Interview by Luis Meiners for the International Socialist League
Monique Dols is an NYC-based socialist and early childhood educator who has been involved in global justice, antiwar, and solidarity movements. Monique is a member of the American Federation of Teachers and a supporter of the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), the social justice caucus of the United Federation of Teachers. She writes and translates frequently about labor and social movements in Puerto Rico.
As an educator and activist, what is your assessment of the government´s response to the pandemic?
In the past month, politicians and educational leaders at every level have showed their inability to act effectively to address the needs of ordinary people in this pandemic. They demonstrate something that socialist feminists have been saying for quite some time: care workers, those who actually do the work of social reproduction of all stripes have a much better idea than the so called leaders of what our communities need.
Trump has ultimate power to make or break the situation–he could with the stroke of a pen commandeer supplies towards NYC and other cities in need right now, he could direct industrial production towards creating ventilators, PPE and medicine for the crisis, as NYSNA has rightly demanded. For that matter he could nationalize any number of services including health—but instead he is breaking the situation on every level. Trump denies science. He is genocidal, period.
However we also have to understand that our local politicians also participated in a form of science denial throughout this crisis. Mayor DeBlasio denied the severity at every step of this crisis and his administration continues to mishandle it. He has mayoral control of the schools and he refused to make a plan to safely suspend classes for weeks, he refused to close the schools as school districts in cities with far fewer cases of COVID-19 did close. As a result didn’t help to take the steps to flatten the curve of the pandemic in NY.
Governor Cuomo helped get us into this mess because over the past several years he has led the New York State wide attack on the public hospital system, which has made us so much more vulnerable in this crisis. He is responsible for the significant reduction in staffing and of number of public hospital beds and now so many have and will die because of that. The crisis we are living right now is a direct result of this criminal negligence. As of today we are up to 4,000 dead in NYC and if they had listened to the science and the care workers earlier, we would have fewer deaths. This is completely ravaging working class New York.
What was the role played by rank and file teachers and organizers in the closure of the schools in NY? Could you describe this process?
At the beginning of March when the first COVID19 case was reported in New York State we started pushing our school administrators to take the problem more seriously and come up with a proactive plan to deal with the looming crisis. We said we need to have better health and sanitation protocols in schools, we need a plan to distribute materials and electronics, we need a plan for school closure because it’s not a matter of if, but when school should be closed.
But when educators would speak up we were often treated as hysterical and overreacting women, like we were getting out of our lane, and being alarmist. We faced a situation in which the very institution, which was supposed to keep our children safe, had completely and utterly fail to do so. So we took the next step to organize a job action.
MORE organized a sick out. A sick out is a tactic developed by workers for whom it is illegal to advocate for a strike or a work stoppage. In New York State it is illegal for public workers to strike. So we encouraged our members to call in sick. We had a conference call to organize the sick out that had over 500 educators from every borough on the call. This was a big deal for us because we are a small social justice caucus in a very top-down and monolithic union. It was wildly successful. So many educators notified that they would be out sick and so many parents were keeping their kids home that the Mayor finally suspended classes.
But he did so in a very reckless way. He announced it on a Sunday evening, effective the next day. He had no plan to take care of the children of first responders. They had no meaningful plan to tend to the needs of our homeless students, our students who rely on school for food and other critical services. Most teachers didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye to their students or give them anything to take home with them because as of Friday there was school on Monday. So it was a victory for us that we forced the city to shut down schools earlier than they had wanted to and we know we saved lives.
But it was a partial victory because we were not strong enough to force them to have a better plan in place that would have tended to the needs of the most vulnerable among us. And unfortunately our union leadership didn’t do that either. And now we are seeing the impact of that, and those who are most oppressed in our society are paying the ultimate price.
Unfortunately, our union, the UFT still won’t recognize the critical role that MORE played in organizing the sickout because their narrative is that it was their threat of a lawsuit that forced the mayor to cave. They are still stuck in their old ways of business unionism. But those of us who work in schools and know how ill equipped both the city as well as our union was to handle the crisis know it was a rebellion from below that finally forced our classes to be suspended. And we are building an alternative from below in this crisis.
Could you describe the general situation of the education system in the US?
The past 4 decades have been full of attacks on public education in the US. It has been a process overall of a slow erosion of our rights as educators as well as the rights of students. This slow erosion has been punctuated by moments when disaster capitalism was employed for neoliberal education “deform” as we say here.
