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California Students Rise Up Against Massive Education Cuts
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Californians by the tens of thousands spoke as one yesterday demanding the primacy of public education in the state’s budget. Up and down the state, students held scores of demonstrations, rallies, marches and teach-ins at governmental centers, universities, community colleges, high schools and elementary schools.
The actions come as the 2010-2011 budget process looms and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after promising in January to increase education funding, instead cut $2.5 billion from education in his budget proposal.
In Sacramento, several thousand students, teachers and workers rallied on the steps of the Capitol building, spilling out over the grassy mall. They demanded state legislators and the governor fully fund public education and make it affordable and accessible to all.
State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D) and Assembly Speaker Manuel Perez (D), as well as several other legislators, pledged support for funding education. Assembly member Alberto Torrico (D) made a pitch for support of his bill that would create a 12.5 percent tax on oil extracted in the state to raise $2 billion a year for public education. He noted that California is the only state in the nation that doesn’t charge such a fee and that oil companies shouldn’t be getting off the hook while education suffers.
In former President George W. Bush’s Texas they raise $400 million per year from an oil extraction tax. Even in Sarah Palin’s Alaska, oil companies get charged a 25 percent fee. The bill, AB 656, says there will be no more free ride for big oil.
Praising the student activists as “troublemakers,” Bill Camp, executive director of the Sacramento Central Labor Council, pointed a finger at the culprits.
They destroyed this economy with their unrestrained greed, and we aren’t going to let them get away with it. Let us never forget who put this country in this position and who we’re coming after—Wall Street!
UC Berkeley student Wendy Brown blamed education’s financial woes directly on the anti-tax measure called Prop. 13 and the anti-tax political culture in the state. She said it’s not the consequence of the state being poor. “The state is very rich in resources and very rich in the rich,” she said, advocating taxing the wealthy and corporations.
Without education there is no substance to the promise of equality and freedom.
UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff is promoting a ballot initiative to do away with California’s Prop. 13′s requirement of a two-thirds vote to pass the state budget and any tax measures, the only such law in the country. He noted that previous speakers had asserted that democracy needs public education.
But education needs democracy. Now we have minority rule, not democracy.
He noted that 37 percent of the legislators—the Republicans—keep the majority from raising revenues to fund the state’s necessary functions. He urged the students to get on Facebook and viral the petitions for the initiative and gather signatures.
Californians have long understood the importance of education funding. Back in 1988 voters passed Prop. 98, mandating that 40 percent of the state’s budget would go to public education, ranging from pre-kindergarten to community college. In 2004, the education community agreed to allow Schwarzenegger to borrow $2 billion from those funds to help balance the budget with the promise it would be repaid the next year. In January 2005, Schwarzenegger broke that promise. Since then, Schwarzenegger again cut education funding in FY 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 by $18 billion when factoring in the cost of living adjustments structured in Prop. 98.
Class sizes are increasing dramatically in kindergarten to 12th grade—from 20 to as many as 33—while extracurricular and arts and music classes disappear.
Students are being turned away from the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) campuses for lack of funding, many classes are overcrowded or unavailable, lecturers are being laid off, employees furloughed and fees for those systems as well as at community colleges are skyrocketing, putting the promise of education out of reach for the state’s poor and minority communities. For example, just last year alone UC fees rose by 40 percent to more than $10,000 per year. And Schwarzenegger’s latest budget proposal seeks more increases.
The March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education was conceived at an education conference at UC Berkeley in October attended by about 1,000 students and teachers. The idea spread throughout California, becoming a national movement with actions in 34 states.
At UC and CSU campuses, students and faculty walked out of classes and held rallies and demonstrations. At UC Santa Cruz, they shut down the school for the day.
In the Bay Area, students at UC Berkeley rallied on campus in the morning, then marched several miles to Oakland City Hall for another 2,000-strong demonstration. There they boarded BART light rail to San Francisco for a 5 p.m. rally at City Hall Plaza, joining many thousands from universities, community colleges, local high schools and elementary schools in a raucous rally.
No politicians were allowed to take the stage—only students, faculty and workers spoke.
The colorful creativity of the picket signs and banners in San Francisco ran the gamut from sloganeering to rhythms and rhymes to perennial favorite sarcasm. My favorites were one that read “Upside Down Sign” and was affixed to its stick that way and another simply hand-lettered one that said, “I couldn’t afford a real sign.”
Speakers made the point that March 4 was only the beginning of the public education movement. More large demonstrations are planned for March 22, including a blitz visit to state legislators in Sacramento.
Today, the education coalition will begin a 250-mile march up the state, starting at California State University, Bakersfield, and going up the Central Valley to arrive in Sacramento on April 21. Along the way, they will hold rallies and media events to publicize the cause and build support.
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2 Comments
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Thanks for putting this story up. Its good to read the back story to the many demonstrations sweeping the country.
Demonstrations, of course, weren’t the only part of the story. Many students, faculty and workers took actions exceeding marches and speaches – I think it would have been good to mention them as well.
Their were several walkouts, student stirkes, occupations, blockades and even some physical altercations with police. You can read more here:
http://thetbf.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/national-day-of-action-to-defend-public-education/
In solidarity,
-John
This Perspective article from the World Socialist Web Site – http://www.wsws.org – discusses the underlying reasons for the attack upon public education.
Full article here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m08.shtml
After the March 4 protests against education cuts
Andre Damon and Joe Kishore
8 March 2010
On March 4, tens of thousands of students and workers demonstrated in opposition to education cuts throughout the United States.
The largest marches were held in California, where state and local governments have pushed through a 32 percent increase in fees for many college students, along with deep cuts in K-12, community college and university education funding. This month, tens of thousands of teachers in the state will receive notices that they could be laid off by the fall.
The demonstrations are an initial manifestation of growing anger and resistance to the policies of the corporate and financial elite. Their significance extends far beyond California. The same agenda of cost cutting is being imposed throughout the country, spearheaded by the Obama administration. Obama has publicly supported the mass firing of teachers and is blackmailing states into expanding charter schools and into carrying out other attacks on public education.
The March 4 demonstrations were not simply student demonstrations; they reflect a developing movement in the working class. As the San Diego rally marched through downtown, hundreds of working class students from local high schools joined in, as did many local workers, who left their houses and workplaces to join the demonstration.
The class composition of the student body is itself predominantly working class, reflecting significant changes in demographics since the last period of major student protests in the 1960s and 70s. The vast majority of college students today come from working class families, and many students have to work to put themselves through school. College graduates confront a bleak job market, along with thousands of dollars of debt.
Neither is this growing opposition limited to the United States. The March 4 events come in the midst of a growth in working class opposition internationally. Over the past several weeks, strikes have broken out throughout Europe in opposition to government-imposed austerity measures, dictated by international financial markets.
Workers in the United States and Europe are victims of the same international drive to slash social spending to pay for the ruination of society by the financial elite. There is growing anger over demands that the working class pay for an economic crisis that they did not create.
Many more expressions of popular opposition will emerge in the coming months. If this opposition is not to be sidetracked and driven into a dead-end, however, it requires a new perspective and program.
There was a significant component of grass-roots organization in planning the March 4 events. Many students, just coming into political life, are reacting to the fundamental attack on public education by seeking a way to fight back.
This largely spontaneous popular opposition, however, was combined with the influence of trade unions and political tendencies that encouraged the illusion that the political establishment, and in particular the Democratic Party, could be pressured to defend public education, or that mass protests by themselves could repulse the attack. The teachers’ unions, which gave only token support for the demonstrations, are pushing for a change in a rule that makes it more difficult for the state legislature to raise taxes.
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There are two mutually antagonistic social forces in contemporary society, taking two irreconcilable stands on the question of public education. The financial aristocracy, which controls both parties, is seeking to convert the working population into low-paid laborers. They have no interest in educating a population destined for such a future.
Only the working class is interested in the fullest development of human society and industry. Its interests, unlike that of the financial elite, lie in the betterment and enrichment of all society.
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