icope's getting out from under - a human rights alternative

Getting Out from Under A Human Rights Alternative to the Corporate Model of Public Education in New York City2012© has been authored and produced by iCOPE in its entirety.

Kindly cite iCOPE as the source when quoting from this document.

INDEPENDENT COMMISSION ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

NYC

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes

the existing model obsolete.

— Richard Buckminster Fuller

Engineer, Inventor, Architect and Philosopher

(1895 - 1983)

Acknowledgements:WRITERS

Dr. Samuel Anderson

Dr. Barbara Barnes

Cecilia Blewer

COVER PHOTO & GRAPHICS

Benita Lovett-Rivera

Warren Minor

Ellen Raider

EDITORS

Carl Arnold

Roberta Pikser

iCOPE applauds the superb work of its members and friends

is a retired New York City Mathematics and Black History professor who has taught at various colleges and universities for more than forty years. He is also the author of books on science, technology and the history of slavery. Sam has been active in the Civil Rights / Black Liberation Movements for nearly a half century and has combined his activism with his scholastic work via numerous community organization and Black Studies Departments. He is also co-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Brecht Forum, the Malcolm X Museum, a member of the Black Left Unity Network and Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence (BNYEE). Sam Anderson is a also a parent of two sons who have successfully navigated the New York City public school system.

has been an educator since the mid 1960’s and currently teaches in the School of Education at Brooklyn College and at CUNY’s School for Professional Studies. She has worked with teachers and students in New York City public schools in collaborative problem solving and non-violent approaches to resolving conflicts. She has also directed a ten college consortium in Westchester County organized to improve the racial climate for learning. Barbara is an active member of the international peace education community having presented at its annual International Peace Education Institute in Turkey, Hungary, Costa Rica, Spain and Columbia. She has also worked in schools in Kenya and Mozambique. Barbara earned her doctorate degree in curriculum and teaching from Columbia University Teachers College where she has taught graduate students in collaborative approaches to conflict resolution.

sent her two children to New York City public schools and became increasingly involved in community building and social justice advocacy in the public school system. She served as PTA president, president of District 3 Presidents’ Council, and on the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council where she was vice-chair. Cecilia is an Elder in her Presbyterian Church and represented the Presbytery of NYC on the Educational Priorities Panel. She has a Master of Divinity from Yale and did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first PTA president to refuse to participate in the sham democracy of Community District Educational Council “elections” that replaced popularly elected Community District School Boards, and did so with the support of her school’s parent body.

is an artist, organizer and parent activist. Her experience with education disparity stemmed from placing her eldest child in an elite private school from grades K-12, and then having her youngest child educated in the public school system. Although her career was in printing / marketing, she has also worked as a Head Start teacher, SUNY adjunct instructor, after school

art teacher and college-prep, essay writing coach. In 2000, while in graduate school, she was awarded an Open Society Institute Community Fellowship for an art and literacy project she designed and ran for young Latinas in East Harlem. Benita also assisted in the founding of two Parent Associations in two distinctly different, brand new public schools opened in Battery Park City and the Lower East Side. She has been an active opponent of mayoral control since its inception and today, uses her graphic and marketing skills to develop messaging for grassroots education and social justice groups. She is also the co-founder of The Mothers’ Agenda NY (a.k.a. The MANY).

is a grandfather, and as a parent of three children who attended Brooklyn’s District 21 public schools, he was an active Parent Association member. Warren was a design and project engineer for textile and garment manufacturing machines for 27 years and later taught mathematics for seventeen years in NYC’s public high schools. He has been active in numerous community organizations; specifically the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society and his local Democratic reform club. Warren has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Brooklyn Polytech, as well as a Board of Education Math license.

has taught international negotiation and mediation skills to thousands of corporate executives and diplomats in the United States and abroad through her own consulting firm. She has also designed cross-cultural conflict resolution training programs for the worldwide staff of UNICEF, the American Friends’ Service Committee, and the United States / USSR Trade Negotiation Project, jointly sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and the Soviet Academy of Foreign Trade. In response to a request in 1988, Ellen set up the training department of the research-based International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teacher’s College Columbia University. In that capacity she taught graduate students in conflict resolution and created training materials for teachers, administrators, school boards, parents, and students in the United States, Canada and Macedonia. Ellen holds a Masters of Education Degree in Educational Psychology (Social and Group Processes) from Temple University. Over the past decade, she has been an advocate for a human rights-based system of public education for New York City.

CONTRIBUTORS

iii

Human rights are something you were born with.Human rights are your God-given rights.

Human rights are the rights that arerecognized by all nations of this earth.

— Malcolm X

African American Muslim Minister, Public Speaker, and Human Rights Activist

(1925 - 1965)

We can never get civil rights in Americauntil our human rights are first restored.

We will never be recognized as citizensthere until we are first recognized as humans.

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Getting Out from Under offers a positive alternative vocabulary, discourse and vision to the current corporate take-over of New York City’s public schools. The grassroots forces gathering to contest this take-over must move from the reactive, fragmented realm of protest into the positive, integrated realm of transformational power.

The human rights framework embodied in this work makes explicit the human and civic values that have been implicit in so much of the protest of the last decade under mayoral control of the school system. These values represent the best of American values just as surely as the corporate take-over that championed mayoral control has represented the worst.

Ten years have passed since the New York State legislature handed control of the nation’s largest school system into the hands of one super-rich man. It was the aftermath of 9-11 when democratic values were undermined by the appeal of coercive power.

This project was conceived and developed in the hope of a transformational moment. With the advent of Occupy Wall Street, that moment and movement — we believe, has come.

We offer this project to those engaged in the growing struggle.

We welcome the critical conversations where ever it occurs.

Godspeed.

We have moved from the era ofcivil rights to the era of human rights,

an era where we are called uponto raise certain basic questions

about the whole society. — The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

African-American Minister, Leader: Civil Rights, Peace and Human Rights Movements

(1929 – 1968)

v


NYC

— Eleanor Roosevelt

United States First Lady, 1933 - 1945

The first White resident of Washington, DC to join both the NAACP and the National Urban League,

the only woman of the five U.S. delegates to the newly-created United Nations, December 1945,

and the drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948.

(1884 – 1962)

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?

In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world.

Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity,

equal dignity without discrimination.

Unless these rights have meaning there,they have little meaning anywhere.

Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for

progress in the larger world.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Mayoral Control The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

School Choice and Charter Schools The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Funding the School System The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Parent and Community Involvement The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

What should students learn? Who should decide? The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

How Children Learn The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Multicultural / Antiracist Curricula and Education The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Safe Schools, Effective Discipline & Classroom Management The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Education Technology The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Teachers and Teachers Unions The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Bibliography

About iCOPE

Thoughts on Our Nation’s Legacy

Why a Human Rights Frame? 1

3

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810

1113

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1719

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2830

3133

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35

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— Ejim Dike

Director of the Human Right Project, Urban Justice Center

Excerpt of her concluding statement as Judge during the Education Crimes Trial

presented by the Coalition for Public Education / Coalición por la Educación Pública, NYC

October 15th, 2011

What is clear to me is that the basic human rights of NYC public school students and parents are being violated daily

and this has been antagonized by mayoral control.

By failing to provide a quality education that develops our children to their fullest potential,

we are violating their basic human rights.

Displaying antagonism towards parents under mayoral control and discouraging

parent involvement in the education of their children, we are violating basic human rights . . .

the city and the state should be held accountable.

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1

Public education stands at a busy crossroads of human rights. It is where our human rights to education and development meet our rights to decent work, human dignity, political participation, culture and non- discrimination, to name a few. It requires robust civic participation and real democracy to realize these interconnected rights together.

It is important to recognize what it means that all human rights are interconnected. Our human rights rise or fall together. The widespread concern that the success or failure of the public education system affects the very future of democracy in America reflects the common perception of the interconnectedness of education and civic health. Less widespread but just as essential is the understanding that the state of American democracy affects the ability of the public education system to function optimally on behalf of all its students.

Similarly, an individual’s ability to enjoy his or her right to education is affected by his or her enjoyment of the rights to food, housing, and dignity, to name a few. By the same token, community’s right to development is affected by how the right of its members to education has been fulfilled.

Human Rights are also indivisible. It makes no sense in human rights terms to diminish one set of rights in order to enhance another set of rights. When the New York State Legislature extinguished civic and political rights in the New York City public school system it did so in the misguided belief that the increased funding it could secure for the school system as a result of the political trade would translate into marked improvements in the city’s public school education system. It is no surprise to human rights activists that just the reverse occurred as the lack of accountability, oversight, and public input resulted in frequent changes of course, waste, and corruption.

The principal human rights at work in public education and which are most material to education reform in New York City and elsewhere in the United States are:

Why a Human Rights Frame?

Individual Rights: Every individual child must have equal access to a quality education adapted to meet his or her particular needs.

Aims of Education: The aims of education must be directed toward the full development of each child’s personality and potential, preparing all children to participate in society and to do work that is rewarding and adequately remunerative, and to continue learning throughout life.

Dignity: Schools must respect the inherent human dignity of every child, creating an environment of mutual respect and tolerance in the classroom, preventing practices and disciplinary policies that cause harm or humiliation to children, and promoting self-confidence and self-expression.

Equity: There must be equitable distribution of resources in education across communities according to need, so communities with the highest need receive the greatest resources.

