taxes.

Juggling budget cuts

Lawmakers have to juggle several details when considering the budget, including the potential for another lawsuit and making sure the state does not drop below 2006 funding levels and lose federal recovery act dollars, said Sen. Jean Schodorf, R-Wichita, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

But at the end of the session in May, the Legislature had to pass a balanced budget. Cuts by the Legislature and later the governor resulted in a $135 million cut to education this year.

"I am sorry that schools districts are thinking about suing the state again, because certainly we did not cause the recession, and we did not want to cut education," Schodorf said.

She said she was aware of the cuts schools had already made, including 3,000 jobs lost statewide.

Those reductions are coming as people in the private sector also are losing their jobs and their health insurance and looking at an uncertain future, she said. In that context the answer isn't increasing taxes.

"We have to consider that it would be very difficult on taxpayers who are barely making it to shoulder extra taxes," Schodorf said.

The state should have made room in the budget to fund education before times got rough, and it should make sure schools aren't as susceptible to cuts, school leaders said. The state constitution makes it the state's job to fund education, said Robb, the attorney for Schools for Fair Funding.

"The Legislature did not fund what they said it would do," Robb said. "It's not caused solely by the economy."

When legislators passed a three-year agreement to increase school funding in 2006, Robb said, they knew they wouldn't be able to pay everything the state owed schools in 2009.

Instead of making provisions for that payment, the Legislature has cut taxes by about $180 million since 2005, Robb said.

Schodorf said both the tax breaks and additional education money were good ideas when the state budget was flush.

"There are going to be a couple of lean years... eventually it will come back and education funding will be better," she said.

Focus: educating kids

Districts said they aren't sure how to keep cutting the budget without laying off teachers because salaries make up the vast majority of a school district's budget.

Wichita superintendent John Allison said the promise of more money in the 2005 agreement was "basically ignored," along with the state constitution that requires state government to establish - and fund - public schools.

"This is a statewide economic issue," he said. "We're looking long-term at attracting and retaining business - when folks look at where they want to live."

Education of future workers shouldn't suffer because a recession lowers tax revenue, Allison said.

"It's key to our viability... long-term," he said. "It has not always been the priority."

Recommendations released last week by a legislative commission charged with studying school funding called education "the single most important function provided by the state government."

Members of the 2010 Commission, including former lawmakers and educators, specifically recommended the state increase property taxes to raise more revenue to fund education. The draft of recommendations stated that lower taxes won't help the economy in the long run if education suffers.

More education money has a direct correlation to higher test scores, especially for low-income students, school leaders said. A 1 percent increase in district performance is associated with a 0.83 percent increase in spending, according to a 2006 legislative post-audit report.

Schodorf doesn't dispute that.

"That's not the question. It's getting through a tough time and picking up the pieces and going forward," Schodorf said.

Backlash to lawsuit?

Because of prior budget cuts, and with school boards anticipating more, many Kansas Association of School Board members have been asking whether they should join a future lawsuit over school funding.

For now the association has left the decision up to local districts, said KASB lobbyist Mark Tallman.

He warned that a lawsuit filed this year is not guaranteed to provide immediate relief to school budget woes. The 2005 school districts' victory started with a 1999 lawsuit.

But districts also are worried that the cuts won't affect only the short-term budgets, Tallman said.

Whichever cuts are made in 2010 and 2011 will be a permanent part of the state budget in the future because they will impact per-student state aid, he said.

"It's one thing to have sort of a temporary tightening of your belt, but what we are talking about is sort of a permanent cut locking itself in," he said.

Tallman said the association has cautioned its members that a lawsuit could cause a backlash from some lawmakers.

"There were a number of legislators who were extremely upset about both the (previous) lawsuit and how the court ruled," he said.

Lawsuits across U.S.

School districts in Kansas aren't the only ones considering lawsuits over school funding.

Nationwide, there has been a lull the past few months as schools and their employees waited to see how budget cuts would come down, said Michael Rebell, executive director of the Access Quality Education Network.

His nonprofit organization tracks school-funding lawsuits, and Rebell said he has led suits against New York state on behalf of students.

Forty-five states have been sued over school funding, and the states lost about two-thirds of the recent cases, he said.

In response to losing a lawsuit, legislatures usually construct new ways to calculate school funding formulas or offer multiyear agreements to pay a certain amount of money, as Kansas did, Rebell said. A few states raised taxes.

Plaintiffs, which can be districts, teacher unions, parents or advocacy groups, usually focus on wording in almost all of the states' constitutions that make the state responsible for providing public education to its residents, Rebell said.

The U.S. Constitution contains no language guaranteeing the funding of public education.

Kansas lawmakers spoke of changing the state constitution after losing the lawsuit in 2005, but Rebell said no state has changed its constitution to make states less responsible for funding education.

"First of all, to get any constitutional amendment passed is an undertaking," he said, referring to a two-thirds majority approval by legislators and then a popular vote. "Very few politicians want to stand on the platform of weakening children's rights."

Dealing with cuts now

While considering a years-long fight, schools are trying to figure out how to absorb a loss of money this school year.

The Goddard and Maize school districts are reassembling administrative and resident committees that helped trim their budgets this summer.

"This next round of cuts is not going to be as painless," said Annette Singletary, spokeswoman for Goddard schools. "We will see how it affects people. Once you've cut all the peripheral, it's very hard to look at things that don't affect people."

The Wichita district cut almost $16 million from its $620 million budget, just short of eliminating teaching positions. Dozens of teachers were next on the proposed cut list.

The state's largest district could have to cut $10 million more if the state doesn't pay for increased costs due to rising enrollment.

The district probably won't have to make drastic cuts this year because it has left positions unfilled and could dip into its roughly $13 million reserve fund, Allison said.

Reach Lori Yount at 316-268-6269 or lyount at wichitaeagle.com.

? 2009 Wichita Eagle and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved. http://www.kansas.com
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From justinakers at cox.net  Sat Nov 14 03:10:48 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:10:48 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Flyer for next meeting
In-Reply-To: <586897.32682.qm@web59207.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References: <744792.52727.qm@web59202.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
	<AB84E74DEA124CD79A0F019E77B38FD6@Justinscomputer>
	<586897.32682.qm@web59207.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <E438709F86834EF8B11FF2D5FE389C56@Justinscomputer>



Attached is a flyer for the next meeting that Luis made. Please
copy and distribute if you can.

Gracias, Luis.

Justin
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From justinakers at cox.net  Tue Nov 17 17:26:51 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:26:51 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] 930 Friday EFA meeting
Message-ID: <1BD46929CCDB4860ACF9A4BD61467F8F@Justinscomputer>

Hello EFA,

Couple of things...

Does anyone have the minutes from the last meeting? If you do or can get them could you please
forward them over this list?


Out meeting this Friday will feature a presentation by Prof. and AFT rep. Jim Miller on California's 
tax structure. This should be very informative and useful. Please invite students, staff and faculty
that are interested. A flyer was sent out over the list recently.

Justin
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From spitcher at sdccd.edu  Wed Nov 18 18:19:56 2009
From: spitcher at sdccd.edu (Sarah Pitcher)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:19:56 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Discussion from Democracy Now! about California
	Public education
In-Reply-To: <1BD46929CCDB4860ACF9A4BD61467F8F@Justinscomputer>
References: <1BD46929CCDB4860ACF9A4BD61467F8F@Justinscomputer>
Message-ID: <80B0EA7556DBC340B4A5E1DD3EDEBCC6B63C09@CIX.sdccd.loc>

 

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/17/why_are_we_destroying_public_education
<http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/17/why_are_we_destroying_public_educatio
n> 

 

Btw, in one of the video footage, some of our past students here at City are
shown.  J

 

Best,
Sarah

 

 

Sarah M. Pitcher, Ph.d.

San Diego City College

Sociology Professor

Honors Co-coordinator

spitcher at sdccd.edu

619-388-3606

 

 

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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Thu Nov 19 05:45:40 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: 18 Nov 2009 23:45:40 -0600
Subject: [Educationforall] Article from SocialistWorker.org
Message-ID: <20091119054540.25852.qmail@dww.pajunas.net>

very inspiring!

