And the new law has teeth; any violations of its provisions will be punished by having 10% of their state funds withheld from the school district or charter school.

This new law comes on the heels of Arizona’s reactionary anti-immigrant law, SB1070, which legalizes racial profiling by requiring police to stop and question anyone who they suspect is undocumented. That was followed by an announcement by the state’s Department of Education that teachers with heavy accents must be removed from classes for students still learning English. Many have interpreted this as targeting immigrant teachers who were first hired under a program to teach bilingual education, a program later abolished as part of the overall anti-immigrant climate. This attack on ethnic studies represents yet another “brick in the wall” of an officially sanctioned white supremacy and American chauvinism in Arizona, while encouraging its spread around the country. Arizona has become an ugly battleground, and testing ground, for a new “Jim Crow,” reviving an official second-class status for the 30% of the people of Arizona who are Latino.

The author of this new law is Tom Horne, Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Arizona’s Department of Education, and Republican candidate for state attorney general. Horne has made it no secret that the law is specifically aimed at eliminating the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican-American Studies program and ethnic studies programs in general. Roughly 56% of the TUSD district’s 55,000 students are Latino, and about 3% of the students take these classes, which offer a rigorous course of study that gives students college qualifying credit. But Horne said the new law will put an end to this; it “would ban La Raza (Mexican-American) studies because it’s a course that’s aimed primarily at members of one race, and we have testimony that this has promoted resentment toward one race.” And he also said the law would end other ethnic studies courses as well.¹

Students “should not be taught that they are oppressed”

Horne has been point-man for a years-long campaign to wipe out ethnic studies classes and courses in the secondary schools. In June 2007, on official state Department of Education stationary, Horne wrote “An Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson,” arguing that the TUSD Ethnic Studies Program should be terminated. He charged that “ethnic studies in the TUSD teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism…” He said “…students should be taught that this is the land of opportunity, and that if they work hard they can achieve their goals. They should not be taught that they are oppressed.”

In other words, in the view of Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction the purpose of public education is to tell students what to think — not to enable them to develop the ability to be critical thinkers. “Truth” — for Horne and those like him whose starting point is protecting and preserving this system — is whatever set of ideas correspond to achieving their goals. What is being demonstrated now in Arizona is that raw power dictates what “narrative” about this country’s history and present-day reality will be taught — that “might makes right.”

Horne’s letter went further; it singled out for attack particular books used in the curriculum, including Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by historian Rudolfo Acuña, a book which received the Gustavus Myers Award for an Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America, and has been used as a standard text in college-level curricula for Chicano (Mexican-American) Studies for many years. And Horne targeted the student group MEChA for attack as well.

State Senator Russell Pearce, author of SB 1070, made this point even more openly in his amendments to a bill in the state Senate, SB 1108 — a bill that had nothing to do with education — approved by the Arizona Senate’s House Appropriations Committee in mid-April. It would withhold funding to schools, including on the college level, whose courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization,” and would bar teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including “democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance.”

Pearce too targeted Mexican-American Studies at the TUSD, and included provisions that would ban student groups like MEChA on any public campuses. The Senate bill would have confiscated books and teaching materials that are deemed “anti-American.” Pearce also singled out Acuna’s Occupied America, saying it amounted to “sedition.” It appears these provisions did not make it into this final law, but they reveal the whole climate around this dangerous offensive.

The origin and importance of ethnic studies

As the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s developed and a revolutionary current emerged, one powerful expression was the hard-fought student strikes demanding courses, departments and schools of ethnic studies. While the students of oppressed nationalities had to fight just to get into the universities, what they confronted when they got there was an educational system which distorted or suppressed those aspects of history and present-day reality that challenged and put the lie to the bullshit about America’s “shining example,” and its “special place” in the world. They began at San Francisco State University in 1968, which saw the longest student strike in U.S. history, led by the Third World Liberation Front (a joint effort of African American, Asian American, Chicano, and student organizations of other nationalities). That strike established the first School of Ethnic Studies.

Ethnic studies programs, which later expanded to include women’s studies, gender studies, etc., established a foothold where oppressed nationality students especially could for the first time learn about, and be part of, discovering their own history; the struggle and resistance; and the contributions to art, culture, science, etc. of Black, Chicano, Native American, Asian and other oppressed peoples in this country. This contributed significantly to bringing to light the truth that America’s ultimate global domination rested on the foundation of the kidnap of millions and millions of African peoples and their enslavement in the “new world,” the genocidal destruction of the Native American peoples, and the theft through war of 40% of the territory of Mexico as the start of a process of conquest that ultimately spanned the globe.

An essential element in the reassertion of the white supremacy and American patriotism on the rise today is the need to restore that “official narrative” about America and its “special role” as the “good guys” in the world. To these reactionary forces, the Mexican-American and other ethnic studies programs on the secondary school and college campuses are an obstacle that must be eliminated.

Whether or not those in power in Arizona succeed in banning ethnic studies outright, the reactionary assault on education that’s now been given the official stamp of approval by Arizona’s new law, is already having a chilling affect on those coming under attack, and it is taking a tremendous toll. In the face of attempts to put them on the defensive, the faculty and administrators have denied the charges against their programs with assurances that the allegations are untrue. Now each teacher entering a classroom will have to teach while looking over one shoulder, facing the choice of self-censorship, or risking state intervention for telling the truth. It is the responsibility of people everywhere to strenuously oppose the whole reactionary offensive that is gaining momentum in Arizona.

