California public education – 2014 The stakes grow ever higher!
Steve Miller, Steve Teixeira y Rosemary Lee*
The past year saw a new generation step onto the political stage in California and in the usa. The same students who are being driven out of higher education have united with their peers from the streets to protest police murder, especially of African-Americans and Latinos, and the rise of the militarized police state in America. This precariat generation is forced to work for temp jobs, contingent jobs, part-time jobs, day-labor jobs… whatever. Many will never work 40 hours a week with benefits, making enough to afford a house and health care for their family as most of their parents were able to do. The new generation is not waiting for politicians “to fix” the situation. The US is beginning to manifest growing movements that parallel the more powerful national movements in Mexico. Ferguson and Ayotzinapa show that class warfare, police murder, the Drug War and the New Jim Crow are inseparable from the increasing battles to protect and expand public education. In public education we are quite familiar with the * I(Members of The Trinational Coalition in Defense of the Public Education) 1. The term precariat refers to the growing numbers of workers in the United States trapped in a cycle of poorly paid temporary “contract’ employment with little or no medical coverage and few benefits.
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august 2015, Intercambio 7
Photo: Latino California
“school-to-prison pipeline”. Education policies drive students out of public schools at all levels, to then be seized by the police, arrested and incarcerated, and spending years in prison. The US jails more people than any country in the world, mostly for non-violent offenses. This historical political rising in the United States is still developing. It also manifests itself in protests against the privatization of public education. University students in California immediately took to the streets in protest against the latest proposals to raise student fees. Protests against police murder in Ferguson, Missouri, New York and California have occurred in both colleges and high schools across the state. In Jefferson County, Colorado, students walked out in protest of a new, sanitized curriculum that drops the history of civil dissent and civil disobedience by African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and working people in 2. A town near St. Louis Missouri, that was the scene of many protests and a militarized response by the State in 2014 following the shooting death of African-American boy Michael Brown by local police. 3. “Jim Crow” refers to a series of laws enacted in the southern US states that reinforced the segregation of African-Americans in public places, including schools, hospitals, restaurants and public transit. These laws also impeded African-Americans ability to vote. The original Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional and overturned in US Supreme Court rulings in 1954, 1964 and 1965. But in recent years a number of southern states have enacted