View original article here:

http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/18/staff-and-students-strike-at-uc

National
======== STAFF AND STUDENTS STRIKE AT UC CAMPUSES ============================

Ian Steinman, Melissa Cornelius and James Illingworth from University of  
California Santa Cruz report on a three-day strike in the UC system that  
begins today--and a library occupation at Santa Cruz that forced  
administrators to back down.

November 18, 2009

A THREE-day strike and protest by students, staff and faculty will begin  
today at campuses in the University of California system against a proposed  
32 percent fee hike for students and continuing attacks on campus unions.

Members of the University Professional and Technical Employees union at UC  
schools are timing their second strike of the semester--this time, a two-day  
walkout--to stand with the broader movement against cuts and fee hikes, and  
to demand a fair contract for members.

Meanwhile, students, staff and faculty across the state will be taking action  
in solidarity with a mass protest planned against the UC Regents meeting at  
UCLA--the demonstrators hope to prevent the meeting from imposing the  
outrageous increases.

These actions were planned at the 800-strong October 24 conference at UC  
Berkeley, where activists from UC campuses, the California State University  
system, community colleges, and pre-K through 12th grade public education  
voted for a statewide strike and day of action on March 4 to defend public  
education.

Although this week's strike is centered in the UC system, activists from San  
Francisco State and the City College of San Francisco, as well as other  
campuses, have planned solidarity events. The California Faculty Association  
is also planning an action at CSU-Long Beach to oppose cuts.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ON THE eve of these protests, around 250 students took over the Science and  
Engineering Library at UC Santa Cruz on the evening of Friday, November 13.  
The 24-hour "study-in" to protest restricted library hours was the largest  
building occupation yet in the growing movement to defend public education.

Due to the ongoing budget crisis, the library on campus was scheduled to  
close at 5 p.m. on Friday and remain closed all day Saturday, denying  
students the opportunity to study in the run-up to finals. In protest,  
activists organized an inspiring example of mass action and democratic  
decision-making, and successfully kept the library open until Saturday  
evening.

The library sit-in emerged from a period of feverish student activism against  
the budget cuts. On September 24, the first day of classes at UC Santa Cruz,  
hundreds of students and workers took part in a statewide strike and walkout  
against the furloughs and pay cuts imposed on faculty and staff.

That same day, a group of about 20 students occupied the Graduate Student  
Commons on campus and remained barricaded inside for a week. A couple weeks  
later, another group of activists organized a second building occupation,  
although this action lasted just a few hours. Hundreds of students, faculty  
and staff have taken part in General Assembly meetings in recent weeks to  
discuss the way forward for the movement.

Last Friday's library occupation at Santa Cruz was inspired by an action at  
UC Berkeley in October, in which over 100 students took over a campus library  
to protest reduced opening hours.

The Berkeley action took place at a time when the two building occupations at  
Santa Cruz had raised some important questions for activists: Should our  
actions have specific demands? Are "militant" tactics such as occupations and  
sit-ins the only way to build the movement? How can we reach beyond the  
committed core of activists and bring new people into action? Should we  
organize in secret, or be as open as possible?

The study-in seems to have answered many of these questions. Students had  
been planning and publicizing the event for several weeks, and had managed to  
create a buzz on campus. By November 13, almost 900 people had responded to  
the event's Facebook page, and thousands more had seen flyers posted on  
campus.

Plus, by choosing the Science and Engineering Library, the organizers  
attempted to reach out to a section of the campus population--science  
students--who had previously not been very active in the movement. Finally,  
organizers gave the event a clear and achievable goal--keeping the library  
open so that students could use it to study.

Throughout the action, students were democratic and inclusive. By contrast,  
campus authorities tried everything in their power to prevent the event from  
happening--including lies, broken promises, threats and intimidation.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ON THE day of the study-in, dozens of students began to gather at the library  
entrance some two hours before its scheduled closing time. To their surprise,  
university authorities demanded that everyone entering the building after 3  
p.m. would have to hand over their ID. This raised concerns about potential  
administrative repression, given that some student activists are already  
facing disciplinary procedures related to previous actions on campus. The  
group as a whole decided to reject this condition for entering the library.

After more than an hour of tense discussions between activists and  
administrators, an agreement emerged. People entering the library would show  
their IDs and sign a list of names to be maintained in the joint custody of a  
librarian and a student activist. The list would be handed over to students  
and destroyed once they left the library.

As closing time approached, dozens of students crowded into the library  
entrance, waiting for the administration to sign a statement formalizing the  
agreement. At the last minute, campus authorities went back on their word and  
stated that a copy of the list would remain with the head librarian, thus  
threatening student activists with future reprisals.

When the growing crowd of students heard about the administration's behavior,  
the response was unanimous. The whole body of 150 students marched into the  
library, chanting "Whose university? Our university!" and "Whose books? Our  
books!" More students poured in behind them, bringing the total number in the  
library to over 200. The campus authorities looked on helplessly.

A second confrontation began a couple hours later. The administration locked  
the library doors, preventing students who had left to get food from  
re-entering the building. Students on the inside immediately called an  
emergency assembly, and over 100 signaled their willingness to engage in  
direct action to open the doors. A heated exchange followed in which the  
administration refused to open the doors unless all students left at  
midnight--even though it had already acknowledged the action would continue  
until 5 p.m. the next day.

Faced with a demonstration of student resolve, however, the administration  
gave in and accepted a proposal in which the students as a whole would decide  
whether or not to stay overnight. Amid cheers, chants and an infectious  
feeling of triumph, the doors were unlocked and another wave of 50 students  
poured in. Soon, 300 students were occupying the library, and the  
administration was forced to concede defeat. The study-in continued through  
to the next day, as originally planned.

Crucially, many of those who participated were working-class students who  
genuinely wanted to use the library to study for coursework and finals. These  
people represent new forces being drawn into the movement for the first time.

The action was successful not only in achieving its stated objectives, but  
more importantly in mobilizing and radicalizing a broad new layer of  
students. It brought together the more radical wing of the movement and a  
large group of students who were new to activism, and represented a  
meaningful escalation of the political consciousness of the student body.

By meeting students where they were willing to go, both in action and  
politics, and then involving them in confrontations with the administration  
from which they emerged morally and practically victorious, the occupation  
pointed the way forward for future actions at UC Santa Cruz.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

What you can do
Many of the week's activities are listed on the UC Solidarity [1] Web site.  
Students, staff, faculty and instructors in the UC system can sign a petition  
[2] showing their support for the strike.

For more on the October 24 organizing conference at UC Berkeley and the call  
for a March 4 strike and day of action for UC campuses, the California State  
University system, community colleges, and pre-K through 12th grade public  
education, see the California Campaign to Save Public Education [3] Web site.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a  
Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [4] license, except for articles that are  
republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material  
belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are  
attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.


[1] http://ucsolidarity.org
[2] http://ucstrike.com/
[3] http://www.savecapubliceducation.org/
[4] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0



From justinakers at cox.net  Fri Nov 20 00:26:15 2009
From: justinakers at cox.net (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Justin_Akers_Chac=F3n?=)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:26:15 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] UC regents approve 32 percent student fee increase
Message-ID: <7FBBEE7920AC47E68D40EAD6E6AF728B@Justinscomputer>

UC regents approve 32 percent student fee increase
BY MICHAEL R. BLOOD, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2009 AT 1:09 P.M.

LOS ANGELES - As hundreds of students demonstrated outside, University of California leaders on Thursday voted to approve a 32 percent hike in undergraduate fees, arguing the increase is crucial because of the state's budget crisis.

The UC Board of Regents, meeting at UCLA, approved a two-phase increase that will boost the average undergraduate fee $2,500 by next fall. That would bring the average annual cost to about $10,300 - a threefold increase in a decade.

After a series of deep cuts in state aid, and with state government facing a nearly $21 billion budget gap over the next year and a half, regents said there was no option to higher fees.