1. 5/1/10 Arizona Republic.

On July 7, Denver Chief Judge Larry Naves vacated—threw out—the verdict and issued a ruling that gave CU everything they wanted. Professor Churchill is not to be reinstated, and he is not entitled to lost earnings or a financial settlement. This ruling by Naves is as ludicrous as it is utterly baseless; it represents a decision to crudely step in to ensure that CU prevails, in spite of the truth.

Background to a Witch-hunt

This case began in early 2005 when Ward Churchill became the target of a highly orchestrated, nationwide right-wing political witch-hunt after an essay he’d written shortly after 9/11 came to light. The attack on Churchill became the focal point of a major assault on critical thinking and dissenting scholars in academia that continues to this day. A chilling message spread to faculty across campuses to “watch out!”—criticism of past or present U.S. crimes could threaten your reputation, your job, even your career.

Faculty, students and others stepped out to oppose the demand for Churchill to be fired, seeing it as a key battlefront in the growing push by powerful right wing forces to use this controversy to bring sweeping changes to university life, and intimidate and silence other progressive and radical scholars. University faculty wrote letters and op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines, and circulated statements signed by hundreds and hundreds of professors in support of Churchill. A full page ad appeared in the New York Review of Books signed by many well known public intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, Derrick Bell, Rashid Khalidi, Mahmood Mamdani, Irene Gendzier, and others calling on CU to stop their push to fire him.

The university first tried to fire Churchill for the content of his essay, but then decided it would be wiser to switch gears and go after him another way. They combined several mainly old complaints about aspects of Churchill’s scholarship, and even solicited another; formed a faculty committee to investigate headed by a former prosecutor known at the time to be biased against Churchill, and used the committee’s findings of alleged research misconduct to fire him.

The verdict confirmed Churchill’s contention that this investigation of his scholarship, under a microscope, should not have taken place, and was for the sole purpose of finding a pretext to fire him for his scholarship and political views. Prominent scholars—such as Noam Chomsky and Stanley Fish—have made the point that no researcher’s work could stand up to this kind of scrutiny.

“Quasi-judicial Immunity”

The court ruling, in large part lifted word-for-word from the motion by CU’s attorneys, accepts CU’s claim that the Regents hold “quasi-judicial immunity,” as a matter of law. In essence this means that the school’s governing board can do practically anything, including fire faculty members for speech they find offensive, and the faculty have no remedy, as long as the university’s formal procedures are followed in firing them. (Find all of the court papers here.)

By making this ruling after the verdict has been reached, Naves is openly granting “quasi-judicial immunity” to a body whose members are known to have publicly denounced the “litigant” before trial; admitted being subjected to pressure to get rid of Churchill; and were found to have taken unconstitutional action in order to punish the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech. What does it mean for a powerful body to be given this kind of immunity for highly political decisions over the lives and careers of university faculty and scholars, including tenured faculty? This, and some of the points that follow, are taken from a letter opposing the ruling that is being circulated in the academic community by the Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia network.

Brian Leiter, philosopher and legal scholar, currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the U. of Chicago, described the decision as having “possibly catastrophic implications” in his on-line Report (Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports), titled: “Attention State University Faculty in Colorado: You Have Almost No Remedy if the Regents Violate your First Amendment Rights.” But the impact of this ruling, if it is allowed to stand, will be felt by faculty far beyond Colorado.

The judge provides numerous different, conflicting arguments for his decision, no doubt hoping to make it unlikely to be overturned on appeal. That’s why, having first thrown out the jury’s verdict, Naves then goes on to invoke it. He claims that the jury’s $1 damage award compels him to deny reinstatement. “If I am required to enter an order that is ‘consistent with the jury’s findings,’ I cannot order a remedy that ‘disregards the jury’s implicit finding’ that Professor Churchill has suffered no actual damages that an award of reinstatement would prospectively remedy.” This argument is completely baseless. The jury’s verdict that Churchill was fired in violation of his protected speech—which can only rightfully be remedied by returning him to his job—is in no way mitigated by the amount of the damage award. The argument that the amount of damages determines whether a constitutional violation should be remedied is absurd.

As it turns out, the judge’s attempt to interpret the jury’s findings is also contradicted by one of the jurors, who has written an affidavit filed with Churchill’s response to the ruling. In it, the juror explains, “It was difficult for us to put a value on Churchill’s emotional distress, and in the end, we listened to Churchill’s testimony that the case was not about the money and hoped that the Judge would give him his job back or give him some compensation.”

In search of yet another argument for overturning the meaning of the verdict, the ruling claims: “The jury determined only that the University did not prove that a majority of the Regents would have voted to dismiss Professor Churchill in the absence of his political speech. That is a very different question than whether Professor Churchill engaged in academic misconduct…” The judge argues that despite the verdict, Churchill committed such serious academic misconduct that it would be wrong and harmful to the university to reinstate him. As Churchill’s attorney David Lane’s Reconsideration motion puts it, how can there be no evidence of academic misconduct serious enough to justify Churchill’s firing, but there is sufficient academic misconduct in the court’s mind to deny reinstatement?