Non-Discrimination: The government must ensure that the human right to education “will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” This obligation includes respectful treatment and accommodation of the cultural heritages of school children and their families.

NYC

A decade of mayoral control has provided ample illustration of the need for a human rights framework for realizing the democratic vision of public education. The failure of the Bloomberg business model of public education has been a high-handed disrespect of children, parents, educators, and members of communities. Communities mobilized in protest against endless school closings, charter school co-locations in public school buildings, and relentless teaching to the test, have been treated as ignorant and obstructive rather than as social capital ready to revitalize their community institutions.

Sufficient evidence also exists to support the intransigent connection between poverty and educational achievement. Homelessness has risen to record levels during the Bloomberg years and the failure of the city’s housing policies means a sizable portion of the city’s school children change neighborhoods and schools with distressing frequency. Food insecurity in NYC has jumped 60% during the mayor’s tenure and three million families not only lack the money to ensure adequate nutrition, but entire neighborhoods are “food deserts,” lacking access to inexpensive and wholesome foodstuffs. Statistics on the incidence of child abuse and physical victimization are lacking for the city. Nationally, more than half of all children face some form of physical assault, half end up victims of bullying or teasing (emotional or physical), and sexual assault occurs to about one in twenty. The most revealing report on the state of mental health of NYC’s residents occurred in the aftermath of 9-11 which found that the trauma of that event was actually a re-traumatizing of earlier wounds, especially among people of color. Not surprisingly, the mayor’s panel to address the mental health impact of 9-11 included an array of city agencies, but none devoted to children or public education.

The struggle to establish a human rights framework for public discourse and policy in NYC is on-going. The Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights only works on issues of discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodation and cyber-bullying. It does not work on issues of education or to build consensus or establish guidelines for a human rights framework for public policy and practice.

But other organizations are leading the way. Our work at iCOPE has benefited from collaborations with other human rights organizations, notably the Human Rights Project of the Urban Justice Center, Amnesty International, the Coalition for Public Education, and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. To NESRI we owe an enormous intellectual debt for deepening our understanding of human rights, and in particular, the right to education.

We invite all New Yorkers to link their struggles for dignity and justice to the achievement of human rights here and around the world.

For more information about these wider struggles, contact NESRI at www.nesri.org, and the Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center at www.urbanjusticecenter.org/projects/human.html.

Participation: Students, parents and communities have the right to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their schools and the right to education.

The Right to Development: Human beings are the central subject of development: economic and social systems should be in service of the right of individuals and communities to develop themselves by means of education, work, and other vehicles for advancement. The lack of development on the part of individuals and communities does not justify abridgement of their rights.

The Right to Decent Work: Teachers and others employed by the school system have the right to see their labor rights respected by public school systems and charter school operators, including the rights to free association and collective bargaining, fair and adequate remuneration, dignity, adequate rest and recreation, and favorable working conditions.

2

ducation is not a business.

The primary function of education is not to produce personal or national wealth, or the goods for an economic system. Its motivating spirit is not greed. Its goal must not be reduced to enhancing our nation’s “competitiveness in a global economy.” Education is an exercise of the human spirit and takes place in the context of human relationships. Its workers — the teachers — must establish positive relationships with the students, whose full development is the central focus of their work.

This booklet examines the dominant structure that governs urban schools today — the business model of public education as it’s now playing out in New York City’s public school system under the control of its billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The features of this business model are familiar:

• exercise strict top-down control

• separate schools from their communities

• see children as raw material and education as an impersonal consumer product

• emphasize numbers and data over qualitative analysis and ethical issues

• exploit competition as a vehicle for improvement

• promote the notion that the managerial class doesn’t need to understand the actual work of the system it manages.

The pathology in American corporate culture that caused the 2008 financial meltdown also drives

the Bloomberg business model of education. Wall Street rating agencies had the perverse incentive to overlook glaring problems when evaluating even the largest financial institutions. That led to an over-reliance on data about what’s measurable versus what’s fundamental and important — giving us the disastrous housing bubble. This mindset mirrors the test score bubble. A state consultant determined that the state achievement tests were not reliably measuring achievement. The recalculated and reevaluated results highlighting actual progress was minimal to nonexistent, exposing the mayor’s claims as grossly inflated. The same perverse incentive exists in an education system run by a politician — the mayor, and funded by another politician — the governor. The moral hazard of committing economically marginal families to loans they cannot understand or afford is similar to the moral hazard of forcing families to “choose” schools and programs for their children that too often do not offer the results promised in PowerPoint presentations in the gym. Careers have been made by inventing such faulty “opportunities,” and the failures are borne by the most vulnerable. The idea that corporations will self-correct makes as much sense as a corporate style school system being able to self-correct. It’s absurd because the same warp in the incentive and accountability structure exists. Education careerists are not accountable to the parents, students or communities they serve, but to their boss — a politician, and the world of very hyped public perception.

There is an alternative.

Introduction

Education is essential to human development.

Education increases a person’s capacities and interests so they can become not just breadwinners for the family but also full participants in society. Individuals who have the knowledge and skills to become fully developed human beings are equipped to strengthen community institutions so that society, government and industry may flourish.

3

The pitfalls of the corporate model of public education can be overcome by the human rights model. This enlightened approach supports education as a means of human development in the broadest terms, from democracy in how schools are run to teaching the whole child. The human rights model understands that fulfilling a child’s right to a complete education also fulfills the parents’ and community’s right to participate democratically in school governance.

The human rights model recognizes that excellent public education requires constant vigilance and community pressure. We believe that building a public school system on a human rights framework would not only re-energize the promise of public education but also help the city realize its best self as a democratic, equitable, secure and culturally vibrant place to live.

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Mayoral control of schools is part of the “New Jim Crow.” While appearing to be race neutral, the large population of people of color in major urban settings has actually been removed from decision-making in their local schools while the teaching force has lost about half its teachers of color. Shifting the annual sales and size requirements for vendors to the school system has locked out many businesses owned by suppliers of color. This shows mayoral control to be a clear racist tactic of selective disempowerment. The New Jim Crow can happen no matter what the color of the mayor — what’s racist is the formal disempowerment of urban communities. Such disenfranchisement would never be tolerated in a suburban or rural setting.

The pace of school improvement in New York City has slowed since the mayor took control in 2002. Nationally, mayoral control has not improved public education. In New York City it has seen the widening of the racial achievement gap.

It is impossible to hold a mayor accountable for school system success because education results compete with many other important issues for voter satisfaction.

The Bloomberg Business Model of Education

Mayoral Control

Illustration by Keith Seidel; courtesy of Bloomberg Watch

roponents of strong mayoral control say it is a necessary part of meaningful school reform. According to this view, by having power over the school system, the mayor can make difficult decisions

for school reform and be held accountable for the results. Proponents of mayoral control believe the public education system can be run just like a commercial business with pay incentives, personal careerism, product proliferation, competition and consumer choice, among other strategies, driving better results.

iCOPE Critique of the Bloomberg Business Model

. . . part of the “New Jim Crow”

5

And putting a politician in charge of a school system opens that system to political convenience and secrecy rather than deeply considering problems, building consensus, full openness and transparency, and keeping the best interests of the school children central to decision-making. The business model has given us overly cautious administrators who resist challenges to their thinking and defend against public participation in public education.

Mayoral control of schools distorts the democratic process. With a Chancellor serving at the pleasure of the Mayor rather than representing an independent Board of Education, education politics has lost much of its creativity and vigor. The Mayor can now dictate the agenda for education politics. As a result, the teach-ers' union no longer serves as an independent point of balance for the education system and is limited to a reactive role. The highly publicized rise in test scores under Mayor Bloomberg was not challenged by the teachers’ union because it strengthened their demand for a pay raise. Those rising test scores were eventually shown to be due to lower standards — not higher achievement. The teachers’ union was neutralized and did not speak out against mayoral control and its policies in exchange for a 43% pay hike from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) decision, which still left their salaries behind those of their suburban peers.

Mayoral control of schools invites the collusion of the press; because the mayor’s office is able to manage media access to the powerful few. Before mayoral control the media were able to scrutinize the public education system since they had access to a Board of Education as well as a chancellor for information. Elected officials, especially at the city level, have been slow to challenge mayoral control of the school system, which has made the mayor that much more powerful than previous ones. At the same time, private money flowing through public systems for principal training, new school development, etc. has thwarted public participation in important decisions and blurred the boundaries between public and private issues.

Mayoral control is losing its luster as a technique for school improvement. Recently, the National Council of Churches issued a pastoral letter urging democracy in school governance. An upset victory in the recent Chicago teachers’ union election is a reflection of dissatisfaction with mayoral control and its dictatorial, top-down decision-making. In New York City, the firing of Board of Education members for not agreeing with the mayor on third-grade retention was explained by the then deputy mayor, now schools chancellor: “This is what mayoral control looks like.”

With the constant change of course under Mayor Bloomberg and the destabilizing of the school system, it is increasingly clear that mayoral control of schools is an example of the “Shock Doctrine” — deliberately induced chaos that presents opportunities for corporations and their political allies to disempower those who oppose their “reforms.”

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The Alternative:

Since public education plays a vital role in the development of both the individual and the community, there must be strong mechanisms to encourage full democratic participation at all levels of the school system to fulfill this human right. iCOPE offers a model of school governance that not only empowers but supports parents, students, teachers and community members at all levels of the public education system and returns administrators and decision makers to their proper role as public servants rather than corporate middle managers.