Outside the meeting hall, hundreds of demonstrators chanted, beat drums and hoisted signs opposing the fee increase while UC campus police in face shields and California Highway Patrol officers with beanbag-shooting guns stood watch.

The protest, which briefly spilled onto busy streets off campus, was noisy but peaceful. One person was arrested. She was cited for obstructing and officer and released, University of California, Los Angeles, said spokesman Phil Hampton.

There were 14 arrests on Wednesday.

Other protesters on Thursday took over an ethnic studies classroom building at the other end of campus, chaining the doors shut and forcing cancellation of classes. However, they were peaceful and were allowed to remain, Hampton said.

Many students from other campuses flocked to UCLA to join the protests, staying overnight in a campus tent city.

Laura Zavala, 20, a third-year UCLA student, said she may have to get a second job to afford the increase.

"My family can't support me. I have to pay myself," she said. "It's not fair to students, when they are already pinched."

Ayanna Moody, a second-year prelaw student, said she might have to return to community college next year.

"I worked so hard to be at one of the most prestigious universities. To have to go back, it's very depressing," she said.

"I think it's outrageous," Moody said of the fee increase. "They've already cut out a lot of our majors and programs. I'd rather they cut some of their (administrator) salaries."

Demonstrations also were held at other UC campuses.

UC President Mark Yudof said Wednesday he couldn't rule out raising student fees again if the state is unable to meet his request for an additional $913 million next year for the 10-campus system.

"I can't make any ... promises," he said.

---

Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in Berkeley, Calif., contributed to this report
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From wscherer420 at hotmail.com  Sat Nov 21 23:58:09 2009
From: wscherer420 at hotmail.com (Wayne Scherer)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:58:09 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Add this email to our database please
Message-ID: <BAY141-W23B4ACFBE325134D7D4F27F6A00@phx.gbl>


minina_888 at yahoo.com

 

This email is for Anika Santorelli.  Please add her asap.  Thank you

 

 
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MFESRP&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MFESRP_Local_MapsMenu_Resturants_1x1
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From wscherer420 at hotmail.com  Sun Nov 22 11:51:47 2009
From: wscherer420 at hotmail.com (Wayne Scherer)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:51:47 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Add this email to our database please
In-Reply-To: <BAY141-W23B4ACFBE325134D7D4F27F6A00@phx.gbl>
References: <BAY141-W23B4ACFBE325134D7D4F27F6A00@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BAY141-W223D47E8619DCCA994804BF69F0@phx.gbl>


Hello Education for All,

The Outreach Subcommittee has established a facebook group page for our organization.  If you are a member of facebook, search "education for all" and join.  Also, links are at the bottom of this email.  If you are interested in become an administrator, in order to assist with managing the groups page, please reply to me with your request.  Additionally, search "revolution 102".  This is the group page for the student/teacher organization established at SDSU, their group has nearly 1000 members and is extremely active.  Additionally, some members of Education for All have received emails from organization leaders of this group and others citywide looking to establish a meeting date in which we can discuss methods to unify our movements and develop our strategies.  If you have a desire to be involved in this meeting please let me know and I will include you in the communication I will be sending to relay our intent to be present. The date is not yet set, and at this point we can offer our input as to a convenient time and place to meet.  

An effort should be made by each of you to promote our new group page to your networks, especially your facebook friends.  Also, the group page is a constant manifestation reflecting the growth and development of our organization and the movement in general.  If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments in regards to the group page they are encouraged, desired, and appreciated.  

Wayne
Outreach Subcommittee

Education for All:   http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181176232885

Revolution 102:     http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=138866603849
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Windows 7: It works the way you want. Learn more.
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/windows-7/default.aspx?ocid=PID24727::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WWL_WIN_evergreen:112009v2
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From wscherer420 at hotmail.com  Sun Nov 22 11:53:24 2009
From: wscherer420 at hotmail.com (Wayne Scherer)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:53:24 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] Education For All - Facebook Group Page
In-Reply-To: <BAY141-W223D47E8619DCCA994804BF69F0@phx.gbl>
References: <BAY141-W23B4ACFBE325134D7D4F27F6A00@phx.gbl>,
	<BAY141-W223D47E8619DCCA994804BF69F0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BAY141-W149F563BF0038C0C5A2306F69F0@phx.gbl>


Hello Education for All,

The Outreach Subcommittee has established a facebook group page for our organization.  If you are a member of facebook, search "education for all" and join.  Also, links are at the bottom of this email.  If you are interested in become an administrator, in order to assist with managing the groups page, please reply to me with your request.  Additionally, search "revolution 102".  This is the group page for the student/teacher organization established at SDSU, their group has nearly 1000 members and is extremely active.  Additionally, some members of Education for All have received emails from organization leaders of this group and others citywide looking to establish a meeting date in which we can discuss methods to unify our movements and develop our strategies.  If you have a desire to be involved in this meeting please let me know and I will include you in the communication I will be sending to relay our intent to be present. The date is not yet set, and at this point we can offer our input as to a convenient time and place to meet.  

An effort should be made by each of you to promote our new group page to your networks, especially your facebook friends.  Also, the group page is a constant manifestation reflecting the growth and development of our organization and the movement in general.  If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments in regards to the group page they are encouraged, desired, and appreciated.  

Wayne
Outreach Subcommittee

Education for All:   http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181176232885

Revolution 102:     http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=138866603849
 		 	   		  
Windows 7: It works the way you want. Learn more. 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Windows 7: I wanted simpler, now it's simpler. I'm a rock star.
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/windows-7/default.aspx?h=myidea?ocid=PID24727::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WWL_WIN_myidea:112009
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov 24 06:35:54 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:35:54 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public Education-
 Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles
Message-ID: <SNT120-W40E7C151CD94F89AC12705A19D0@phx.gbl>


Hello All,

 

I wanted to let everybody know that there is going to be a Southern California Regional Meeting To Save Public Education on Saturday December 5th at 1pm. I came across the info for this meeting at a socialism conference I was attending this weekend. This meeting is going to be held at the Southern California Library (On Vermont, between Slauson and Gage) 6120 S Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90044 (323)759-6063. I think it would be extremely important to have some representation there from our campus to network with others in the same struggle to learn from and share ideas with, and also info, strategies, lessons learned, ect from each other. After all if March 4th and April 15th are going to be super successful, it will only be if we ensure that we are organized not just at our campus but at a statewide level. 

 

I am planning to attend this meeting and hopefully we can get a large number of you guys to attend as well, and maybe organize some carpools. I have not been able to find a website of facebook announcement of this meeting, but if I do I will sent it over the list.

 

Just a reminder that our next meeting is on December 4th and this So Cal Meeting is the next day Saturday December 5th, so there is some urgency regarding starting a discussion over the list serve regarding those who would like to attend and organizing the details. Please respond to all. Thanks.

 

 

-Marcos Perez

 

 
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MFESRP&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MFESRP_Local_MapsMenu_Resturants_1x1
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From esalinas at sdccd.edu  Tue Nov 24 19:15:15 2009
From: esalinas at sdccd.edu (Elva Salinas)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:15:15 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public
	Education- Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles
References: <SNT120-W40E7C151CD94F89AC12705A19D0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <117A2D8F2AE1CA46A993B377A805CEF0E7A7ED@CIX.sdccd.loc>

Hey Marcos,  I would really like to go to this.  Do you think I should post
this message as a facebook event?
 
In Unity,
 
Elva
 
Elva Salinas
Professional Development Coordinator
Professor English/Chicano Studies
619-388-3411
619-3883204
esalinas at sdccd.edu

________________________________

From: Marcos Perez [mailto:marcosresiste at hotmail.com]
Sent: Mon 11/23/2009 10:35 PM
To: educationforall at lists.aktivix.org
Subject: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public Education-
Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles


Hello All,
 
I wanted to let everybody know that there is going to be a Southern
California Regional Meeting To Save Public Education on Saturday December 5th
at 1pm. I came across the info for this meeting at a socialism conference I
was attending this weekend. This meeting is going to be held at the Southern
California Library (On Vermont, between Slauson and Gage) 6120 S Vermont Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90044 (323)759-6063. I think it would be extremely important
to have some representation there from our campus to network with others in
the same struggle to learn from and share ideas with, and also info,
strategies, lessons learned, ect from each other. After all if March 4th and
April 15th are going to be super successful, it will only be if we ensure
that we are organized not just at our campus but at a statewide level. 
 
