NYC Public School Parents for Equity & Desegregation

Dec 7, 2016

PSPED meeting/reunión Dec. 15!

(español/English)

The future landscape of public education has changed quite a bit since our last meeting. As we work toward equity across public schools, we now face an uphill battle to preserve public education as a whole. This work starts at the local level. It starts with our schools, our districts, our boroughs, our city. It starts with us.

Please join us for a community meeting on Thursday, December 15th, 6:30pm to plan next steps. Bring others!
Children are welcome, they can play and eat during the meeting.
Translation to Spanish is available.

Agenda:

Post-Trump discussion about how to work for equity and to preserve public schools
Next steps on Community Controlled Choice as a way to desegregate schools
Grappling with PTA funding inequity among schools

Questions? Email nycpsped@gmail.com.

El futuro de la educación pública ha cambiado bastante desde nuestra última reunión. Mientras trabajamos hacia la equidad en todas las escuelas públicas, enfrentamos una lucha dura para preservar el sistema mismo. El trabajo empieza al nivel de lo local. Empieza con nuestras escuelas, nuestros distritos, nuestros boros, y nuestra ciudad. Empieza con nosotros los padres.

Por favor juntese con una reunión comunitario el jueves, 15 de diciembre a las 6:30 para planificar las próximas actividades. ¡Trae a otros padres también!
Los niños estan bienvenidos y pueden jugar y comer durante la reunión.

Tendremos traducción a español.

Agenda:

Cómo trabajar "después de Trump" por la equidad y para preservar las escuelas públicas
Próximos pasos en la lucha por la Selección Controlada por La Comunidad como medida para desegregar a las escuelas
Luchando en contra de la desigualdad entre escuelas que se produzcan los recaudamientos de fondos por las PTAs (asociaciones de padres)

¿Preguntas? Mande un correo electrónico a nycpsped@gmail.com.

Nov 21, 2016

Dozens of public school parents, school staff across NYC call for the city to mandate school equity, defend against Trump.

Mayor Bill de Blasio
City Hall, New York City
Via web contact form

Chancellor Carmen Fariña
NYC Department of Education
Tweed Hall, New York City 10007
Via email: CGFarina@schools.nyc.gov

CC:
New York City Panel for Education Policy members
New York City Council Education Committee members

November 21, 2016

Dear Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Fariña,

For the past few years, the parents and communities of Harlem and the Upper West Side have been pleading with DOE and CEC3 to notice, care about, and address the crisis levels of racial and income inequality. DOE has been silent, and the CEC has refused. This week – on top of the shocking election to the presidency of a man who has promoted violence, racism, and misogyny and has targeted Muslims, immigrants, and LGBTQ people – we’re offered yet another D3 rezoning proposal from DOE that cements the practice of filling some schools with wealthy families who fund massive PTA budgets, and segregating out low-income students whose families rely, at their great peril, on public funding for education.

There are many ways that New York City schools are unequal, and we have been begging DOE to address them by creating a fair admissions policy that mandates and creates diversity in each school.
But the crisis of segregation is now an emergency that threatens the destruction of public schools across the board. Donald Trump has indicated that he may gut Title 1 funding to schools serving low-income kids and use those funds for school vouchers that suck funding out of public schools. He has also said that he’ll support the replacement of public schools with charters and private school seats – a policy that has literally ended public school systems in other cities – and vastly expand the version of “school choice” that is largely responsible for New York City’s school equity crisis.

In Trump’s future, public schools will rely even more heavily on parent contributions to make up their basic budgets. Schools that can’t raise the funds to support good teaching and good learning environments will be abandoned, along with the students in them. We need strong DOE policy

RIGHT NOW that gets in front of the coming catastrophe by making schools equitable – and through equity, makes them strong enough to withstand Trump’s attacks.

Please, please, instruct the DOE to immediately mandate equitable admissions (including Community-Controlled Choice in D3) that distribute rich and poor families evenly among our schools. Half-measures like rezonings and voluntary, piecemeal set-asides of seats for low-income students are meaningless as “diversity measures.” They tinker with a few wealthy schools while leaving out most of the rest. As Trump proposes stripping public schools, they amount to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic instead of turning the ship to avoid the crash.

