Category Archives: outreach

The following is an explanatory, one-page outreach letter to parents of College students that can be revised and adapted to meet local circumstances.

College Protests ~ A Letter to Parents

As you know, students, faculty, staff, parents, and community supporters are protesting at colleges and universities across the state. We want to explain why.

Our protests were triggered by the huge cuts in higher-education budgets and the enormous tuition increases that are occurring year after year. The politicians blame it on economic crisis, but that’s not true. For years, in good times and bad, officials have chosen to cut state support for universities and colleges while slashing taxes for the 1% and increasing funding for prisons.

Fifty years ago, California citizens demanded affordable and accessible college education for the children. In 1960, Sacramento enacted a promise to Californians called the “Master Plan for Education.” It required that all students be able to attend a UC, CSU, or Community College tuition free. For two generations that promise was kept, but then in 2000 the politicians decided that cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy — the 1% — was more important to their political careers than honoring their promise to our kids. As a result, between 2000 and 2011 tuition at UC has tripled from $4,000 to $13,000, with corresponding increases at the CSUs and Community Colleges.

For many students and their families, especially those hard hit by layoffs and foreclosures, the dream of a college education has been priced out of reach. And for Latinos, Blacks, and others who have historically faced discrimination, the hope of higher education is being denied as economic barriers are re-segregating opportunity in California.

So many courses have been cut that last academic year total enrollment in public colleges declined by 165,000 students. And those who do manage to get into a school are discovering that required classes are no longer available so they have to attend an extra year to graduate (and pay yet more tuition). Meanwhile, class sizes are increasing, which means less individual attention, less chance to ask questions, and less contact with the remaining professors.

Another fundamental issue that has nothing to do with taxes and budget cuts is how education funds are spent and how those decisions are made. For example, at the same meetings where they jack up tuition and cut staff, the UC Regents grant hefty pay raises to executives and senior bureaucrats. Apparently $500,000 a year isn’t enough, so the wages of janitors have to be cut and librarians laid off so that the top brass are not inconvenienced. And why are there so many bureaucrats? Fifteen years ago UC professors outnumbered senior managers by two and a half to one, but today there are actually more high-paid administrators than professors. And the situation is no different at the CSUs and Community Colleges.

The real issue is political policy, not lack of resources. The real issue is that politicians and school administrations have abandoned the principle of tuition-free, publicly-funded higher education for all. They are steadily moving our system of public colleges away from education-for-all towards the model of expensive private schools — with high costs and tightly restricted admissions. The word for this is “privatization.” It is a word that means converting public colleges to the model of private universities. It is a word that means higher education will soon be only for the affluent.

We are writing you this letter to ask you to stand up for our children, and the public education that they must have to survive and thrive in the 21st Century. It’s time for parents and tax-payers to demand that free public education be restored and expanded for all. It’s time for parents to become involved.

Now is the time to take a stand.

Join us for the March 1-8, 2012, National Days of Action for Education:

Occupy Education California (www.occupyeducationca.org)

Occupy Education National (www.occupyed.org)

The following is an explanatory, one-page outreach letter to parents of Kindergarten through high school (K-12) students that can be revised and adapted to meet local circumstances.

California Public Schools in Crisis ~ A Letter to Parents

We are writing this letter to ask you to stand up for our children and the public education they have to have to survive and thrive in the 21st Century.

In the past three years state funding for education has been cut by $20,000,000,000. California now ranks 46th in per-pupil spending. 40,000 teachers and staff have already been eliminated. This year they tell us they’re going to cut even more.

They justify these cuts by citing all sorts of statistics, but education is not about statistics, it’s about children. And most of us know that our kids in public school are not receiving the education they need and deserve. We don’t need to be mathematicians to know that:

• Class sizes are already too large and getting bigger due to budget cuts.
• Many schools are in such poor repair as to be unsafe, with insufficient money for maintenance.
• There are constant shortages of materials, supplies, and equipment — and it’s getting worse.
• Enrichment programs in sports, languages, art, music, & other areas are being slashed or eliminated.
• Pre-Kindergarten and Adult Education programs are being gutted or canceled.
• Critical positions such as librarians, nurses, counselors, janitors and safety officers are being wiped out.

They tell us cutbacks are necessary because of the current economic crisis. But when Wall Street looted the economy, politicians bailed them out and ensured that the robber barons kept their multi-million dollar bonuses. Now our kids’ education is being forced to bear the cost. That was a political choice, not an inevitable necessity.

The truth is that they’ve been cutting public education for decades. Proposition 13 was supposed to relieve homeowners burdened by excessive property taxes, but almost all the benefit went to big- business and commercial landlords. Corporations used to pay the majority of education-related taxes, but their share has been so reduced that now individual taxpayers carry most of the load, and there is no longer enough money to adequately fund public education even in the good times, let alone the bad.

They tell us that public education provides equal opportunity for all, but every parent in California knows that there are rich districts and poor districts, “good” schools and “bad” schools. And despite all the rhetoric and promises, everyone knows that public schools serving Black and Latino communities get the short end of the stick, and that educational inequality is part of a pattern that cannot be separated from job discrimination, inadequate housing, lack of health care, and unsafe streets. In the words of Dr. King, the promise of equality in America is “… a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”

Some people feel that charter schools are the answer to all our problems, but both charter and public schools get their funds from the same inadequate source. Pitting public and charter schools against each other in a losing battle for dwindling resources diverts us from the real issue — Sacramento’s refusal to provide a quality public education to all.

They tell us that the only way to hold schools and teachers accountable is by imposing one-size-fits-all regulations decreed by distant bureaucrats. But children are not standardized assembly-line parts, and neither are individual schools or school districts. Who can best determine what each child needs, the parents and teachers who see them every day, or officials in Sacramento and Washington? Local communities — parents and teachers together — need the power to hold the system accountable, to support schools and programs that are succeeding, and to change those that are failing.

Our kids must be educated to meet the requirements of the 21st Century. They also need an education that helps them grow into knowledgeable individuals capable of living productive, meaningful lives and function as empowered citizens in a democratic society.

Now we need our politicians to bail out education instead of banks, and to adequately fund education in California. Now is the time to take a stand.

Join us for the March 1-8, 2012, National Days of Action for Education:

Occupy Education California (www.occupyeducationca.org)

Occupy Education National (www.occupyed.org)