Public Schools, Climate Disasters, Workers’ Control
by Don Fitz / June 28th, 2025
When teachers’ union president Ray Cummings told the superintendent that her plan could put students in danger, he brought together problems of excluding workers from critical decisions and schemes to use climate disasters to privatize public schools.
On May 16, 2025 a tornado tore through predominantly Black north St. Louis, killing 5, and leaving thousands of homes, businesses and schools either destroyed or with roofs ripped off. A month later, many buildings still had blue tarps over the top as the only way to protect them from hot summer downpours.
Without consulting the teachers’ union, School Superintendent Millicent Borishade outlined a policy to move students from seven damaged buildings to other schools which were selected according to “bell schedules, proximity from the original schools, space utilization, athletics and principal input.”
Upon learning of the proposal, Ray Cummings, presidents of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 420 in St. Louis, wrote to the superintendent that it could result in serious conflicts between students. He explained that there is often mistrust between students from different neighborhoods. Cummings warned that violence could easily erupt by cramming such groups together.
Missouri AFT President Carron “CJ” Johnson told me during an interview that she agreed with Cummings that Borishade’s proposal “threatens to create unsafe conditions by consolidating students from different areas into overcrowded, unfamiliar environments, heightening tensions and security risks to those who may not be wearing the right color shoes for that neighborhood.” She also emphasized that St. Louis already has problems with school buses and that the administration should not be making the transportation situation worse.
But the superintendent’s plan would crowd Yeatman-Liddell Middle School into Gateway Middle, which has a capacity of 658 students. Their combined total would be 737 students. Johnson pointed out that “Dunbar Middle School never should have been closed and if it could be re-opened it could accommodate students from Yeatman-Liddell or any other school that would be able to enter it.”
The capacity of Miller Career Academy is 1013 students. A similarly dubious part of the superintendent’s measure would be to transfer students from two damaged schools to Miller, bringing its enrollment to 1253.
Superintendent Borishade relocated from Seattle to St. Louis in 2023. AFT’s president Johnson said that the superintendent “is not in tune with students, families or workers. She is not listening to people on the ground. She is not changing her narrative to fit with the people of St. Louis.”
One of the big concerns for Cummings and Johnson, as well as other union members and parents, is that schools hit hard by the May 2025 tornado may never be reopened and that the buildings could be sold to charter school operators. For years, pro-privatization groups such “Opportunity Trust” have provided money to those pushing charter schools in St. Louis. They try, and often succeed, in electing candidates to the St. Louis Board of Education (i.e., “School Board”) who typically advocate closing as many public schools as possible. Others run for the School Board to win approval for their own charter school.
Privatizers push hard to open charters in Black neighborhoods, claiming that Black parents must send their children to charter schools if they want them to learn how to read. The two great ironies of this argument are that (a) those coordinating such charter school schemes are typically white and (b) there is no evidence that Black children who attend Missouri charters have better reading scores than those attending public schools.
Critics have documented that charter schools represent a range of threats to public education. Charters typically do not require professional and non-professional staff to have the same level of degrees and qualifications as do public schools. As a result, they offer lower pay and fewer benefits to staff that may result in greater turn-around and less bonding with students.
Charters often offer fewer academic hours and extra-curricular activities as do public schools. They can “cream” students, meaning that they only admit students with the best academic records or fewest behavioral problems. Even if they do not “cream,” they are very likely to “dump” problem students back to public schools.
Charter schools may not test the proficiency of students the same way public schools do, meaning it is harder to evaluate their claims of success. Above all, decision-making processes for charters are not done by publicly elected boards, meaning that parents and others may have little to no ability to influence governing bodies set up to increase corporate profits.
When Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans in 2005 privatizers smelled a gold mine. The May 7, 2025 webinar on “Defending Public Education” was co-hosted by the Green Party of St. Louis and AFT Local 420. Dave Cash, President of the United Teachers of New Orleans, described how the “near total privatization of New Orleans public schools had devastating consequences for communities, teaching staff and students.”
Like St. Louis, New Orleans teachers have had a hard time getting decision-makers to listen to them, a task made more challenging to those organizing a union when the privatizers are motivated by profit rather than concern with education. Like New Orleans, those in St. Louis are worried that those interested in undermining public education will let no catastrophe be overlooked as an opportunity to destroy what should be our right as citizens. As climate-related crises escalate, so will openings to dismantle public services.
The problem of top administrators ignoring sound advice from those who carry out daily tasks brings up the very old question of “workers control.” Should unions limit themselves to “bread and butter” issues like pay, benefits, sick leave and vacation? Or, should unions seek more control over the work lives and decision-making power for employees? It is a core question of whether working people should accept their roles as mere cogs in the wheel of production or seek to humanize labor by defining their own jobs.
One of the best known current advocate of workers’ control is Michael Albert, who originated the idea of “participatory economics” or “parecon.” Albert emphasizes ways tasks can be shared so that there are “more and more people having a more and more appropriate level of say over their own lives.”
Historically, the concept of workers control has been emphasized as a safety and health issue. People working in factories are worried about injuries from unsafe use of tools or speed-up causing accidents and injuries. But now that a huge number of union members are in professional jobs, workers’ control applies to issues such as stress, treatment by administrators and how work affects the public – such as students who could be endangered by poorly thought out policies that could increase clashes at school.
The dispute over what should be done for St. Louis schools following the climate disaster has deeper ramifications than might meet the eye. More that just asking how students should be relocated after the 2025 tornado, it brings up the question of how decisions should be made. Teachers know student strengths and weaknesses because they are in touch with them daily. It may not be enough to say school bureaucrats must listen to teachers. Is it time to establish veto power for elected worker representatives who are themselves directly affect by decisions and represent others who are similarly affected?
