Last week high school teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island—who were fired en masse last February for defying concession demands—were forced to accept an agreement in return for their jobs that will increase the school day by 25 minutes, compel them to tutor an hour each week, gut seniority rights and submit to a new evaluation system that will facilitate their termination.
The firing of the 74 teachers and 19 other staff members—hailed by President Obama for imposing a “sense of accountability” on teachers—was a blatant act of intimidation. Its aim was to break the resistance of teachers nationally to an assault on their working conditions and living standards and pave the way for the further privatization of the public school system.
The sackings were carried out under guidelines drafted by US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is targeting 5,000 “low-performing schools” across the country for similar treatment. In the name of “turning around” such schools, the administration has encouraged school boards to fire teachers or close schools and reopen them as privately run charter schools or under the management of for-profit contractors.
Rather than overturning Bush’s reactionary education policy—embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)—the Democratic president has spearheaded an assault on teachers and public education that his Republican predecessor could only have dreamed of.
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