Seattle's Garfield High School Student Walkout and March Against Budget Cuts

"Seattle Public Schools have seen the loss of librarians, much-needed family service counselors and college admissions counselors, the reduction of the arts to “art on a cart” and school principals and staff making difficult decisions on the number of teachers they can budget for. School facilities are in poor condition and many buildings are not safe in terms of earthquake code."

"The students of Garfield High School issued a statement on their Facebook page. It goes as follows:

"We are Washington State Public Schools students tired of the constant cuts to our education. We are the people who have been affected most by these cuts, and we are showing that we care. For too long, this stat…e’s budget has been balanced on the backs of its students. Apparently, our representatives in Olympia have forgotten that the Washington Constitution says that funding education is this state’s “paramount duty”. This is a student voice reminding our legislature of that fact. And also of this one: We are this country’s future. We will vote. And we will hold them accountable." 

"We have two primary goals we hope to accomplish:
-We want to stop the constant cuts to education that have hurt our school and other schools in the state.
-We want to insert a student voice into the political discourse in issues regarding education."

Lessons from the New Corporate Schooling

"All of this is connected to the system’s growing need for a laboring population that is highly regimented, with only a relatively few students being tracked into more quality schooling. Traditionally, capitalist societies have seen education largely in functionalist terms, as meant to fit students for future occupations. Today this has to do with fitting many of them (particularly in the case of inner-city kids) not for work as such, but for a life of military-style discipline or incarceration."

Chart 1. National Defense as a Percentage of Education (K-12), 1999–2009

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 3.15.5 (Government Consumption Expenditures and Gross Investment by Function).

Neoliberal Education Restructuring by Pauline Lipman

"There is a long and complex road ahead with no clear outcome. But education is the frontline in class warfare by the rich against the working class. The assault on public education, teachers, and their unions has been evolving over the past thirty years as part of the neoliberal restructuring of the global capitalist economy, but the current crisis of capitalism has accelerated this assault. Education has been a key sector in the neoliberalization of social policy and the neoliberal political economy of cities. The resistance to these policies has been broad at classroom and school levels and in a growing movement of education activists allied with parents and students. Education, for those in power, plays a key role in social reproduction of the labor force and in ideological legitimation of the social order. Those who, conversely, have seen education as a way to strengthen democratic participation in society and human liberation have always contested these goals. There is a rich history of people of color, women, workers, educators, and social movements fighting for democratic, inclusive, liberatory education. The crisis and the accelerated assault on teachers and public education are sharpening the contest over the right to public education and the role of education in society."

"In this article, I review the neoliberal project to restructure education, particularly its relationship to neoliberal urban development, and responses to it. I discuss implications of privatization and austerity measures for public education and its function in social reproduction. I argue that this crisis is a moment of danger but also opportunity, not only to defend public education, but also to reshape it as part of the struggle for a new social order based on human liberation."