The International Students for Social Equality is the student organization of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI publishes the World Socialist Web Site, the most widely read daily socialist publication in the world.
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The recent education cuts by Michigan’s Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm and the state legislature have thrown virtually every school district in the state into crisis, and many into opposition, as hundreds of millions of dollars have been eliminated from the districts and from vitally needed social programs.
In late September the state cut $165 per pupil in preparation for the budget that was due October 1. Two weeks later, Granholm slashed an additional $127 per student, for a total of $292 per student in every Michigan school district, forcing districts that had already allocated their resources to make additional cuts. Along with the second round of cuts, Granholm took away an additional $51.7 million from 39 districts considered to be more affluent, but also reeling under the budgetary assault.
Hundreds of students participated in a demonstration at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan to protest budget cuts on Monday.
Students demanded a repeal of cuts to the Michigan Promise Scholarship, which provides grants of between $1,000 and $4,000 to assist 100,000 state residents from low-income households to pay for college. These students will see a substantial increase in their tuition as early as the spring.
The elimination of these scholarships was part of an overall 61 percent cut to student financial aid. Also eliminated were state nursing scholarships, the Michigan Work-Study Program, and the Part-Time Independent Student Program.
A World Socialist Web Site reporting team spoke to a number of those on the demonstration to oppose the closure of Abbeydale Grange school in Sheffield on November 21.
Dean Morton is a parent of a pupil at the school. He said, “I’ve got a child at the school in year seven. If the school closes it will be the saddest day in Sheffield’s history. He has to get a bus and tram into the school as he comes from the other side of the city.
On Saturday November 21 up to 150 parents, pupils, staff and supporters from Abbeydale Grange School in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England marched to oppose its proposed closure.
The march was called by the FLAGS parent-teacher organisation (Forging Links with Abbeydale Grange). A number of speakers addressed the rally, including the prospective Labour Party and Green Party candidates for Sheffield Central for the 2010 General Election; Paula Hunter, a parent with a Year Eight special needs child at the school; David Smith, the interim head teacher, and Professor John Coldron, the chair of the school governors.
Colleen Smith, a learning mentor and leading member of the Socialist Equality Party, spoke at the protest, as did the school’s community liaison manager and senior teacher, Ibrar Hussain. (See accompanying video)
Recent 32 percent fee increases at the University of California (UC) have provoked an outpouring of opposition from students. These protests should be welcomed and become the starting point for a movement throughout the US and internationally to reverse crippling cuts in education and other basic social services.
The fee raises, which will effectively put the UC system out of reach for thousands of working class youth, are part of billions in budget cuts. Similar attacks have been made in the Cal State system, and additional funds have been cut from community colleges, adult education, health care programs, and critical state services. More cuts are to come, as the state faces a budget deficit of more than $20 billion next year.
Protesters at the University of California, Berkeley
Protests at University of California (UC) campuses continued for a third day on Friday, as students mobilized against a massive hike in fees at the state’s institutions of public higher education.
Yesterday, the UC Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in fees for undergraduates attending a UC school. In total, the fee hike, which will be implemented in two stages over the course of 2010, will add about $2,500 a year to students’ bills. This will bring the price tag for enrolling in the UC system to more than $10,000 a year. This sum is in addition to the thousands of dollars that undergraduates and their families must pay in order to cover the costs for room, board, books and incidental expenses.
Recent days have seen an unlikely threesome promoting the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” public schools initiative. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has joined with Al Sharpton and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to tour the country in support of the plan.
The basic idea is to force state governments to compete for $4.35 billion in federal assistance, with the money going to those states which do the most to promote charter schools, utilize standardized testing, and weaken workplace rules for teachers. Essentially, the scheme sets up a bidding war among the states for desperately needed funds on the basis of an anti-public education agenda that has been promoted for decades by the right wing.
Pairing the Democratic Party demagogue Sharpton with Gingrich is aimed at suggesting that a broad coalition has formed behind Obama’s education agenda.
Protests erupted this week on university campuses throughout California in response to the decision by the University of California Regents’ Finance Committee to hike student fees to unprecedented levels. On the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), police responded violently to student protests.
