EDUCATION ACTION SUMMIT PLATFORM
Building A Human Rights Vision
For New York
City Public Schools
Seeking a Common Vision through a Human Rights
Framework
On April 16, 2005, parents, students, teachers and
advocates met at the Education Action Summit to call for a new system of
public education in New York City based on human rights. Whole system
change is needed to create schools that meet the needs of every child and
place greater power in the hands of parents, students, teachers and school
communities.
Human rights represent a legal framework, political
vision, and global strategy for ensuring the equality and dignity of every
human being, as well as a culture shift in attitudes and practices.
Bringing a human rights culture to New York City schools would mean the
creation of safe and nurturing environments for children that help fully
develop their capabilities. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and
other human rights documents guarantee the rights to quality education,
dignity and safety for every child, an equitable distribution of
resources, freedom from discrimination, and meaningful participation for
parents, students and communities.
The current New York City school
system fails to guarantee these human rights standards. Children are
denied the skills and knowledge they need as a result of inadequate
resources in the classroom, overcrowded and crumbling schools, the
pressure and narrow focus of testing, inadequate counseling, and the
criminalization of schools. Disparities in resources and outcomes based on
race and class violate the human rights principle of non-discrimination.
These disparities stem from the historical and present reality of American
society which sorts people into two groups – those who receive a good
education and those who do not – limiting one group of people to work in
low-paid jobs. Our system’s top-down bureaucracy prevents flexibility in
reform efforts, and keeps the power to change the system away from
parents, students, educators and communities. These problems run too deep
for any one change in policy or shift in governance to solve. A whole
system change in education is needed.
Creating an Independent
Task Force for Whole System Change
The Independent Commission
on Public Education (iCOPE) calls for the formation of an independent task
force of parents, community members, students, teachers, principals,
policy-makers, elected officials, scholars and business leaders that is
free of political partisanship and control to shape a new common vision
for our schools based on human rights. The independent task force will be
charged with leading a civic conversation and inspiring the mobilization
of the community to demand a restructuring of the school system including
strategies for:
• Focusing policy at the school level to create effective
“learning communities” based on a teamwork model that respects the
professionalism of teachers, the central role of students and families,
and the need for collaboration among all participants. The only function
of structures and bureaucracies above the school level is to support and
ensure the success of such learning communities.
• Creating an
accountability system with less top-down, testing-based control and
management, but rather much more effective means for school staff,
parents, and students themselves to assess each student's progress and
take action to assure successful outcomes. More reliable information for
the public, city, state, and federal governments is needed to assess the
success of each school, and provide assistance and
intervention.
• Building a governance structure that guarantees
the rights of parents, students and communities to have power in
education decision-making independent of the Mayor, School Board and
Chancellor. The governance structure must be transparent and free of
corruption. A public advocate or ombudsperson should be created to
ensure that parents, students and communities have the support,
training, and information necessary to fulfill their roles, and to
guarantee that remedies are available when rights are violated.
•
Ending discrimination by developing school policies, relationships, and
classroom methods to eliminate institutional racism and class
bias.
• Ensuring a holistic educational system based on a shared
responsibility between the home, school and broader community, requiring
the collaboration of cultural, civic and health agencies to address the
many social and economic problems facing our communities that our
schools alone cannot solve.
This new vision for public schools should be guided by the
following human rights standards:
• The individual rights of every child to a quality education
must be promoted through curricula, teaching methods and services that
adapt to meet each child’s specific needs.
• The aims of
education must be to help children reach their full potential to
participate in society, to do rewarding work for a living wage, and to
continue learning. Education must develop each child’s respect for his
or her family, language and culture.
• The dignity of every child
must be guaranteed by creating an environment of respect and tolerance
in schools, preventing practices and disciplinary policies that cause
harm or humiliation to children, and promoting self-confidence and
self-expression.
iCOPE is a volunteer collective of parents, educators and activists who are dedicated to building a human rights based system of public education for NYC.
• The equitable distribution of resources must
be guaranteed across communities and grade-levels according to need to
ensure equality in educational outcomes.
• Non-discrimination
must be ensured regardless of race, class, sex, sexual orientation,
language, religion, immigration status, disability or other
factors.
• The meaningful participation of students, parents and
communities must be guaranteed in decisions that affect their schools
and their right to education.
• Protection of the family must be
ensured in the educational process with respect for the
responsibilities, rights and duties of parents, guardians, or extended
family members.
The independent task force should develop this new vision and
strategy in the next two years so that members of the community seeking
fundamental changes to the school system through human rights can use it
as a basis to fight for change. This strategy will involve participating
in debates around city and state elections as well as mobilizing students,
parents, and teachers. As we approach the end of the current mandate for
mayoral control in 2009, the task force should work to put this new vision
into practice to create a more participatory and child-centered school
system. As a first step, the task force should identify existing education
models that meet human rights standards to encourage their replication and
help develop this new vision.
Why We Are Calling for Whole
System Change Based on Human Rights
The current educational
system in New York City was designed over a century ago. In its early
years, the goal of the system was to “sort out” only a small percentage of
children for high school. Now it is expected that most students will
graduate from high school, but the level of skills and knowledge that many
achieve is still expected to be quite low, limiting them to work in
low-wage jobs and the military. Built into the system is an expectation
that not all children will reach their full potential or fully participate
in society. These limited expectations fail to meet both human rights
standards and the needs of New York City’s diverse communities, and fail
to prepare students for the realities of our interconnected
world.
