Democrats, Republicans vs. Public Education

We Need a Class-Struggle Workers Party

By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT

For the past year, schools and colleges across the country have been in turmoil as protests mounted against the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. While ultra-rightist Republicans in Congress summoned administrators to Washington for witch-hunting hearings, Democrats also slandered the protests as supposedly “antisemitic” and brought in police to shut them down. Gaza became a hot issue in K-12 schools as well. In New York City, the Department of Education (D.O.E.) issued a directive threatening disciplinary action against expressions of support for the embattled Palestinian people by students and educators, even on employees’ own time and outside of school.¹

Now the final spurt to the November elections is in full swing, and teachers unions are going all out to elect the Democratic Party slate. After President Biden (now widely derided by student protesters as “Genocide Joe”) dropped out, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) quickly jumped to endorse the Democratic ticket headed by Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris. (The NEA had to curtail its July annual assembly and Biden’s address in Philadelphia due to picketing by striking staff members, to which it responded with a lockout!) So as the slaughter in Gaza continues and spreads to Lebanon, teachers unions are promoting Harris’s campaign theme of “joy” and “freedom.”

Adding to the enthusiasm was her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach and teacher. Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz, also was a teacher and school administrator for over two decades. NEA president Becky Pringle gushed that educators were “excited to see one of their own on the debate stage.” Within the first 24 hours of Walz’s selection as running mate, the Harris campaign brought in $36 million from 450,000 donors, with teachers as the top profession. Now NEA and AFT members are phone-banking, door-to-door canvasing and busing to battleground states on weekends to elect Democrats, perhaps with more urgency than usual but basically following the same old playbook.

As the Democrats posture as supposed friends of labor, women and educators to bring home the money and the vote, the Republican candidate Donald Trump, a certified sociopath, is  demonizing and threatening to deport “nearly 20 million” immigrants. Now he is regurgitating fascistic verbiage, vowing to “root out the communists” and “Marxists” he calls “vermin.” At the same time, Republican governors and state legislators have embarked on a racist crusade to erase black history from public school libraries and classrooms, along with Latino and Native American history, references to Palestine in history books, anything about transgender rights (or even sexuality). Plus, of course, union-busting.²

Yet over the years, the historic alignment of the teachers unions with the Democratic Party has not put an end to, or even diminished Republican attacks on public schools and teacher-bashing. Far from it, as on issue after issue, Democrats have chimed in on the agenda of charterizing, corporatizing and privatizing public education. The reason is straightforward: the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, is a capitalist party, and as the capitalist system decays at an increasing rate, it is seeking to slash expenditures on public schools, hospitals, welfare and social programs. This reached its nadir in the COVID-19 pandemic when millions died as the U.S. public health system all but collapsed.

Teachers unions are in the crosshairs of racist reactiona­ries and Wall Street money men, Democrats and Republicans alike, because they are an obstacle to the drive to gut public education. Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) says that you can’t defeat Trump with Democrats. This is doubly true in the public schools, where the bosses (local governments and school administrators) and union leaders are almost universally supporters of the same capitalist party – the Democratic Party. Being in bed with the bosses is class collaboration. You won’t defend teachers and students with pillow talk. What we need is a fighting workers party prepared to lead hard class struggle to defeat the bipartisan capitalist war on public education.

L.A., Oakland, Chicago: Education Bosses Are All Democrats

Just take a look at the history of teacher strikes in recent years. The 2018 walkouts, from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Arizona, were in Republican-governed states where teachers unions are weak. But the next year saw major strikes by teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland, California and a continuing standoff in Chicago. In L.A., where 35,000 teachers struck in January 2019 for smaller class sizes and against charter schools, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union president, Alex Caputo-Pearl steamrollered strikers into voting for a contract that sold out those goals. UTLA had endorsed Democrat Gavin Newsom for governor and Democrat Eric Garcetti for mayor. As the CSEW wrote then:

“The governor, state superintendent of education [Austin Beutner], Los Angeles mayor and almost all members of the L.A. school board are Democrats, who also hold huge supermajorities (over 70%) in both houses of the state legislature, which they have controlled almost continually since 1970. They are the ones directly responsible for the perilous state of public education in California today. Yet both the UTLA and the LAUSD are looking to the Democrats to resolve the issue in the strike.”