I am planning to attend this meeting and hopefully we can get a large number
of you guys to attend as well, and maybe organize some carpools. I have not
been able to find a website of facebook announcement of this meeting, but if
I do I will sent it over the list.
 
Just a reminder that our next meeting is on December 4th and this So Cal
Meeting is the next day Saturday December 5th, so there is some urgency
regarding starting a discussion over the list serve regarding those who would
like to attend and organizing the details. Please respond to all. Thanks.
 
 
-Marcos Perez
 
 


________________________________

Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place. Try it now.
<http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MFESRP&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_
MFESRP_Local_MapsMenu_Resturants_1x1>  
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov 24 19:31:48 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:31:48 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public
 Education- Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles
In-Reply-To: <117A2D8F2AE1CA46A993B377A805CEF0E7A7ED@CIX.sdccd.loc>
References: <SNT120-W40E7C151CD94F89AC12705A19D0@phx.gbl>,
	<117A2D8F2AE1CA46A993B377A805CEF0E7A7ED@CIX.sdccd.loc>
Message-ID: <SNT120-W42C13E2121C0322D0EDB95A19D0@phx.gbl>


Yes Profe that would be great! Lets try to get the most active people from San Diego fighting the budget cuts to attend this important meeting. 

 

Marcos
 


Subject: RE: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public Education- Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:15:15 -0800
From: esalinas at sdccd.edu
To: marcosresiste at hotmail.com; educationforall at lists.aktivix.org





Hey Marcos,  I would really like to go to this.  Do you think I should post this message as a facebook event?
 
In Unity,
 
Elva
 
Elva Salinas
Professional Development Coordinator
Professor English/Chicano Studies
619-388-3411
619-3883204
esalinas at sdccd.edu



From: Marcos Perez [mailto:marcosresiste at hotmail.com]
Sent: Mon 11/23/2009 10:35 PM
To: educationforall at lists.aktivix.org
Subject: [Educationforall] So Cal Regional Meeting To Save Public Education- Sat. Dec 5th Los Angeles


Hello All,
 
I wanted to let everybody know that there is going to be a Southern California Regional Meeting To Save Public Education on Saturday December 5th at 1pm. I came across the info for this meeting at a socialism conference I was attending this weekend. This meeting is going to be held at the Southern California Library (On Vermont, between Slauson and Gage) 6120 S Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90044 (323)759-6063. I think it would be extremely important to have some representation there from our campus to network with others in the same struggle to learn from and share ideas with, and also info, strategies, lessons learned, ect from each other. After all if March 4th and April 15th are going to be super successful, it will only be if we ensure that we are organized not just at our campus but at a statewide level. 
 
I am planning to attend this meeting and hopefully we can get a large number of you guys to attend as well, and maybe organize some carpools. I have not been able to find a website of facebook announcement of this meeting, but if I do I will sent it over the list.
 
Just a reminder that our next meeting is on December 4th and this So Cal Meeting is the next day Saturday December 5th, so there is some urgency regarding starting a discussion over the list serve regarding those who would like to attend and organizing the details. Please respond to all. Thanks.
 
 
-Marcos Perez
 
 



Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place. Try it now.  		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Bing brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MFESRP&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MFESRP_Local_MapsMenu_Resturants_1x1
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov 24 19:36:43 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:36:43 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] Struggle heats up in California-
	SocialistWorker.org
Message-ID: <SNT120-W11D6F533EAC5183EC0EFF0A19D0@phx.gbl>


Struggle heats up in California

Todd Chretien reports on protests at UCLA and campuses across the University of California system during three days of strikes and actions by students and staff.

November 20, 2009

Student protesters at UCLA have faced tear gas, tasers and arrests 

NEARLY 2,000 students from University of California campuses--including Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Riverside, Irvine and San Diego--converged on UCLA's campus November 19 to confront the UC Board of Regents as it voted to increase tuition by 32 percent next school year.

Several hundred students surrounded the Regents' meeting, chanting, "UC Regents, I see racists!" and "Lay off Yudof," referring to UC President Mark Yudof. Workers and students disrupted the meeting, and 14 people were arrested, as large numbers of police lined up to defend the Regents.

California Highway Patrol officers were even brought on campus for crowd control. Three Black students were reportedly Tasered in altercations with campus police.

After the Regents voted for the fee hike, students held a die-in, blocking the busy intersection of Wilshire and Westwood for several minutes. But protests began earlier in the day, even before the sun came up, when around 30 students occupied Campbell Hall with a banner reading, "In solidarity with university occupations everywhere."

The action came in the middle of a three-day system-wide protest, anchored around a strike by members of the University Professional and Technical Employees union at UCLA and UC Berkeley, which was supported by Coalition of University Employees union members and others.





 


On Wednesday, around 500 students, faculty and staff blockaded the main entrances to UC Santa Cruz, and more than 150 students occupied Kresge Town Hall in solidarity with the actions in LA. On Thursday, over 250 occupied the Clark Kerr administration building.

At UC Berkeley, two busloads of students from the UC Davis campus joined over 2,000 Berkeley students, staff and faculty at a rally and march to send off a bus caravan to join the protests at UCLA. Later in the day, some 200 students occupied a building at UC Davis, and police were threatening mass arrests late Thursday night.

At Berkeley, in an ominous development, police have charged a student for "incitement to riot," which could be a felony charge--and they moved aggressively to break up an attempted occupation of the Engineering Library. Police also threatened students with arrest if they erected a tent city in historic Sproul Plaza, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement during the 1960s.

The police even shut down a planned teach-in in the Bear's Lair, a campus caf?--on the grounds that the students were not authorized to use the cafeteria for the purposes of an educational event.

In response, students on the strike planning committee have issued an emergency call for a rally and march to the UC police department on Friday to oppose police intimidation.

Action also spread beyond the UCs, as around 100 students at San Francisco State University occupied the administration building for the afternoon, disrupting campus business. Nearby, over 500 students at City College of San Francisco marched through the campus before confronting the vice chancellor to demand that the administration support the call for a March 4 statewide strike to defend public education.

The Regents' vote is certainly a defeat for the movement to defend public education. But the statewide response shows that the movement is growing--and points to a large mobilization for the March 4 statewide strike and day of action to defend public education.

 
John Osmond contributed to this article.
 

What you can do 

Many of the week's activities are listed on the UC Solidarity Web site. Students, staff, faculty and instructors in the UC system can sign a petition showing their support for the strike.

For more on the October 24 organizing conference at UC Berkeley and the call for a March 4 strike and day of action for UC campuses, the California State University system, community colleges, and pre-K through 12th grade public education, see the California Campaign to Save Public Education Web site.
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft's powerful SPAM protection.
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov 24 21:19:11 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:19:11 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] The war on public-sector unions -
	SocialistWorker.org
Message-ID: <SNT120-W93280DFCD707B0E23A9F9A19D0@phx.gbl>


 
This adds fuel to the fire that is going to burn April 15th, general strike across all public sector workers. -Marcos
 
Analysis: Lee Sustar
 
The war on public-sector unions

State and local governments are making deep spending cuts wherever they can, and taking aim at the power of public-sector unions. Lee Sustar documents this latest turn in the long war on labor--and talks to activists who are putting forward an opposition.

November 6, 2009

Protesting teachers' layoffs in Washington, D.C. 

THE LONG war on unions is escalating in the public sector as the recession wipes out tax revenue and triggers deep budget cuts in states, large and small.

The biggest headlines have come out of California, where 193,000 state workers have suffered pay cuts of at least 14 percent because of "furlough" days, while thousands more have endured layoffs.