You have pledged to confront any actions from the President-elect that threaten New Yorkers. We will be with you. We just need you to give us an avenue through which to collectively protect public schools.

We await your reply at nycpsped@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Yassiel Nieves, Parent, PS145M
Toni Smith-Thompson, Parent, Mott Hall 2 Emmaia Gelman, Parent, P.S. 75
Lisa Walters-Valera, Parent, PS75 Emily Dickinson School
Thomas Gray, Parent, PS 75
Landon Westbrook, Parent, Central Park East I
Megan Benett, Parent, PS75
Gerson R, Parent, Board Member, Ps 75 Emily Dickinson
Carl Riehl, Parent, Community member, P.S. 75
Miriam Nunberg, Parent, Park Slope Collegiate

Elyssa Gersen-Thurman, Parent, MS 88
Eevin Hartsough, Parent, Community member, PS 75
Chris Parkman, Parent, PS75
Janet Paskin, Parent, P.S. 241 (Brooklyn)
Hannah Gersen, Parent, P.S. 15
Reyhan Mehran, Parent, PS 146 - Brooklyn New School
Amelia Costigan, Parent, MS447
Nora Painten, Parent, PS 29
Anna Siegal, Community member, PS 506
David Ratzan, Parent, PTA member, PS75
Caroline Falzone, Parent, Teacher/staff, Community member, Preschool teacher, PS 124
Lindsay Manley, Parent, PS8
Francis Colon, Parent, P.S 96

Melissa Moskowitz, Parent, Teacher/staff, 15K464/01332
Lisa Guido, Community member, PS 282
Oona Adams, Parent, Ps154
Rose Saxe, Parent, PS 130
Hannah Mermelstein, Parent, PS 185
Emily Winkelstein, Parent, PS 375
Nancy Workman, Mother of two public school graduates, P.S. 9
Kavita Singh, Parent, Community member, PS333-Manhattan School for Children
Pamela L., Teacher/staff, NYC
Jonathan Lessuck, Community member, ELLIS PREPARATORY ACADEMY
Mitra Rastegar, Parent, Manhattan Country School (UWS Independent School)
Rebecca Vilkomerson, Parent, Ps 154/MS 51
Corinne Locke, Parent, PS163/PS75/Computer school
Sunaura Taylor, Parent
Elizabeth Roy, Parent of preschooler, District 3
Meredith Slopen , Parent, Future PS9
Anita Schmid-Frey, Parent, PS 185

Kelly Bare, Parent, PS 705
Susan Rubin, Parent, CPE1
Eustacia Smith, Parent, PS 75
John Andrews, Parent, PS 185
Miriam Meir , Parent, CPE1
Tanya Barrett, Teacher/staff, PS 130
Mariana Kovel, Parent, Hamilton Heights School
Matthew Campbell, Student, Ps145M
Amanda Vender, Parent, PS149 Q
Mayra Campbell , Parent, Ps145M Vennie Perez, Parent, Ps145M
Felicity Griswold, Student, Ps145
The P.S.75 PTA (Emily Dickinson School)

Nov 15, 2016

Firma la carta: ¡que defiendanos contra los próximos recortes escolares de Trump!

(Información sobre las politicas escolares de Trump está debajo del texto.)

Los padres y comunidades escolars estan firmando una carta al alcalde de Blasio y al departamento de la educación de la ciudád de NY. Ud. puede firmarla aquí. Las políticas de Trump despojarán y privatizarán el sistema de educación pública. En otras ciudades -- Philadelphia y New Orleans, por ejemplo -- el sistema escolar se ha terminado por estas mismas políticas. Intentamos compartir pronto más información acerca de esa historia.

