Dear Neighbors,

I hope some of you will be able to attend Sat 6/11 report back and dialogue with the interim superintendent and RTA president.  But beyond that event, and for this first "discussion" item, please provide your thoughts, critiques, identify where clarification may be needed and most importantly how we can collaborate among already existing projects and efforts.   The following are intended to be brief, but substantive descriptions of these 8 principles many of you may have heard us referring as the basis for organizing CETF's work. 

To demand and support measurable accountability regarding the expectations of excellence for all stakeholders

      The Community Education Task Force was formed in response to the anti-democratic call for the elimination of the RCSD Board of Education and centralization of control of city schools under the mayor.  Had mayoral control been imposed, we would have lost a critical mechanism for accountability in our schools.  At the same time, we acknowledge the very real accountability crisis heightened by the "perfect storm" of an autocratic and corporatist superintendent (Jean-Claude Brizard), a weak and uncritical school board, and the global financial collapse and ongoing political exploitation of the crisis by political and business power-players.  Tangible demands for accountability run throughout CETF's work, from holding the line against mayoral control, to repeated collaboration with the New York State Committee on Open Government to argue successfully for the release of suppressed and redacted audits and to pressure the School Board to follow laws regarding open meetings,  to our current demands for an open and democratic superintendent search and selection process.  Our decision to run three of our core parent-activist members as the "Community Education Task Force Slate for Educational Change" -- with these fundmental principles for change as the platform -- is a direct response to the lack of responsiveness to our children's needs and the absence of accountability exhibited by the current school board.

To increase local control, and reject any further attempts to privatize the public school system

      The drive to privatize public education is real, and it is being pushed in all urban districts across the U.S.  We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the impact of efforts a) to extract profit from pre-K-12 public school systems; and b) to socially engineer a two-tiered system split between those being prepared for creative, high-skilled professions and those destined to remain outside the formal economy or to toil in insecure poverty jobs or in prison. CETF is actively working to educate and encourage dialogue about privatization its implications for public education.  A forum featuring two area experts on charter schools was held in May, and plans are underway for more public discussion and the development of multi-media approaches to increase our collective knowledge.

To implement and sustain methodologies that produce widespread, broad-based civic and political engagement of all stakeholders

Civic education and participation undergirds all of the work CETF is trying to accomplish – vibrant spaces for authentic, decentralized democratic participation are powerful antidotes to both the authoritarian tendency of mayoral control and to the push for ever increasing inequality inherent in privatization of our public spheres.
Members of CETF are reaching out to engage students, families and staffs together in efforts to expand neighborhood-school connections around addressing community needs.  We believe a good public education system ought to encourage the development of competent and engaged citizens.