Voters expel profiteers from public schools

Special to the World

This article was reprinted from the January 17, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

WILKINSBURG, Pa. - People in this "rust bowl" town are still savoring their victory in the Nov. 4 election that swept from office a Republican-dominated borough council and school board, and elected a slate of grassroots activists committed to reversing a costly experiment in school privatization.

Voters used a long-handled broom, electing the only African American mayor in Allegheny County's 130 separate municipalities. Wilkinsburg residents delivered the final blow by defeating a "law-and-order" former FBI agent running for district judge.

Despite their no-holds-barred efforts to stay in power, Wilkinsburg Republicans and their Democratic Party allies crashed and burned. Voters defied cold and snow to turn out in near-record numbers for an off-year election and endorsed a progressive, anti-corporate, anti-racist agenda. While public education dominated the debate, other front- burner issues were housing, jobs, taxes, government services and control of the police.

Progressive activists in Wilkinsburg began the fight to take back their town three years ago when the school board decided to privatize Turner Elementary, one of the town's three elementary schools. Residents joined with the Wilkinsburg Education Association to organize Wilkinsburg Residents Against Profiteering (WRAP).

WRAP mobilized working-class residents around education issues. It was guided by two rules: First, tell the truth about the schools and the town and, second, treat teachers as advocates of quality education. Alternative Public Schools (APS) - the Nashville-based company hired to run Turner - proclaimed loudly and often that teachers and their union were the main obstacles to reforming Wilkinsburg's schools, an obstacle they boasted they would remove.

On the contrary - WRAP candidates took all four vacant school board seats. They joined with one holdover, Karen Payne, to create a pro-public education majority on the nine-member board. Payne consistently voted against school privatization, and the first act of the new board was to elect her president.

Sometime within the next several months, the board will bargain a contract with the teacher's union for the first time in four years. With the help of WRAP, the board is embarking on an ambitious program to make quality public schools the hub of the town.

Members of the borough council were sworn in Jan. 5 with the promise of making the voters' demands their agenda. As a result of the November election, there is a new majority at the borough building - four reform Democrats, including two WRAP candidates, join holdover Astrid Ware to create a majority on the nine-member council.

Among the victors was Denise Winebrenner Edwards, Pittsburgh correspondent for the People's Weekly World and chair of the Western Pennsylvania District of the Communist Party USA, who will now represent the Third Ward. She easily defeated incumbent Republican Sara Beth Walkney despite desperate GOP red-baiting aimed at her and the entire WRAP slate.

"They never blinked," Edwards said of her running mates. "The Republicans put scurrilous, anti-communist leaflets on every doorstep. They red-baited us during a news conference in borough council chambers. Of course, we were worried. But my running mates said, 'Don't worry, Denise. This is just nonsense. They are desperate.'"

There were cheers election night as the returns rolled in. "For whatever reason, Third Ward returns were the last to be counted and, as the evening wore on, I started preparing my concession speech," Edwards said.

"A group of teachers were over in the corner tallying the votes. One of them shouted, 'Denise! You've won!' Everyone cheered. I can tell you, it was quite a moment."

The election night party, Edwards said, "was Wilkinsburg: half African American, half white, kids and retirees, men and women. The restaurant manager told us they had never seen anything like it."

Edwards described the celebration as a gathering of "the foot soldiers who had struggled for well over two years to produce the victory, an army of dedicated classroom teachers, concerned parents and trade unionists who had phone-banked, gone door-to-door, warning residents of the danger to public education from greedy privatizers, and getting out the vote."

WRAP volunteers had covered every polling place, determined to guard against fraud or outright thievery. "This was a slam-dunk vote against school privatization, not only in Wilkinsburg but for all of Pennsylvania," Edwards told the World. "It was a victory over the cynicism and defeatism created by a political system so corrupted by corporate cash that many voters have simply stopped casting their ballots."

Edwards said the Wilkinsburg election proved that a grassroots, labor-community coalition can defeat extremist Republicans at the ballot box "no matter how much money they have, no matter how many dirty tricks they pull. Voters are hungry for issues, serious debate on how to answer the rust bowl crisis, not personalities," she said.

Wilkinsburg, a community of 22,000 adjacent to Pittsburgh, has been a stronghold of the ultra-right for many decades. In the 1930s, there was an active Ku Klux Klan; in the 1950s it was seen as good pickings for the John Birch Society. Today, it is a center for right-wing Christian fundamentalists for all of western Pennsylvania.

Wilkinsburg was once virtually all white. Now the white population tends to be older retirees while the younger newcomers are Black. Thus, the school population is 95 percent African American.

In many ways, the town typifies communities decimated by the shutdown of steel mills and the closing of factories in the Monongahela-Allegheny and Ohio River valleys. In a town covering 2.5 square miles, there are 2,000 abandoned properties as the steel corporations and Mellon Bank took the money and ran.

The moving force for Wilkinsburg school privatization was the millionaire Republican landlord and school board member Brian Magan, whose children attend Catholic schools. Magan has since been implicated in a tax scandal and was forced to step down from his school board post.

