Tear Up Racist Elite High School Admissions Test!

NYC Schools: Separate and Unequal

Labor: Fight for Quality Integrated Public Education!

Correction Appended

A token proposal by New York City’s Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio to give a tiny fraction of black and Latino youth greater access to eight elite public high schools has touched a raw nerve in one of the country’s most racially segregated school systems. Underscoring the profound racial inequality intrinsic to education in capitalist America, the student body at NYC’s most prestigious public school, Stuyvesant, will this fall be less than 1 percent black. And the segregated schools are just one part of the living nightmare for black people who face daily police terror, low-wage jobs, abysmal housing, and little to no health care in a system founded on black oppression.

Wringing their hands over school segregation, liberal bourgeois politicians in the Democratic Party push diversity schemes—like a scattering of a few more black and brown faces—to sell the lie that they stand for the interests of the oppressed black and Latino masses. De Blasio has proposed phasing out the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), currently the only way to gain entrance to one of these elite schools, which are lavished with government funding and provide the kind of quality education and college counselor connections that offer a path to the Ivy League. Instead, seats would be given to the top 7 percent of students from each of the city’s middle schools, a measure that would increase black and Latino enrollment. Any such plan that provides even a modicum of greater access to quality education for these youth should be supported. Down with the SHSAT!

At the same time, in a school system of over 1.1 million students that is 70 percent black and Latino, the vast majority would still be confined to decrepit schools that are little more than holding pens with metal detectors, surveillance cameras and “zero tolerance” enforced by armed NYPD officers. De Blasio is well aware that his plan is unlikely to pass the NY State legislature in Albany, where many Democratic lawmakers voted to set up the SHSAT in the 1970s to exclude black youth from the top NYC schools. Predictably, even this minimal gesture has become a lightning rod for racist reaction. Filthy rich New Yorkers like billionaire cosmetics mogul Ron Lauder and the black former chairman of Time Warner and Citigroup, Richard Parsons, have poured millions into efforts to preserve the test.

Every child in New York City and across the country, whatever their background, deserves to attend a school with the level of resources allocated to Stuyvesant. There is a crying need for a class-struggle fight for free, quality, integrated public education for all up to and including the universities! This fight must include the demand for bilingual education in every language spoken by students, which is vital for all Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, and would benefit native English speakers as well. Competitive screening, “tracking” systems and specialized schools, set up to enforce and exacerbate the class and racial divisions in this society, should be eliminated. To provide real access to higher education, we call for open admissions, no tuition and state-paid living stipends for all students, as well as the nationalization of the private universities.

There is no shortage of wealth in this country to massively fund public education. The problem is that the wealth and the reins of this society are in the hands of a tiny capitalist class, which spends on educating working-class and minority youth only what it considers necessary for maintaining the workings of the profit-driven system. With the destruction of hundreds of thousands of unionized industrial jobs in recent decades, the capitalist rulers have deemed the poor, especially black youth, an expendable population. The one force with the social power and interest to seize the wealth of society is the multiracial working class—and that can only be done by overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.

The fight to create genuinely equal education must be waged by working people independently of and in opposition to the Democratic Party. The Democrats, no less than the openly labor-hating, racist Republicans, are enemies of the exploited and oppressed. De Blasio has proven, time and again, that he is the mayor of Wall Street, ruling on behalf of NYC’s financial titans who lord it over the working class—white, black and immigrant. Meanwhile, liberal darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t even muster a pretense of opposing the SHSAT at a heated Queens town hall meeting on public schools in March, and black NYC public advocate Jumaane Williams, who touts his “progressive” credentials, has vocally defended the test. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!

Race, Class and Education

The appalling state of public education in the U.S. is the product of a social system built on the bedrock of black chattel slavery. Where it was once a crime punishable by death to teach a slave to read, the 1861-65 Civil War that smashed the Southern slavocracy opened the way for public education for all, including poor whites. The freed slaves and their allies made the fight for education central to their struggle for the full social emancipation of black people. But the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the most democratic period in U.S. history, led to the consolidation of black people as a specially oppressed race-color caste, the vast majority of whom remain forcibly segregated at the bottom of U.S. society. While a thin layer of black people has achieved a degree of financial security, for the mass of the black population upward social mobility is nil.

The heroic struggles of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement attempted to remove the formal legal inequalities imposed on black people in America. The landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” for schools that had been segregated by law in the Jim Crow South. But the civil rights movement did not redress systemic racial oppression, not least in education, at the core of U.S. capitalism. Its liberal leadership, such as Martin Luther King Jr., sought legal reforms through pressuring the capitalist Democrats and courts, the very forces maintaining de facto segregation. In the North, the bourgeoisie kept black people out of the best jobs, housing and schools without resorting to Jim Crow laws. In 1965, black writer James Baldwin pithily remarked: “De facto segregation means Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.”