At trial, the jurors heard testimony by experts in American Indian Studies and Indian Law highly critical of the findings of the faculty investigative committee, as well as by witnesses for the university, and that was a critical part of the basis for their conclusions. Again, as the juror’s affidavit states:

A majority of the Jurors thought that the academic misconduct charges were not valid. We felt that the procedures afforded to Churchill by the University of Colorado, before his termination, were biased. In fact, during our deliberations, we listed every witness that testified at trial, and determined that the majority of the University of Colorado’s witnesses were biased and dishonest.

Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School professor and frequent national media commentator, called the refusal to reinstate Churchill “bizarre.” He blasted Naves’ final argument that puts the blame for refusing reinstatement on Ward Churchill’s statements showing “hostility to the university”:

The university opposed the reinstatement on the ground that, if he returned, the relationship ‘would not be an amicable one.’ That was obvious from the jury verdict. However, that is like using the bias as a defense. First, the University is found to have improperly terminated Churchill due to its hatred for his views but then successfully blocks reinstatement due to its hatred of his views.

There is a great deal at stake for academia and for society overall right now in upholding and defending this verdict, and deepening its lessons. An ugly, high-stakes public witch-hunt by dangerous, reactionary, and powerful forces, aimed at spreading a repressive chill over the universities, has been dragged into the light, and dealt a setback. But these forces, far from retreating, are regrouping, and trying to turn the meaning of this verdict on its head. This absurd, twisted and clearly unjust decision by Denver Chief Judge Naves only contributes to those objectives, and it must be opposed. And at the same time, the debate we called for in that article is needed more than ever, with those within and outside academia who, in spite of the verdict, are still taken in by a distorted view of what the case is about.

As the fall term approaches, faculty and students, and everyone concerned with the defense of the unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent, need to step forward on campuses around the country and develop plans for how to call out, build opposition to, and to delegitimize, this ruling, calling meetings and rallies, writing letters to newspapers and to CU and the Colorado court, taking out ads, and more. And broader segments of society need to join with them.

The challenge to administrators, faculty, and especially students is to stand up to this assault. And broader segments of society must join with them. We must continue to defend those like Ward Churchill when they are singled out for attack, and, more generally, defend the ability of professors to hold dissenting and radical views. It is vitally important that the new generation of students step forward to defend an unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent. One way or another, this struggle over the university and intellectual life will have profound repercussions on what U.S. society will be like, and on the prospects for bringing a whole new society into being.

One thing I kind of admired or respected was that, even though the world may disagree with what Ward Churchill said, even though it was very painful to people, I do respect that he can stand up for what he believes in… He never issued an apology because he doesn’t feel one was needed.

– Juror Bethany Newill, at the Denver Post, 4/4/09.

On April 2, a jury in Denver rendered its verdict in the case of Ward Churchill. The jury agreed with former University of Colorado (CU) professor Ward Churchill—and the many distinguished scholars in his field of Native American studies who testified on his behalf—that he was fired in July, 2007 not for faulty scholarship but in retaliation for a controversial essay he wrote after 9/11. There’s been extensive and continuing coverage in the major media of the decision’s impact. And this is an indication of the significance and great stakes for the battle to defend dissent and critical thinking in academia, and ultimately in society. The essence of the case from the very beginning was the political persecution by a major university of a controversial professor, scholar, and activist—that’s what the jury confirmed. The jury’s verdict is a significant setback for forces hell-bent on suppressing and stifling dissent and critical thinking on campuses.

The jury also awarded $1 in damages. Five out of the six jurors argued to pay Ward Churchill more in damages, but the jury as a whole could not agree. A juror who spoke to the press later explained their decision: “…it wasn’t a slap in his face or anything like that when we didn’t give him any money. It’s just that David Lane (Churchill’s attorney) kept saying this wasn’t about the money, and in the end, we took his word for that.”¹ Professor Churchill said: “What was asked for—and what was delivered—was justice.”

Witch-hunt on Trial

There were two elements the jury had to determine in rendering its verdict: did the majority of the Board of Regents of CU fire Professor Churchill principally because of his post-9/11 essay? And even if they did, was Churchill correct that he would not have been fired for other reasons—that is the alleged research misconduct?

Ward Churchill was a tenured professor of American Indian Studies and Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at CU-Boulder (2002-2005). In January 2005, his invitation to speak at Hamilton College in upstate New York suddenly became the target of right wing forces, the governors of New York and Colorado, and radio and TV figures like Bill O’Reilly, because of a sharply worded essay Churchill had written three years earlier, right after 9/11. This essay was critical of the U.S. role in the world and included a formulation about how those people who worked as functionaries for the large corporations with offices in the World Trade Center were “little Eichmanns”—a reference to the functionaries of the Nazi regime.

The speech was cancelled, and numerous politicians, including the governor of Colorado, called for Churchill to be fired. After first launching an investigation of all of Churchill’s writings to find a reason to fire him, the university changed gears, put together a collection of mainly old complaints about aspects of his large body of work, and formed a faculty committee (IC) to investigate. In July 2007, Churchill was fired by the university Regents, who pointed to the IC’s findings of “serious research misconduct,” though the IC had only recommended suspension.