But the picture is similar everywhere. To take two examples from recent days: In Iowa, Gov. Chet Culver will cut $520 million in state spending by ordering furloughs for 3,258 employees and layoffs for 180, while leaving 230 positions vacant. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell anticipates laying off hundreds of state employees just in time for the holiday season, in addition to the 300 Pennsylvania government workers who have already lost their jobs.

This list could go on.

In some cases, the attacks on unions go beyond layoffs and furloughs to target union organization itself.

In Detroit, Mayor Dave Bing has tried to claim that the city's fiscal crisis allows him to unilaterally "terminate" union contacts covering about 4,500 workers--and he's already ended the practice of deducting dues from workers' paychecks. He seems to be taking his cue from Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortu?o, who's using new laws to sweep aside union contracts--in order to lay off 25,000 public employees and privatize big chunks of government services.

But even the far smaller government spending cuts that have become routine in the recession are having devastating results--not only for union members, but the public that relies on crucial public services.

For example, in Chicago, layoffs are set for Cook County Stroger Hospital, the health care provider of last resort for the uninsured and the poor. "The county has recently given layoff notice to 80 nurses, but it's not due to funding issues, but a reorganizing of the hospital to make it more on par with private institutions," said Dennis Kosuth, a member of the National Nurses Organizing Committee at Stroger. "The layoff notices have instilled some fear for the future of the hospital among nurses."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

TEACHERS UNIONS are the biggest targets of all. Budget cuts have already cost 40,000 teacher jobs in the course of the recession. In Hawaii, public schools face 17 "furlough Fridays" during the school year, forcing parents to try and find ways to raise money to keep schools open.

The message from the White House about this blow to our children's education? Be grateful to us, because things could have been worse.

According to government figures, the $787 billion stimulus package passed earlier this year prevented tens of thousands more teachers from getting pink slips. Nevertheless, school kids face the loss of skilled and effective teachers, bigger class sizes and fewer resources, even as Wall Street bonuses soar and the Pentagon war machine gears up for another Afghanistan surge.

The education cuts alone should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised "change." Instead, the crisis is being used by the White House to give added momentum to ongoing efforts at school privatization dressed up as "reform."

Under President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program, money-starved states and school districts can tap $4.3 billion in federal education money if--and only if--they lower barriers to the creation of charter schools and impose merit pay on teachers, regardless of existing collective bargaining agreements.

That's a twin-barreled attack on the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the 3.2 million-member National Education Association (NEA), which together represent the biggest single sector of unionized workers in the U.S. today. As David Rapkin, a member of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) board of directors, put it:


It's political blackmail, plain and simple. Sell the soul of public education, make decisions that will ultimately hurt not just teachers, but kids and communities, or else we'll starve your schools. No serious research ties merit pay to student achievement, while much of the literature shows it actually does a great deal of harm.

So what you have is the federal government putting a gun to our heads in order to further a dogmatic, blatantly ideological agenda. They don't care about educating kids; what they want to do is privatize education and bust unions. 

The cutting edge of school privatization has been in the post-Katrina New Orleans school system, where a majority of kids now attend charter schools, and the remaining public schools are starved for resources.

But now the central front is shifting--to the Washington, D.C., school system, where Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 388 high-seniority teachers while keeping hundreds of newly hired teachers on the payroll in complete disregard of a contract with the Washington Teachers Union.

Meanwhile, in New York City, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg campaigned for re-election on the promise to move 100,000 students--10 percent of the total--into charter schools.

The trend is growing. As the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools points out, "Today, a record 14 communities have more than 20 percent of their public school students enrolled in public charter schools, eight more than the number from just three years ago. Additionally, 72 communities now have at least 10 percent of public school students in charter schools, 27 more than three year ago. These numbers illustrate that charter enrollment growth remains strong."

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) already has 9 percent of its students in charter schools--that's 59,122 students, the most of any school district in the country. Now, LAUSD wants to put 50 brand-new schools and 200 "underperforming" ones through a "Public School Choice" initiative that encourages charter schools operators to take control of them.

Under the school board's legally questionable move, the teachers' union, UTLA, can submit its own proposals for reform or simply allow outside entities to move in. Those angling for control of LA schools include the nonprofit Green Dot, which has an impressive array of corporate foundations behind it.

The Los Angeles Times editorial page, hostile to the UTLA and a vociferous proponent of school reform, declared that the reform must go through, or else: "If the Public School Choice initiative does not emerge as a strong reform policy, L.A. Unified will be signaling its ongoing inability to fix itself and its schools--which could prompt an outside takeover of the district."

The LA Times hard-line stance reflects the extent to which the city's establishment, led by billionaire investor Eli Broad, is determined to roll over the UTLA and its reform leadership.

When UTLA planned a one-day strike to protest layoffs of some 4,000 teachers and other school employees, LAUSD obtained a judge's temporary restraining order that barred the walkout on penalty of fines that would have bankrupted the union and stripped the teaching credentials of strikers. The judge's order recalled a New York judge's injunction against striking subway workers in New York City in 2006, which has left the union financially crippled to this day.

It's a none-too-subtle message to public-sector workers: If you're going to resist, you'd better be ready for the fight of you lives.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THIS TYPE of onslaught is all too familiar to members of unions in the private sector, where the percentage of workers has dropped from more than 30 percent in the 1950 to just 7.6 percent today.

Public-sector workers have seen plenty of attacks previously: the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in the PATCO union who were fired by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 worked for the federal government, and the smashing of their union gave the green light for the most aggressive management attacks on unions in industry since the 1930s.

But in general, the public sector has been friendlier territory for organized labor, notwithstanding the fact that several Southern states bar collective bargaining agreements with unions. Overall, 36.8 percent of public-sector workers are organized. Thus, in the effort to grind down union power, federal, state and local government officials are taking their cue from private employers.

Business has used the recession to extract concessions from organized labor and squeeze workers harder, both in union and nonunion environment. The numbers tell the story: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, worker productivity in manufacturing rose 1.2 percent in 2008, even as manufacturing jobs declined 3.4 percent and hours worked fell by 3.9 percent. While those percentages may seem small, they represent vast gains for capital.

The labor movement's response to this new wave of attacks ranges from paralysis to capitulation.

The United Auto Workers' (UAW) embrace of the Obama administration's proposal to restructure General Motors and Chrysler has led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, the elimination of union work rules built up over decades, big cuts in benefits and a six-year ban on strikes. At Ford, workers recently voted to reject those concessions. But the UAW, once the pacesetter for a steadily rising standard of living for U.S. workers in the decades following the Second World War, is still collaborating with employers in a race to the bottom.

Now that same sort of partnership-at-all-costs unionism is coming to the teachers' unions.

In a recent article on the Huffington Post, AFT President Randi Weingarten rebranded the AFT as "public school entrepreneurs, trying new approaches, taking some risks and looking for promising ventures--all in the quest to improve student learning. Our efforts are magnified by the tremendous backing of our fellow education entrepreneurs--five of America's most prominent private philanthropic foundations." The money went to nine local teachers unions to support a variety of projects, including towards greater "collaboration" with school officials and developing programs that tie teacher pay to test scores.

The foundations that bankrolled much of the AFT's "Innovation Fund"--the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation--are some of the most aggressive proponents of charter schools.

And in a signal that the AFT leadership is willing to adapt to that agenda, Weingarten added, "With the exception of vouchers, which drain vital resources from public schools, everything is on the table in terms of reform, as long as it is good for kids and fair to teachers."

Weingarten's idea of fairness was on display in a teachers' contract in New Haven, Conn., which she personally helped to negotiate. According to the Wall Street Journal, the contract, which allows administrators greater freedom to close schools, includes "tough performance evaluations and fewer job protections for bad teachers." According to Weingarten, it's "a model or a template" for future teachers' contracts.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THAT'S BAD news for rank-and-file teachers and more militant local leaders who are trying to hold the line on privatization, defend union rights and put forward a genuinely democratic vision of school reform, based on fully funded schools and parent-teacher-community alliances. In UTLA, the reform leaders and the Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC) are strategizing over next steps.