The Regents met on the UCLA campus on Wednesday to finalize plans to increase student fees by 32 percent, bringing tuition for the nominally public university system to over $10,032 a year. This is the first time in history it has passed the symbolic $10,000 marker. Half of the 32 percent hike will take effect in January 2010, in time for the start of winter quarter. The other half will take effect in the Fall of next year.
The demonstrations taking place all over the world, including the weeks-long occupation of lecture-rooms in a number of European countries, are an important step in the struggle against the profit-oriented restructuring of the education system. These protests are part of social conflicts that are erupting on an international scale as the economic crisis deepens.
The demands raised by students following intense discussions are to be welcomed: an end to the system of study fees that limit access to higher education to all but a wealthy elite, the democratization of schools and universities, and increases in education funding.
Hundreds of graduate student employees at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, went out on strike on Monday.
After a rally at 7:45 a.m. on Monday morning, graduate employees and their supporters established pickets around a number of campus buildings. The pickets continued throughout the day. Many professors and undergraduate students refused to cross the lines, either canceling classes or convening off campus.
A teaching assistant told the World Socialist Web Site that most undergraduates did not attend classes, and the few who did found their buildings and classrooms empty. She said that as many as 1,000 people joined the picket lines.
Last week, 92 percent of teaching assistants (TAs) and research assistants (RAs) participating in a strike authorization ballot voted in favor of striking.
When the Labour government was elected in 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair promised that a central plank of its policies would be “education, education, education”.
This was an issue of great concern to millions, as educational standards in Britain were woefully poor. Schools had been chronically neglected and under-funded, as Conservative governments under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major conducted a fierce assault on the state education system.
Spearheaded by an ideological attack on “trendy”, “progressive” and “leftist” teaching methods, a major restructuring was undertaken of the comprehensive education system to open it up to private capital and destroy the supervisory power of Local Education Authorities.
In a blatant attack on democratic rights, two former university students were arrested when they attempted to deliver a petition to the administration of Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand on October 21. The petition, signed by 50 academics, union officials and educationalists, called for the lifting of a two-year trespass order imposed by the university on the pair, Heleyni Pratley and Joel Cosgrove, over a protest against fee increases a month earlier.
Rather than allow the two to present the petition, the university authorities mobilised security personnel to block their entry and called the police, who arrested them. They have been released on bail on condition they neither enter university property nor associate with each other.
The state of Michigan is on the verge of enacting massive cuts to elementary and secondary public education in the state, forcing administrators and school boards to scramble to avoid bankruptcy.
All told, the state appears set to slash per-pupil funding for schools in the state by nearly $300. Some schools, largely in the suburban areas of Detroit, face substantially higher cuts of as much as $500 per student. Among these are major school districts such as Dearborn, an inner-ring suburb and the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company.
There is some possibility that the size of these cuts could be reduced if Senate Republicans approve a House measure using more federal stimulus dollars to relieve school districts this year. However, that would only defer more cuts until 2011—what some are referring to as “the cliff year.” Commentators predict that cuts for 2011 could go as deep as $600 per student.
Britain is to dispatch an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, the United States is planning a massive build-up of tens of thousands of additional troops. Currently 9,000 UK personnel and US 65,000 troops occupy the country. Taken with the 124,000 personnel still in Iraq, these occupation forces outnumber the 186,000 involved in conflict under President Bush.
The war has already claimed the lives of almost 1,400 coalition forces and Afghans numbering in the multiple thousands. The election of Barack Obama was hailed as a fresh chance for peace. Instead Washington’s war drive has escalated. In Britain, all the major parties are committed to the conflict.
Britain is to dispatch an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, the United States is planning a massive build-up of tens of thousands of additional troops. Currently 9,000 UK personnel and US 65,000 troops occupy the country. Taken with the 124,000 personnel still in Iraq, these occupation forces outnumber the 186,000 involved in conflict under President Bush.
The war has already claimed the lives of almost 1,400 coalition forces and Afghans numbering in the multiple thousands. The election of Barack Obama was hailed as a fresh chance for peace. Instead Washington’s war drive has escalated. In Britain, all the major parties are committed to the conflict.