A human rights model of public school governance recognizes that all rights are interconnected — one cannot be sacrificed to promote another. Democratic school governance is not a right to be traded for fair funding of the NYC school system. That’s what was done in 2002 when the legislature gave the mayor control of the school system, a trade of democratic rights for the promise of education rights that has taken place in other US cities as well. Instead, a ground-up model of school system governance should replace the current top-down model that now afflicts our schools and communities so that both democratic rights and education rights can be mutually fulfilled.

Robust democratic governance of the school system also has the benefit of empowering individuals and neighborhood institutions by fostering contact, building networks and skills, and exchanging information to tackle related problems affecting their schools. Strengthening schools as communities has a multiplier effect that is good for children, their families and their neighborhoods, and lays the groundwork for true democratic participation by all generations.

A Human Rights Model

Mayoral control

is an affront to

democracy and

a hindrance to

meaningful

improvement in

education.

Ending it is a

crucial first step.

There is one basic way to transform public education so that it works well for everyone —

establish a school system built on human rights principles so that democracy and

accountability are both the means and the purpose of decision-making.

Students, parents and communities have the right to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect their schools and the right to education.

Participation is a principle of human rights in education:

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NYC


When schools compete, students lose.

The need to attract students has resulted in wasteful spending on brochures, videos and presentations that school budgets can ill afford but which display the dazzling financial and political clout put behind charter schools. The favoritism benefiting charter schools in NYC has undermined public schools in several ways: • put several schools into one building, forcing existing public schools to lose access to common spaces such as cafeterias, gyms, libraries and auditoriums.

• demoralize existing public school communities by the stark contrast with the attractive physical appearance of charter school spaces.

• blackmail school communities into accepting a co-location by the enticement of improving their neglected building.

No education system should be in the business of creating student winners and losers, or assigning improvements based on political favoritism or cynical deals.


“School Choice” and Charter Schools

roponents of mayoral control believe that the marketplace makes the best decisions about products and resources. In their view, education can be treated as another consumer product. They

believe competition between schools fosters improvement because parents can vote with their feet. In their view, schools that fail to attract families or whose test scores are poor should be closed.

NYC Charter $chool

?

The logic of school reform through marketplace options has made the creation small, themed high schools a priority for the Bloomberg administration so that parents and students have more choices than before the shift. High schools that existed to serve their neighborhoods have been redesigned to accept applications from across the city. According to the Bloomberg business model, charter schools help the school system innovate beyond the reach of restrictive union rules and provide competition to regular public schools to stimulate their improvement. Proponents of charter schools believe that they are just another form of public school because they receive public funds and offer all parents the opportunity to choose the right school for their children. They insist that charter school results are superior to those of regular public schools.

WELCOME toyour co-located public school By order of the NYC DoE: We can only afford to care about test scores. DO NOT ASK us for fresh paint, new desks, books,toilet paper,

soap, pencils, music, art,computers,

science labsor use of the gym.

... [Chancellor] Klein was agitating against the very ideaof the neighborhood school with deep roots in a community.

— Jonathan Mahler

Author, and Writer for the NY Times

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The marketplace model of school improvement makes the effort to improve a poorly performing school less desirable than closing the school altogether and replacing it with a new one. The system has become adept at creating new schools, but not at improving existing ones.

The choice model is a misnomer. Parents don’t select a school. In reality, it’s an application process through the school or a lottery that determines where a child goes to school. Families are discour-aged from applying to their preferred high schools for fear of losing the chance to enter one more likely to accept their children as the applications move from school to school until an acceptance is granted.

Requiring students to apply to high school places an undue burden on families. Responsible selection requires gathering information about individual high schools, visiting them, meeting with staff, filling out forms, etc. The process favors families with the most resources. Parents in the know consider only a few schools in the city desirable — the rest are deemed average, mediocre or poor and are to be avoided.

The difficulty of getting a place in a desirable school close to home frequently imposes a financial and time burden on families in terms of travel, making it that much more difficult for students and parents to participate in the life of the school. When students face long commutes, after-school programs like clubs, sports and tutoring are undermined, further eroding students’ educational experience and their attractiveness to college recruiters and employers.

The small, themed high schools have not proven to be more effective at educating teens. Their size has kept out English Language Learners and Special Needs students because they cannot support the infrastructure to help these students. Nor can they support a rich curriculum that provides choice as students develop their interests. In fact, rural communities often choose to create larger high schools out of smaller grammar school districts in order to be able to offer a wider array of academic choices.

A school system does not need charters to innovate. Before Mayor Bloomberg was given control of the city school system, community school districts were able to make progress by introducing new programs

and creating new schools — without resorting to charters. In 2000 community resistance to turning six underperforming schools into charters was successful under the previous, more democratic system of school governance. This makes clear that the proliferation of charter schools is a direct result of the disenfranchisement brought on by mayoral control. Charter schools remain a contested issue in NYC but the lack of a public forum or community vehicle for decision-making gives the charter school industry a distinct advantage, even in neighborhoods that do not want them.

Charter school results are no better than public school results. However, since families must submit their children’s names to a lottery months in advance of registration, families from the most marginalized groups of the city don’t tend to send their children to charters. To boost their academic and disciplinary ratings, charter schools have been known to “counsel out” underperforming or disruptive children. Special Needs children and English Language Learners are discouraged from attending because charters often do not meet their needs. This “cherry picking” by charters puts an additional strain on public schools and is unfair competition as it undermines the educational opportunities for public school children. When charter schools are co-located inside public school buildings they compete for space with the existing public school and contribute to overcrowding.

Publicly funding charter schools doesn’t make them public schools any more than a military contractor is part of the army. Charters are run by independent companies that answer to their schools’ own boards of directors, not to the public They are an assault on the democratic vision of public education.

Competition, school choice, and charters were originally intended to improve neighborhood schools. Instead, they have overwhelmed existing schools and have led to the demise of some, often with great neighborhood opposition to their closing. Competition, school choice and charters often re-stratify educational opportunity along the lines of race and class, and create additional burdens for the many even as they sometimes privilege the few. “School Choice” obscures the responsibility of the government to provide proper education for all by shifting the burden to families to compete for limited seats in a few decent schools.

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The Alternative:The neighborhood public school needs to be supported and strengthened because it’s

what is most accessible to students and parents, and most responsive to the community

and its elected officials.

The iCOPE model of school governance envisions the development of new

schools and programs as collaborative efforts within and between schools,

supported by the district administration. It should be the School Leadership

Teams and District Leadership Teams that drive innovation in response to

community need.

Time and money spent on transporting students to schools outside their

neighborhoods would be better spent on after-school programs that enrich

and engage them.

There are successful interventions available to underperforming schools

short of closing them. One was the creation of the “Chancellor’s District” that

put a failing school directly under the supervision of the Schools Chancellor

and increased its resources. Under Bloomberg, the Chancellor’s District was

eliminated and schools have been closed without the chancellor staking his

prestige and resources on fixing them. The well-regarded SURR process

(Schools Under Registration Review) that brought NY State Education

Department intervention into a failing school has been eliminated, and with

it an independent and professional analysis of what factors were at work

in compromising a school along with recommendations for specific improve-

ments. This review mechanism needs to be revived in a form that elicits

candid observations from all members of the school community and from the

neighborhood at large as schools falter for a variety of reasons, some of

which, like financial improprieties, can be readily fixed. Moreover, there needs

to be a process that mobilizes school communities and neighborhoods to bring

about the changes necessary to lift their schools and increase civic pride and

participation for the long term.

Community

pride in

neighborhood

schools should

not be

disrespected as

an obstacle to

changes brought

in from

the outside.

Community

pride is an

enormous source

of energy that

should be

mobilized in

support of

school and

neighborhood

improvement.


Non-Discrimination is a principle of human rights in education:

The government must ensure that the human right to education “will be exercised without discrimination ofany kind as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” This obligation includes respectful treatment and accommodation of the cultural heritages of school children and their families.

NYC

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Funding the School System


he narrative of the Bloomberg business model of education is that the chronic underfunding of the city’s

schools could only be addressed by turning the nation’s largest school system over to mayoral control

as a matter of political expediency and good administrative practice.

In this way, the resistance of the business and political elites to increased funding of the school system would be allayed by adoption of the business model for administering the funds and operating the system itself. According to the Bloomberg business model of education, all public institutions in a democracy are best run as private businesses with minimal public input and participation.

Funding for the New York City public school system has indeed substantially increased since the mayor took control of the school system. Teachers gained a substantial increase in salary and benefits. When the expected increase in test scores did not materialize, the narrative of a system chronically underfunded gave way to blaming the teachers for ineffectiveness. It followed that business practices like financial incentives for educators to boost the scores of their students were instituted.

Bloomberg points to the attraction of outside money as evidence of the success of his corporate-style school reform. Money from foundations and private-public partnerships has indeed helped change the dynamics of the New York City public school system from top to bottom to conform to a more businesslike culture.


The influx of tax dollars into the New York City school system is not reaching the school or classroom in ways that contribute to student learning. The increase in teacher salaries over the last decade still leaves them at lower rates than most New York suburbs — and they were not accompanied by an increase in resources for the classroom. The larger school system budget is paying for no-bid contracts and for increased numbers of highly paid consultants and administrators in the central bureaucracy.

