Mar 09 - Chicago, Illinois - A socialist programe to defend education

From the preschool to post-secondary level, the right to a decent public education in the United States is under attack. The economic crisis, which has precipitated the collapse of the housing market and the tax base upon which education depends, has been seized on as the occasion for full-scale dismantling of the public education system.

President Barack Obama, with his “Race to the Top” program, is expanding the attack on education initiated by Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” act. The Obama plan makes federal funding for school districts conditional on closing traditional public schools in favor of charter schools (publicly funded but privately managed) and paying teachers based on the scores of their students—measures that will widen inequality in the school system. Education cuts are part of a wider assault on all the social programs and gains won by the working class over decades, to make working people pay for the raging economic crisis and the multibillion bailouts handed over to the bankers and the superrich. This can only be opposed through a mass political mobilisation of students in alliance with broader sections of working people.

This means a struggle for a new form of social organization that starts with social need rather than private profit and in which the main levers of the economy, including the banks, are publicly owned and democratically controlled. It is a struggle for the only alternative to capitalism, that is, socialism.

Join the International Students for Social Equality at this public meeting for a discussion of the way forward in the defense of education.

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