The basic hallmarks of this system include:
1) primary decision-makers far removed from actual teaching and
learning;
2) racial and class-based segregation and
discrimination;
3) narrow educational goals which exclude the
emotional and social development of the child (such as building
leadership and character, social skills, ethics, etc.); and
4) the
lack of authentic implementation of existing standards for the content
of curricula.
Piecemeal reform efforts cannot change the beliefs, relationships,
and organizational structures reflected in the current system.
Furthermore, recurring cycles of piecemeal reform regularly expose
children, especially poor children, to great instability producing school
closures, high teacher turnover and frequent program terminations, without
tackling the underlying issues. Instead reform struggles are needed that
draw people into the larger, ongoing struggle for total system
change.
In order to create a school system that guarantees
universal, high-quality education for all children, the current
distribution of educational resources and aims of education must be
fundamentally altered. The human rights framework demands that educational
resources must be distributed across communities according to need to
ensure that children from different socio-economic backgrounds and with
different economic, social and emotional capabilities are all able to
receive a quality education.
This system change must be reflected
at all levels – student, family, classroom, individual schools and school
system. It must tackle the most difficult of systems problems, such as
what decision-making processes and funding allocations are necessary to
create an educational program that is high quality and meets the needs of
all children. Whole system reform must also address the challenge that
educators face when children are denied other fundamental rights which
impact the right to education, such as the right to food and healthcare.
Without addressing these rights, school systems will not adequately
educate children. Yet schools by themselves cannot bear the weight created
by failures of other social institutions, such as the healthcare system.
Whole system reform in education must be combined with efforts to improve
quality and access in other social services affecting children and their
families.
Unifying Our Struggle through Human
Rights
Ineffective and piecemeal approaches to education reform
are fueled by the lack of a shared vision for system change. The many
controversies confronting public education over reading methods, bilingual
education, institutional racism, discipline and many other issues prevent
a dialogue about a shared vision. Such a shared vision is also challenged
by the advocacy communities that tend to work only on a particular issue
or for a particular constituency. A human rights approach provides ways to
talk about system change that engage the full range of the education
reform community. Human rights can strengthen the struggle for equity and
quality in education because they bring all of these issues together under
one framework.
Education Action Summit Platform
Planks:
Highlighting Current Struggles
As we call for whole
system change in public education, we work in solidarity with those
fighting to address the many individual problems facing our schools. We
support their struggles and call on them to unite with us – only through
whole system change can all of the problems be addressed. We highlight the
following issues included in our Platform Planks:
• Curriculum must be reformed to ensure that it meets the needs
of the diverse community of students in New York City, and is geared
towards the full development of the child.
• High stakes testing
must not narrow the aims of education or punish students who are not
receiving a quality education in our schools. Instead, tests should be
combined with alternative assessments to measure student progress and
hold schools accountable.
• Nutritional, health and recreational
needs of students are currently not being met by New York City schools
and must be ensured.
• A safe, orderly and caring learning
environment must be guaranteed for all students.
• Police
presence in schools is not compatible with safe and child-friendly
school environments. Alternative security measures are being
successfully implemented in many schools and should be replicated along
with human rights-based training for staff.
• Communities must
not be forced to accept military recruitment in their schools to access
the right to education. The right to privacy of students and families
must be protected.
• The State must provide an equitable,
rational, transparent and streamlined funding formula based on an
objective analysis of the actual cost of providing all students with an
education that meets human rights standards, ensures the full
development of the child’s personality, and prepares them for the
economic realities in a globalizing world.
• Class sizes must be
reduced to appropriate levels based on both the needs of the specific
student population and the subject matter being taught.
• All
schools should have education in art, music, and second languages at all
grade levels.
• Parents of children in the school system must
have access to comprehensive training around the structures and
processes of participation in the system. School-policy and
resource-allocation decision-making must be participatory, transparent
and accountable.
• Translation services must be clearly and
comprehensively mandated to prevent discrimination against parents or
guardians with limited English skills.
• All students regardless
of their status, including students at risk of dropping out and students
with behavioral and/or disciplinary problems, must be provided with the
programs and services necessary to meet their educational
needs.
• Students with disabilities must be afforded the full
range of necessary support, services and specially trained staff to
fully exercise their right to an education.
• The misdiagnosis of
disabilities, in particular over-diagnosis of emotional disturbance and
learning disabilities among Black and Latino students, must be prevented
and students must receive the appropriate services for their needs.
Psychological testing and psychiatric drugs can only be administered
with parental consent and without coercion.
• Students who are
still learning the English language must receive the full range of
necessary support to learn all subjects. Comprehensive plans at the
school and district level should be developed to meet the needs of this
population.
• Children in transitional housing and foster care
must have continued access to schooling.
• Admissions policies at
the school and district levels must not lead to the discriminatory
placement of students based on race, class, language, disability or
other factors.
Read Education
Action Summit Platform Planks (submitted by advocates from throughout
New York City) | Read List of Endorsers
|
