Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública: September 2009

Friday, September 18, 2009

CPE-CEP Members' Sponsored Events This section keeps us up-to-date around the various events our members sponsor all over the city

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Affirm & ACT: A Social Justice Park Party!

This Saturday 19 September at 1pm, in St. Nicholas Park
located on St. Nicholas Ave. and 135th St. we will party.

We will celebrate 30 mentors, 5 Youth Councils and our efforts to end mayoral control. We will feast on the finest burgers, hotdogs and snacks. We will listen to the most beautiful soulful sounds and the most mesmerizing lyrics muttered on this side of Harlem. We will be bedazzled by b-boys & b-girls who really know how to break dance down. We will glare at glorious graff by the baddest graffiti artists in NYC. And all of this will serve to affirm our belief that we can and will make a better world. Then we will act. We will sign up for mentorships, we will get our friends to sign up for mentorships, we will encourage kids to join Youth Councils, we will get involved. We will visit the tables of organizations like Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, like the Audre Lorde Project, like Drop the Rock, like LUCHA, GQ, C-Roots, and the D8 Youth Council, and we will sign up to take action. We will act to recruit 100 mentors, start 25 new Youth Councils, start 15 new scholarship funds, and redesign our school system by helping to create a People's Board of Education, and we will do this while smiling, dancing, and eating in celebration. Share this with your friends and your listserves, speak to a friend, text a friend, work with us, party with us, join us this Saturday to help... Transform America.

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"There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now." - James Baldwin Transform America www.transformamerica.org follow us: http://twitter.com/transfrmamerica

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

First Day of School
Protest at PS123 against
HSA Charter School’s Invasion

Thanx to Angel Gonzalez
of the Grassroots Education Movement, GEM

September 9, 2009 – District 5, Harlem NYC

First day of school, 6:30AM: the Community Public School 123, the Harlem Success Academy (HSA), an invading Private Charter School in the same public building on 141 St., and the Dept of Education (DOE), were treated on the street to a hands-on lesson in justice, equality & democracy. 25 parents, teachers& education activists denounced the chaos precipitated by the HSA charter takeover of PS 123 classrooms, the disarray to their supplies & furnishings, the DOEs dictatorial imposition of charter schools, privatization and the resulting separate and unequal conditions.

Parents speak out!

One telling moment at around 6:32-6:45 — The charter schools kids are being lined up against the wall of the building. They're obviously a little frightened in the hubbub and it is not clear why they have to be there at all instead of being taken inside. The demonstrators are certainly not preventing them from entering the building. One certainly has to question what's going on here.

Monday, September 7, 2009

OUR FIRST NEWSLETTER! Click on Image to Enlarge

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The Coalition for
Public Education

Coalición por la
Educación
Pública

Who We Are
What We
Want

The Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública is an independent, non-sectarian, and non-governmental organization with short, middle and long-term educational and social goals. We believe that education is a human right and we want to ensure that New York City public schools are places of learning in which all stakeholders (parents, students, educators, non-pedagogical staff, administrators and the community) are engaged in a democratic process to provide a free and quality education to all its students, from Pre-school to College.

Our coalition is based on antiracist/antisexist democratic grassroots organizing concepts and not based on the idea that any one individual, politician, union leader, or political messiah will save us.

Our coalition will participate in election campaigns but will focus on mass action as a primary vehicle for social change.

Therefore, we will organize the distribution of leaflets, mass rallies, forums, civil disobedience, petitions, referendums, web-based actions, economic boycotts, and other grassroots tactics. We also understand that we are not alone in struggle and that we must unite with other groups and individuals who support democracy, self-determination and the empowerment of our communities.

What We Want:

I. A Peoples' Board of Education

II. Local control of our Public Schools not Mayoral Dictatorship!

III. Better Public Schools not Charter Schools!

IV. Power to Parents, Students and Educators!

V. Implementation of a mandatory Antiracist Curriculum!

VI. Recruiting educators from our neighborhoods to achieve racial parity!

VII.Money for Education Not War!

VIII. OUR Schools = Neighborhood School Control!

NYC EDSTATS You Can Use

New York City Schools by the Numbers

By John Tarleton
www.indypendent.org

$12.5 billion: Annual New York City Department of Education (DOE) budget (2002)

$21 billion: Annual New York City DOE budget (2009)

1,719: Number officials employed by the DOE central administration in June 2002

2,442: Number of officials employed by the central administration as of November 2008

2: Number of DOE officials earning more than $180,000 per year in 2004.

22: Number of DOE officials earning more than $180,000 per year in 2007.

5: Number of DOE public relations staffers in 2003.

23: Number of DOE public relations staffers in 2008.

944: Number of contracts approved by DOE in 2008, at a total cost of $1.9 billion.

20: Percentage of contracts that exceeded estimated cost by at least 25 percent.

$67.5 million: Annual budget of Project Arts, a decade-old program that was the sole source of dedicated funding for arts education. It was eliminated in 2007.

86: Percentage of principals who said in a 2008 poll that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes in their schools.

100,000: Number of seats DOE plans to provide for charter school students by 2012.

25,000: Number of seats DOE plans to build under 2010 to 2014 capital plan.

66,895: Number of K-3 school-children in classes of 25 or more during the 2008-09 school year.

15,440: Average number of seats per year built during the last six years of the Rudolph Giuliani administration.

10,895: Average number of seats per year built during the first six years of the Bloomberg administration.

27.2: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2001-02 who were Black.

14.1: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2006-07 who were Black.

53.3: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2001-02 who were white.

65.5: Percentage of newly hired teachers in 2006-07 who were white.

76: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Latino students in 8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) in 2003.

75: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic students in 8th grade ELA in 2008.

77: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic 8th graders in math in 2003.

81: Percentage of white and Asian students who performed better than the average Black and Hispanic 8th graders in math in 2008.

54: Percentage of New York City public school parents who disapproved of Mayor Bloomberg’s handling of education, according to a March 2009 Quinnipiac poll.

Sources: New York City Council, New York City Comptroller’s Office, New York Daily News, New York Post, Eduwonkette, Quinnipiac Institute, Black Educator, Class Size Matters, New York City Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein.