UE Convention Resolutions
Public Education:
Stop the Attacks and Fund
Quality Education for All
One of the first demands of early labor organizations in the U.S. was the right to quality education for all. At a time when only the rich could attend decent schools, labor leaders saw that access to publicly-funded schools was the only way that the working class and the poor could achieve basic literacy skills. Labor leaders knew that education was tied to the ability to organize and exercise political power.
Today we find ourselves in an ongoing battle to prevent not just the erosion, but the outright destruction of the very foundations of public education for all. Public school teachers and schools are constantly accused of not making the grade, while pundits making the accusations take no responsibility for the fact that many public schools are starved for tax dollars. That starvation means poor equipment, crumbling buildings, and larger and larger numbers of students in each classroom. Rather than fund public education adequately, conservatives push for privatization and contracting-out, practices which leave workers at both K-12 schools and public universities without jobs, and turn the work of janitors, cooks, maintenance workers, educators, and many others over to poorly-paid contract workers who receive few or no benefits.
The Bush plan for learning and teaching in the K-12 schools, embodied in "No Child Left Behind," is to test, test, test. Children end up being taught nothing but what is on the test—a very poor way to prepare them for the complex world we live in today. The Bush plan then punishes those children and those schools who don’t score well on these stressful, high-stakes tests—often the same schools that are already poorly funded—by taking away even more of their funding. This vicious circle is a recipe for destroying the very foundation of public education, and for limiting the ability to organize and exercise political power.
"No Child Left Behind" is at best a smoke-screen for the decades-long push to get taxpayers to fund private schools, thus leaving many, many children behind. The evidence from 20 years of experiments in vouchers is in. Private schools using taxpayer-funded vouchers are not accountable to the public or to elected officials. Vouchers rarely cover the full cost of a private school education, meaning most poor and working-class children do not really benefit. Private schools do not have to hire certified teachers and they do not produce any better test scores than do public schools.But private schools and high-stakes testing do produce tremendous profits for the corporations that run them. So does the widespread commercialism in public schools and universities. Schools that are starved for funding turn to Coca-Cola and other corporate sponsors. Those corporate sponsors flood the schools with commercial messages, undermining teachers’ attempts to teach students to think critically and ask questions about the world they live in.This same commercialism is also rampant in public colleges and universities, leaving many vulnerable to intellectual and moral corruption. In addition, the cost of public education at the undergraduate and graduate levels is becoming more and more prohibitive, putting working and middle class families deeper and deeper into debt for services their tax dollars are supposed to provide.
Higher education workers are also facing a crisis as their employers replace full-time positions with "contingent" faculty. Adjunct instructors are paid a fraction of the wage a full-time professor would receive, and they are contracted with no benefits. Job security is nonexistent for these workers. Along with vouchers and standardized tests, growing dependence on part-time workers is a further indication of corporate and profit-driven motives in education. This trend inevitably leads to a decrease in the quality of public education.
Public schools, funded adequately and fairly, with certified teachers and full-time faculty, who have long-range educational plans that teach basic skills and critical thinking to all students is the only way to resolve this problem. We support public education because it promotes the best interests of everyone when all members of our society are well educated and able to think independently.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 70th UE CONVENTION:
- Calls upon our union, other unions, and all progressive organizations to demand and promote:
- Federal funding that achieves an excellent public education at all levels, including early childhood and adult learning programs;
- Restructuring of federal, state, and local taxation and funding systems so that all public schools are funded fairly, without regard to the income levels of local school district residents;
- A reduction of class sizes to a manageable student-to-teacher ratio at the primary, secondary, and college/university levels;
- Barring the use of taxpayer-funded voucher programs that siphon off much-needed funds from public schools and route them to private schools;
- Elimination of high-stakes testing, which pressures teachers and administrators to "teach to the test" or risk financial ruin, and therefore puts tremendous emotional and psychological pressure on children who are forced to endure such high-stakes tests;
- Removal of commercial/corporate sponsorship that tends to interfere with the academic freedom of students and teachers and the decision-making freedom of elected school boards and other publicly employed professionals;
- Preservation and enhancement of the arts, foreign language and multilingual education programs, whose elimination most often hurts poor and working-class children’s education;
- Preservation and enhancement of vocational education programs for adolescents and adults;
- Full and appropriate services and accommodations for students with disabilities;
- Full funding of Head Start;
- Passage of conflict-of-interest legislation that prevents individuals with ties to for-profit schools and to for-profit corporations with school contracts from serving on school boards or boards of regents;
- Elimination of privatization and contracting out of school services;
- The teaching of labor history and other aspects of history which present a full view of the economic, social, and political history of the U.S. in public schools, colleges and universities; and support local labor education centers.
- Calls on UE Locals to support the lawsuit filed by Connecticut against our federal government to provide the funding necessary to comply with "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB);
- Calls on the UE to work with other unions and push for a change in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in order to ensure that all employees have the right to unionization;
- Supports all campaigns which advocate universal access to free public higher education.