Education equity: A vision for the future of our schools
Quality education is a human right, not a business, not a commodity to be sold to those with the most money.
Alexa is a union-backed mom who joined the fight for education justice because of her experiences as a parent. The mother of two public school students, she has witnessed the inequities and injustices of NYC’s school system firsthand. In nearly a decade as president of the Parent-Teacher Association of her daughters’ school, Alexa dramatically expanded the PTA’s budget and secured funding and equipment for a number of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) programs. She also fought to give parents a voice in their children’s education, bridging linguistic divides, and bringing to light issues related to overcrowding, culturally responsive curricula and learning environments, IEP support, and more. During her tenure, Alexa learned that politics is about talking to people — in this case, bringing teachers, parents, and students together — learning what they need, and recognizing the power of solidarity to fight for what we deserve.
The crises of the last year have made painfully clear the ways in which our education system perpetuates injustice, particularly for working-class, immigrant communities of color, like ours in City Council District 38. According to the Alliance for Quality Education, even before the pandemic swept through the state, New York was ranked 49th in the nation in terms of educational equity. The organization further notes that “8 out of 10 Black and Latinx students attend a school that has been systematically underfunded by the state.”
Elected leaders at every level of government must recognize that fully funding our public schools is essential to the future of our city, but that investment alone will not undo the damage.
Today, schools across the city, particularly those of District 38, are overcrowded and understaffed, lacking a proper number of teachers and counselors. COVID, has devastated our community, leaving schools gutted of resources, and families and school workers struggling to ensure that students have what they need to survive.
Here is how we can right the many wrongs that have been done to our students and transform our education system into the cornerstone of a just society:
Fund our schools
As our City Council Member, Alexa will insist our public schools receive the funding they are owed. She will fight to redirect funds from the bloated NYPD and other wasteful and unjust systems of city government, and toward our public schools. Alexa will also stand up to the privatization of education and push the City to stop subsidizing charter schools that drain our public school system of resources. According to the United Federation of Teachers, for the 2020 - 2021 school year, “NYC expects to see its charter school expenditures increased by $93 million — now costing the city over $2.3 billion.”
Together, we will organize to demand full funding from the State and the City for early childhood education, K-12 schools, CUNY, and adult education. Make no mistake — there is more than enough money in New York to give every single person a quality education. But we need to fight for it.
Fully fund PreK-12 schools, CUNY, and adult education, allowing us to hire more teachers and counselors, expand language access, and foster culturally responsive learning environments. Simply taxing the rich at the state level will generate the funds we need to implement dramatic improvements at every level of education — from our youngest students to adults furthering their education at our city colleges. We must pass the Invest in Our New York Act in 2021, and advocate for similar legislation in the future.
Truly universal early childhood education for District 38. The expansion of early childhood education over the last eight years in New York City has been a major success, but working families in District 38 are struggling to find available spots, as most 3-K for All programs are full. For 3-K for All to be truly universal, we need adequate funding and for our community in South Brooklyn to be prioritized.
Demand that the State pay the over $1.4 billion it owes NYC public schools in Foundation Aid. Although a grueling legal battle ended with the NYS Court of Appeals ruling that the state must increase public school funding in 2006, the State has not paid the full amount it owes since 2008. The City must hold the State accountable for the funding our students deserve.
Recalibrate the DOE budget so that it invests in a positive school climate, not in high-stakes testing, unethical contracts and more.
Stop the privatization of education. Place a moratorium on new charter schools, stop using public money to pay charter schools’ rent, and work with the DOE to develop a process that brings charter schools back under public control. At the same time, the co-location of public schools with charter schools needs to end.
Invest in youth services. We must fund programs that create meaningful education and employment programs that enhance opportunities, especially for 16- and 24-year-olds who are out of school and out of work. Fully fund the Summer Youth Employment Program and expand workforce programs.
Address the injustices of our education system
Alexa has seen firsthand how our public schools exemplify some of the worst inequalities that afflict our city. Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and forced to work without the equipment and training they need to serve our students. Our school workers’ working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. We must pay our teachers fairly and give them the resources to foster their students’ growth. We must also equip them to handle the challenges of their workplace.
We must shift the power dynamic in public schools, centering parents, students, educators and staff in decision-making. This is necessary if we are to acutely address the social and emotional needs of our children and create a comprehensive recovery plan after COVID that addresses their trauma and the learning lost in 2020 and 2021.
It is critical that we get the police out of our public schools, replacing them with the professionals who understand our students’ needs and whose goal is to help them develop, not to put them on the path to incarceration. Over-policing in schools increases youth imprisonment along racial and economic lines, according to the NYCLU.