The Republicans were able to preserve their grip on the borough and the school board because the Democratic Party was headed by a right-winger who favored school privatization. Eventually she was removed and replaced by a former steelworker, a change that helped set the stage for the November victory.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge had visited Wilkinsburg soon after APS took over Turner Elementary. Ridge endorsed the privatization scheme as the answer for plummeting test scores in Wilkinsburg's underfunded, overcrowded and dilapidated public schools.

But the fightback against the scheme was already in motion. Teachers at Turner - members of the National Education Association (NEA) - came to Edwards and her husband George, a retired steelworker, lifelong Communist and an activist in the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR), asking for their help.

Edwards is a 20-year resident of Wilkinsburg. She was a member of the Steelworkers union when she became the first woman to complete the millwright apprenticeship program at the Edgar Thompson Works of U.S. Steel. She quit in 1985 when she became a World correspondent. In 1992, she ran as an independent for Congress against Rick Santorum, now an ultra-right U.S. senator. Several unions and the National Organization for Women endorsed her at that time.

So when the Wilkinsburg chapter of the NEA approached them, the Edwards' were ready. "We told the teachers we would be glad to help out. When we first met to form WRAP, we had a discussion of the name. I suggested 'Wilkinsburg Residents Against Privatization.' But someone said, 'Let's call it Wilkinsburg Residents Against Profiteering,'" Edwards said. "That caught the militant, anti-big business spirit of the movement and the name stuck."

WRAP elected as their first president Lenora Olday, an African American woman whose children attend public schools. Anne McLenore, a woman leader of the United Needletrades Industry and Textile Employees who chairs the Pittsburgh chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, was elected secretary-treasurer.

The United Steelworkers of America, the Allegheny County Central Labor Council and NEA provided thousands of dollars and generous in-kind contributions. The NEA mobilized an army of 100 classroom teachers for phone banking and door- to-door canvassing.

"It was a labor-community coalition from the very beginning," Edwards said. "We had protesters at school board meetings. When the school board met in executive session, we would take over the meetings and have a pro and con discussion on privatization."

Edwards said that despite these activities, "the deal was already done" and the steamrolling had begun. Only two of the nine board members were consistently opposed to privatization. APS took over at Turner in September 1995.

Meanwhile, WRAP prepared for the 1995 election with the aim of ousting the privatizers. In the primary election, WRAP candidates won four out of the five board nominations. "It looked like we were headed in the right direction but the campaign was being run from Harrisburg by a professional campaign manager who was afraid of introducing any issues," Edwards said. "He thought it was 'too risky.' We were barely able to bring out a position against privatization."

This weakened the campaign and WRAP won only one seat. "I made a point of writing a letter to the steel union and the teachers union that we should have more control, including control of the purse strings," Edwards added.

The lesson was taken to heart. WRAP began preparing immediately for 1997. Meanwhile, things went from bad to worse in the school system: a $650,000 deficit run up by APS and test scores at Turner falling two years behind the publicly-administered schools.

As parent anger mounted, foes of privatization filed a lawsuit based on the Pennsylvania State Constitution and the state code governing public schools that clearly forbid the use of tax revenues for private profit. The suit was upheld by Judge R. Stanton Wettick of the Court of Common Pleas for Allegheny County, who ordered APS expelled from the Wilkinsburg schools by September 1998.

However, Wettick's order contained a loophole, permitting the formation of "charter" schools and the legislature rushed through a bill authorizing use of public revenues to fund charter schools.

With lightening speed, APS renamed itself Beacon Education Management and enlisted a tiny handful of Turner parents to file a proposal to form a charter school under Beacon management. The outgoing school board approved the proposal as its last official act.

The new board took office Dec. 1. "This 'charter school' scheme is just a fig leaf for privatization," Edwards charged. Ray Griffith, a newly elected school director, likened APS and the other school privatizers to "cockroaches: once you've got them they're very hard to get rid of."

Edwards expressed trepidation at the challenges she and her running mates now face. "I never expected to win," she said. "It's all new to us. It's a case of 'on-the-job training,'" she said.

Her husband is more confident. "The victory was possible because WRAP activists seized on a burning issue that masses of working people were ready to fight on," he explained. "They proved how important it is to be persistent when victory is not immediate. They went after every vote and every voter, never prejudging a person's position on privatization."

They discovered, for example, many Republicans who were strongly opposed to the takeover of public schools by a corporate profiteer. Edwards said, "WRAP's motto might be 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.'"

The battle went on for nearly three years, and it would have been easy to throw in the towel. WRAP's secret weapon was the power of an independent grassroots coalition led by organized labor and community activists. The unions provided campaign workers, $4,500 and access to union telephones for phone banking and to photocopy machines.

Wilkinsburg's new borough council member warns against dogmatic rejection of an endorsement by the Democratic Party. "When we say 'independent' the question is 'independent of what?' Our coalition is independent of big business. and is very much dependent on the working class," Edwards said.

"Victory was possible because WRAP, and all the forces linked with it, rejected every ploy aimed at splitting them, including virulent anti-communism that reached a crescendo in the final hours of the campaign," Edwards said.

The election proves that a majority of voters reject that anti-communism, Edwards said, and "masses of people are ready to accept Communists as coalition partners in the struggle to defend their vital interests against the corporate profiteers."