Elsewhere, rank-and-file militants are organizing to challenge the retreat by Weingarten and her counterpart, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel.

In recent elections in the United Educators of San Francisco, a new caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union, made a strong showing and captured several seats on the union's executive board earlier this year. In Chicago, where the corporate-driven school reform movement took off in the late 1990s, another new group, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), just won their union's two seats on the pension board. Given that schools CEO Ron Huberman has made pension "reform"--i.e., cutbacks--a top priority, CORE will be at the forefront of a key struggle for the union.

Rebuilding--indeed, saving--the teachers' unions won't be quick or easy. But the pieces are coming together for stronger resistance. In New York City, a new formation, the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), has brought together longstanding militant groups to challenge the retreat of the United Federation of Teachers, where Weingarten was president before taking the top spot nationally.

"It's the beginning of a grassroots movement of teachers who are willing to fight the assaults on public education, like charter schools, and put forward a vision of quality public education," said GEM activist Megan Behrent, a high school teacher in Brooklyn.

The K-12 schools aren't the only place where resistance to the cuts is taking shape. At the University of Vermont, the faculty union, affiliated with the AFT, was central to a wider fightback against the cuts.

"In the face of public scandals about administrative bloat and financial mismanagement, the United Academics AFT/American Association of University Professors full-time unit won a surprisingly superb contract in September as the union threatened a public campaign," wrote Helen Scott and Nancy Welch, who teach English at the university. "The part-time union subsequently won a far less good contract, but avoided givebacks."

That was just one battle in a longer war, however. The university successfully pushed through major budget cuts despite a big campaign by faculty members and students that involved a student walkout--and the faculty union had to be pushed into supporting the fight. "The elected leadership of the union is quiescent to the extreme; they only reluctantly signed onto the campaign, and are even more reluctant now to challenge the continuing cuts," Scott and Welch wrote.

A similar struggle is unfolding on a much larger scale at the University of California, where a contract fight by the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) became the focal point for a one-day strike and walkout September 24 across the UC system. At a time when the biggest public-sector union in California, the Service Employees International Union, has failed to mobilize its members against cuts, UPTE helped spark a wider fight.

Central to the solidarity effort is AFSCME Local 3299, the UC union that last year won a strong contract after a campaign that included a one-day strike and several marches and demonstrations. Local 3299 has refused UC's demand for unpaid furlough days, so the administration has targeted the local. As Kathryn Lybarger, an activist in Local 3299 at UC Berkeley, put it:


They intend to make up the savings, in a far more punitive manner, that they would have gained if we had agreed to their furlough program. This means a cut of about 4 percent or more for our members, which is equal to the amount of pay raise we won this year from our recent contract fight. Note that the funding shortfall from the state is less than 3 percent of UC's overall budget. Smells like revenge from UC against a union that kicked their ass. 

More and bigger battles lie ahead at UC and beyond. Tax revenue shortfalls are expected to worsen, even as the economy recovers, so governments at all levels will be seeking to squeeze as many concessions out of workers as possible. In the UC system, activists have set March 4, 2010, as a day of action.

The UC solidarity movement should serve as a marker for the entire labor movement. At a time when governments claim that budget deficits mean there's no alternative to the cuts, the workers, students and faculty at UC have changed the debate, questioning the social and political priorities in California and beyond--and fighting to change them.

As the attacks on public-sector workers and services continue to mount, that example couldn't be more timely.
 		 	   		  
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Tue Nov 24 22:17:20 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:17:20 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] Police break up UC occupations -
	SocialistWorker.org
Message-ID: <SNT120-W526DEC02AF4773176E608AA19D0@phx.gbl>


Police break up UC occupations

Rachel Cohen reports from the University of California Santa Cruz, one of a number of campuses where protesting students and staff were confronted by riot police.

November 23, 2009

Student occupied Kerr Hall at the University of California Santa Cruz (Indybay.org) 

 

POLICE, ACTING on orders from university and state officials, cracked down on protests and occupations at campuses across California, in a clear escalation of force against the growing movement of students, staff and faculty protesting severe budget cuts and tuition increases.

The last police attack of the weekend, and one of the most violent, came early Sunday at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). Officers clad in riot gear forced their way through lines of protesters at an occupation of Kerr Hall, the central administration building on campus--and began manhandling demonstrators. One faculty member, who was acting as an observer, was injured when he fell 12 feet to the ground while trying to avoid the dangerous crush at the top of a staircase.

The UCSC occupation and other actions that continued through the weekend began as part of three days of strikes and protests in the University of California (UC) system and other schools.

While the UC Regents--the governing board of one of the nation's most prestigious state university systems--met to approve a 32 percent fee increase, student took part in coordinated actions starting November 18. The demonstrations were anchored around a two-day strike by the University Professional and Technical Employees union at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

At six schools--UC Berkeley, UCLA, San Francisco State University, UC Davis, CSU Fresno and UCSC--students took over buildings to reclaim space and send the message that they won't tolerate an exorbitant fee increase, coming on the heels of cuts, layoffs and furloughs, and an increasing reliance on private funding and free-market logic in place of public financing and support.

The UC Regents met in Los Angeles, and the UCLA campus was host to hundreds of protesting students who came by bus from across the state to take their message directly to the board. When news reached the crowd outside that the Regents had affirmed the 32 percent hike, students took direct action to obstruct the Regents' exit, linking arms and surrounding the building, and later sitting down to block their vehicles leaving campus.

Students also took over Campbell Hall, renaming it "Carter-Huggins Hall" in honor of two leaders of the Black Panther Party, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, murdered there in 1969. While the occupiers left the building peacefully, protesters across the campus faced police attacks. Fourteen people were arrested in all.

At UC Davis, 250 people occupied an administrative center at Mrak Hall on Thursday. Though UC Davis spokesperson Claudia Morain told the Sacramento Bee that students inside Mrak Hall "ordered pizzas, played bongos and were well behaved," police suited up in riot gear before entering the building and making 52 arrests. Students cooperated with the arrests, but the next day launched a second occupation of Dutton Hall, another administrative center. They dispersed peacefully at the end of the day.

At UC Berkeley, during the early hours of Friday morning, around 40 students barricaded themselves in Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Shortly afterward, hundreds of students began to gather outside in support of the occupiers inside Wheeler--by noon, the crowd had grown to between 1,000 and 2,000.

Riot cops from the Berkeley, Oakland and UC Police Departments, as well as Alameda County Sheriff's Department, arrived and began aggressively pushing back the crowds of students with batons and rubber bullets. Dozens of students were injured by police, some suffering broken fingers and bruising.

Despite efforts by some faculty members to persuade students to disperse, the crowd remained committed to staying put as long as the Wheeler Hall occupation continued. The police and campus administration refused to negotiate, and at around 5 p.m., a SWAT team arrived and broke through the barricades to arrest the students inside Wheeler.

The continued presence of thousands of students outside forced police to release the occupiers into the crowd. However, three of the occupiers face bogus felony burglary charges, and are due to appear in court on Monday.

Throughout the days of protests, students at far-flung universities across the country sent messages of support and thanks to the student occupiers in California. On Saturday, students in Vienna, Austria, marched on the U.S. Embassy to protest police violence used against students in California.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE DEMONSTRATIONS at UCSC began on Wednesday, November 18, with an occupation of Kresge Town Hall. The decision to occupy was nearly unanimous among the crowd of 400 protesters who gathered for a General Assembly. Kresge Town Hall is a large auditorium and ideal for mass meetings, but it rents for about $50 an hour, so students took over the space to claim it as a free center for organizing.

The following afternoon, students gathered at a General Assembly in the occupied auditorium voted to expand their occupation by taking over the campus' central administration building Kerr Hall.

On Friday, Kerr Hall's new occupants selected seven key points from a list of 30 previously adopted demands--among them, keeping resource centers such as the Women's and Ethnic Resource Centers under the management of individual directors; protection for undocumented students and workers; a freeze on layoffs of campus employees and restoration of reduced hours for custodians; and guaranteed funding for graduate students who lost teaching assistant positions and undergraduates who lost work-study positions.

The next day, a group of protesters began negotiations on these demands with representatives of the administration, but more than eight hours of talks yielded only a tepid response from administrators--and as students debated these terms, UCSC's two top officials personally rejected even these terms. Student negotiators were informed that the administration would issue a formal warning to occupiers, after which police would be called in.

Inside Kerr Hall, students gathered to fine-tune plans for responding to the police. Following several days and nights of occupations, many participants were exhausted, and anxieties ran high, yet students carried on a clear and concise discussion.

After about 45 minutes, the protesters voted by a narrow margin to barricade doors from the inside and maintain a human barricade on the patio outside. Inside, 40 to 50 occupiers planned to peacefully sit in, waiting to be physically removed from the building. Outside, over 100 students and faculty said they would observe the police action, taking photographs and video to help ensure the safety of those who were willing to risk arrest.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NO WARNING ever came from the administration, and occupiers waited through what must have been the coldest night of the winter thus far. Minutes after 5 a.m., police cars arrived at the base of campus, and students and faculty assembled again. As we waited for the sun to rise, we discussed the range of consequences we might face.

At a quarter to 7 a.m., teams of riot cops rolled into view. By the dozens, they marched down the hill toward Kerr Hall. Stopping some yards before the patio outside the building, police declared that any assembly in the building, on the patio or in "the surrounding area" was unlawful. Protesters and observers alike were given 3 to 5 minutes to disperse.

Protesters lined up along a concrete staircase on the opposite side of the patio from police. The police then advanced in a line that was able to break through the human barricade of students who had linked arms. Once the cops got through this line, they fanned out behind the seated students and began to push them toward the staircase.

Yelling "We are peaceful, how about you?" we watched as police used batons to shove a dense group of students and faculty observers along the railing of the stairwell, producing a dangerous crush at the top of the staircase. Several people were forced to climb over the railings and jump to safety. One of these, UCSC anthropology professor Mark Anderson, fell about 12 feet to the ground below while trying to escape.

While police above continued to grab, push and prod protesters with their batons, a handful of cops surrounded and inspected Anderson. Incredibly, the police then brought dogs onto the patio to further intimidate protesters. Minutes later, police lingering in front of the doorway to Kerr Hall made a show of tearing down a large banner that read "Raise hell, not costs," congratulating themselves with high fives and pats on the back.

Some 20 minutes later, Anderson was finally taken by ambulance to a hospital where he could be checked for spinal injuries. He was released later in the day.

But long before Anderson was carried off on a stretcher, police set to work breaking through several entrances to the building to get at the occupiers still inside.

After a period of anxious waiting, police showed signs that they intended to bring the occupiers out through a back entrance. No sooner had half the protesters split off to observe the removal of the occupiers in back than word reached us that police had resumed use of their batons to stampede students the rest of the way down the stairs.

While the tumult continued outdoors, inside Kerr Hall, police began to back down. They first invited occupiers to leave through the front entrance and be arrested one by one. When those inside rejected this proposal, the cops offered occupiers a decision between leaving voluntarily through a back door and being arrested. All the occupants opted to leave, and did so without being detained or identified. So the occupation ended without arrests.

After the occupiers emerged from the building, the crowd began to move, marching back to Kresge Town Hall for a rally.

"I'll be honest," said one participant at the open mic at Kresge "About 15 minutes before the cops arrived, I was ready to split." But then, he said, as the cops arrived, he saw dozens of fellow students stand their ground. "That's what made me stay," he said.

Despite the enthusiastic mood following an occupation that ended with no arrests, protesters also agreed to several concrete next steps. Students organized a collection to support Mark Anderson.

Some participants also underscored the fact that while the protests of the past few days were a new step forward for the movement, we still have a long way to go in the struggle to defend public education. None of the concrete demands raised by the occupiers have been met. Future actions must continue to engage broader forces among students, the faculty and staff.

As protesters agreed to reconvene in Kresge Town Hall--a space that will no longer be occupied, but which Kresge College Provost Juan Poblete is working to secure as a free meeting space for future discussions--the applause ringing through the auditorium showed that no one is ready to quit the struggle.
 		 	   		  
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Wed Nov 25 17:48:35 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:48:35 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] We have to learn how to fight -SocialistWorker.org
Message-ID: <SNT120-W21DD3B3F47B7E90E0661ECA19C0@phx.gbl>


We have to learn how to fight
November 25, 2009

California is at the epicenter of a national wave of bitterness at cutbacks in education and government programs of all kinds. In mid-November, university students and staff at campuses around the state took part in three days of strikes, protests and building occupations. The movement in universities is being joined by teachers, parents and students in pre-K through 12th grade education. A conference of activists has set March 4 as a day of action and strikes at every level of public education in California.

In a recent speech at the Northern California Socialist Conference, Adrienne Johnstone, a member of the Educators for a Democratic Union caucus of United Educators of San Francisco, described the destructive impact of state budget cuts on schools and the threat to public education posed by President Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative.


Students join in a protest against teacher layoffs and increased class sizes in Los Angeles 

 

 

I'M A member of the union in San Francisco that represents teachers and paraprofessionals. I teach 4th and 5th grade. Before I talk about the attacks that are to come, I want to let you know what it's like already in our schools. Because since the collapse of the economy, the people at the top of society have done what they always do, which is let it rip on the rest of us.

 

I've been thinking about a couple people in my school. The first is a woman who works in our school, but has lost some of her extra tutoring and after-school hours because of the budget cuts from last year. We regularly see her in the morning in the cafeteria eating the free school breakfast, because that's the way she can afford breakfast--to get it at work.

I was also thinking about a student of mine who, a couple weeks ago, was asking to eat crackers in class, because his mom, who works in the building trades, hasn't been able to get work laying floors, and he hadn't had dinner in two days because she was saving up money to pay the rent. This is the way it is already.

 

I'm a teacher, and my job is very hard, but at the same time, it's one of the last good jobs left in this country. The government knows it. As public employees, we're paid by the government. They want to bring their labor costs down--and to do it, they're planning to create an education system in this country that is market-based, where they're not actually obligated to serve all children and provide a quality, free public education. We're under a ridiculous attack right now as public school workers, in this state and in this country.

 

I want to talk about where this attack is coming from. Part of it is comes directly from Sacramento. We have had 10 straight years of cuts to education in California; in the last two years, these cuts have totaled $17 billion. Last year, in California, more than 20,000 teachers and support staff were laid off. We're now number 47 in education spending. In California, we spend half what they spend per pupil in New York. This is because California refuses to tax rich people and corporations.

 

What that means in San Francisco is that we saw class sizes go up last year in K to 3, and also in 9th grade. They will only continue to increase. And last year was a good year, because we had a rainy day fund and stimulus money that came from the federal government. So while a lot of people lost their jobs in places outside San Francisco, we were able to stop layoffs here.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BUT THIS is only part of the picture. We're also under a national attack that's changing the face of public education, and will continue to do so until we're able to resist. You may have heard about "Race to the Top"--and if you haven't, you should, because it's going to change the way education looks in this country.

 

It's a $4.3 billion pot of money that the federal government is dangling out in front of states. Only about a dozen states will get the money, and if states want to be competitive for this grant, they have to do a number of things that are going to completely wreck what's left of public education.

 

You have to get rid of caps on charter schools in your state, so they can open up as many as they want, wherever they want. You have to sign on to accept national learning standards, so all states will have the same standards, and students will take the same test every year. You can draw that out and see that we'll be using the same textbooks and the same materials, printed by the same companies.

 

Their idea is that you can just put somebody in the classroom, straight out of college, 21 years old, as part of the Teach for America training program. You put a scripted curriculum in front of them, burn them out in five years and drive them out of the profession. So they want to have a revolving door that keeps the cost for teachers in the classroom very low.

In addition to opening up more positions for groups like Teach for America, which is notoriously anti-union, Race to the Top funds require school districts to open the door to teacher merit pay. The aim is to link teachers to student test data, and pay teachers according to their students' scores.

 

So aside from this deskilling of teaching--by reducing it to reading off a book--there's also, through merit pay, an attack on the unions. This is designed to make the education unions even more ineffective than they are right now.

 

Merit pay, of course, destroys seniority. It gets rid of anything like a salary scale in which your pay goes up the longer you work and more experience you have. Instead, merit pay ties your pay to the performance of your students and breeds competition between teachers and schools and education workers, rather than creating the cooperation needed to educate students.

 

This attack is being led by the Obama administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who touts mayoral control of school districts, closure of "failing" schools, the imposition of merit pay against teacher union resistance, and opening more charter schools.

 

This is happening already. State legislators are running to lift charter caps and remove any barriers to merit pay. It's happening all across the country. In Washington state, which has had a law against charter schools, the legislature is considering a law that would open things up for charters.

 

School districts in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles are under some form of mayoral control. Detroit and Milwaukee are lining up to be next. Advocates of mayoral control claim that this centralized power is more efficient, and that democratically elected school boards are an obstacle to progress. But mayoral control does nothing to counteract the impact of budget cuts.

 

In Hawaii, the irony couldn't be more sickening. Arne Duncan says the state has little chance of qualifying for Race to the Top grant money to help fund education. Why? Because it instituted a four-day school week, with Furlough Fridays, to close its budget gap. And Hawaii's teachers took an 8 percent pay cut on top of that.

 

This, unfortunately, is what capitalism does. The state budget crises are being driven by the collapse of the economy, and they're coming for the teachers--the 4 million teachers represented by the AFT and NEA, the largest unionized work force in the country.

It's being justified by strong ideological attacks from the top. After cutting our budgets, teachers get blamed for not being able to do more with less. After driving living standards down--we know that poverty has an impact on children's learning--teachers get blamed for not being able to erase the effects of poverty.

 

And unfortunately, this propaganda has been successful: 71 percent of teachers under 30 say that merit pay is a good thing for teachers who do more and work harder. Charter school support is widespread. And you can understand why, from a family's point of view, because our schools are a mess.

 

I was standing across the street from my school the other day, looking at my classroom on the second floor, with crumbling pieces of concrete that have fallen down from above the window onto the ground, wondering when the next piece of concrete is going to fall off and land on one of my students while they're out at recess. And there are some teachers who are burned out and demoralized, and not effective in the classroom because our situation has been driven so far into the ground.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IF OUR unions don't learn how to fight, this list of tragedies is going to continue to grow.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has collaborated with this Race to the Top. In her latest comments, she said, "The Department of Education worked hard to strike the right balance between what it takes to get system-wide improvement for schools and kids, and how to measure that improvement." She thinks the Department of Education has struck a balance.

 

So our message has to be very broad and bold, because there is a very broad and very bold attack being brought down on us. We have to say that the state and federal government has intentionally, deliberately and knowingly starved our schools--there is money in the prisons, the war budget and the pockets of the rich to pay for schools. There is no funding crisis.

 

It's the teachers and families in the schools, and not mayors of big cities, that should be controlling education. We have to educate the children in our classrooms based on the world and community they live in, and not by some standards to cover the entire country.

We have to learn how to fight. Right now, there's a tour going around the country--the Race to the Top tour--with Arne Duncan, Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton talking about how charter schools are the way forward for public education. They're using New Orleans--where the school district was destroyed in the aftermath of Katrina, and today most children are in non-union charter schools--as an example of the direction we need to be going.

 

We have to learn to fight. In San Francisco, where we have an annual budget in our city of about $350 million, the district is promising anywhere from $80 to $90 million in cuts over the next two years. We have to learn to fight, and to include the word strike when we're talking about fighting. Because in my union, they're very proud of the fact they haven't been on strike since 1979, and I think that's a problem.

 

We have to learn to fight because the other side is straight-up lying. If this were about social justice for African-American and Latino students, as advocates of charter schools and other "reforms" claim, they wouldn't be doing things like what they've done in Chicago, where they shut down schools and force students to travel clear across town to go to other schools that aren't any better. They wouldn't be letting charter schools just not accept special education students and English language learners so that test scores can be kept artificially high.

 

We have to learn to fight, because we want to be a model for the rest of the workers in this state and country, and also for the students we have taught who are now in the California State University system, on the University of California system and the community colleges. We have to draw a line and say we're not yielding on that line.

And we have to learn to fight because our leadership doesn't know how to fight. If we're looking for someone else to deliver a strategy to us that's going to win, it's not going to happen. We're going to have to figure that out among ourselves and do it together.

 

On March 4, I think we can begin to learn to fight, when students and educators across the state participate in a statewide day of action, and learn to fight the cuts, carry the fight forward so it can expand into a fight against the war, a fight for LGBT rights and a fight against racism.

 

We have to resist, and we have to draw a line.
 		 	   		  
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From marcosresiste at hotmail.com  Fri Nov 27 23:20:57 2009
From: marcosresiste at hotmail.com (Marcos Perez)
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:20:57 -0700
Subject: [Educationforall] Demonstration Day After Obama's announcement on
	Afghanistan
In-Reply-To: <COL114-DS6F4F16AD4CD68083269C4A59A0@phx.gbl>
References: <COL114-DS6F4F16AD4CD68083269C4A59A0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <SNT120-W23445167B3F3D8DCEE6EECA19A0@phx.gbl>




  







 Please forward widely.




President Obama is likely to announce on Tuesday, December 1 an escalation in Afghanistan  

SDCPJ calls for a Demonstration The Day After his announcement ( Wed., 12/2; we will send out a verification of this after Obama's announcement)
35,000 new US occupation troops next year 
$35 billion more to pay for the war and occupation 

We don't yet know the details of the Afghanistan escalation, but these headlines are the best guess we have now, based on White House leaks.
 
We are in the deepest economic crisis in over 70 years, with the highest unemployment rates in living memory, and deep cuts in education and social services. We should not be forced to tighten our belts to pay for their imperial adventures.
 
Do you think things are headed in the wrong direction? We in the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice think so, and we know that many of you agree with us.
 
Join us on the day after Obama announces his war escalation plan. We will gather in front of Congressional Representative Susan Davis' office to demand that she oppose any funding for the wars and occupations.

The Day After
Wednesday, December 2
5-6 pm
in front of Susan Davis' office
University Avenue and Fairmount Avenue
City Heights, San Diego
End the Occupation of Afghanistan Now!
Healthcare, Jobs and Education ? No to War and Occupation!

Tell you friends, coworkers, neighbors and fellow students! Bring your signs and banners! Spread the word! Bring candles and flashlights! Be there!

San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice ? www.sdcpj.org
 
 

 

 
 


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From wscherer420 at hotmail.com  Sun Nov 29 09:29:54 2009
From: wscherer420 at hotmail.com (Wayne Scherer)
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:29:54 -0800
Subject: [Educationforall] MEETING: Friday, December 4th, 2009 11am
In-Reply-To: <990367.45185.qm@web33706.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <990367.45185.qm@web33706.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BAY141-W73C32F7C2B678FC5D0E67F6980@phx.gbl>


 

Education For All Coalition,

 

This email is to serve as a reminder for our meeting this coming Friday at 11am.  If you have a topic you'd like to add to the agenda please submit it for inclusion to the E4A email.  Please be aware that at 12pm (and perhaps sooner) guests from organizations headquartered at SDSU will be joining us to discuss collaborative efforts and strategies regarding the budget crisis.  Throughout this past week members of E4A have been in discussions with these organizations to establish a meeting.  Our meeting this coming Friday is being co-op'd with enthusiasm in order to strengthen our local movements and develop the foundation of the cause.  If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.  Also, in case you missed the Outreach Committee's last communique, we have developed a facebook page and encourage your contribution, promotion, and suggestions to enhance its value to our organization.  Thank you.

 

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181176232885&ref=nf

 

-Wayne

Outreach Committee

 

SDSU Organizations confirmed for attendance:  FUeL - Frente Universario en Lucha, MECha at SDSU, Revolution 102, Joint Forces


 
 		 	   		  
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