Mayoral control has made this form of patronage worse than ever because education dollars are now part of the mayor’s arsenal of power. The increased lack of transparency that has come with mayoral control means that outright corruption is more difficult to track and expose. Historically, the propensity for corruption by mayors’ offices was one of the reasons for establishing an independent Board of

Joel Klein [was] the Bernie Madoff of the NYC school system.— Leonie Haimson

Founder & Executive Director,

Class Size Matters

11

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Education in the first place. Experts on corruption and patronage recommend that decision-making on

spending should be made in a decentralized manner — this keeps the problem from becoming large and

system-wide, and makes community oversight easier.

There is a limit to what teachers can do without enough resources and adequate professional support.

Most teachers continue to struggle with large class sizes, crumbling school facilities, and students coming

to school hungry, with untreated physical and mental health issues and other serious problems. The

deteriorating economy has increased the numbers of transitory students.

It’s not just the school and classroom that need to be adequately funded but also health and welfare

services for students so teachers will be able to teach children to their full potential. Giving bonuses to

teachers and principals has been shown not to work as a way of improving school performance.

It provides financial incentives at the school and classroom levels to corrupt the entire testing process.

Outside money can come with strings attached and often amounts to an end-run around public debate.

A lack of openness has thwarted the intentions of Title I and Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) monies

coming into the New York City school system to reduce class size and help schools serving especially

disadvantaged communities.

Overage high school students who have not been adequately educated in the public school system yet still

desire to graduate and earn their diplomas are counseled into GED programs through the New York City

Office of Adult and Continuing Education (OACE). Forty-four percent of all OACE students are parents

themselves. Within that percentage, OACE students are also the parents to 3,400 pre-schoolers, and

represent public school parents of 5,800 children enrolled in elementary grades. OACE claims to be the

largest provider of adult literacy education services in the state, and credits itself with being an integral

part of the NYC Department of Education's District 79 Alternative Schools and Programs, yet its direct

program funding has been decimated, while contracts to provide these educational services by private

entities abound.

The dysfunction of the current system costs more in the end because prison, unemployment, and

poor mental and physical health are the very costly alternatives to developing the vast potential of our

city’s children.

The Alternative: A Human Rights Model

Mechanisms need to be established to identify funding priorities at the school,

community and city levels. Such mechanisms should be able to challenge the priorities

of the central bureaucracy and enrich debate.

Rights interdependent with education, like health and housing, also

require priority funding in order to achieve the goal of fulfilling the

right to education.

The connection between education and adequate, stable family housing, health

services and other human rights make integrated planning and funding a necessity

for combined effectiveness. iCOPE proposes aligning Community School Districts

with Community Board Districts since Community Board Service Councils are

the logical place to integrate school and neighborhood needs and resources for

maximum benefit to students and their families.

Financial transparency at all levels of the school system and in government

agencies is essential to curbing patronage, mismanagement and corruption so

that dollars flow to the appropriate schools and classrooms. User-friendly reports

should be provided at every level of the school system showing how tax dollars

as well as donated resources are spent. Vendor recipients of school funding

dollars should be readily identifiable by name, amount and purpose to minimize

patronage and other corruption. Checks and balances must be built into the

system so full accountability becomes a reality.

Education is

a human right

and as such

deserves

adequate

funding as a

matter of

priority.

There must be equitable distribution of resources in education across communities according to need, so communities with the highest need receive the greatest resources.

Equity is a principle of human rights in education: NYC

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Parent and Community Involvement

The business model sees no role for the community in their neighborhood schools apart from calling the

police when there’s a problem. According to this view, the community should not have a voice in the school

system at any level because it does not have children in the schools. Because many media statements speak

to the mastery of control the mayor has over NYC’s public schools, it has been unflinchingly asserted that

parents tend to hinder the business of school governance. In 2009 The Villager, a downtown Manhattan

newspaper with an affluent readership, printed an article entitled “Only Some School Issues Are for

Parents.” The excerpt below solidifies the mayor’s unbiased thoughts on the role of parents, proving that he

does not favor one group over another, regardless of the community their children attend school in:

Parents need only be involved in the micro issues of their child’s education, like the student’s

attendance, behavior and grades. It does not make sense for parents to be involved in larger

issues . . . . Parent involvement should not be parent control. We have professional principals,

administrators and teachers — experts.

With the establishment of the universal high school application process and the end of neighborhood high

schools, communities have even less stake than ever in their neighborhood schools.

The Bloomberg business model of education sees parent and community involvement in shaping school

system policy and practice as absurdly over-participatory and a waste of management’s time. They see

the resources of the system better spent managing parent and community expectations through public

relations vehicles.

he Bloomberg business model of education holds that there is a proper division of labor between

education professionals and parents. In this technocratic view, most parents of New York City

public school children are too ill-educated and/or too busy surviving economically to be able to contribute

in a positive way to their children’s schools. Their proper role is to choose the best school option available

for their children, supervise homework, and let the experts do the rest.

Parents are the first and most importantmodels and teachers of their children.

— Dr. James Comer

Founder & Chairman,

School Development Program,

Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center

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Parent involvement in decision-making at all levels of the school system has been found by countless studies to

be an essential ingredient of high-quality public education. Parents and community members of all social and

economic classes provide an essential perspective on neighborhood realities and are indispensable partners in

mobilizing communities to press for change.

Day-to-day economic struggles of parents make it particularly important that their children attend schools in

their own neighborhoods — and that these neighborhood schools be excellent — so that neither parents nor

children travel great distances to participate in the lives of their schools.

The community’s voice must also be reflected in the policies and ethics of the schools — for example, whether

it’s necessary to have a police presence; or how controversial topics are approached in the classroom. Because

parents are often afraid of reprisals from schools, it’s important that the community have a place at the table

to give voice to the vulnerable. Moreover, the community has a history with this and other school systems

that individual parents often do not, and thus can add dimension to the deliberative process.

Robust parent and community involvement strengthens the community itself and that provides secondary

benefits for neighborhood schools.

The effect of separating schools from their neighborhoods has dis-empowered both parents and communities.

Albany’s acquiescence to Mayor Bloomberg in replacing elected community district school boards by

Community Education Councils (CECs) selected by parent leaders and with a vastly diminished role, has all

but eradicated the effectiveness of the parent and community voice throughout the system. Moreover, local

elected officials and representatives who have traditionally helped their constituents with problems at their

neighborhood schools are now less likely to represent families using these schools. Their effectiveness has

been diminished, and with it a source of support for parents and communities in negotiating problems

with the school system.

Opportunities and mechanisms for democratic participation in the school system by parents have all

but evaporated. The orchestrated chaos caused by Tweed’s constant re-organization, revised regulations,

relocation of offices and renaming of departments with confusing authority and titles, furthers the outright

disenfranchisement of parents and community members. The marginalization of School Leadership Teams and

District Leadership Teams to merely advisory bodies, the co-opting of parent leaders through their hiring as

parent coordinators, and then using this titled position to promote the DoE’s party line to community

parents, rather than truly helping them challenge the wrongs of the system — are all part and parcel of the

anti-democratic nature of the Bloomberg business model of education.

Lastly, mandating parents and teachers to volunteer in DoE-constructed parent organizations that lack

genuine power does not work. By and large, the coercive methods used by Tweed and school administrators

to increase parent engagement and involvement have proven to lack measurable benefit to the children,

parents and teachers in the majority of NYC’s public schools. To be highly effective, school-parent groups

must be independent of the DoE’s regulatory governance, and formed as independent entities governed by

human rights principles and guidelines.

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Parents and community members have a human right to participate in all decisions concerning them and their children. This is especially important in public education, which has such a pervasive influence on the quality of all their lives. Moreover, mechanisms for parent and community decision-making at all levels of the school system must be in

place for these decisions to occur and take effect.

To unify the efforts of parents of public school students across the city who are

working toward a common goal of equity and excellence in their schools, a true

and independent Parent Union must be established. It must be created by public

school parents themselves whose primary goal would be to advocate for policies

and legislation favorable to common parent interests across all boroughs and

school districts. The Parent Union must be completely democratic in structure

and modeled from only the very best practices and policies found in this nation’s

greatest labor and trade unions. Parent members would democratically elect

delegates from their schools and districts who will represent their interests when

negotiating with the New York City and State Departments of Education — as

do the unions representing teachers (UFT) and school principals (CSA).

To replace the lackluster parent engagement offices thus far established, the

Parent Union would be responsible for establishing a NYC Parent Academy —

run independently of the Board of Education, its vendors and any other New

York City labor union interests. The academy would have training sessions

taught by current and alumni public school parent leaders that would ensure that

other union parent-members know their rights and those of their children.

Through the provision of comprehensive workshops, and shared knowledge of the school system’s operation,

parent members would be afforded opportunities to acquire and practice the persistent skills necessary to work

in an equitable, nurturing and fully participatory capacity at all levels of their child’s schooling. Finally, the

operations and finances of the Parent Union must be transparent, and members, through their delegate news-

letters and Parent Union website, would have timely knowledge of their union’s activities as well as its

accounting and spending practices.

Establishing both a real, democratically formed Parent Union and its Parent Academy counterpart would

benefit parents, parent organizations and decision-making bodies, such as School Leadership Teams (SLTs)

and Parent Associations. It would strengthen the parent voice and be able to resolve any conflicts both within

and between parent organizations. To enhance their civic participation in the city’s school system, community

members should also be eligible to attend special classes and trainings held by the Parent Academy.

