Support Oakland teachers! For a general strike to defend education!
By
WSWS Teacher Newsletter
22 February 2019
Three thousand teachers in Oakland who went on strike Thursday are the latest battalion of educators in the United States to take a stand against the corporate war on teachers and public schools. This struggle deserves the active support of all workers and young people. What is at stake is the very fate of public education.
The teachers’ demands for living wages, smaller class sizes and a halt to school closures, budget cuts and school privatization are the same demands that have driven hundreds of thousands of teachers to strike last year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and this year in Los Angeles, Denver and West Virginia again.
But these struggles have been betrayed by the teacher unions, which isolated each strike, leaving teachers fragmented and vulnerable to the united efforts by enemies of public education.
On the eve of the Oakland strike, the unions shut down the second walkout of 33,000 West Virginia educators, cutting another rotten deal with the state’s billionaire governor. As for the Oakland Education Association (OEA) and the California Teachers Association (CTA), they are telling teachers to look to the Democrats, who are no less enemies of teachers and public education than the Republicans.
In Los Angeles last month, the unions shut down a powerful strike, giving teachers only a few hours to review and vote on a deal. This has paved the way for the school district to escalate its attack on public education, with Los Angeles school superintendent Austin Beutner announcing a plan this week to break up the district in order to facilitate the expansion of charter schools.
It is time to draw a line in the sand in Oakland! The call…