–CSEW, “To Win the Teachers Strike We Must Shut Down L.A.” (21 January 2019)

The following month, 3,000 educators of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) went on strike against the school district for pay raises, smaller class sizes and more school funding. Again, the prime enemies of the teachers were Democrats, including top-level capitalists pushing education “reform”: Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Eli Broad. Bloomberg, the billionaire NYC ex-mayor who switched from Democrat to Republican and then back to the Democrats, “dropped more than $5 million on California elections to elect charter school supporters,” including $300,000 to a slate in Oakland seeking to turn half of local schools into charters (CSEW, “Mobilize Bay Area Workers to Win Oakland Teachers Strike,” 21 February 2019).

Both the UTLA and OEA’s rotten deals in cities governed by Democrats amounted to pay cuts (when adjusted for inflation), achieved essentially nothing on class size, and did not stop the charter school invasion and the resulting cut in funding to the public schools. Still, “California teachers unions [had] spent more than $1.3 million supporting Newsom” in the elections, who only called to make charter schools “more transparent” (“Here’s who invested in Gavin Newsom – and what they want him to do,” The Bee, 11 February 2019).

In the Windy City, Democratic mayor Rahm Emmanuel declared war on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) even before taking office in 2011, essentially forcing a strike the next year.³ He was replaced in 2019 by Democrat Lori Lightfoot, who continued trying to strongarm the teachers through mayoral dictatorship over the schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the CTU put forward specific demands for safely reopening the schools, she locked 150 teachers out of Google Classroom in a blatant union-busting move. As we noted then, “one of the main forces behind Mayor Lightfoot’s diktat ordering teachers back to school no matter what, was the sinister outfit Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which has long attacked the CTU, and teachers unions in general.”⁴ The DFER was bankrolled by Bloomberg.

So while Republicans demonize teachers unions and want to destroy them, it is most often Democrats who deliver the blows, and the union tops trail along behind like good boys and girls. Union misleaders like AFT president Randi Weingarten, a longtime member of the Democratic Party National Committee, argue that aligning with the Democrats gives teachers more clout and leverage in backroom negotiations. The UFT has poured millions into its lobbying operations in Albany and Washington. But none of this has protected teachers, students and schools from charters, standardized common core curricula, high stakes national testing and the like. And in many cases such schemes were originated by the Democrats and pushed by Democratic party elected officials.

Clinton, Obama and Eva Moskowitz

Take the case of Hillary Clinton. Back in the 1980s, when husband Bill was governor of Arkansas, she chaired a state Education Standards Commission, denouncing the head of the NEA affiliate as the “leading villain” for opposing Clinton’s introduction of “teacher competency” tests. She was put on the board of directors of virulently anti-union Arkansas-based Wal-Mart. Hillary also raked in $100,000 for leading a Commission on Workforce Skills of the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE). And when in November 1992 Bill was elected president, NCEE CEO Marc Tucker wrote her outlining a plan to separate off college-track students at age 16, while others would be channeled into programs focused on “work-related skills.”

The Clintons enacted much of this plan in the 1994 “Goals 2000: Educatg America Act” and “School-to-Work Opportunities Act.” Later, a 2006 NCEE report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, financed by the Gates Foundation, called to end secondary education for many poor and minority students after the 10th grade; to “change the shape of teacher compensation,” raising wages by gutting pension plans; to end seniority for teachers and introduce “merit pay” based on student performance; and to sideline local school boards so “schools would be operated by independent contractors, many of them limited-liability corporations” (from the November 2008 Internationalist supplement, “No to Teacher-Basher McCain and Education-for-War Obama”).

In Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate bid, she remarked in a campaign debate, “I think we ought to streamline the due-process standards so that teachers that don’t measure up would no longer be in the classroom.”⁵ With her trademark calls for “public-private partnerships,” for decades she has backed charter schools, many of them financed by her friends in the Walton Family, who’ve “given grants to one in every four charter startups in the country, for a total of $335 million.”⁶ In her 2016 presidential campaign she added some mild criticisms of charters, causing a few jitters in the corporate “education reform” crowd that considered her a political ally. But her overall support for these privately managed schools, which siphon off money and space from public schools while receiving millions from Wall Street, did not change.

So what has been the response of the teacher union leaderships to these Democrats backing anti-teacher policies? In 2008, they were all for Barack Obama’s “hope” and “change,” which brought the “Race to the Top” program (a knock-off of Republican George W. Bush’s infamous “No Child Left Behind”) that “sent money to states that reformed their public-education systems by, among other things, weakening teacher tenure, introducing data-driven accountability measures and adding more nonunionized charter schools.”⁷

In 2024, on the same day Biden exited, within hours the American Federation of Teachers leadership endorsed Kamala Harris, the first union to do so. Yet all that Harris had to say about education policies when she spoke to the AFT convention a few days later was, “God knows, we don’t pay you enough.” Of course, almost every union-busting education “reformer” has called to raise teachers’ salaries, combined with weakening or abolishing teacher tenure, in order to be able to fire them more readily. So come November, teachers will be asked to go to the polls and vote for Kamala Harris, being told that, even if you oppose Biden/Harris genocide in Gaza and railroad strikebreaking “at home,” Democrats are a “lesser evil” – “vote blue, beat back Trump.” But lesser-evilism is a ticket for defeat.