Charter Schools and “Paperism”
by Shawgi Tell / June 28th, 2025
It is standard practice for most charter school owners, operators, promoters, commentators, reporters, and even some “critics” of charter schools to habitually describe charter schools, word-for-word, as they are spelled out in state charter school laws (while often overlooking inconvenient or unflattering descriptions as well). Even those who try to be somewhat nuanced or grounded in their descriptions of charter schools engage in this pattern.
This is “paperism”—dogmatically repeating what appears on paper without deeply thinking about, let alone questioning, how charter schools actually operate in practice. Part of this stems from an ossified prejudice that says there is no gap between charter school rhetoric and charter school reality. Whatever appears on paper is automatically assumed to be correct and indisputable. One is supposed to instantly believe what they read in state charter school laws while ignoring how charter schools work in real life. In this way, words on paper are reified to the extreme, thereby fostering anti-consciousness.
Writers who enumerate the differences between charter schools, public schools, and private schools in order to “educate the public” about their “educational options” are one of the groups most guilty of paperism. Such writers pop up regularly and nonchalantly repeat all kinds of things that bear little resemblance to how charter schools really operate. More often than not, such forces promote a neoliberal view of phenomena, thereby undermining the public interest and a socially responsible path forward. Such a view distorts reality by mixing facts with myths, half-truths, omissions, and falsehoods.
In doing so, many charter school promoters and commentators present a distorted view of charter schools to the public, causing many to reach comclusions about charter schools that are different from the reality of countless charter schools. For example, charter school supporters and commentators consistently promote half-truths and disinformation about student admission and enrollment practices (including “lotteries”), tuition policies, teacher credentials and qualifications, funding sources, the nature and philosophy of high-stakes standardized tests, student achievement, the origin and rationale for charter schools, the “publicness” of charter schools, the condition, history, and programmatic offerings in traditional public schools, the nature of charter school accountability, the meaning of “choice” versus rights, so-called “innovation” in charter schools, and the factors common to all charter schools no matter how “different” they are said to be from each other.
Charter school supporters and commentators do not present the whole story so that people are properly informed and oriented. They regularly overlook many important facts and relationships. Coherence, context, connections, and correct conclusions become major casualties in this flawed scheme designed to wreck public opinion.
Importantly, charter school promoters and commentators fail to analyze, let alone reject, a fend-for-yourself, egocentric, consumerist, competitive, “free market” model of education. They do not see education as a modern social responsibility and basic right that must be guaranteed in practice. In their view, it is superb that parents are “customers,” not humans, who have to “shop” for a school the same way they shop for shoes and hope they find something good. A brutal dog-eat-dog world of competing consumers (”winners” and “losers”) is seen as the best of all worlds. In this outmoded set-up, all the pressure is put on parents to figure out everything. They have to ask a million questions, verify a million things, and hold tons of people accountable every day in an exhausting, never-ending, up-hill battle—all while trying to earn a living in an increasingly chaotic, expensive, and alienating world. The unspoken assumption is that zero social responsibility for basic needs like education in a modern society is somehow acceptable. You are entirely on your own in the name of “choice,” “freedom,” and “rugged individualism” in this arrangement that privileges private property over all else. There are no guarantees or certainty in this kind of world. Thus, if your charter school is one of the many that fail and close every year in America—oh well, better luck next time!
The racist and imperialist doctrine of Social Darwinism is taken to the extreme in this old set-up in which only “the fittest survive.” Meaningful accountability and redress are largely absent in this divisive context. This arrangement is also buttressed by a set of ideas that uncritically presupposes that all forms of government are inevitably bad, dangerous, undesirable; the risk-taking ego-centric consumer is the end-all and be-all, the center of the universe.
To be sure, these neoliberal forces do not possess, let alone defend, a modern definition of “public” or the “public interest.” They do not see charter schools as the privatized education arrangements that they are. They ignore or downplay the fact that charter schools differ from public schools in their structure, operation, governance, oversight, funding, philosophy, and aims. They casually treat deregulated, segregated, unaccountable, de-unionized charter schools operated by unelected private persons as if they were public schools. Despite dozens of differences between charter schools and public schools, many charter school supporters, researchers, and commentators continue to irresponsibly assert that both types of schools are public schools, as if “public” can mean anything one wants it to mean. Key differences between these two types of schools magically disappear in this ahistorical approach to phenomena.
The gap between charter school rhetoric and charter school reality has been wide for 34 years. Relentless top-down neoliberal disinformation about charter schools has left many rudderless and confused. This will not change until the pressure to not investigate phenomena is actively rejected. Disinformation and anticonsciousness can take hold, spread, intensify, and wreak havoc only when serious uninterrupted investigation disappears.
Special Note
On the question of the origin of charter schools as being schools that supposedly started out decades ago to empower teachers by giving them the “flexibility,” “freedom,” and “autonomy” to “innovate” and “think outside the box,” it is revealing that 34 years later, 95% of charter schools are not started, owned, or operated by teachers. “Innovate” is just a another way of undermining teachers unions and the institution of public education in a modern society. “Innovation” includes demonizing public schools and attacking collective bargaining agreements that enshrine the valid claims of workers.
About 90% of charter schools are deunionized. It is thus no accident that charter school teachers less experienced and less credentialed than public school teachers, and they are also paid less while working longer days and years than their public school counterparts. Not surprisingly, the teacher turnover rate in charter schools is very high coast to coast. This constant upheaval invariably undermines learning, continuity, stability, and collegiality.
More charter schools equals more problems for education, society, and the economy. Charter schools on the whole do not solve any major problems, they just exacerbate them. Privatization makes everything worse. Fully fund public schools and keep all private interests out of public education at all times. No public wealth of any kind should be funneled to private entities.
