Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública: May 2010

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Baruti Kafele: a Principled Principal

Newark's Principal Kafele:

Transforming Mis Education Into Quality Education

Greetings family,

The Milken Family Foundation spent a day at Newark Tech filming a few months back. Check out the short clip. After 9 hours of filming, the following clip is the finished product. Hope you like it.

I might add that I am EXTEREMELY proud of our State Standardized test results for juniors which were released last Friday – 93% of our students were proficient in Language Arts and 82% in math. This is truly phenomenal! I might also add that for our seniors, after retakes of the test, 100% passed Language Arts and 88% passed math. Kudos to the Newark Tech staff and students for a job well done!

Principal Kafele
"I'm on FIRE!!!"

Author – Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life
http://www.principalkafele.com

--------------------------

BIO--

Principal Baruti Kafele, whose African first name means "teacher" is on a personal mission to motivate, educate and empower teachers, counselors, administrators and parents of Black and Latino children the world over.

As an educator, Principal Kafele has excelled in the capacity of teacher and principal. As a teacher in East Orange, NJ, he was selected as the East Orange School District and Essex County Public Schools Teacher of the Year. He was also selected for Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers six times. As a principal, he led the transformation of four different New Jersey public schools, including his current school, “The Mighty” Newark Tech, which has been recognized twice by U.S. News and World Report Magazine as one of America's best high schools.

As a writer, Principal Kafele is the author of five books which include: A Handbook for Teachers of African American Children, A Black Parent’s Handbook to Educating Your Children (Outside of the Classroom), and his new best seller, Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life.

As a speaker, Principal Kafele is on fire! He has "fired up" countless audiences with his empowering message of "extraordinary achievement" for over twenty years. He conducts professional development workshops for educators at major national conferences and school districts throughout the U.S. regularly. He also conducts parenting workshops, male empowerment seminars and student motivational assemblies in addition to his empowering keynote addresses.

As a family man, Principal Kafele is happily married to his wife Kimberley and is the proud father of his three children, Baruti, Jabari and Kibriya.

Finally, Principal Kafele earned his B.S. degree in Management Science/Marketing from Kean University and his M.A. degree in Educational Administration from New Jersey City University. He is also the recipient of numerous educational, professional and community awards, including the prestigious Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award in 2009 and the City of Dickinson, Texas proclaiming February 8, 1998 as "Baruti Kafele Day!"

Sunday, May 16, 2010

ED Cartoon of the Week

"Race to the Top" Is Bottoming Out
================

Protesting Black Cleveland Hi School Youth Get Red-Baited by Corporate Media

NOTE: It is becoming clearer everyday that our fight for a free quality public education for all New Yorkers is not a lonely battle. From Puerto Rico to Los Angeles to Cleveland, students, educators, parents and communityfolk are resisting the cutbacks, charterizing and criminalizing of our youth. Here is just one example of the growing resistance movement....

NOTE: This video is visually shaky but has a decent audio.

ClevelandFIST — May 15, 2010 — This video shows students from Collinwood High School gathering in a crowd of several hundred chanting save our schools! Later, Martha Grevatt is shown responding the media attempts to claim the protest was part of Caleb Maupins communist agenda.

Devin Branch, a local organizer with the October 22nd Coalition, is seen engaging in a discussion with a leader of the local SEIU. Devin Branch says "I am ready to accept a level of disorganization the part of the youth to make up for the lack of militancy and the complacency of the adults."

Devin Branch makes it clear that he feels the attacks on local Marxists and Cleveland FIST for supporting the student led protest are hypocritical, when NAACP and other forces ignored the students demands and have done very little to stop the destruction of the Cleveland Public School system.

• Call the Fifth District Police station, 216-623-5618 & 216-623-6500 to demand all charges against the students be dropped and to protest the brutal treatment of the students.

• Call the Cleveland Board of Education, 216-574-8000 and Collinwood High School, 216-451-8782 to demand the suspensions be rescinded and that Seth Barlekamp not be threatened with expulsion.

http://www.clevelandfist.blogspot.com
http://www.fistyouth.org
http://www.workers.org

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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.