A Human Rights ModelThe Alternative:

To ensure that this

human right is

enjoyed by all,

parents and

community

members require

on going organizing

and educating so

that they have the

knowledge and

skills to participate

meaningfully in

decision-making.

Human beings are the central subject of development: economic and social systems should be in serviceof the right of individuals and communities to develop themselves by means of education, work, and othervehicles for advancement. The lack of development on the part of individuals and communities does not justify abridgement of their rights.

The Right to Development is a principle of human rights in education:

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What should students learn?Who should decide?

ccording to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and his predecessor,

Joel Klein, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and their corporate and political allies,

the fundamental purpose of education is to ensure our nation’s competitive advantage in the global capitalist

economy by preparing young people for their future economic role in it. In their view, school curricula should

be developed by education experts working closely with corporate leaders.

The business model promotes a common core curriculum emphasizing basic skills in reading, writing and

math, but also includes science, social studies and the arts. They believe that this core ensures that all

children will learn what’s important. Many see it as essential for building and maintaining national unity in

our culturally diverse nation, especially when it centers on the classics of Western tradition. A core

curriculum also facilitates testing as it provides a common standard by which to evaluate schools, districts

and states in meeting goals for higher educational achievement.

The core curriculum determines what is peripheral to education. In the view of the business model, the

many children who come to school not ready to learn should be focused on the basics: reading and math.

They believe that social studies, social and emotional learning, physical education, science, second-

language acquisition, creative writing and the arts should be postponed until disadvantaged students acquire

the basics.

The business model believes that students should be sorted out by aptitude and interest, and set on their

respective tracks. As they believe that students succeed based on ability and hard work, there is no

injustice involved. A few will do very well and be the next generation’s leaders. Others will be managers,

technicians or functionaries who carry out responsible roles in our economic system. And there will

always be a group at the bottom — those who, because of limited mental capacity or lack of hard work,

choose not to be successful. They will perform the menial work in our society.

Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society —

not for changing the nature of the relationship. — John Ralston Saul, Ph.D.

Award-Winning Essayist and Novelist

President, PEN International

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Currently, much of urban education is a limiting experience for most young people. It’s driven by high-stakes

exams and test preparation, though exactly what’s being measured by these tests is unclear. The curriculum

for most students is organized around corporate needs for compliant personnel with low-level technical skills.

Creative and critical thinking are not encouraged, as they could lead students to question the status quo of

racism, Eurocentrism and other injustices in the school system, society and the world. Elites live in wealthy

suburbs with excellent schools or send their children to private schools where a well-rounded education with

personalized approaches to learning is expected and valued.

Relying on corporate projections of the needs of the labor market to guide school curricula is desperately

misguided. Long-term labor market projections are notoriously wrong as new technology and global events

present new, unanticipated realities. Corporate leaders’ track record for handling the economy in ways that

serve groups other than their own is appalling. Corporations are first and foremost concerned with profit,

not the well-being of workers or society. Moreover, today the labor market for high-level, well-paying jobs

is global, for which high-quality, though Eurocentric, schooling is necessary but only for the few.

What corporations want from local labor markets is support staff, workers and consumers of their products.

This is the outlook for New York Cit public school children.

Much more is at stake in the education of children than the development of a workforce for large

corporations, and our curricula should reflect this broader vision of the goals of education. For

a democracy to function, our children need the knowledge and skills to create a robust civic, cultural,

commercial and personal life in their communities. Curricula should enable such self-determination

and development. Apart from its evident utility, education should be treated as a human right first

and foremost.

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The Alternative:The purpose of education is the full development of each child’s rich potential. This includes

their creative expression, emotional and social capacities, physical development, critical

thinking habits and skills, as well as their academic competence.

Curriculum — the subject matter that students read about, write about, talk about and through which they learn basic skills — should grow out of who our children are— their life experiences, including their culture, and their interests, as well as our understanding of the world we live in. A curriculum that connects to students’ lives will have meaning and encourage them to use their experience to understand what they need to learn to live in the world — and hopefully make it better. Children living in large cities and in rural areas may begin their schooling by investigating different topics. What they get excited about, curious about or inspired to learn about, may be different for each. Of course, as schooling progresses, communities, nations, cultures and problems far away from home will be introduced and integrated into the studies about the local community.

Academic skills and content are not enough to form a complete human being. Students must develop social and emotional competence. Managing feelings, communicating in ways that show consideration for others, listening intelligently to opinions that differ from their own, appreciating cultures other than their own and finding common ground with those cultures, and behaving respectfully toward everyone are all important to each person’s well-being and success as a caring human being as well as the smooth functioning of our schools. These skills

and sensitivities can be taught and need to be part of any curriculum that hopes to develop fully responsible and engaged citizens.

A common national curriculum does not make sense in a country as diverse as the United States. Who would, or could decide what it should be? Instead, it makes sense for our local communities, made up of parents, teachers, students where appropriate, and community members to decide on the specifics of what’s important for the children of the community to learn, along broad guidelines that include each child’s fundamental human right to a high-quality education within a human rights framework.

iCOPE demands an end to the one-dimensional high stakes tests and the narrow, barebones curriculum used to prepare for them. We call for flexibility, depth and vigor in a curriculum that connects to students’ lives, and gives attention to the whole child, not just language and math. Teachers, parents, students, curriculum developers, and community representatives must all be partners in devising the best course of study for their children within a human rights framework.

Academic

skills and

content are

not enough

to form a

complete

human being.

Students must

also develop

social and

emotional

competence.


Aim of Education is a principle of human rights in education:

The aims of education must be directed toward the full development of each child’s personality and potential, preparing all children to participate in society and to do work that is rewarding and adequately remunerative, and to continue learning throughout life.

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How Children Learn /How We Engage Children in Learning


n the Bloomberg business model of education, teaching is a low-level technical skill and learning is a

matter of passive absorption. To proponents of this view, teaching and learning are not rocket science:

students come to school more or less as empty vessels to be filled up with as much knowledge and as many

skills as possible. If teachers follow the school curriculum developed by “experts,” they should have no

difficulty ensuring that students are successful — those who are capable.

The Bloomberg business model of education sees culture or nationality as irrelevant to the teaching and learning process. The social backgrounds of both teachers and students should make no difference to the work produced. The teacher’s role is simply to transmit, to all students willing to learn, what the schools chancellor, and ultimately the mayor, believe necessary according to the corporate model.

The Bloomberg business model of education treats schools as factories and learning as manufacturing. As reading and math are treated as essential to a child’s success, the business model demands that education initially focus on these skills in teaching and testing. A curriculum timetable must be followed precisely. Success is measured by how well students score on annual high-stakes tests. The consequence of failure is to hold a child back, like a faulty product component, or to be deny participation in other subjects while the problem is addressed.

The business model of education does not have room for joy. It views school as hard work. Boredom is no excuse not to get the job done.

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author, Poet and Philosopher

(1803 - 1882)


The Bloomberg business model of education dehumanizes the people of the school community and the work

in which they’re engaged. Education occurs in sensate human beings in the context of a relationship between

teachers and children. Before any learning can take place, children need to feel safe, cared for and personally

supported. Students are not simply robotic hard drives waiting to be crammed with information. They need

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Individual Rights is a principle of human rights in education:

Every child must have equal access to a quality education adapted to meet his or her particular needs.

to be understood in all their complexity and individuality, including learning style, social class, culture, racial

background, and life experiences — and interests if teachers are to effectively guide their learning.

The most successful curriculum grows out of lived experiences and interests. Basic reading, writing and math

skills are best incorporated into subject matter drawn from students’ lives. This works far better than

monotonous drilling of stand-alone skills and mechanical memorizing for tests, a strategy that ignores the

multiple dimensions and connectedness of the human mind.

Small class size is vital, especially in the lower grades, where 15 to 18 students should be the maximum number.

Teachers can only get to know a limited number of children well and are best able to develop their students’

potentials when their numbers are manageable.

A teacher’s work is to guide student learning. Real learning includes grappling with

topics that have meaning to each of us as individuals.

Students need to be excited about what they’re learning, proud of what they

know and can do, and comfortable thinking like scientists or historians.

Building skills in research, writing, quantitative reasoning — and developing

capacity for complex critical and creative thinking — are key and can be

incorporated into topics that interest students. Thus it makes good sense to

study few topics in depth and not be so concerned about the number

of subjects covered. Learning how to transfer what we’ve learned to

different life contexts — and learning how to learn — are the most important

goals for education today.


We all learn by

connecting what

we already know to

something new.

Test prep interferes

profoundly

with this

dynamic process.

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ccording to proponents of corporate education reform, promoting a model of education that

serves corporate interests, any multicultural, antiracist or Africa-centered curriculum leads

us down a slippery slope toward hatred and reverse racism. In keeping with a corporate culture that

replicates racial stereotyping and discriminatory labor practices, this type of curriculum is seen as without

substance, a mere feel-good remedy for deeper educational issues that Black and Latino students face.

According to this view, multicultural, antiracist or Africa-centered curricula promote academic superficiality

rather than academic rigor and foster the intellectual marginalization of minority students. These students

are thus denied the future opportunities that are rightfully theirs. Students are better served by a core

curriculum more in keeping with American educational traditions.

Moreover, the Bloomberg business model of education views multicultural, antiracist or Africa-centered

curricula with suspicion, thinly disguised leftist propaganda against “democratic values,” free enterprise,

and the American way of life. In this view, it teaches anti-Americanism that disunites, promotes a useless

and uncalled for white guilt, and spreads racial hatred.

