OPEN THE SCHOOLS? DAMN THE TORPEDOES, FULL SPEED AHEAD!?
WE SAY: ONLY WHEN MADE SAFE BY BY SCIENCE & ENGINEERING AND MANAGED UNDER WORKERS/COMMUNITY CONTROL!
“We need to get the schools open!” “We need to get the economy open!” Back in March we heard the crybabies of capital and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick telling us we had to sacrifice our grandparents for the economy! Now that grandma and grandpa, along with 400,000 others are dead, we have to look at the criminal response by the ruling capitalist class to the pandemic and offer a solution that meets our need for jobs, education and healthcare. Now, just as the science is showing youth are also susceptible and suffer from COVID-19 and the psychologists warn us that suicide and depression are on the rise due to the lockdown, from all corners we are hearing a rush to reopen. Reopening has been stuffed onto the agenda, but what it will look like, how safe it will be and when it is coming are all to be decided by the class struggle or lack thereof? Right now the ruling capitalist class is calling the shots and, as a class, they care not one whit about your family’s health or your children’s education.
All across the country in major urban centers, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Democratic Party mayors respond to pressure from the Chambers of Commerce and relatively small mobilizations of right wing parents. This pressure is turned on by an obsequious union leadership which is cutting deals to get teachers back in the classroom while infection levels remain higher than when schools were first closed.
So where did the call to reopen the schools come from? Was it coming from the parents and the teachers? Is it a legitimate response to the psychological crisis of youth during the pandemic? We think it’s politicians catering to the chambers of commerce both big and small. Health and safety be damned with kids back at school the rest of the economy will become “essential”.
They know kids don’t vote. Is school unpopular? Dying in school is even less likely to be popular and so what? The pols’ drive to restore ‘normalcy’ is their political imperative, driven by the employers. So their push to reopen schools at the earliest reminds us of the Assad secret police who told the parents of kid protesters they killed “have other kids!”
The issue is played out internationally. Worker militants of the Liga Comunista de los Trabajadores (LCT) in Argentina report that “The height of the contradiction is knowing, and even announcing, that in March-April there will be the third wave, which is believed to be the one with the most infections, but through the nation’s Minister of Education, Nicolás Trotta, pressure is placed on the teachers’ unions to carry out face-to-face classes, when neither the important building works have been carried out in the schools nor have the teachers been vaccinated.”
In liberal San Francisco the city sued the school board to open the schools and the union leadership quickly fell into line. Mayor London Breed rails against the school board and the unions to force the school district to put together an in person re-opening plan in place immediately.
A right wing “Decrease the Distancing” protest rallied only a few hundred predominantly white and asian parents and children for their march and silent mobilization accelerated the pressure on the capitulationist mayor.
“End the Zoombie apocalypse,” read one. “I miss my teachers,” “I forgod haw to spel,” “I want to go to kindergarten in real life,” “I miss my friends,” “I’d go to Ted Cruz High School if it were open,” read others.”
The article continues:
“Competing news conferences ratcheted up the tension. A tearful Mayor London Breed, standing before children holding signs saying “I miss my friends,” called on the school board and teachers’ union Thursday (2/4) to reach agreement to reopen classrooms.
Unions representing teachers and other school workers said at their own press conference that they’ll return when San Francisco’s enters the red zone for reopening and they get vaccinations or when infection rates fall even farther, pushing San Francisco into the orange zone — which is when they’d be willing to resume in-person teaching without shots.”
On February 6th the SF teachers union reached an agreement to reopen the schools with conditions. Health screening, testing, supply masks, ensure social distancing and support the provision of vaccinations. If in the red tier schools can open if all teachers are vaccinated, if in the orange tier they can open without all teachers vaccinated, and they can open right now in the purple tier. We think this is a suicide pact!
American Academy of Pediatricians advocated opening the schools in June, 2020 with a long list of qualifying guidelines. Two weeks later they dialed back their recommendations because as anyone familiar with the condition of our schools knows they were not prepared to open safely.
“We call on Congress and the administration to provide the federal resources needed to ensure that inadequate funding does not stand in the way of safely educating and caring for children in our schools. Withholding funding from schools that do not open in person fulltime would be a misguided approach, putting already financially strapped schools in an impossible position that would threaten the health of students and teachers.”
Governor Newsom released guidelines and ordered school districts to submit their plans for reopening by February and that funding would be available, but districts are finding the cost of opening under the requirements is more costly than the promised funds.
Like cold water on hot embers school opening without major retrofits turned into what many long term educators call “a shit show”. So once science and medicine stepped up and said ‘whoa cowboy,’ then what happened? The fight for the Trump big win ignited the Russian Bots, the QAnon, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers all stepped up their penetration of social media and millions of Americans became science deniers egged on by fringe doctors, celebrities like RFK Jr. and thousands of hours of online video with unsubstantiated assertions and just enough legitimate reasons to be sceptical of the for-profit medicine corporations to keep the Big Pharma conspiracy theorists in great demand.
The right wing nut echo chamber COVID Deniers and enemies of public education, Trumpites and Charter School anti-union hacks promote the virtues of opening up science to “alternative” facts in August after gaining prominence in the media as a critic of lockdowns and other measures. This was when “herd immunity” was foisted on us from the White House. You want to put all such anti-science out of consideration. The kids and those tasked to serve their education deserve a program that provides a comprehensive remedy and not a transparent chase after profits without adequate human life protections!
How would a workers government reopen the schools and the economy?
Under worker’s control a planned reopening would have started months ago by mobilizing resources to create safe spaces for assembly, primarily by installing engineering controls and source barrier controls. A worker’s government would put tens of thousands to work building out the ventilation systems in the school restoration projects to provide the necessary airflow and build out the physical space needed for social distancing, bigger class rooms and smaller class sizes needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and future pandemics. The worker’s state would provide the internet and equipment for all economic classes of students to get equal access to lessons, so the most vulnerable can continue distance learning as needed. And for those students wanting remote learning, the computer equipment and internet access would be provided as well as paid tutorial and SAT preparation help.
There would be maximum resources geared towards producing vaccinations and making sure they were administered in a planned manner, as well as testing and contract tracing. PPE such as masks and gowns would be produced for healthcare and other workers and for the general population. There would be free, quality healthcare for all through socialized medicine! Contrast the socialist solution to how the capitalists have responded. Under socialism all the medical corporations would be sharing information, intellectual property would be abolished and knowledge would be the property of all. All medicine, vaccines and gains of social knowledge would be social property and distributed for the benefit of all regardless of ability to pay, because the big shareholders would be expropriated without compensation. That is how you fix the crisis of for profit medicine and healthcare. You will all die waiting for the DSA, Bernie and the squad to win universal quality healthcare. Not gonna happen, not until the working class nationalizes the pharmaceutical industry, health care and insurance industry under workers control.
Real workers’ power is derived from organized workers councils which will have the authority of the law and the power of the state, a workers state based in these democratic councils and resting upon their militia forces.
The capitalist governments have proven incapable and unwilling to deal with the COVID pandemic and have now let it spread out of control. Under capitalism, an anarchic system of exploitation that seeks to maximize profits, not produce for social needs, they could not do otherwise. The time for the working class to take power, expropriate the capitalists as a class and build a centralized planned socialist economy that meets social needs is urgent. Capitalism in terminal crisis will only produce yet more deadly pandemics, fascism, wars and climate catastrophe.
Build revolutionary workers parties and a new Workers International to fight for World Socialism!
