All over the world, governments are forcing teachers and students to return to schools amid a raging pandemic that has already left over one million dead globally. This policy of 'herd immunity' is designed to get parents of school-aged children back to work producing profits as soon as possible, no matter how many lives are lost.
The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is spearheading the fight back. To stop the spread of COVID-19, save lives and defend public education, we are building a national network of rank-and-file committees to link up teachers with one another and with all workers opposed to the deadly back-to-work drive. We fight for the following demands:
The immediate closure of all public, private and charter schools!
Full funding for public education, internet access and online instruction! No budget cuts, but a vast infusion of resources to expand educational access.
Full income protection to all parents and caregivers who stay home with their children!
No loss of income for educators who choose to stay home!
For free speech and the protection of whistleblowers!
We urge all educators, parents, students and advocates for public education to sign up for the WSWS Educators Newsletter and get involved.
Hundreds of thousands of middle and high school students in New York City are being sent back to classrooms for in-person instruction today as the pandemic continues to spread throughout the school system and the city.
The Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) and the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) is seeking to ram through a one-year contract as part of the preparation for a return to full in-person learning.
“Teachers and educators are among those owing a debt to Assange and to the whistleblowers who courageously decided to leak classified information in the public interest.”
Throughout the course of the strike, many students admirably asserted that their fight was not only about the health and safety of themselves, but of the community as a whole.
The Soviet literacy campaign remains the largest and most successful in world history. It serves as an enduring demonstration of the extraordinary possibilities for reorganizing society in the interests of the working class on a planned, socialist basis.
This two-part article is a critique of the Democratic Socialists of America’s narrative of the teachers strike wave in 2018-19. It reviews the role of the teachers unions from West Virginia to Arizona, exposing the claims of “victory” by the unions and the DSA. It also assesses the DSA’s opportunistic “dirty break” with the Democratic Party and their role in collaborating with the unions to divert teachers by pressuring the powers-that-be.
This article reviews the significance of the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court case. As an AFSCME’s lawyer warned the ruling elites during oral arguments, the collection of “agency fees” is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in union contracts. He warned, “Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and discord on their hands.”
In line with the identity politics promoted by the Democratic Party and the pseudo-left, “abolitionist teaching” foments divisions among teachers and students based on race.
The origin of the term ethnomathematics is attributed to Brazilian postmodernist Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (1932-). It emphasizes “power relationships” and cultural relativism, downplaying “objective knowledge.”
After Trump provocatively called educators “loser teachers preaching socialism,” the AFT made no comment. Far from defending teachers against red-baiting, union president Randi Weingarten (annual salary above $500,000) agrees that “socialist” teachers have no business in the classroom. This report looks at some of the long and ugly history of the union’s anticommunism.
