In February 2018, West Virginia teachers launched a strike that reawakened a movement. Tens of thousands of teachers from around the country have taken part in what is now the largest strike wave in decades, demanding better public education in the face of years of austerity.
The fight for public education reminds us that working-class struggles around the world are linked—and that international solidarity is the key to victory.
On Feb. 11, 2019, as the U.S. wave continued, teachers union leaders from across Africa gathered in Addis Ababa for a meeting of African Union heads of state with their own demands: to halt the continent’s moves toward privatized education and provide “inclusive and equitable quality free public education for all.”
Though an ocean apart, West Virginia and Addis Ababa are two fronts in the same war. The fight for public education reminds us that working-class struggles around the world are linked—and that international solidarity is the key to victory.
In many U.S. districts, school funding still hasn’t recovered from cuts made during the Great Recession. Teachers are underpaid, classrooms are overcrowded, and textbooks are out of date. Rather than increase funding, conservative public figures like Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, have turned to private and charter schools that deepen inequality and further drain resources from the public system.
At the same time, foreign-owned, for-profit schools like Bridge International Academies and GEMS Education have swept Africa. There is no doubt that the status quo of public education in much of the region is dire: Education systems are largely underfunded, illiteracy remains high, and a large gender gaps prevail. But an unaccountable, profit-driven system funded largely by American and European investors is not the solution. Private schools crowd out the public sector, base education on ability to pay, and exacerbate economic and social stratification.
Investors like Bridge’s digital Taylorist curricula, which are identical across all schools, planned down to the minute, and require specialized tablets that track the finger movements of their teachers. However, there’s little evidence that such lessons adequately serve poor and working-class students. School privatization in Africa is part of the same neoliberal project that inspired teachers to walk out in West Virginia.
Milton Friedman—free market ideologue, adviser to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and mentor of the “Chicago Boys”—is considered the founding father of the school choice movement in the United States. It was his brand of market fundamentalism that was then foisted on the Global South in the 1980s, leading to Africa’s “lost decade” of growth and the continent’s current state of education. International Monetary Fund austerity demands inevitably forced public funding cuts while the World Bank pushed school fees and privatization. The World Bank, along with international aid agencies like the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, continue to promote for-profit models even today.