Among the “heavy-hitters” behind Professor Churchill’s firing who were called as witnesses was former Republican governor Bill Owens. Juror Bethany Newill described the testimony this way: “We’d seen depositions of previous testimony, and we found that a lot of them contradicted themselves.” In speaking of Governor Owens she said: “He had gone on the Bill O’Reilly show and mentioned threatening the budget” [that he might cut CU’s state funding if they didn’t get rid of Churchill]; “On the stand, he said that wasn’t what he was doing, but that was clearly what I saw.”

There was remarkable testimony by Betsy Hoffman, who’d been president of the University of Colorado from 2000 until resigning in March of 2005, shortly after the controversy broke out. One observer at the trial described Dr. Hoffman’s testimony where she described a conversation she had “with the Governor [Owens] where she said he told her to fire Ward Churchill ‘tomorrow,’ that his tone was ‘threatening,’ and that if she didn’t he would ‘unleash his plan.’”²

Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, asked Dr. Hoffman about the comparison of the treatment of Professor Churchill to neo-McCarthyism that she’d made in a speech to a faculty committee less than a week before resigning:

“She said that the list of the 101 Worst Professors in the Country by David Horowitz³ was an example of this type of targeting, and pointed out that list included Mr. Churchill and some ‘very highly regarded academics, like Derrick Bell, who were espousing controversial left-wing views.’

“Dr. Hoffman… began researching where some of the criticism of Mr. Churchill was coming from. She found a website for ACTA, an organization the Colorado Chapter of which Governor Owens and Senator Hank Brown had been founding members. The organization encouraged members to ‘take a very active role in reducing the left-wing bias in universities.’ Once ACTA became involved in an ‘all out assault’ on CU and Mr. Churchill during February 2005, Dr. Hoffman assumed that the action was part of the ‘plan’ ‘unleashed’ by Governor Owens….

“Mr. Lane asked if she saw a link between the 9/11 essay becoming publicized and ACTA working in concert with the right-wing media to paint Mr. Churchill as an example of ‘what’s wrong with academia in this country’ and Dr. Hoffman indicated that this was her impression at the time… ‘It was an all-out assault on Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado, and me,’ she testified.”² (emphasis added)

The jury concluded political motivations were principal among the majority of Regents in the decision to fire Churchill. The question remained; would Professor Churchill have been fired for research misconduct anyway?

Experts in American Indian Studies and Indian Law Testify

Many scholars, experts in Professor Churchill’s field of American Indian Studies testified on his behalf, disagreeing with most of the IC’s findings and conclusions. Professor Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, had only met Churchill in 2007, but was familiar with his scholarship and held it in high regard. He said his reaction to the IC report, as elaborated in his extensive recent essay, “Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct,”⁴ was that the charges were “fundamentally baseless and motivated by the political circumstances surrounding the 9/11 essay.” He then went on to challenge each of the committee’s findings.

Dr. Barbara Alice Mann, an eminent historian, teacher and writer at the University of Toledo, is a Native American and author of nine books. Her latest, The Gift of Disease, includes a chapter on the 1837 smallpox epidemic that destroyed the Mandan Indians of the Great Plains. Dr. Mann’s testimony contradicted the IC’s report—saying there was indeed a “reasonable basis” for Churchill’s claim that the smallpox epidemic was a result of blankets taken from an infirmary in St. Louis, and the claim that army doctors at Fort Clark told the infected Indians to scatter.

This is just a glimpse of how fundamentally flawed, how politically motivated, and how damaging to historical scholarship and the search for the truth this whole investigation was. Research by Revolution reveals that in November of 2006, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at CU-Boulder had written the university, saying out of Churchill’s more than twenty books and hundreds of articles, chapters, speeches, and electronic communications, the committee investigating Churchill’s work studied six pages of his writings. The IC offered no evidence that they were even familiar with the bulk of Churchill’s work, yet they made claims from a tiny sample of evidence that he “deliberately” engaged in research misconduct; that there was a “pattern” of such misconduct, and that he “has repeatedly plagiarized, as well as fabricated and falsified information to support his views on American Indian history.” Nevertheless, their findings have been used to destroy Churchill’s reputation as a scholar, and to delegitimize basic verdicts about the genocide of the native peoples.

After weeks spent listening to testimony about Churchill’s scholarship, juror Newill concluded: “I definitely saw where [the university] was coming from on a few of them,” but in other instances, “I thought they had really weak arguments. To me, it just seemed like the charges were trumped up. And even if all of those things were true, we didn’t feel that was the reason for termination.”²

In a New York Times essay on April 5, 2009, Stanley Fish, a highly recognized professor in the U.S., wrote that the accusations that the committee investigated “are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him.” Fish then observed, like many other scholars, “…if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.” He added, “There is… a disconnect in the report between its often nuanced considerations of the questions raised in and by Churchill’s work, and the conclusion, announced in a parody of a judicial verdict, that he has committed crimes worthy of dismissal, if not of flogging.”⁵

The battle to defeat the political persecution of Ward Churchill is far from over. CU has a month to appeal the verdict; and it is up to the judge to decide whether CU will be ordered to pay Churchill’s attorneys’ fees, to award Churchill his lost wages, and to require the university to give Churchill his job back, which has been at the heart of his demands from the beginning. CU officials are expressing strong opposition to his returning to campus.