New York City’s own battle for school desegregation reached a fever pitch in 1964 amid tumultuous struggles for decent housing and jobs and against rampant cop terror. A massive school boycott that year by black and Puerto Rican parents and students was one of the largest civil rights demonstrations on record. After a racist backlash, Democratic Party politicians and black civil rights leaders caved and abandoned the battle. As we noted at the time, when the struggle for black rights develops a mass character, it poses a direct threat to the capitalist system itself but cannot go forward without a revolutionary leadership (see “Negro Struggle in the North,” Spartacist No. 2, July-August 1964).

Today, over six decades after the Little Rock Nine broke through the color bar in an Arkansas school, New York’s school system is more segregated than those in the Deep South. Half of NYC schools are more than 90 percent black and Latino, where students have higher drop-out and lower graduation rates. From kindergarten, children are tested and tracked. In addition to the elite high schools, some 200 middle and high schools screen students for admission based on grades and test scores. The citywide system of “school choice” is a fraud—those parents and students with the means have choice, while those without the means have almost none.

At a May forum on school diversity in heavily Latino Washington Heights, youth called for eliminating the divide between their prison-like schools lacking basic supplies and the plush specialized schools. On June 6, in a multiracial rally in Manhattan, hundreds of students chanted: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, segregation has got to go!” Placards read, “Integration Is an Education,” drawing on some of the slogans from the 1964 school boycott.

Demonstrating his utter contempt for desegregation, last year de Blasio declared that the 1970s attempt to integrate the Boston school system through busing “absolutely poisoned the well.” Meanwhile, NYC education chancellor Richard Carranza, who claims to be for school desegregation, said that busing students from one part of the city to another was “way, way, way far away.” Although not a panacea, as a partial step toward equality busing would at least improve the school options for black and Latino students.

The Boston busing crisis was a front line in the fight for elementary democratic rights for black people. Busing in Boston was bloodily smashed by racist mobs in the streets abetted by liberal Congressional Democrats, who designed the program to fail by busing black children to poor white neighborhoods, and vice versa, rather than to wealthier suburbs. At the time, we called to extend busing to the suburbs so poor kids, black and white, could have a shot at a better education. In the face of the howling racists, we called on the integrated union movement to mobilize labor/black defense of besieged black youth. The defeat of busing opened the floodgates to a nationwide assault on school desegregation, foreshadowing the rollback of the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement.

No reform under capitalism can fundamentally transform the social conditions that continue to imprison the impoverished black masses in the segregated ghettos and inner-city projects, where the lack of affordable, quality housing is connected to the hellish conditions of schools. Showing his true colors on school desegregation, de Blasio in 2017 cried, “We cannot change the basic reality of housing” in the city. But de Blasio has very much intensified “the basic reality of housing” segregation. Billions are dished out by the city to real estate magnates who throw up luxury skyscrapers, while slumlords hike up rents and drive working people and the poor out of gentrifying neighborhoods. As the homeless population in NYC continues to swell, one in ten public school students is in temporary housing, including homeless shelters.

Against Capitalist Divide-and-Rule

Within the framework of the capitalist status quo, funding for education and other social services is rationed in a way that deliberately fans racial and ethnic tensions. The intense competition over the limited seats at the NYC specialized schools is a case in point. Today, nearly two-thirds of the current student body at these schools is Asian, and parental opposition to scrapping the SHSAT is strong among segments of this highly diverse population that traces its origins to the Far East or the Indian subcontinent. Last December, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance and Asian American Coalition for Education, backed by right-wing foundations, filed a lawsuit to block de Blasio’s interim plan to grant admission to black and Latino students who almost pass the SHSAT, claiming anti-Asian discrimination.

This country’s racist heritage includes the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Asians, as well as Latinos and other predominantly non-white minorities, suffer oppression in capitalist America. However, as an intermediate layer, they navigate a society where the main racial divide is between black and white, and every institution is permeated by anti-black racism. The enduring color bar has proved invaluable to the capitalist masters, serving to pit workers against one another and to obscure the class line between the working class and its exploiters.

To this end, the rulers have long invoked the myth of the Asian “model minority” as a wedge against black people. As part of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration during the civil rights era, future Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan infamously blamed black oppression on a supposed lack of family values, which he contrasted to the “enlightened family life” of Asian Americans. Such pernicious stereotypes also disappear national and class differences among Asians. In NYC alone, some quarter-million Asians live in poverty.

