Three More From March 4

On Friday I asked some 'rades and friends for quickie first-hand reports on what has probably been the most significant national mass protest of the Obama era to date, the March 4 mobilization to protect public education from cutbacks and privatization. One Associated Press report said, "Millions of students, teachers and parents rallied in schools and college campuses across California and many other states to protest deep spending cuts to schools and universities."

Yesterday Rahim on the Docks and I posted reports on Newark, NJ and Berkeley, CA respectively. Ovenight, some more folks kicked in short reports: Mirk from the other side of San Francisco Bay, Anne from Austin, TX and Roadsigns contributer Napolitana Piemontese, who works in the NYC school system.

One thing these reports make clear is that while the nature and focus of the actions and the main group participating varied from place to place, there was, and is, a solid foundation of anger and determination not to pay for a crisis the rich created which promises more and better in months to come.

SF: No Ifs, Ands Or Buts!

The early morning in SF saw little kids (kindergarteners on up) marching up and down 24th Street and Mission Street as Buena Vista Elementary and Bryant Elementary went out en masse.

In the afternoon: The gathering in San Francisco was really fantastic. Estimates of up to 20,000 people (at least).

One of the biggest was from 24th and Mission to the Civic Center. I marched with San Francisco Community School--3rd to 8th graders--which led the march from 24th and Mission. 9 and 10-year-olds holding mini-bullhorns led the chants:

What Does SOS Mean? Save Our Schools!
Money For Education Not For War, Tax The Rich Not The Poor!

and (perfect for elementary and middle school kids)

No Ifs, Ands Or Buts--Stop All The Budget Cuts!

300 kids and teachers from Mission went out despite the threats from the school district. So did kids from Monroe Elementary, Marshall Elementary, Balboa High School, June Jordan, John O'Connell High School.

Hundreds came from City College, same from SF State which brought huge puppets. 10 buses came from De Anza College. Teachers were there from every school.

The marchers filled the streets from one side to another over at least 15 blocks.

Perhaps one of the starkest moments came when we marched past a private Friends School. On one side of the heavy wired fence, locked in, were those kids. On our side--an entire community.

And it was an entire community, demanding their right to education. And it was kids who had never been in a demonstration before feeling the power of being out in the streets.

A side note--organic urban farmers who had been given what they believed to be good fertilizer from the city (and then learned that it was toxic) went to City Hall in Hazmat suits and dumped tons of the stuff all over the place.

We'll see what happens.

[Some great photos from SF , including one of Mirk, here.]

Austin: Cuts For Staff, Hikes For Students...
And a $2 Mill Raise For The Coach!

We had more than 200 students, staff, and instructional workers turn out on campus at University of Texas--Austin. We gathered for a march, rally, and speak-out organized by the Stop the Cuts Coalition which includes: the Texas State Employees Union, Anthropology Graduate Student Association, Student Friends of the Cactus Café, University Democrats, MEChA, International Socialist Organization, ¡ella pelea!, UT Student Prison Caucus, Amnesty International--UT Chapter, and Join the Impact--Longhorn chapter.

We're seeing major cuts to staff, lecturers, grad student admissions, community and student services, plus larger class sizes, fewer classes, and rising tuitions BUT this is opportunistic. The administration at UT-Austin decided to grab jobs, cut programs, and freeze staff salaries in order to have money to spend on a raises for a few (a $2 million raise for the football coach), highly speculative research hires which they think will increase their prestige, and new facilities. UT is running a full-page ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline "Texas Wants to Take You Higher." (We don't think this is what Sly had in mind.)

Students and workers are joining together to fight against an administration that sets priorities based on privilege, private money, and exclusivity. The action on March 4 is just a start towards mobilizing and organizing our campus.

NYC: P.O'd And Ready To Fight

I attended a rally outside a board meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in NYC. Folks had marched there from a rally at the Governor's Midtown office but I missed that part.

The main focuses were the threats to make high school students pay for their own metrocards (generally thought to be a shadow play between the City/Mayor and the MTA) and the probably more real plan to lay off station agents in dozens of subway stations. So it wasn't strictly a public ed focus but a broader "defend public services/jobs" focus. I'm not sure who put that all together but the Transport Workers Union was out in force with placards and union jackets; they even had people collecting the placards as the rally petered out.

One very unusual feature was a rousing speech by the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police union, pointing out the centrality of station agents to police work and public safety, and noting that (I paraphrase) "our members may be on the other side of the barricades here, but in out hearts, we're with you."

The crowd of a thousand or so (I'm told it was much bigger for the march) ranged from teenagers to seniors, majority people of color, with high school and college students, transit workers and a few teachers. We were, of course, in metal pens on the sidewalk and part of the street outside the FIT building, with one side open for exit and entrance. As the hearing was about to start, and we were chanting (slogans didn't seem very thought out), and it wasn't clear what else we could do, some young white anarchists tried to agitate people to bum-rush the hearing. They then marched around to a back entrance, whereupon the cops closed off that route by placing pens on the one open side.