With the business model emphasis on standardization through a set core curriculum and a matching set of

tests, a multicultural, antiracist or Africa-centered curriculum is seen as fringe learning at the expense of

real learning and little more than a tool for demagoguery.

iCOPE Critique of the Bloomberg Business Model of Education

The current New York City public school K-12 curriculum is, for the most part, narrowly Eurocentric.

It short-changes all students because it doesn’t allow any of them to see and experience the rich and

Multicultural / AntiracistCurricula and Education

Until lions have their historians,tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

— African Proverb

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dynamic contributions of various world cultures in their own lives. They are in fact prevented from gaining a deep understanding of their own histories, cultures and lived experiences.

The current promotion of a Eurocentric curriculum distorts the rich and complex texture of European history, itself a product of cultural, commercial, migratory, and political exchanges with Africa, Asia and the Americas. A completely Eurocentric curriculum has a profound impact on the perspectives and self-esteem of all children, regardless of class or race. It serves to foster the racist status quo; on the one hand encouraging white children to live up to subtle, but very real Anglo-supremacist codes and practices; while on the other hand influencing students of color to live down to the “racial inferiority” stereotype encoded in this white supremist society.

The NY State Department of Education has defied state law and ignored both the Underground Railroad Act and the Amistad mandate to devise a Black History K-12 curriculum. As Americans, we live together in a historical process whose roots go back to slavery and racial hierarchy. By denying our children an opportunity to locate themselves in this history, we are undermining the value of truth telling and education itself.

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The Alternative: A Human Rights ModelMulticultural education is not just including perspectives and insights and information

from various cultures or groups . . . It's an ongoing process that empowers students to view

the world from multiple perspectives and to understand the ongoing dynamics of this

rapidly changing world . . . The anti-racist component is included when you talk about

empowering students to make changes in the world, to make critical judgments about

justice and equity, and not to be complacent about the status quo or about historical

omissions and distortions. - Kathy Swope, Educator-Activist, Milwaukee, WI.

Non-Discrimination is a principle of human rights in education:

The government must ensure that the human right to education “will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” This obligation includes respectful treatment and accommodation of the cultural heritages of school children and their families.

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A Multicultural / Antiracist Curriculum and Education should not be looked upon as an add-on to a Eurocentric common core, or canon. It is an attempt to teach the realities about humanity’s past, present, and future struggles for equity and social justice from the perspective of all who were and are involved.

It also forms a moral and ethical grounding for all students. It helps them to see and understand that humanity’s development is tied to our urge to fight the evils of what people may do to each other and to promote the goodness that people may offer each other. Both of these elements are in evidence even in the most horrendous of times such as during the eras of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States or during the many genocides that have taken place across history.

A Multicultural / Antiracist Curriculum connects to the entire curriculum — including mathematics and the sciences. A Multicul-tural / Antiracist Curriculum and Education explores how social, economic, and cultural institutions contribute to the inequality of all, with particular reference to the Western Hemisphere’s experiences of slavery, colonialism and forced migration. From a human rights perspective, such curricula can be more academically rigorous than those currently in use.

A Multicultural / Antiracist Curriculum and Education is grounded in the lives of our students, their parents and their community. It draws on the voices and perspectives of those “being studied.” It teaches through dialogue. Further, it critically supports students’ identities as well as recognizing and embracing New York City students’ more than 147 home languages and their cultures. Moreover, the use of a K-12 multicultural curriculum has been shown to significantly increase racial understanding and harmony not only among the students, but also among educators, staff and parents.

Education,

including curricula

and

teaching methods,

have to be acceptable

(e.g. relevant, culturally

appropriate and of

good quality) . . .

and respond to the

needs of students

within their diverse

social and cultural

settings.

— UN Committee on Economic, Social

and Cultural Rights

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roponents of the Bloomberg Business Model of Education believe a policing approach is the best method for public schools to be safe enough for learning to take place. They believe that school

safety officers should report to the police department rather than the school principal so that principals can concentrate on education. In their view, the presence of police officers and metal detectors in schools deters student violence.

When did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to makechildren do better, first you have to make them feel worse?

The View of Bloomberg’s Business Model of Education

Safe Schools, Effective Disciplineand Classroom Management

— Jane Nelsen, Ed.D.

Educator, Psychologist and Author

The command-and-control nature of the Bloomberg model carries over into student discipline with a zero tolerance policy for all areas of student misbehavior. It believes a well functioning system of student discipline is best devised when it resembles a legal code transmitted by the authorities — and enforced without exception. It believes that when students show by their misbehavior that they are not willing to abide by the rules of the school, they must be removed and sent to special facilities.

The Bloomberg business model of education holds that when students know the consequences of misbehavior, they have no one to blame but themselves if they run into trouble.

In this view, bad behavior in school can easily lead to criminal behavior in society. A policing approach to school safety and discipline correspond to a belief that coercive force is required to keep public school students in line.

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Students act out for all sorts of reasons. Police and zero tolerance policies don’t address core issues behind misconduct. For example, students with learning difficulties that haven’t been addressed — or even for that matter, recognized — often misbehave. Severe punishment will not teach them how to read or do math. Only supportive human connections and specialized teaching will enable them to learn.

Students also misbehave because they find their schoolwork boring, trivial, uninteresting or contrary to the values of their culture and/or the realities of their lives. Curriculum that revolves around daily practice for

high-stakes tests is tedious, mind numbing and can provoke misbehavior.

Students also misbehave when they don’t know how to behave in a specific situation. For these students threats of escalating consequences and punishments make no sense. What’s needed is personal support and learning opportunities— starting in preschool— that enable them to develop the skills and understandings necessary to navigate challenges at school.

Finally, overcrowded, dilapidated schools send a message to students, parents and educators that they don’t count for much. A school in disrepair is an obstacle to building a strong and positive school culture and community, and overcrowding taxes the patience of teachers and students alike. Neuroscience tells us that the human brain is still in formation until we are in our mid-twenties. Children and teenagers are not adults; they need to be understood for who they are and supported in their development, not pathologized or criminalized.

There is little evidence that schools with metal detectors and police are safer than schools without them. Given the historic distrust between the police and communities of color, cops in schools get in the way of building trust, support and respect among members of a school community. Students need a culture of safety, trust and fairness— and a sense of belonging— to feel free to speak out when something negative happens.

When students feel humiliated and disrespected by school or public authorities, by the prison-like culture of their school, by the disrepair of their school building, and by the mindlessness and disconnect between their lives and the school curriculum, it should be no surprise that many become alienated and not likely to follow school rules and regulations. At least those students who are misbehaving are still in school. Every effort should be made to keep them from dropping out or being dismissed from the school system.

Candid illustrations created by two high school students in focus groups during the Participatory Action Research done by YRNES (Youth Researchers

for a New Education System) for their Report on the New York City School System; pages 12 and 13.

Metal Detector & Wanding

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The Alternative:Learning how to deal with conflicts in a positive manner is an important part of education

as it addresses the goal of full human development.

Teachers and principals are ultimately responsible for providing a safe and positive learning environment for their students. They know the students best and often care deeply about their well-being and the development of their potential. Giving students a voice in developing classroom practices is important to their understanding of the mutual responsibilities of community and imparts familiarity with the democratic process.

Participation increases the likelihood of students behaving well and feeling connected to their classroom community and school. If they’re involved in dealing with infractions to school and classroom rules through peer mediation and other processes, their support for a positive school climate and culture will strengthen as well.

Parents and community members also have a role in developing and implementing school rules and procedures that contribute significantly to positive school environments. Their local knowledge and eventual support of the norms governing school culture can be a significant factor in creating an environment that sustains student achievement.

Good behavior and interest in learning come much more easily if students feel cared for, respected and understood by teachers who work to get to know them and to connect curriculum to their lives. A rich, relevant, vigorous and engaging curriculum can be the most effective tool for

promoting positive behavior.

Giving students

a voice in

developing

classroom

practices is

important to

their

understanding

of the mutual

responsibilities

of community

and imparts

familiarity with

the

democratic

process.


Dignity is a principle of human rights in education:

Schools must respect the inherent human dignity of every child creating an environment of mutual respect and tolerance in the classroom, preventing practices and disciplinary policies that cause harm or humiliation to children, and promoting self-confidence and self-expression.

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Education Technology

The View of Bloomberg’s Business Model of Education

roponents of the Bloomberg Business Model of Education believe education is a consumer product produced by an impersonal, technocratic process. In their view, there’s almost no downside to the use of

education technology.

“Distance learning” and in-class educational automation are seen as cost-effective realities that allow schools to make teaching staff redundant and avoid building new school facilities. They believe that with more new educational technologies coming online in the next few years, the per-student cost of “delivering educational services” can be dramatically cut — in many cases by more than half.

To proponents of the Bloomberg Business Model, the benefits of replacing traditional classrooms with virtual ones are tremendous. “Schools can develop new distribution methods to enable equity and access for all students, they can provide high quality content for all students and they can begin to shift [even more of] their management structures to support performance-based approaches through data-driven decisionmaking.”* Once a quality online learning system has been created and purchased, it provides infinite use by countless numbers of students, unlike books that suffer from wear and tear and must be replenished. A school’s online learning system carries little additional overhead other than the cost of the classroom computers, as opposed to teachers who must be recruited, trained, and provided with continuous and costly support. The many advan-tages of new educational technologies can help establish a common core curriculum that will replace individual teacher variation and personal bias. With great online learning systems, teachers are released from the depen-dency of students who expect constant instructions, feedback and reassurance from them. Teachers can become guides and mentors who only need be trained in student interaction to instruct their assigned learners as needed, permitting for greater flexibility, especially as telecommuting for teachers becomes the norm in schools, rather than the exception.