Aquí se presenta (en inglés) un sumario de las políticas de Trump. Incluyen cerrar al departmento federal de la educación y posiblemente destripando las escuelas de bajo ingreso de sus fondos del Título 1, y desviar esos fondos a las escuelas "charters" o privadas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/11/10/what-a-trump-presidency-means-for-americas-public-schools/

En leer las políticas de Trump, no sea engañado por sus palabras sobre "la elección de escuelas." La elección libre hasta la cuàl refiere quiere decir que las personas pueden quitar los fondos públicos de las escuelas públicas, y llevarlos a las escuelas privadas y las con fines de lucro -- las escuelas que pueden escoger y rechazar a los estudiantes en vez de garantizar el aceso a la educación. Eso diezmará el sistema puúblico. En el futuro según Trump, los padres que quieren las escuelas iguales tendrán que luchar contra las corporaciones y sus interéses de lucro y monopolio, en vez de movilizar a nuestros representantes públicos que estan obligados a nosotros la comunidad.

Nov 14, 2016

Sign the letter to DOE: Defend NYC public schools against Trump's promised decimation.

(Scroll to bottom for info on Trump's education policies.)

Parents & school communities are signing a letter to Mayor de Blasio and NYC DOE. You can sign it here. Trump's policies will gut and privatize the public educations system. In other cities -- Philadelphia, New Orleans -- the public school system has been shut down by these same policies. We'll post more about that soon.

Here's a summary of Trump's education policies, from shutting down the federal Dept. of Education to possibly stripping low-income public schools of Title 1 funding, and redirecting those funds to charters or private schools.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/11/10/what-a-trump-presidency-means-for-americas-public-schools/

When reading about Trump's policies, don't be fooled by his language about "school choice." The kind of choice he's referring to means letting people choose to take public school funding to private and for-profit schools -- schools that pick and choose which students they'll serve. It decimates the school system that's supposed to provide equitable, good education to all. In Trump's future, parents who want equitable public schools will be forced to battle corporations whose bottom line is money and monopoly, rather than trying to move our public officials who are ultimately accountable to us.

Nov 1, 2016

John Oliver makes us laugh about segregation(?!) and lays it out so clearly.

Oct 28, 2016

Letter: Where CEC won't represent parents, DOE must help

A joint letter from PSPED and the District 3 Task Force for Equity in Education:

October 28, 2016

Dear Chancellor Fariña,

The parents and educational communities of Community School District 3 are in a dual crisis.

It is common knowledge that our schools are made deeply unequal by years of disparities in resources and supports, and yet there is no vision and no policy to address those inequalities. The effect is that access to education and educational outcomes are skewed by race, income, national origin, housing status, and other factors. This is happening not just because schools serving low-income families have less, but because privileged parents are allowed to group themselves into specific schools for the purpose of having more. This deliberate production of inequality is largely unacknowledged by the Department of Education (DOE) and Community Education Council (CEC) 3, although it is a matter of constant public discussion among parents and school communities.

Compounding this unacceptable state of District 3 schools, our CEC has yet to acknowledge its obligation to represent District 3 parents and “promote achievement of educational standards and objectives relating to the instruction of students,” as New York State law demands.

“Desegregation” and the CEC rezoning

We appreciate the fact that the CEC has recently acknowledged that the District’s schools are segregated and that the problems of zoning, overcrowding, and segregation are joined. This was not the case a year ago, and it does mark significant progress. However, we disagree with the CEC that its rezoning plan is a “desegregation" plan; it does not represent the interests of low-income families of color throughout the district. While the CEC has begun to portray itself as a champion of diversity, we must insist that words be backed with actions that address how structural racism creates segregated and unequal learning environments and opportunities for the majority of the district’s children.

At the same time, CEC3 continues to sideline discussions about the vast disparities that exist among schools, and how privilege allows some families to choose and gain access to certain schools, thereby disproportionately concentrating resources in select schools and exacerbating overcrowding. Moreover, for the past three years, the CEC has focused its attention on overcrowding at a few high-performing and heavily parent funded schools at the southern end of the district. The rezoning focuses mostly on schools where high-income families have accessed the vast majority of seats. The schools left aside are virtually all low-income Title I schools, serving mostly families of color.

