By Steve Brier
In the latest ominous sign of the ramping up of the neoliberal agenda to undermine public funding for public institutions, the state-appointed Philadelphia School Reform Commission (PSRC), which has managerial control over the city’s public school system and its 130,000 students, on October 6th unilaterally cancelled the longstanding contract it had with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), as reported earlier on the Murphy Institute blog.
This public school crisis was the result of decades of systematic underfunding of public institutions by the state of Pennsylvania, which is now firmly in the political hands of Republicans — especially the reactionary Governor Tom Corbett, who cut close to $1 billion from the state’s education budget over the past few years.
While the city’s teachers are understandably dispirited by the cancellation of their contract, the schools’ students and parents are helping them fight back. One parent criticized the PSRC for trying to have teachers underwrite their own health care costs, concluding that this was tantamount to “robbing the children.”
Students have refused to remain idle in the face of this struggle, using social media like Twitter and Facebook to organize a walkout and a series of mass demonstrations in support of their teachers. Hundreds of students marched and picketed their schools, chanting “SRC! Leave our teachers be!” and carrying handmade picket signs, one of which read simply: “Students 4 Teachers.”
An alliance between students (and their parents) and public school teachers is essential if the full force of neoliberal attacks on public education is to be blunted. Trade union tactics and collective bargaining alone will not be sufficient to defend unionized workers.
Two of the student leaders of the demonstrations spoke to the need for solidarity, as quoted in a follow up report in Philly.com:
“There’s a lot of talk about teachers going on strike,’’ said Cy Wolfe, a theater major at CAPA who helped organize what he called the “Philadelphia Student Strike.” “It’s more important to us that they stay in the buildings until things get sorted out,” Wolfe said.
Co-organizer Leo Levy, 16, a junior at Science Leadership, said the event was held “to show student solidarity with the plight of the teachers and to show how invested in a proper education the student body really is.”
Another student, Juliana Concepcion, 16, a sophomore from South Philadelphia, argued: “The teachers already do so much for us. It’s just not right for the teachers to have their benefits cut like this.”
That high school students understand more clearly than politicians and their administrative flunkies how important it is for public school teachers to have decent pay and benefits is a sad commentary on the shabby and dispirited state of public life in the current moment. It also reminds us of how important it will be in future struggles for communities and the labor movement to be closely aligned and in solidarity with one another’s needs and demands.
Dr. Steve Brier is a Murphy Institute Consortial Faculty Member and Prof. of Urban Education and the CUNY Graduate Center.