This effectively trapped the rest of us, which of course is an unlawful detention prohibited by the US Constitution, as many of us informed the police rather vociferously. After about 10 minutes of us chanting "Let us go," and some shoving of barriers and tussling with the police, a white guy in a suit (some thought it was the PBA president but I wasn't sure) told the cops to open that pen and let us out.

A friend who is TWU Local 100 and I agreed that, given the relative lack of publicity within union circles, the size and spirit of the turnout showed that people are p.o.'d and ready to fight.

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March 4: The Tide Is Rising--A First-Hand Report

Perhaps the most important single protest of the Obama era so far took place yesterday--the national day of action in defense of public education. Despite the huge differences in specifics from pre-K to grad school and from state to state, there were hundreds of protests around the country in response to an initial call, from Cali, the epicenter of the current wave of struggle.

These battles are the most widespread organized resistance to tuition hikes, savage cutbacks and privatization initiatives, all fueled by the economic meltdown. Somehow the "green shoots" the administration and media so like to talk about appear to be unable to push up through the mountainous state and local budget deficits and education is one of the first targets.

Although there's a lot of day after reportage, the build-up took place largely under the media's radar, despite endorsements from the likes of the national AFL-CIO. One noteworthy occurrence suggests real concern and divisions in the ruling clas--that's the feature article published March 3, the day before the protest, in the NY Times, on rebarbative "education reform expert" Diane Ravitch, who is now recanting the pro-privatization, pro-charter school, pro-standardized testing views she had spent decades pushing. Clearly some realize that a total collapse of the US educational system is not in the interests of the ruling class.

Anyhow, I want to get to cases. Here is a inspiring and moving summation of some of what happened in Berkeley, just sent me by Liz, a 'rade of mine who is in grad school there.

It Looked Like Movement To Me!

What I saw yesterday at UC Berkeley looked like "movement" because so many different kinds of people were moving in sync: anarchists who want to shut it down and occupy; students who want to lobby in Sacramento; laid off high-school teachers who want to teach; Asian and Pacific Island students demanding the right to education for immigrants; custodians who want to send their own kids college; 10 year-olds chanting "We want P.E." Black, brown, Asian, and white. Students, parents, teachers, and workers. Movement is when one student who prefers to march and chant, has friends who are shutting down the highway.

The organizing was broad and deep, connecting radical students with identity groups, with unions with faculty and staff, and community groups. It was highly coordinated - centrally democratic and drawing on institutions of student organization and unions. It was also spontaneous and decentralized. Many groups organized their own actions behind their own banners, in their own style, in their own language, choosing their own targets.

We marched in a group of 30 law students through our law school, through the library and the main lecture hall screaming "Whose University? Our University!" and "Join us! Join us!" When we passed our building's custodian in the hallway, she yelled "Si se puede" for us. The librarians chanted quietly. We "took the street" outside the law school, shutting it down for about 10 minutes, and marched to the main campus protest with our banner "Berkeley Law: We Object." It was not radical, but it was a crack in the wall of business class solidarity that holds up conservative law school culture. Chanting in the law library felt a little bit like movement.

The mobilizations at the law school in the fall attracted mostly white students with labor organizing backgrounds, targeting the law school Dean and protesting the law school fee hikes (we're going to pay $8,000 more next year to the education loan industrial complex). This semester women of color leaders organized in advance, taking care to build strong relationships among students, with radical staff at the law school, and with leaders on the undergrad campus. Women of color at the helm focused the message on "We are public education" - what it means to be a school for low-income students, for students of color, and immigrants. Many of the students who joined the mobilizations yesterday were newly politicized, new leaders, and students of color.

The march from UC Berkeley to Oakland was an exodus of students pouring off campus into the city. We were joined along the way by groups of kids and parents. The faces were Black, brown Asian and white. The sight of downtown Oakland filled with the masses was beautiful to all of us. I wasn't there for the protests around Oscar Grant (young black man murdered by police last winter) but people were saying they felt connected to that protests.

Two of the best movement moments of my day happened on the train on my way back to Berkeley. A groups of kids in braces, Asian and white, looking a little bit punk and a little bit like chubby children saw my sign and said "Yeah, money for schools not for war!" They told me they staged a walk-out at their school and they were kind of bummed that only 7 kids walked out. I told them 7 kids was more than ever walked out of my middle school. They agreed that next time there would be more.

On my way out of the train, the operator paused before pulling out of the track to talk to me. She was an older African American woman and she wanted to know how the protest went. She wanted to make sure I knew that slave owners denied education to slaves. She wanted to tell everyone on the train platform that government divests from education in order to suppress political dissent, so that the masses will be poor and helpless and too uneducated to do anything about it. She said we have to fight back, and then moved the train to the next station.

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