Together, we can make NYC public schools welcoming places, where every worker has all they need to best serve our students, where no one feels threatened, and where every student, teacher, and family is valued.
Equip each student with the tools they need to succeed in school. During the pandemic, we saw that many students do not have access to the devices they need, like working laptops, iPads and more. Just as books are essential for students to learn, so is up-to-date and workable technology.
Create and adequately fund programs for those with differing abilities.
District 38 is deprived of special education resources, and children in our community have to travel across Brooklyn — sometimes even to different boroughs — to receive the attention and care they deserve. This is a funding problem for existing programs, but it’s also a problem in how we plan for new schools. When we build new schools, we can create the spaces for students with special needs to thrive. We must also ensure that special education classes are fully staffed.
Address shortages in bilingual special education evaluations and classes.
Expand specialized programs, like Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) Nest and ASD Horizon, and develop new ones.
Clean the backlog of special education cases.
Ensure that all school communications are available in the languages spoken by parents. DOE policy explicitly calls for universal language access so that all families can participate in their child's education, and the department provides some resources to schools. But its implementation since 2009 has been uneven at best. In many schools, the designated language access coordinator is also the parent coordinator — a part-time and undervalued position. We need to both ensure that money for translation and interpretation actually gets used and goes toward supporting language access, and we must also expand the resources available to schools.
Focus on reducing class sizes. Reduced class sizes should be our main criteria for improving school quality. Although there are costs to reducing class sizes, the NEA notes that not reducing class sizes could be costlier, considering greater dropout rates and fewer opportunities for students who don’t receive a quality education. Taxing the rich and funding our schools is paramount to ensuring we have the educators and staff needed for schools to function, but New York City can get creative, too. Rather than focusing on test scores, the school system could redirect funds from testing contracts to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes. Other cities like Rochester have been able to reduce class sizes from kindergarten to fourth grade at low costs by reallocating resources across the system.
Increase support for English-Language Learners (ELLs), and prioritize smaller ELL classroom sizes. According to Advocates for Children of New York, only about 27% of ELL students graduated high school by their fourth year in 2017. We need to ensure that ELL students not only receive the correct accommodations, but that they are given the tools to succeed in school and advance to the next grade level. For ELL students, the problem of overcrowding in our schools is particularly acute. We need small class sizes, so that students have the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Adopt culturally responsive, anti-racist curricula and practices. Students, teachers and parents should each take part in deciding what curricula and practices their school adopts.
Hire, train and place more social workers, counsellors and mental health professionals; develop trauma-informed curricula; and educate teachers in de-escalation techniques, breaking the school-to-prison pipeline and giving our students the support they deserve.
End the school-to-prison pipeline.
Get cops and metal detectors out of schools. Parents, students and school workers have been repeating this for years: Cops in our schools don’t make any of us safer. The NYPD’s presence only serves to perpetuate the unjust and racist school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately targeting Black and brown youth.
Create a citywide trauma-informed disciplinary policy that applies equally to district and charter schools, which have a history of higher suspension rates. Work with administrators, teachers, and staff to change the culture of discipline, practicing restorative justice rather than punitive measures. Students should have the ability to learn responsible methods to cope and adjust their behavior. Furthermore, we should encourage peer-to-peer connection, accountability, care and conflict resolution.
Emphasize bilingual and multilingual learning. We need to ensure that there are adequate resources for biliteracy, which means that we both need adequate funding, and more comprehensive planning to ensure these services go where they are needed. These services should be equitably distributed to students with special needs, too.
Rezone to desegregate our schools. NYC schools remain some of the most segregated in the entire country. We need to redraw our school district lines with feedback from local communities, and move to a district-based lottery system that ensures that wealthy students aren’t pre-selected for the best schools. Comprehensive rezoning and greater sharing of resources across the system are tools to combat racial and economic segregation in our schools and communities.
In order to support teachers, students, and families during COVID and beyond, we need to demand fair wages and just working conditions for all public educators and school staff.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were often told to accept the false dichotomy between supporting students’ learning and protecting teachers’ health and safety. Alexa knows that safe working conditions for teachers mean better learning conditions for students. Families and school workers must stand united in demanding vaccination for themselves and their communities, safe conditions in schools, and support for working parents who need to balance their children’s remote learning.
The pandemic has also made clear the physical infrastructure issues in our school buildings, such as lack of ventilation. These issues aren’t new, and have continually posed health threats to teachers, students, and staff. COVID makes such problems all the more pressing. We must upgrade existing schools and design new ones with the health of everyone in the community in mind.