Beyond that, there is also a great deal at stake for academia and for society overall right now in upholding and defending this verdict, and deepening its lessons. An ugly, high-stakes public witch-hunt by dangerous, reactionary, and powerful forces, aimed at spreading a repressive chill over the universities, has been dragged into the light, and dealt a setback. But these forces, far from retreating, are regrouping, and trying to turn the meaning of this verdict on its head.

To them, Professor Churchill remains the “poster-boy for academic irresponsibility in both substance and style,” as the Chairman of the conservative National Association of Scholars put it in “NAS Regrets Ward Churchill Verdict.” John Leo, senior fellow at the ruling class think tank the Manhattan Institute, calls Churchill’s scholarship “hideous and embarrassing,” blaming the university for hiring, “for diversity reasons, an unprepared, erratic, ideologue with no sense of fairness and no academic credentials…” And Ann Neal, president of ACTA, says “shock, hurt, and even anger are surely natural reactions to the recent jury determination,” but promises that “ACTA is here to help” all those trustees strongly motivated to respond.

With stakes so high, a robust debate is called for with those within and outside academia that have accepted these twisted distortions, now discredited by the Denver verdict. Roger W. Bowen, who was head of the AAUP when the Churchill attack was in full swing, practically brags in the Wall Street Journal that he did nothing in response to requests for assistance from “his [Churchill’s] loyal spouse, Natsu Taylor Saito.” Bowen says, “When Churchill invokes ‘academic freedom’ as a protection for scholarly fraud, he dishonors a noble tradition that appropriately defends honest scholars who bravely challenge conventional wisdom.”⁶ What is this other than continuing to cling to the same distortions coming from the likes of academic hit man David Horowitz; ACTA; William Bennett and company.

In a supplement to Revolution Issue #81, “Warning: The Nazification of the American University” we wrote that powerful, right wing forces in this country have set out to transform university administrations into instruments of coercive enforcement and control over faculty and students—intimidating, threatening, and “cleaning house” of dissident thinkers when called on to do so, while leaving scholars under attack to fend for themselves. These right wing forces attacking the university are “out to turn the university into a zone of uncontested indoctrination, where severe limits would be placed on permissible discourse—in terms of professors speaking out, writing, or encouraging engagement over controversial issues in the classroom, etc.; and in terms of restricting and gutting programs like African American studies, women’s studies, etc., that challenge and refute the official narratives and explanations of U.S. history and present-day inequality and global lopsidedness.”

And further: “The overall objective of this attack on dissent and critical thinking is to change the university as we have known it: in its internal life and functioning and in its effects on society. If this reactionary program wins out, the university will be turning out students who will have had little, if any, opportunity to think critically, into a society qualitatively more severely repressive than anything seen in this country’s history.”

The challenge to administrators, faculty, and especially students is to stand up to this assault. And broader segments of society must join with them. We must continue to defend those like Ward Churchill when they are singled out for attack, and, more generally, defend the ability of professors to hold dissenting and radical views. It is vitally important that the new generation of students step forward to defend an unfettered search for the truth, intellectual ferment, and dissent. One way or another, this struggle over the university and intellectual life will have profound repercussions on what U.S. society will be like, and on the prospects for bringing a whole new society into being.

1. Michael Roberts, “Juror Bethany Newill talks about the Ward Churchill trial,” Denver Westword, 4/3/09.
2. From a blog of law school observers of the trial, theracetothebottom.org.
3. Referring to the book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
4. In Carvalho, Edward J. and David B. Downing, eds., Works and Days: Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University 51/52.26 (Spring/Fall 2008).
5. Stanley Fish, New York Times, 4/5/09.
6. “Freedom, but for Honest Research,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2009.

In many ways Locke High School concentrates the utterly failed education system that “serves” the oppressed people in the urban cores of this country. In 2005 only 332 Locke students graduated from a class that, as ninth-graders, had 1,318. Only 143 students qualified for admission to the University of California and Cal State University systems. In March, 2005 a 15-year-old girl died after being shot in front of the school.

Even before the fight at Locke became national news, the L.A. school district had signed a contract agreeing to turn complete control of Locke over to a private charter school organization known as Green Dot Public Schools. (A charter school is a public school run by a private business or organization.) This isn’t the first charter school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And it’s not the first of Green Dot’s charter schools in L.A.; they already operate twelve small charter schools. But this is the first time that any charter operation has been given sole responsibility for providing the public education that high school students receive in a section of a major urban ghetto.

This high-profile experiment in privatization is being looked to by the powers-that-be as a potential model for a radical transformation of the public education system in the most oppressed communities of the proletariat, especially Blacks and Latinos, not only throughout L.A., but nationwide. The Los Angeles Times wrote in a recent editorial, “[I]f it succeeds, Green Dot will have created a blueprint for public schools.”¹

And a lot of people at Locke—parents, the teachers and administrators who stayed on, many students, and people all over—are hoping that Green Dot will actually be the model for “closing the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers” that the sales pitch of the charter school movement promises.

Green Dot aims to produce a small number of students from inner city schools who will help fill the need for “knowledge workers” in this society—people who work with information, such as engineers, analysts, marketers, etc. And for those who do make it into the “knowledge worker” strata, to serve as a political and ideological force to shore up this system of exploitation and inequality—including by providing a basis to claim that “anyone” can make it in this system; a cruel lie when in fact, for millions and millions of youth in the inner cities, their so-called “opportunities” are the streets and a likely early death, prison, or the military.