Dump the Democrats, Oust the Bureaucrats,
For a Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government

Considering the Republican vituperation against teachers unions and their ties to the Democratic Party, it is striking that Democrats have been at the forefront of many of these schemes to regiment teachers and corporatize or privatize public schools. Even “evil Eva” Moskowtiz, the NYC “charter school queen” who cofounded Success Academy Charter Schools together with Joel Greenblatt of Gotham Capital, got her start as a Democratic City Council member. In particular, hedge fund operators and private equity funds, many led by Democrats (as opposed to the mostly Republican Wall Street establishment), which took off after Bill Clinton’s 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating banks from speculative investments, piled into the charter business in order to milk the cash cow of state funding.

The fact is that the Democrats, like the Republicans, defend the interests of capital. And the fundamental loyalty of the bureaucratic layer that sits atop the unions is to American capitalism rather than to their own members. This has been seen with crystal clarity in the recent (and on-going) fight in the United Federation of Teachers over the attempt by mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams working together with UFT president Mike Mulgrew, to force a private “Medicare Advantage” plan onto retirees. The 2-to-1 victory of the Retiree Advocate slate in last June’s union chapter elections forced Mulgrew to back off, although the threat of forcing retired city workers off government Medicare health insurance is still there.

The fundamental point is why Mulgrew and the rest of the union tops in the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) were so committed to this plan to gut health care for their members. De Blasio, Adams, Mulgrew and the other MLC bureaucrats are all Democrats, and as such they accept the “responsibility” of looking out for the finances of the (capitalist) city government rather than militantly fighting to defend union gains against the onslaught by the capitalist state. The attacks on teachers are also motivated by a drive to cut the “overhead costs” of capital, cutting back on school funding, etc. The labor bureaucracy represents a (well-paid) intermediate layer between capital and the working class, whose task for the bosses is to keep a lid on worker discontent.

In a nutshell, the capitalist Democratic Party is a class enemy of working people, while the labor bureaucracy is an obstacle to workers’ struggles. That’s true not only of an establishment figure like the AFT’s Weingarten but also of union reform groups like the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (C.O.R.E.) in Chicago, who when they get into office are barely distinguishable from the sellouts they replaced. Now, labor officialdom is trying to corral votes for the Dems, except a few like the Teamster and ILA docks union tops who are playing footsie with Trump’s Republicans. As the bureaucrats engage in class collaboration with the bosses’ parties, working people and the oppressed need a workers party to lead sharp class struggle against the bosses.

Union misleaders argue for their alliance with the Democrats saying they get a “seat at the table.” But while the Wall Street fat cats feast, working people only get crumbs from the capitalist table. In several unions in different parts of the country (L.A. transit workers, City University of New York faculty, the Painters union national convention) where they are present, supporters of the Internationalist Group, with which Class Struggle Education Workers is fraternally allied, have put forward motions based on a model resolution by Class Struggle Workers – Portland declaring:

 “WHEREAS, the Democratic and Republican parties, which have shared and alternated in power for over a century and a half, have led U.S. society into a deep social and political crisis that poses existential threats to workers and oppressed people here and around the world; and …

“WHEREAS, it’s high time for the labor movement to ditch the endless parade of billionaire-backed capitalist politicians who keep promising “change” while things keep getting worse for the working class; and

“WHEREAS, “Genocide Joe” Biden’s VP Kamala Harris fully shares responsibility for his administration’s warmongering from the Middle East and Far East to Ukraine; the strikebreaking legislation against rail workers that they and the Democratic Congress rammed through in 2022 while claiming to be “pro-union;” and competing with the Republicans in targeting immigrants; …

“RESOLVED, that since labor’s continued subordination to the bosses’ parties will only deepen the threats facing the working people here and around the world, [our union] will not endorse or support the Democrats, Republicans, or any capitalist party in the elections….”

In conclusion, the CSEW together with the CSWP and other Internationalist supporters “call on the labor movement to break from the bosses’ parties and politicians and build a class-struggle workers party to lead the struggles of the working people and all those ground down by capitalism.”

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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