Steve Light: As $1 billion is earmarked for stadium, New York City teachers mark two years without a contract

As $1 billion is earmarked for stadium: New York City teachers mark two years without a contract
by Steve Light
World Socialist Web Site

As the political establishment in New York City remains firmly focused on the profit-driven scramble to build a stadium for the Jets football team—at the cost of $1 billion to taxpayers—the city’s 80,000 school teachers are marking the end of two years without a collective bargaining agreement.

While insisting that the city is too broke to afford any more funding for schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is prepared to hand over massive subsidies and valuable Manhattan real estate to fellow billionaire and Jets owner Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV.

This is the reality of political and social relations in New York. The gap between the city’s overwhelmingly poor and working class population, on the one hand, and the world’s greatest concentration of multimillionaires and billionaires, on the other, has never been greater.

Public policy is determined by the interests of this wealthy elite, at the expense of the majority. The city is ending the current fiscal year this month with a $3.3 billion surplus, yet the Bloomberg administration is vowing no change in course from a fiscal policy based on budget austerity and tax cuts. Meanwhile, the trade union organizations that historically have claimed to represent the working class, including the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), have been reduced to impotence.

The lack of a teachers’ contract is only one of the symptoms of the abject neglect of the country’s largest public education system, situated in America’s wealthiest city.

The New York City schools system is failing. Its dropout rate has not dipped much below the most recent figure of 32 percent for 2001.

According to a 2005 City Department of Education (DOE) report following the class scheduled to leave high school in 2001, just over half of the students—52 percent—were able to graduate in four years. Graduation rates (including General Equivalency Diplomas [GEDs] achieved outside of school) rose to 63 percent in five years and 68 percent in seven years (when most had turned 21).

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