Savage Inequalities

The conditions of the inner city schools today perfectly reflect the conditions of the inner cities.

Beginning after World War 2, and in intensifying levels by the early 1980s, the inner cities of the U.S. lost more stable and better paying factory jobs as the imperialists dramatically restructured the U.S. economy to take advantage of investment opportunities internationally. Those in power consciously chose to respond to these changes with policies that dramatically increased the polarization between the suburbs and these devastated urban cores. As a result the inner cities became more and more characterized by high concentrations of non-whites, rising unemployment, shit-jobs for those who could find work, and massive imprisonment.

The collapse and breakup of the Soviet empire in the early ’90s did not produce the “peace dividend” for social services and education that some hoped for—indeed it removed more barriers to globalization. In the ’90s, capitalism moved jobs out of the inner cities even more dramatically, leaving vast urban wastelands devoid of jobs, social services, or decent schools.

There has been conscious policy, as well as the workings of the system, behind the systematic decay of the inner-city public schools, just as there has been with the devastation of the inner cities overall. Jonathan Kozol has argued passionately and eloquently in a series of books against the conscious under-funding of inner city schools compared to those of the middle class, suburban secondary schools, and the savage consequences for the quality of education and the lives of the young people. Severe overcrowding; dilapidated school buildings; a shortage of books and supplies to aid learning; and teacher salaries too low for schools to either attract good teachers or do without substitute teachers in the schools of the urban districts—in sharp contrast to the well-funded and predominately white suburban schools.

In his 2005 book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Kozol reports finding on his recent visit to schools across the country that the proportion of Black students attending majority white schools was lower than any year since 1968. And the largest public school systems in the country have been all but abandoned by whites. This at the very time that the Supreme Court has accelerated this polarization by repeatedly stamping out attempts to use any form of affirmative action to even incrementally reverse this trajectory.

The following are the percentages of Black and Latino students in the public schools of major U.S. cities: Chicago—87%; Washington DC—94%; St. Louis—82%; Philadelphia—78%; Los Angeles—84%; Detroit—95%; New York City—73%. And within these districts, segregation is often even more extreme, with white students mainly concentrated in a small number of wealthier neighborhood or magnet schools. And almost three-fourths of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority. Greg Anrig wrote in Washington Monthly, “America’s urban school systems remain almost universally dysfunctional, primarily because the country as a whole is about as segregated by race and income as at any time since the civil rights revolution.”²

This is the ugly reality of the urban cores of this country, and the schools that serve them. It is producing a massive section of youth, seething with anger, who have been written off by this system, told “there’s nothing here for you,” and then shoved into the prisons at world record rates. It is an international embarrassment for this imperialist power claiming to be the model for the world, and it’s an outrage to sections of the middle class who are coming to know about it. And under certain conditions it can become extremely explosive, as was revealed by the ’92 L.A. rebellion. This is a critical concern of those driving the transformation and privatization of the school system.

Bringing Forward Models of “Reform”

The ruling class has approached this crisis in urban education not from the perspective of how to provide a good education for every child, but through a collection of changes that have made the situation worse. Two significant changes have been the widespread promotion of school vouchers, which undercut public schools and in many cases promote religious schools; and the No Child Left Behind Act that imposed rigid test-based standards for schools.

In 2001 Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed with support of the Democrats. Behind the empty rhetoric about achieving “high standards,” “world class education,” and “closing the achievement gap,” NCLB is just standardized testing—with severe punishments instead of help if test scores don’t improve. Schools not showing progress over time are first required to pay for private outside consultants. Continued lack of progress leads to being forced to totally contract out education to private enterprises. Schools in the middle class are not targeted because this only applies to schools with very low test scores.

The impact of NCLB is to essentially force teachers to get students’ grades up at all costs, because the school’s very existence is on the line. It has led to a shift towards teaching via a script designed with the goal of preparing students to take standardized tests—widely known as “teaching to the test.” Large numbers of weaker 9th graders are held back in some schools just to improve results on the all-important 10th grade tests. It has resulted in the elimination of art, music, foreign language study, even sports in many schools, and it has reduced the time spent teaching subjects that are not included in the tests. Thousands of schools, mainly in low-income areas, are targeted for closure due to failure to meet stringent federal standards. This is fueling the growth of charter school organizations and education management organizations (EMOs) that are training “education entrepreneurs” to be the managers of the privatized public schools that are coming.

NCLB was passed in a context of a decades-long process of undermining the legitimacy of public schools, the development and funding of alternative schools, and the creation of models for a new kind of privatized public school. Reagan’s education program was “bring God back into the classroom” and government-funded school voucher programs. School vouchers give government funds to parents who want to put their children in private, and in particular religious, schools—popular among the growing Christian fundamentalist forces at the time.

Vouchers have been controversial because they challenge the principle of the separation of church and state. After a favorable state supreme court ruling in 1998, Milwaukee’s voucher experiment was expanded from about 1,500 students attending less than two dozen secular schools, to more than 5,000 students spread among nearly 100 mostly parochial (religious) schools. Today roughly 20,000 Milwaukee students attend 122 voucher schools. In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court settled the church/state question when it okayed Cleveland’s voucher program by defining public funding of religious schools as an expression of “choice.” There are also voucher programs in Florida, Colorado, and the District of Columbia. Vouchers are championed by McCain in his education program: “Public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child’s education follows that child into the school the parent chooses.”

