Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública

Monday, October 17, 2011

The People's Education Trial/Tribunal Was a Great Start!

On to the People's Board Of Education!

Some of the early morning crowd who came out to DC37's Main Hall.

On Saturday 15 October more than 50 people testified about the decade-long educational crimes and violations they or their children have endured from the Bloomberg Mayoral Dictatorship regime.

Nearly 200 people were in attendance throughout the day at DC37. Those in attendance as well as the 8 prominent judges were moved by powerful testimony not only about the daily atrocities parents, students and educators have to face in our public schools, but also about how those who testified resisted and fought back... and were -at times- victorious.

City Councilman Charles Barron making a point in his testimony as the judges and State Assemblywoman Inez Barron listen .

The 8 judges were:

• Attny Esmeralda Simmons- Director, Center for Law and Social Justice (CLSJ) at Medgar Evers College

• Attny Joan Gibbs- Senior Counselor, CLSJ/National Council of Black Lawyers

• Attny Roger Wareham- December 12th Movement

• Father Luis Barrios, PhD- Pastors for Peace

• Ejim Dike- Human Rights Project (Urban Justice Center)

• Attny Damon T. Hewitt- NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund

• Attny Thomas Mariadason- Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund

• Attny King Downing- American Friends Service Committee

The first group of witnesses to testify came from Brooklyn's La Union. They gave powerful testimony concerning the daily racist onslaughts they and their children have to face as Latino immigrants and English Language Learners.

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CPE Members attending to the final work of the day. (Left to right: CoChair Muba Yarofulani, Roberta Pisker, Benita Rivera, Charmaine Phillip, Sandra Rivers, Akinlabi Mackall)

Over the next week or two, look to this blog and our website: www.forpubliced.org for all the video proceedings and documents submitted at the Trial/Tribunal.

The Coalition for Public Education/Coalicion por La Educacion Publica (CPE-CEP) will also be calling for the Founding Convention of the People's Board of Education within the next couple of months. So, be prepared to come and participate in envisioning, organizing and fighting for a new more democratic school governance system rooted in our communities and cultures.

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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.