Virtual courses provide expanded opportunities for academic achievement from elementary, middle and high school students who with regard to their peers, are at all different places in the achievement gap and learning spectrum. Online learning permits more advanced students to take courses beyond their grade level and study subjects their schools wouldn’t be able to otherwise offer. Struggling learners benefit by being plugged into supplemental and immediate remedial assistance, so crucial to their needs.

Lastly, the Bloomberg Business Model subscribes to the notion of NYC maintaining its position as a global leader, no less true with experiments to innovate the delivery of education. In Singapore, every teacher is trained to teach online; which highlights the business driven / marketplace demand in this hi-tech information age to quicken NYC students’ readiness to compete with their technologically-savvy, global peers.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

- Albert Einstein, Ph.D.

Professor and Theoretical Physicis

(1879 - 1955)

* Susan Patrick, North American Council for Online Learning Report, Pg. 6

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Education is not a product to be “delivered.” It’s a process of discovery which includes a rich and nuanced

communication between teacher and student. Significantly reducing the number of teachers in direct contact

with students and substituting computer terminals and formatted lessons increase student isolation, and since

no one’s available to respond, young minds are trained not to ask questions.

The industrial approach sees educational technologies as vehicles for the corporate bottom line: you don’t have

to pay a salary, benefits or pension to a machine. This way, billions of our tax dollars can go directly to major

companies such as Microsoft, Apple, NewsCorp and other for-profit firms who hope to mirror the aggressive

growth, financial and political clout amassed by K12, Inc., presently the country’s largest provider of full-time,

public virtual schools and programs.

As of this writing, over 160 public elementary, middle and high schools

in NYC are using “iLearn,” a host for assorted online learning courses

provided through a variety of vendors including the K12 corporation. In

the rapid evolution, experimentation and roll-out of virtual schooling,

there has been a lack of accountability to the city’s students, particularly

as reported recently in failing schools who have adopted this program.

In at least one high school serving low-income, struggling students in

Far Rockaway, their entire Fall term of English, a core course and

Regents diploma requirement was provided through iLearn without

benefit of an assigned classroom teacher or instructor. There has been

no solid research demonstrating substantial proof that cyber learning is

good for all, although what has been demonstrated is that it reduces

labor costs, regardless of the detriment to students most in need of

superior, in-person instruction. iCOPE’s concern mirrors that of virtual

schooling critic and Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy

Center, Gene V. Glass, who warns, “We have to make sure that cyber

schools don't become just a cheap way of providing second-rate service

to disadvantaged schools and students.”

Finally, the corporate approach sees the use of educational technologies

as a way to easily and seamlessly use a single mode of schooling that’s

just this side of programming and brainwashing. Computer programs

cannot perform the critical thinking required of teachers to adapt

lessons to the needs, interests and backgrounds of their individual

students. This approach undermines the educational process itself

by removing the intangible but very real contributions of human inter-

action to a child’s learning. By indoctrinating children to accept remote

and impersonal authority, we usher in new generations of citizen

consumers who are accustomed to doing what they’re told. Moreover,

a narrowly instructed and machine-taught workforce would lack the

skills and knowledge to suggest innovations and challenge employers

and governments — the essence of democracy.

Here’s an interesting discovery about K12, Inc. founded by Ronald Packard, a former Goldman Sachs banker and William Bennett, the former US Secre-tary of Education and a current Republican writer and radio talk-show host who has served as the board chairman of K12:

Ronald Packard’s start-up venture received $10 million dollars in capital as an investment from the convicted and disgraced, former junk-bond king and now, education philanthropist, Michael Milken, as well as funding from Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp., a software and hardware systems maker. At one time, K12’s biggest competitor for online public schooling had been Kaplan Inc., the test-prep company owned by The Washington Post, but K12 was able to maneuver an acquisition of Kaplan’s branch into the virtual-schools business. As noted on their website, “the firm has delivered over 2.5 million courses to date to more than 80,000 K-12 students” (www.k12.com).

We cite this information as relevant to iCOPE’s critique after learning about a new study conducted by researchers at Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center that found as many as two-thirds of all K12 schools are failing by the federal mandates established in the No Child

Left Behind law.

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The Human Rights-based approach to public education recognizes the value of

technological advances within education.

The Human

Rights-based

approach

encourages all

students,

teachers and

parents to

participate in

determining

which

technologies to

select and how

they should be

used.

However, it sees those advances as enhancing — not substituting for — the

vital human interaction between teachers and students, students and students,

and teachers and teachers. These technologies are open, welcoming and can

be shared globally.

The Human Rights-based approach also asserts that students, teachers and

parents should be involved in the development and design of new

educational technologies based on their particular needs. Major tech

corporations would partner with — rather than impose upon — the school’s

learning community, its educators, students, parents and community supporters.

Aim of Education is a principle of human rights in education:

The aims of education must be directed toward the full development of each child’s personality and potential, preparing all children to participate in society and to do work that is rewarding and adequately remunerative, and to continue learning throughout life.


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Teachers and Teachers Unions

They believe that unions protect incompetence among their members and that this is especially true of

the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers. This business model holds that education would

significantly improve if tenured teachers could be easily removed from the system.

Advocates of this business model believe teachers are not professionals like doctors and lawyers. They

believe that no specialized skill or knowledge is required to become a teacher and that people can be trained

very quickly to become teachers and be placed in a classroom. All teachers need to do is follow rules and

procedures, and implement a curriculum set by headquarters.

Modern cynics and skeptics see no harmin paying those to whom they entrust the minds

of their children a smaller wage than is paidto those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

— John F. Kennedy

35th President of the United States

(1917 - 1963)

roponents of the Bloomberg Business Model of Education view all unionized labor as an obstacle to

their vision of school reform and thus an obstacle to the promotion of the public good. In their view,

unions are self-serving: they care only about the number of hours their members must work, their working

conditions, pay, benefits and pensions.

iCOPE Critique of the Bloomberg Business Model of Education

Unions play a vital role in promoting a democratic and just society. Teachers unions came into being because

it was necessary to struggle together for decent wages and benefits, to advocate for better working

conditions — such as a reasonable class size and adequate classroom resources — and to protect against

arbitrary firing. Not too long ago, teachers could be dismissed for their political or religious views, or sexual

orientation, or other qualities their supervisors didn’t like.

The evidence of a connection between educational quality and teachers’ unions does not support the basis of

the Bloomberg Business Model. In areas of the United States where there are no teachers’ unions, teacher

pay, school resources and student achievement are significantly lower. In Finland, on the other hand, a country

known for its high academic student achievement, teachers are fully unionized.

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High-quality education is enhanced when teachers are able to advocate together for reasonable pay and good

working conditions. Good working conditions enable them to do quality work with students. Decent wages

allow teachers to give full attention to students and not have to take on an additional job to make ends meet.

Without collective bargaining, teachers’ standard of living would go down, making the profession less

attractive. Without a collective voice, teachers wouldn’t be able to advocate for policies like smaller class size

and adequate school resources. High union standards and security help attract the best of each generation

to become teachers.

Recent attacks on teachers and other public sector workers are humiliating assaults on public servants. Such

attacks are perhaps most cruel for those teachers — highly motivated, hard working and totally dedicated to

their students — who spend many hours beyond the school day either with students, preparing their classes or

improving themselves professionally.

Teaching requires diverse and nuanced skills. Some can be learned in college, others can only be developed

through practice. Teachers are professionals in the way religious leaders, psychologists and social workers are

— by inspiring the desire for knowledge and wisdom through their skill in reaching those in their care.

Teachers’ unions have never granted tenure. Tenure is granted only by school administrators and boards of

education. Unfortunately, in most instances, there is little evaluation of the quality of a teacher’s work before

tenure is granted. At the same time, beginning teachers seldom get the support they need to grow in the

profession. Often they’re afraid to ask for help out of fear of a negative tenure evaluation.

In fact, teacher development and retention are problems for the city schools that are at least as pressing as the

question of tenure. Almost half of new teachers leave the profession in their first five years, most often for lack

of support. It’s not in the interest of the teaching profession to support low-quality teaching. Moreover, it

matters individually to teachers that fellow teachers, especially those who have instructed their current

students, are good at their jobs. Recently, teachers have advocated for larger and more defined roles as

teacher/professionals. This includes mentoring new teachers, ongoing peer support and participating in peer

review. This also means working together to improve curriculum and to develop diverse, culturally responsive

methods to support the learning of all students.

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The Alternative:All people benefit when fair wages and good working conditions are the norm, not the

exception. Moreover, unions have an obligation to join in larger social movements

promoting the human rights of others. In the human rights model, teachers and their

unions have a special responsibility to become partners in the social justice reform of our

inequitable educational and social institutions, especially those that affect the

communities they serve.

