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The role of the bureaucracies in the educators’ unions has been to actively block educators from joining together to oppose the devastating effects of the “fiscal cliff” and, frankly, even preventing educators from being aware of the struggles facing schools across the state or nationally. By design, teachers are balkanized district-by-district and fed lies about “accounting errors” or alleged “years of over spending,” when the truth is that the financial oligarchy is moving to shred the very right to public education.
The Trump-aligned Project 2025 makes no pretenses of this. It would replace Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) funding with block grants to states, eliminate the Department of Education, and accelerate privatization. However, such measures would merely intensify the cuts the Democratic Party have overseen, both on the federal and state levels.
The Biden-Harris decision to allow the end of ESSER funds is the culmination of years of defunding public schools and supporting various privatization schemes.
More than half of states now have at least one private school choice program, according to Education Week. Many have several. Twelve have programs that currently or eventually will accept applications from all students in the state. This school year, for the first time ever, more than one million of the nation’s 50 million K-12 children took advantage of private school choice, further draining the coffers of public education. These “innovations” were promoted and subsidized by the “school reform” agenda of former Democratic President Barack Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
The end of the ESSER grants will be accompanied in many states by cuts to other funding streams for education, as a direct result of tax cuts to the wealthy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that 17 states are pursuing two or more policies that would cut education revenue even as they face a loss of more than 5 percent in education funding due to the end of ESSER. Arkansas, for example, is facing a 6.8 percent decrease in education funding due to the end of ESSER, even as it is pursuing income and property tax cuts and funding shifts to school vouchers. The CBPP report estimates that the ESSER loss, as well as these tax policies, will result in a loss of nearly $2 billion in education funding in Arkansas in the 2025 fiscal year.
Overall, CBPP says these tax cuts to businesses and the rich will total $111 billion in lost revenue to schools by 2028.
These are but a brief selection of some of the recently announced attacks on education. The facts clearly establish the need for the building of the Rank-and-File Educators Committee (US), independent of the two political parties of big business and the trade union apparatus. Affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, the RFEC is creating lines of communication among educators and advancing a political program to stop the bloodletting and demand billions for education. This is a fight against the domination of society by a financial oligarchy that has no interest in the future of the next generation or the preservation of culture and learning, only their ill-gotten wealth and escalating wars for geopolitical control.
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Publish date : 2024-10-13 14:07:00
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