Since the early 1990s one major trend in “reforming” education has been the growth of for-profit and non-profit charter organizations around the country. In 2004 there were 3,000 charter schools serving three quarters of a million students in 37 states and D.C. New York City just raised the number of charter schools by 18 to a total of 78, serving 24,000 students. One in every 18 public schools in NYC is now a charter school.

There are for-profit public charters like the well-known “Edison Schools” founded by John Chubb, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute. There is also a growing number of public military charter schools, which target poor, minority students, especially Black youth. They appeal to parents and students with the promise of a disciplined school environment along with training and preparation for careers in the military. And they are viewed by the Department of Defense, which helps fund them, as a pipeline for new recruits to the all-volunteer army.³

It is the non-profit public charter school operations that are now garnering the most widespread support from the public, and the ruling class, including forces grouped around Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. A central selling point of charter operations is that they replace the education “bureaucracy” with a more streamlined, efficient management model based on business principles. Individual accountability is emphasized, with clear goals and results measured on a regular basis. That means school managers can be fired for poor performance by their students. And teachers can be as well, since charters do away with tenure. At a time when the government has been steadily taking funds away from education, their emphasis on accountability and cutting through red tape has the added appeal of promising that major transformations can be brought about without huge infusions of public funds.

The executive director of Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Bay Area Schools said recently: “Our focus on results is appealing to business leaders. So is our decentralized model that emphasizes autonomy, flexibility and innovation…” In return, the business community has been the biggest backers of charter schools: “The business community, both business leaders through their personal philanthropy and also corporate giving programs, have undoubtedly been a critical component of our fundraising success.”⁴

The Green Dot Model: Making a Bad Situation Worse

Green Dot Public Schools is among the many non-profit charters being championed and guided by some of the most influential and “far-sighted” of the business world, civic leaders and leaders of the education establishment, and people in the world of politics. Green Dot is headed by Steve Barr, an influential Democratic Party fundraiser and co-founder of Rock the Vote, which brought millions of young people into electoral politics and registered them to vote. The board of directors includes the Dean of the Loyola Marymount Graduate School of Education, and Susan Estrich, now a USC law professor and once head of Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign. Green Dot’s focus is on what they call “School Transformation” projects like the one at Locke. Their aim is to create a model, and with it broad public opinion, that will pressure school districts to adopt this model as their own.

Contributing an important element to this rush to privatization is Teach for America (TFA), a private, non-profit venture which for a number of years has been successfully recruiting graduates of Ivy League and other elite universities around the country for a two-year stint teaching in inner-city public and charter schools. A number of these students become inspired to pursue careers in teaching—but this is not TFA’s goal. Rather, TFA hopes after two years these young people will join the broadening base of experienced education managers, with the rest entering the professional world as informed supporters of these efforts. The KIPP Schools, based in San Francisco, were started by a pair of TFA graduates. And 250 TFA recruits are now in New Orleans, where—in the wake of the Katrina catastrophe—a massive experiment in charter school privatization is taking place.⁵

As a charter school that is completely replacing a public school, Green Dot is required to accept all the eligible students in the area that had been served by Locke. But that doesn’t mean they will have to keep them. There are many factors at work that are already driving students toward the door, with the repressive atmosphere being the main one.

School policies that push students out of school and into the criminal justice system have been called the “school to prison pipeline.” The ACLU opposes not only zero-tolerance policies that involve the police in minor school incidents, but also other school policies that do the same thing, “by excluding students from school through suspension, expulsion, discouragement and high stakes testing requirements.”⁶ Green Dot’s “School Transformation” project is already making it harder for struggling/borderline students at Locke to be able to stay there, while raising the stakes and consequences for those who can’t.

Green Dot requires all students to wear uniforms (as do most charters), a condition that has already sent some students to enroll at Jordan High, another high school in Watts. Those whose shirts are not properly tucked in are being sent to detention. Talking to a student, even your cousin, in a different on-site academy is forbidden. The much stricter tardy and attendance policy is also part of the weeding process. In fact, Green Dot is setting up an on-site continuation school for students cut from their academies. Students report that there are more security guards inside the school now packing weapons. They say the street outside the school is lined with cops the moment school ends, so no one is allowed to hang out with friends even after school. The school days are longer, and the school year as well. And all students will have not just the opportunity, but will be required to take a college track curriculum, which—given the education they have (not) received to that point—many may find impossible to do.

This is a “model” for a “no-nonsense” school system that has no qualms about tossing far greater numbers of students down the school to prison pipeline.

The principal financial backers of Green Dot and many other charter operations are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, started by Eli Broad, a real estate tycoon who is #42 in Forbes’ 2007 list of richest people in America. These two foundations have pumped more than $2 billion into charter school organizations around the country. And last year the Gates and Broad foundations created a $60 million fund to get their education program onto the agenda of the 2008 elections. The extent of the active involvement of figures like Gates and Broad in revamping public education is an expression of the overall concerns within the ruling class about the urgency of making these changes.