PS 241 and the exclusion of low-income schools from CEC representation

The CEC has also consistently sidelined discussion about the need to support the many under resourced schools outside the small area targeted for rezoning. The “surprise” closure of PS241 is just one example of how the CEC’s myopic focus has harmed families and schools in the rest of the district.

Like the CEC’s new turn to “desegregation,” its plan for PS 241, which would effectively change zone lines, seems to have emerged without the participation of the affected school community. The CEC’s proposed zoning plan for PS241 makes no provision for mitigating the impact it will have on the children in the building, and recommends an engagement process only after the plan is approved. We ask, do the families in this school and all the other schools in the northern part of District 3 deserve the same policymaking process that has been afforded the more vocal families at PS199, PS452, PS9, PS87, PS166 and the other lower district communities who have controlled the discourse on this subject?

CEC leaders have often repeated the refrain that low-income parents, parents of color, and parents from Harlem schools should raise equity concerns at CEC meetings – and that since they don’t show up en masse like parents concerned about rezoning, they must not be very concerned. There are several problems with such reasoning. First, as parents and community members have commented: there has consistently been a lack of notice, a lack of outreach, and a lack of infrastructure (language interpretation and childcare) for meetings that have resulted in the de facto prioritizing of those with greater flexibility of schedule and resources. Second, discussions about disparities and supporting low-income schools have had to be virtually elbowed in at Zoning Committee meetings and CEC public meetings. Since these meetings are never set up to discuss school equity, raising these issues often appears “off topic” and is treated as a distraction from the severely limited issues around which agendas have been planned. Given the need to literally clear space to talk about school quality, and the often hostile and dismissive response from CEC leadership, the claim that the CEC is open to parents is disingenuous at best. The combined result is that parents concerned about equity and parents at low-income schools have little reason to view the CEC as a place where they can find representation.

Community-Controlled Choice
Parents, PTAs, SLTs, and community advocates have been asking since 2014 for CEC3 to consider Community-Controlled Choice as a way to remedy unequal schools, admissions criteria that offer disproportionate choice to privileged families, and over- and under enrollment. There is no other proposal on the table to address those problems.

In its October 18 letter, the CEC claimed that Community-Controlled Choice had been considered but had left too many unanswered questions. Both of these claims are untrue: it was never considered, and the CEC has never pursued answers. Further, the leadership of the CEC has made clear that they oppose Community-Controlled Choice. Letters from the leadership of the CEC to parents and advocates have made inaccurate claims that “controlled choice does not enjoy a level of support in District 3 that makes further consideration prudent.”[1] The leadership of the CEC has made these profoundly undemocratic assessments against Controlled Choice.

Under pressure from parents, advocates, and PTAs, the CEC held two deeply flawed community forums to discuss Community-Controlled Choice. They were planned in such a way that low-income parents were substantially excluded.[2] The Task Force, which had invested several years considering how Community-Controlled Choice might work in District 3, was not allowed to present because it was “not impartial.” Instead, the CEC created a panel with little knowledge of District 3, and limited what the panelists could say. Lisa Donlan, a panelist who was then CEC1 president, detailed in a recent comment on Chalkbeat that the panel appeared set up to preempt, rather than facilitate, consideration of Community-Controlled Choice:

“Despite my clear claims that, under the model of community-led controlled choice, each community would need to clarify its own values and examine the geographic and historical context that contribute to the segregation problem that controlled choice could address, I was asked to answer questions about a plan for D3 that had not been created!...

…That process is not necessarily lengthy or expensive (in D1 we funded most of our work- workshops, forums, studies, Town Halls, etc, with our CEC budget and certainly could have been well advanced by now if it had been undertaken when discussed many months ago…

…I was told by a CEC Task Force on Overcrowding panel organizer that I could not use words like "segregated schools" as they are too hurtful…

…The panel was asked to provide a busing and transportation plan for a proposal that had not been designed, and other such backwards planning requests.