In accordance with this human rights model, teachers, working with parents and communities, will redefine their profession to include fostering community support of their students and schools. This means that teachers will actively engage with parents and communities — beyond the traditional partnership — to understand the best ways to facilitate the learning of individual children. Teachers, parents, community members and, as appropriate, students will work together through revitalized School Leadership Teams and district teams to improve all areas of education, including curriculum, discipline and safety, and school decision-making, and to effectively struggle for high-quality schools in each neigh-borhood of our city. Thus a new and important professional role of teachers will be to work together with other interested groups to understand factors both inside and outside school that influence readiness and motivation to learn, and to work together with these groups to improve the atmosphere of learning.

New ideas and approaches will enable teachers to receive the professional support they need to provide high-quality, culturally relevant learning for all students, or be counseled out of the profession in a thoughtful and caring manner if they aren’t able to make the grade. The union will also promote policies to prepare and hire significantly more teachers of color so the culture and nationality of the teachers more closely reflects that of the students.

Union leadership will be creative, flexible and democratic so that a social justice orientation defines how teachers are organized. Teachers’ unions will be in solidarity with families and communities on issues beyond education that affect the well-being of society as a whole and will join with other groups struggling to build a more just world for everyone.

The right to

organize, form

unions and

engage in

collective

bargaining is

a basic human

right and should

be respected

as such.


The Right to Decent Work is a principle of human rights in education:

Teachers and others employed by the school system have the right to see their labor rights respected by public school systems and charter school operators, including the rights to free association and collective bargaining, fair and adequate remuneration, dignity, adequate rest and recreation, and favorable working conditions.

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Bibliography: BOOKS

ARTICLES

Sources that helped us put this booklet together

Michael Apple & James A. Beane, Democratic Schools: Lessons in Powerful Education, 2nd ed., Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York: The New Press, 2010.

Wayne Au, ed., Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Rethinking Schools, 2009.

Anthony S. Bryk and Barbara Schneider, Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.

Mary Cowhey, Black Ants and Buddhists, Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades, Portland, Me: 2006.

Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity will Determine our Future, New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University, 2010.

Beverly Falk, Teaching the Way Children Learn, New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University, 2009.

New York Civil Liberties Union, Safety with Dignity: Alternatives to Overpolicing in our Schools, New York, NY: 2009.

Deborah Meir, Diane Ravitch, et al., NYC Schools Under Bloomberg & Klein: What Parents, Teachers and Policymakers Need to Know, New York: Lulu Publishing, 2009.

Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

REPORTS Bruce D. Baker, Richard Ferris, “Adding Up The Spending: Fiscal Disparities and Philanthropy Among NYC Charter Schools” http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/NYC-charter-disparities (Boulder, CO.: National Education Policy Center. January, 2011)

Gene V. Glass, Kevin G. Welner, Justin Bathon, “Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Ventures in Need of Public Regulation,” http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/online-k-12-schooling (Boulder, CO.: National Education Policy Center. October, 2011)

Alex Molnar, Faith Boninger, Joseph Fogarty, “The Educational Cost of Schoolhouse Commercialism,” http://nepc.colorado. edu/publication/schoolhouse-commercialism -2011 (Boulder, CO.: National Education Policy Center. November, 2011)

Eve Tuck,et al., “The YRNES Report, New York City 2008” - Youth Reasearchers for a New Education System, NYC. The National Center on Schools and Communities, Fordham University and The Independent Commission On Public Education (available at www.icope.org)

The Governing Board of the National Council of Churches, “A Pastoral Letter on Federal Policy in Public Education: An Ecumenical Call for Justice,” The National Council of Churches in the USA, New York, NY: 2010 (available at www.icope.org).

Parent Commission on School Governance and Mayoral Control, “Recommendations on School Governance,” New York, NY: 2009 (available at http://parentcommission.org/parent_commission_Final_Report.pdf (New York: 2009)

Liza Featherstone, “Report Card: Here Comes Success,” http:www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/local/report-card-here-comes- success (Brooklyn, NY: The Brooklyn Rail, December 2011).

Jonathan Mahler, “The Fragile Success of School Reform in the Bronx,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag- 10School-t.html? (New York, NY: The New York Times Magazine, April, 2011)

Ian Quillen, “Virtual Ed. Advocates Respond to Wave of Criticism,” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/11/23/13virtual.h31.html?tkn=ULUF5Wkz2nE8eiEKBZo589GSjyy0b9dar6dy&cmp=ENL-DD-NEWS1 (Bethesda, MD: Education Week, November 23, 2011).

Stephanie Saul, “Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-education/online-schools- score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html?_r=2&ref=education# (New York, NY: The NY Times, December 13, 2011).

Dayna Smith, “Virtual schools are multiplying, but some question their educational value,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virtual-schools-are-multiplying-but-some-question-their-educational-value/2011/11/22/ (Washington, DC: The Washington Post, November 22, 2011)

34

About iCOPE The Independent Commission on Public Education (iCOPE) is a volunteer, grassroots think tank. Over the past decade, iCOPE has led an Education is a Human Right campaign whose purpose is to show that a more just,democratic and effective education system is possible. To this end, we have been developing an alternative vision of public education based on human rights principles. We believe that a human rights framework offers a well developed and internationally agreed-upon set of standards needed to create schools that meet the needs of every child and place greater power in the hands of parents, students,educators and school communities.

iCOPE believes that the New York City public education system, both under the current system of mayoral control and under previous regimes, has failed to meet human rights standards. We have become particularly alarmed by the anti-democratic tone of public discourse that has accompanied Mayor Bloomberg’s appropria-tion of the city school system. Yet the causes of persistent failures in our schools are systemic and thus require a systemic response. One element that iCOPE advocates is a structured, collaborative planning process that brings together all rights-holders, including parents and students, to build on common ground and design a new system of public education for the 21st century.

Under Mayor Bloomberg, NYC schools are run according to an authoritarian / industrial model of one-size- fits-all. Prior to the 2009 debate regarding school governance and mayoral control, iCOPE had long been working on offering an alternative. We understood that school system governance and accountability must be based on a vision of the public school system that rests on a clearly articulated, democratically oriented mission statement and set of core principles for the NYC school system. This approach was adopted by the Parent Commission Report on School Governance and Mayoral Control in 2009 and the 3R’s Coalition.

iCOPE proudly sponsored the Youth Researchers for a New Education System and published their ground- breaking 2008 report on New York City schools. The “YRNES Report” articulates student concerns and the dire need for respect, equality and a voice in decision-making. The report included the Problem Tree, a graphic representation of the critical issues confronting NYC high schools. It was featured from 2009 - 2011 in an exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, entitled “Courage: the Black New York Struggle for Quality Education.”

iCOPE participated in the writing of “Race Realities in New York City,” the Human Rights Project’s shadow report on the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. This 2007 report was particularly critical of the dismally low graduation rates for Blacks and Latinos, and the disproportionate abuse of suspension for students of color in New York City. iCOPE is also a member of the Human Rights Project’s NYC Human Rights Initiative, whose goal is to pass a bill in the New York City Council that would require city agencies to conduct internal human rights audits to identify and prevent human rights violations.

iCOPE supports the Dignity in Schools Campaign coordinated by the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative to re-frame the national debate on school atmosphere and discipline using human rights principles. Schools are pushing children out by placing arbitrary rules before their education and treating children as “problems” to be dealt with rather than humans in need of guidance and respect. Children, their families and teachers have a human right to dignity in schools.

iCOPE is also a member of the Coalition for Public Education / Coalición por la Educación Pública which supports neighborhood control of schools, the end of mayoral control, and a new People’s Board of Education; and also participates in the Occupy DoE working group of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

35

The struggle for Human Rights has it roots deep in American culture and politics because the formerly

enslaved always saw their struggle for freedom as a struggle to be recognized and treated as fellow human

beings as the most fundamental of Human Rights. This understanding was further enhanced during the

Civil War and Post Civil War period of Reconstruction by African Americans and their white allies

asserting that Black folk had all the rights and privileges of White America. It was during the 20th Century

that the language and practice used to continue the struggle for the realization of Human Rights changed

to imply that the Black Freedom Movement was merely about narrowly defined US civil laws. But, the

relentless persistence of racism in the midst of the passage of ground-breaking civil rights law even made

the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. strongly assert that the struggle for Human Rights was, and is

the foundation of Black Freedom.

Thoughts on Our Nation’s Legacy

America did not invent human rights.In a very real sense, it is the other way around.

Human rights invented America.— Jimmy Carter

39th President of the United States

Education is the keyto unlock the golden door of freedom.

— George Washington Carver

Professor, Scientist, Botanist, and Inventor

(1864 - 1943)

36

Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights.You will make a greater person of yourself,

a greater nation of your countryand a finer world to live in.

— The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Changing the existing business model of public education to a system based upon human rights will require a

democratic chorus of diverse voices with new ideas and bold initiatives — much more than what we have

briefly described here. Our challenge was to spark enough interest in an alternative to the existing system as

to solicit responses from an activist community of concerned parents, students and educators alike. We hope

to engage with all who want to consider a human rights alternative that is unique to New York City — and

viable, both for our children and the system of public schooling that governs their futures.

We welcome your comments on this booklet. We hope you will contact us so we may include your ideas and

thoughts in the work that follows. Please join us, and contribute towards the urgent goal of developing an

in-depth human rights model for New York City’s public schools.

Send your comments and suggestions to: [email protected].


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NYC

Phone

718. 499.3756

Email

[email protected]

Newsletter

http://icopenyc.blogspot.com

Website

www.icope.org

icope's getting out from under - a human rights alternative

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