NEW YORK CITY, November 18 – The liberal New York City (NYC) bosses’ racist handling of the pandemic is coming to a head as positive Covid-19 cases among students led liberal misleaders Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio to shut down school buildings and revert back to all remote learning today.
These past two months have taught the working class—students, parents, and education workers—some lessons on who this system is built for and who it is built against. Progressive Labor Party in the education field is gathering virtually this Sunday to report back and share our experiences, lessons, and fightbacks.
Promising developments
This week, teachers’ anger bubbled over in recent social studies department meetings at two different Brooklyn high schools. A promising sign is that teacher frustration is not directed at students. School leaders who haven’t a clue on how to engage students in distance learning are demanding that teachers “figure it out.”  Heat in buildings has not kept pace with the need for open windows, leaving classrooms routinely just a few degrees warmer than the outdoors.  Through a class-conscious lens, teacher anger is being directed at school bosses, not at students.
In schools where communist ideas have a history, union chapters have been won over to the pro-student idea that our presence as education workers in school buildings is important to guarantee that it is safe to return. Otherwise the bosses will take shortcuts that risk student health. Some of the “me-first” ideology that capitalism teaches is being displaced as a more  pro-student form of class-consciousness is taking hold.  
But in schools where communist practices have taken root, school-based “equity teams” have moved from theoretical to actual antiracist work. An example is offering support for teachers in correctly handling racist outbursts in virtual classrooms.  
Going against the grain
Teachers are trained by the bosses, that when things go wrong, they should blame students and their parents. But most of us also know on some level that the main purpose of schools under capitalism is not to educate working-class students to become critical thinking humans, but rather to recreate capitalist inequities and teach students to accept them.
It’s no wonder,then, that remote and hybrid education is a mess that leaves both students and their educators frustrated. For instance, it’s hard to teach a class of students when their cameras are off.  Kids are depressed because they live in a world where there is no sense of a stable future, short or long term.
Teaching students that their anger and sadness is a completely logical response to the crisis of capitalism is necessary. Above all, teaching students that they have to become part of a movement to smash this racist system is the most important lesson we as communists and antiracist fighters need to impart. When feeling frustrated in school the best remedy is to become more political with students!