In Barack Obama’s speech on education, he spoke to the dangers as he and others see them: “America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy…. In this economy, companies can plant their jobs wherever there’s an Internet connection and someone willing to do the work, meaning that children here in Dayton are growing up competing with children not only in Detroit or Chicago or Los Angeles, but in Beijing and Delhi as well.” At stake, he said, is “whether we as a nation will remain in the 21st century the kind of global economic leader we were in the 20th century… It’s not just that a world-class education is essential for workers to compete and win, it’s that an educated workforce is essential for America to compete and win.” (emphasis added)

“Tough Choices or Tough Times”

“The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce,” a panel made up of former Cabinet secretaries and governors in addition to federal and state education officials and business and civic leaders, issued a report in December 2006 titled “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” The report “warned that unless improvements are made in the nation’s public schools and colleges by 2021, a large number of jobs would be lost to countries including India and China, where workers are better educated and paid much less than their U.S. counterparts.”⁷ Within the last decade 1.5 billion people have joined the global labor force from India, China, and the former Soviet bloc. And there are now twice as many young professionals in low-wage countries as in high-wage countries, who will be a lot cheaper to employ than American workers for decades to come. Projections are that as many as 40 million jobs could be at some risk of being “offshored,” including jobs requiring some college, in the next 15 years.

The impact on the economy and employment won’t be the same for all workers. A report by the National Center on Education and the Economy entitled “America in the Global Economy” predicts a “shortage” of workers with an associate degree or higher, and a “surplus” of workers with the least schooling. It concludes that families headed by college and graduate degree holders are much more likely to be moving up the income distribution, while families headed by high school graduates or dropouts are more likely to be moving down the ladder. And the report says: “The American class structure is very dynamic… Nevertheless, we can say that the middle class is dispersing into two equal and opposing streams of upwardly mobile college-haves and downwardly mobile college-have-nots.”

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce recommendations for changing public education were described by its chairman as “calling for a complete shake-up from top to bottom.” They include authorizing school districts to pay companies to run all their schools, organized along the lines of charter schools. They would be “highly entrepreneurial”—rewarding successfully run schools and firing those whose students don’t perform. The panel also called for all students to be required to take state board qualifying exams in the 10th grade that will be used to divide students into two groups. Those who do “well enough” could go directly to community colleges for a technical degree or a program leading to a four-year state college. Those who score even better would stay in secondary school two more years to prepare for four-year degree programs.

There is no mention of what would happen to those who don’t make it into one of these two groups. This is a formula for creating an apartheid system where the great majority of basic masses, particularly among the oppressed nationalities in the inner cities, would now be officially relegated to striving for vocational or community colleges at best, or discarded altogether. And it is perfectly consistent with the vision and direction of the public charter school movement, including Green Dot.

This is still a system with no future for the masses of poor and oppressed people in the urban cores of this country’s largest cities. Green Dot and this whole drive to radically transform the system of public education does not change that.

“They Made It, Why Couldn’t You?”

The rulers of this country believe they face a powerful compulsion, coming from the fundamental needs of this system, to raise the education level of the U.S. labor force as a whole. Not to enable everyone to become a “knowledge worker,” which they know is impossible, but in order to maintain this country’s competitiveness in the world economy as much as possible.

At the same time they confront the challenge of heading off potential upheaval in the face of a widening polarization between the masses at the bottom of this society and the rest of the population, which these changes cannot overcome. Eli Broad, a major capitalist funding Green Dot and many other charters, wrote that if they don’t make these changes, they “run the risk of creating an even larger gap between the middle class and the poor. This gap threatens our democracy, our society and the economic future of America.”⁸

The changes in public education that are on the way, we’re, told will “level the playing field,” with the implication that now if you fail, well, it’s your own fault. “We gave you a chance, but you didn’t take advantage of it.” But the hype that everyone will have the opportunity for a college-level career covers up the reality that in today’s capitalist-imperialist economy, 50% of the new jobs being created are in the minimum wage service sector. So what these changes are really going to contribute to is fostering a climate of public opinion that shifts the blame even more fully away from the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system onto the masses for their own “failure.”

And the small section of students who DO make it through the education gauntlet and into a college career will play a crucial role as models, ideological buffers that are proof the system works: “They made it, why couldn’t you?” This is going to create even sharper polarization within these oppressed communities, enabling politicians and police to marshal public opinion to justify writing off a whole section of youth. Green Dot is a “blueprint” for turning inner-city schools into fortified islands in the midst of an apartheid sea.

1. “Day 1 For the New Locke,” L.A. Times editorial, 9/8/08
2. “An Idea Whose Time Has Gone,” Washington Monthly, 2008/0804.
3. One of the first such public military charter schools is the Oakland Military Institute, proposed by Oakland, California Mayor Jerry Brown in 1999. 90% of its 1200 students are Black or Latino.
4. According to Don Fisher, who started the Gap stores and has given tens of millions of dollars to support KIPP Schools and other charter schools: “I’m a businessman, and I think education is a business, and I think each school is a separate entity—it’s not much different from a Gap store.”
5. A recently-published book by former Newsweek correspondent Donna Foote, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America, popularizes this trend by following four young teachers who spent a year teaching at Locke High.
6. “Testimony of Donna Leiberman on behalf of the NYCLU Regarding the Impact of School Suspensions, On Students’ Education Rights.”
7. Washington Post, 12/15/06.
8. Eli Broad, on the Broad Foundation website.