…These sorts of constraints and questions indicated an underlying general resistance to actually exploring controlled choice as an option, based on a deep aversion to removing zone lines, the ones that ensure privileged access to the most resourced schools.

…The panels felt set up in a way to avoid having to consider ways to reach for real equity for all children by finding fault with controlled choice before it even had a chance, so it would not be given consideration in D3.”[3]

What would be needed to genuinely give Controlled Choice a real consideration is a commitment from the CEC to invest in a community-wide planning process, similar to the process that District 1 developed and implemented.[4] This process would not be a decision to implement Controlled Choice, it would be a decision to fully consider it, and finally address the severe and entrenched inequities that plague our district.

Public process and Open Meetings law
The CEC has created an unfortunate practice of making decisions on behalf of District 3, with little or no public consideration – often accompanied by disingenuous claims that they are actually the product of public engagement. The summary dismissal of Community-Controlled Choice is one example. The CEC’s rezoning proposal letter is yet another.

There is a question as to whether the CEC’s plan required a public vote since there was an action taken by the members of the CEC that proposed a rezoning plan. The New York State Committee on Open Government is directed by the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and under the Open Meetings Law to furnish advice and issue regulations. The law requires public bodies, including the CEC, to provide notice of the times and places of meetings and to keep minutes of actions taken. Open Meetings Law states: “It is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society that the public business be performed in an open and public manner and that the citizens… be fully aware of and able to observe the performance of public officials and attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy." We are very concerned that it appears that CEC3 did not follow the Open Meetings Law in proposing a re-zoning plan to DOE without a vote in public. It is imperative that all actions by the CEC be transparent so that the public may be engaged and informed in a proper and timely manner about decisions that affect all the students in the District 3 community.

Finally including all of District 3 parents, schools, and communities

The CEC’s October 18^th proposal to Chancellor Fariña demonstrates that the CEC has begun to recognize the problem of segregation and inequity in our District. But tacking “desegregation” onto a small, piecemeal rezoning is a shortsighted approach that avoids confronting the underlying causes and leaves the systemic problem unresolved. It is also unconscionable to conduct “desegregation” without the participation of low-income communities.

We respectfully request, once again, that you support our recommendation to engage the District 3 community in a planning process to delve seriously into Community-Controlled Choice as a potential solution to the most pressing systemic problems that create unequal schools.

We request that the CEC’s plan be rejected in favor of a more comprehensive plan that reviews the entire district and fulfills the CEC’s unmet obligation to provide all District 3 parents and community with “a public forum to air their concerns.”

The families of District 3 deserve to have a real chance at equitable schools throughout the district. Segregation (the problem) and overcrowding (its effect) need to be addressed in a manner that deals together with defining and creating diversity, equitably funding and supporting schools, improving school outcomes, halting the siphoning effect of charter schools, and challenging the “ownership” of better resourced schools by privileged families.

This cannot happen in a CEC that represents only the loudest, most privileged families and schools. We ask, therefore, for your support in holding the CEC to its statutory obligation to represent the rest of us, and to create equal educational opportunity for all of our children.

Sincerely,

Ujju Aggarwal

Marilyn Barnwell

Flor Donoso

Lori Falchi

Theresa Hammonds

Elena Nasereddin

Donna Nevel

Lizabeth Sostre

Members, District 3 Equity in Education Task Force

Emmaia Gelman (PS 75)

Yassiel Nieves (PS 145)

Kavita Singh (PS 333/MSC)

Toni Smith-Thompson (Mott Hall II)

for

NYC Public School Parents for Equity and Desegregation

[1] https://nycpsped.blogspot.com/2016/10/cec3-pres-response-to-psped-letter.html

[2] For discussion of forum planning, see www.d3equity.org.

[3] http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2016/10/19/drowned-out-of-upper-west-side-rezoning-battle-desegregation-advocates-fight-for-a-broader-plan/#.WBN6L-ErL-Y

[4] For information on CEC1’s community engagement process, see CECd1.org