The remand custody of Inter University Students Federation (IUSF) convener Udul Premaratne was last week extended until October 30 by the magistrates’ court in Nugegoda, a suburb of Colombo. He has been in remand prison since being arrested by the police on September 17, along with 14 Ayurvada University students, while protesting in front of the Ministry of Indigenous Medicine in Navinna.
The students were demanding the opening of the outpatients department at Ayurvada Hospital in Rajagiriya and protesting against the hospital’s lack of medicines, which severely affects their practical training courses.
The police, however, charged them with damaging public property at the ministry. Although the police have yet to submit a final assessment of the alleged damage to the court, media reports said it would be around 94,000 rupees. The students face large fines, calculated according to the damage caused, or prison terms, or both.
Jennifer Granholm, the Democratic governor of Michigan, on Thursday announced yet another drastic funding reduction for public education in the state.
The cut, which is likely to be made effective in one month, would reduce per-pupil funding by $127 per student, and comes on the heels of a $165-per-head reduction Granholm signed into law on Monday. Also on Monday, Granholm used her veto power to slash a further $54 million in funding to so-called “high-spending” school districts.
The combined per-student cut now stands at just under $300, a 4 percent cut in the $7,316 minimum currently mandated by state law. Schools targeted by Granholm’s Monday veto may lose as much as $600 per student.
Granholm attributed the latest cuts to a sharper than expected decline in sales tax revenues that fund public education. She also said the state legislature had not secured funding for the school spending bill it passed last month.
Teachers, students, parents and workers must act now to oppose the cuts to public education agreed to by Michigan lawmakers.
Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm on October 19 signed into law cuts in public school outlays that will reduce per-student funding by $165. She then used her veto power to cut an additional $54 million from school districts throughout the state.
More cuts are to come. In signing the bill, Granholm said that a $100 million shortfall in the state’s education fund remained, and this can only grow as sales tax revenues continue to decline. By all indications, another drastic cut to funding will be imposed within a matter of weeks, bringing the total per-pupil cut to $300 or more.
The impact on the education of young people is incalculable. The reductions will translate into immediate layoffs, cuts to school services, and increased class sizes.
“Non-essential” education for high school students will be gutted—music, physical education, sports, art and history. There will be fewer textbooks and computers. Overworked and underpaid teachers will be unable to provide the same level of instruction. Bus routes will be cut. Schools will be shut down.
An overwhelming majority of the state’s population opposes these cuts. But this opposition finds no expression in the political establishment—neither in Lansing, nor in Washington.
The economic recovery touted by the Obama administration—and celebrated on Wall Street with record salaries for top bankers—is not being shared by the nation’s college students and their families.
A new study by the College Board shows that tuition for the 2009-2010 academic year increased at US public colleges by 6.5 percent on average to $7,020, following a virtually identical increase last year of 6.4 percent. If room and board are added the average cost is $15,193.
At private colleges tuition jumped by 4.4 percent, to $26,273, or $35,636 with room and board. At community colleges it also increased by 1.6 percent to $14,285, all costs included.
Tuition costs grew far more rapidly than inflation over the same period, which actually declined by 2.1 percent in the twelve months following July 2008, based on the consumer price index. In fact the cost of attending public universities has been outpacing inflation for many years, with the average annual tuition increase at public universities during the “boom years” of the 1990s more than 4 percent, and from 2000 on about 5 percent per year.
Wages, meanwhile, have stagnated for decades, when adjusted for inflation, and have actually declined outright this year.
“The struggle of families to pay for college is largely attributed to rising prices, but also to the fact that incomes are simply stagnating,” said Sandy Baum, a policy analyst with the College Board. “Families are facing these prices with incomes that are not making any progress at all.”
Public schools have seen their funding from state governments slashed across the country, a result of the economic crisis that erupted a year ago. Administrators and trustees have responded by reducing staff, increasing class sizes, and, most of all, increasing tuition. In the states of Washington, Florida, and New York, tuition has been increased this year by more than 15 percent.
As a direct consequence of the fiscal collapse in the state of California, the state university system has increased its tuition by one third, while the University of California has increased it by about 8 percent and will enact a much larger tuition hike by next fall.