In the US, we have some of the most unequal and segregated school systems in the world as well as a system that is extremely uneven and deregulated. The main edges of the attacks on education have been budget cuts, the regulation and stultification of schooling through standardized testing regimes, the policing and repression of students who are disproportionately Black and Brown known as the school-to-prison pipeline, and privatization efforts through the introduction of charter schools, which are publically funded but privately managed schools. This process has been paired with the destruction of the social safety net and health care system, which schools and educators have had to step in to help carry the burden of.
Teachers have been a major part of the strikes in the US over the past few years. Can you give a brief assessment of this?
In the spring of 2018, an illegal strike of educators in West Virginia initiated a strike wave in states across the United States. These strikes were significant for a number of reasons. First of all, they largely started and spread throughout states that are today widely considered to be conservative states, but actually have unique radical working class histories. These buried histories played a role in the outbreak of the strikes.
These strikes were also explosive, responding to years of neo-liberal attacks and releasing years of pent up anger at the terrible state of public education. They were lead by largely non-unionized educators who took over state capitol buildings and made political in addition to economic demands. The strikes revealed the often hidden (to some) underbelly of poverty in the rural United States. In many cases demands included cross class demands for better wages for other even more vulnerable sectors of the working class. They also pointed to the need to tax industry as well as the rich in order to pay for public education. There was a spirit of rebellion, solidarity and an explosion of class anger that has not been present in many of the strikes in recent decades that were controlled by more established and entrenched union bureaucracies.
What are your thoughts of online teaching/learning in the midst of the pandemic and moving forward?
Distance learning exacerbates inequalities that existed before this crisis. The first problem of course is about access, access to computers and tablets, families who have access sharing devices among many people, and consistent access to Wi-Fi. But there is also a question of computer and tech literacy, which has many class characteristics. Some schools were able to transition into distance learning much easier than others because they were better resourced and already had elements of distance learning in place, technology, platforms that staff and students and families were familiar with. But for many public schools this is a completely unfamiliar world.
There are also questions of content involved. Once a student is able to access the learning what are they being asked to do? Is it meaningful? Is it relevant? Or is it just a continuation of business as usual? For most students it’s a continuation of business as usual and this isn’t particularly great in “normal” times but now it’s a disaster. The character of education under capitalism as a sorting tool, in which some kids learn to rule and others learn to be ruled, is unveiled by the pandemic crisis. The politicians are just so crudely concerned with controlling and containing working class kids and their families and it’s gross to watch. Many of our students are now being asked to work longer at home then when they are at school, and for many it is very meaningless work. It’s adding more work for the caretakers of the family and is adding pressure to already stressed families.
I don’t think that exclusive distance learning is ideal for anyone, but for the younger child it is damaging. Children, and humans in general need social interaction, as is an essential piece of learning. Children learn through play. We should not impose alienated concepts of play and work on children. If we want to protect our children as much as possible in this period of immense suffering we should be thinking about how we can support their play, and consider it their work as well as their therapy.
Now is not a time for us to continue to do things that don’t make sense for out students. We need to dispense with the curriculum of the past and begin to rethink the role of education on a wide scale. We need to arm our students to make sense of their worlds, not to just grind on and accept them at face value.
What demands are teachers fighting for at present?
I can only speak from the perspective of NYC. We have a lot of demands. We are being attacked from all angles, so there are a lot of demands. There are huge cuts in educational spending right now, hour by hour we are learning more about what the politicians are doing, how they are using this crisis to push for more. It is pure shock doctrine, in which they are taking advantage of our trauma to push forward attacks at a dizzying pace. You can read our recent statement, which is a call for a slow down of academic expectations, application of trauma informed principles for social-emotional learning, lowering the stakes by canceling all grades, evaluations and assessments, a ramping up public health initiatives as well as a rescheduling of our cancelled spring break.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
The gestures of solidarity that I have seen over the past several weeks have been so moving. At the beginning of the crisis I was communicating with my friend Mercedes Martínez-Padilla who is the president of the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico. We were coordinating to get the last of the funds raised for their Earthquake Survivor Solidarity Fund. But when she realized what was happening here, instead of accepting those final funds she insisted on us keeping the funds here in NY to donate for PPE for nurses, which we donated to several efforts including one for NYSNA. The FMPR, which has been fighting disaster capitalism for more than a decade in the US colony, has had a lot of experience with dealing in situations of acute crisis, whether it’s fighting Washington’s debt crisis, hurricanes or earthquakes. I will never forget the gesture of solidarity that Mercedes offered us. Her words were a powerful reminder: “Welcome to our world. Just know that you are not alone.” Every day I remind myself of that and remember how important it is that we accompany each other with solidarity and comradeship in this struggle.