Marxists strive to break down the racial and ethnic divisions sown by the capitalist exploiters, which weaken the working class. Unity in struggle against the common class enemy is in no way automatic but must be fought for, including by combating both anti-immigrant chauvinism and anti-black racism. Working people must be won to the recognition that the fight for black freedom is in their interests and fundamental to razing the entire edifice of American capitalism. In turn, only the workers’ seizure of power and the establishment of their class rule can open the road to the eradication of all oppression.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective

Over the last four decades, public education has come under sustained bipartisan assault, from steep cutbacks to widespread school closures. The blame for the lack of learning and low test scores is cynically heaped on teachers and their unions. The Obama administration launched sweeping attacks on the public schools and the teachers unions packaged as education “reform,” which included a major expansion of the privately run charter industry.

Out of desperation over the deplorable state of inner-city public schools, many black parents have been manipulated into thinking that charters are some kind of answer. Notably, behind the Teens Take Charge program that organized the pro-integration rally on June 6 are alumni of Teach for America, one of the country’s largest pro-charter and anti-union forces. Opened in the poorest areas, and often on public school grounds, the overwhelmingly non-union charters are even more segregated than the public schools and notorious for vicious discipline and for excluding non-English speakers and disabled students. The charter industry must be smashed through class struggle and its teachers and staff brought into the public schools and the unions; an important step in this direction would be for labor to organize the charters.

In a series of strikes across the country, beginning in West Virginia 15 months ago, teachers have shown a real appetite to fight back against the union-busters and privatizers. These walkouts over better pay and conditions found wide resonance within poor and minority communities and attracted broad support among students and parents, as well as some expressions of solidarity from other unions. By waging class struggle on behalf of both their livelihoods and their students, teachers made their cause that of the working people as a whole.

But the potential impact of these battles was largely squandered by the trade-union officialdom. The labor lieutenants of the capitalist class hitch the fortunes of the unions to the Democratic Party, thereby compromising teacher strikes. NYC’s United Federation of Teachers bureaucracy is particularly venal in its subservience to the Democrats, and is against abolishing the SHSAT. What is needed is a fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions—one based on complete independence from the bosses and their political parties. This leadership would have as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party.

We Need a Workers Party!

Black and Latino workers make up a core component of organized labor across the country, including among NYC transit, sanitation and other municipal unions, whose members could shut down the center of U.S. finance capital by withholding their labor. Many of these workers attended NYC public schools and now have children enrolled there. They represent a living link between the social power of labor and the anger of the downtrodden ghetto and barrio masses.

The multiracial working class as a whole confronts the same prospect of immiseration and hopelessness that is inflicted in a more intensified form on the bulk of the black population. Workers have every interest in mobilizing to fight for quality, integrated education and housing. But it will take a leap in consciousness and organization for the proletariat to bring its power to bear in the fight for such demands, which must be linked to the struggle for its own emancipation from capitalist wage slavery.

Namely, it will take the intervention of a vanguard workers party acting as a tribune of the people. Such a party would be guided by the program of revolutionary integrationism: a proletarian-centered struggle against every manifestation of racial oppression based on the understanding that the complete integration and equality of black people can be realized only in an egalitarian socialist society. Over 150 years since the Civil War, many black people despair of integration, which the rulers cynically equate with “diversity.” The Spartacist League is dedicated to forging the workers party that is 70 percent black, Latino and other minorities to sweep away the entire system of racist capitalist oppression. For black liberation through socialist revolution! Finish the Civil War!

Correction

In “NYC Schools: Separate and Unequal” (WV No. 1157, 21 June), we incorrectly stated, “It was once a crime punishable by death to teach a slave to read.” This statement is too sweeping. Punishments varied from state to state, ranging from heavy fines to imprisonment and whippings. For most of the period before the defeat of the slavocracy in the Civil War, the death penalty for promoting slave literacy was not on the books of any state. However, the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, along with the spread of abolitionist literature that flooded the South, struck fear into the hearts of the slave masters. As a result, Virginia strengthened its anti-literacy laws so that the death penalty could be imposed.

In some cases, state statutes also mandated punishments for slaves caught reading or writing; however, the plantation owners often took matters into their own hands, meting out all manner of cruelties. Defiantly, many slaves like Frederick Douglass devised creative methods to learn how to read and write as an important step toward freedom. Douglass went on to become one of the most eloquent leaders of the abolitionist movement. (From WV No. 1160, 6 September 2019.)