Transition away from high-stakes testing and evaluate students in ways that teachers recommend: portfolios, presentations, research papers, and more. Remove academic screens like the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which have been proven to segregate schools along racial and economic lines.
Fund free tutoring services for all students. Experts tell us that individual tutoring helps kids learn. Alexa will push to expand tutoring programs like the one piloted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and to give them City funding, so that educators receive the pay they deserve for giving our children the tutoring they deserve.
Create a new DOE Office for Students in Foster Care and Temporary Housing. One in 10 New York City public school students is experiencing homelessness, and kids in foster care are considerably less likely to graduate high school than their peers. A new citywide office designed specifically to help these students would have an immediate impact on our most vulnerable and help break the cycle of poverty.
Protect student privacy. Parents should be informed if private e-learning vendors are collecting data on students, how that data is used, and have the ability to opt out. There have to be basic quality standards and vetting for vendors that the DOE works with, even during times like the transition to e-learning due to the pandemic.
Build schools that serve our communities
Schools can and should serve as centers of a thriving community. Alexa believes schools can be places that develop students, educators, families, and communities — so that they can build a better world.
To create this better future for our schools, we’ll need to act with creativity, boldness, and, most importantly, solidarity.
There are five new schools being built in District 38. It is critical that parents’, students’ and school workers’ voices shape each new building’s design and functionality — along with the grades served by each school, and where they’re located. District 38 needs middle and high schools, not only more elementary schools. Equity is embedded in infrastructure.
Schools must also reflect the core values of the community, particularly along the lines of climate and social justice. We know that the best way to integrate such values into school planning is by centering educators, parents and students.
New housing must be coupled with new schools. To ease overcrowding, our planning and zoning code need provisions that necessitate school infrastructure.
Make CUNY free again. For nearly 130 years, our city’s colleges were like the rest of our public schools: free. Education is a human right, and as such we must again provide free college to all New Yorkers who seek a college degree.
Every school should be a place where communities can find information and care. Our libraries must be well-stocked, and there must be an adequate number of trained nurses at every school.
Expand after-school programs so that students of all ages have a place to enrich their education with programs that highlight and expand their skill sets in areas like language, painting, photography, technology, cooking, dancing, and more. For elementary-aged students who can’t stay home alone, there should be free after school programs in every school.
Reach out to families to emphasize the importance of early childhood education. Community outreach is critical to ensure equal access to early childhood education for all District 38 families.
Make space for parent voice and engagement. Create a mechanism that supports equity across PTAs, like a shared pool or enhanced financial and capacity support using a weighted equity formula. For context, some PTA budgets in School District 15, which includes Park Slope in addition to Sunset Park and Red Hook, are $30,000. Others raise $1 million a year.
Fund and partner with programs that place dentists, immigrant-rights advocates, and other support directly into schools where students need them.
As a result of state budget cuts, the Community Schools Initiative faces a $9 million cut. Hundreds of students are set to lose out on access to health and dental clinics, counselors, and social workers as a result. We must restore funding to this program and expand partnerships with similar programs to ensure that our schools meet the needs of our students.
Push for free public internet in NYC to put an end to the inequality that currently prevents many students from attending online classes and many parents from contacting their childrens’ schools.
46% of New York City households living in poverty do not have broadband at home, including a majority of Black/African American or Hispanic households. This inequality has put children in our community at a major disadvantage, particularly in the last year. We must ensure that our students have internet access at home so that they can succeed in school.
Identify and invest in ways of communicating with parents whose work, language, etc. currently prevents them from learning about their children’s education and participating in the school community.
Fight for inclusive schools, where gender justice is a priority. This includes consent-based, queer-inclusive curricula and an end to arbitrary sex segregation in schools (i.e. boys and girls lines). It also means that adolescent girls, particularly girls of color, shouldn’t be disciplined based on their gender — scolded over dress-code restrictions, chastised over antiquated ideas of gendered speech patterns or talkativeness, etc.
Connect high school students with jobs programs in their communities that gives them access to new opportunities and professional networks. Council Members and City Offices should bring youth leaders and fellows into their offices to learn and grow. This is dear to Alexa’s heart, and we seek to model it in our campaign.
Make it free for our kids to get around the city. Three rides a day is not enough for many students who have jobs in addition to school. The MTA should be free for all, but we can start by making Student Metrocards unlimited. This is a transit justice issue, and one of many reasons to demand that the city take control of the MTA back from the state.
Expand the Teaching Fellows program and advocate for alternative ways to train more Black and brown educators as well as multilingual educators.