Dear friends,
It’s time to school ourselves on a few important education-related matters.
I got my first graduate degree from City College, of the CUNY system, and it is the only institution I graduated from that I still support financially. When City College was founded in 1847, it was called The Free Academy.
[W]ith higher education within reach of only the more affluent of the city’s youth, a plan to educate and train New Yorkers of all backgrounds and classes [was] seen as a necessity by the city’s progressive leaders.
City College hasn’t been tuition-free since the mid-70s, and the imposition of tuition fees for the public colleges in the CUNY system closely followed the implementation of the “open admissions” policy, which promised to serve every person who graduated from a NYC high school. Open admissions was a response to demands by Black and Latinx students who had been closed out of the system’s undergraduate programs, which served under 50,000 students in the mid-1960s.
Access to quality post-secondary education continues to be a justice issue in 2021.
Please write your state legislators to let them know that “investing in CUNY will help the communities hardest hit by COVID, increasing economic mobility for low-income New Yorkers and people of color.” This is a one-minute, ready-made action!
With city high schools scheduled to reopen next week and spring weather on the way, it seems like a good time to mention the National Covid Outdoor Learning Initiative. If you are a teacher and/or a parent, you can avail yourself of their excellent resources so that you can make the coming season a better one for the young people in your life.
Check out the Existing Outdoor Curriculum library!
There is no rest from electoral politics, it seems. A progressive Latina named Mino Lora is running to fill a city council seat in the Bronx (CD 11) which will be vacated by Andrew Cohen.
A group called Voters of NYC is supporting another candidate in this race, Eric Dinowitz, with a fat pile of money from real estate firms. In addition, Alice Walton, whose tens of billions come from her Walmart inheritance, is putting her wallet on the scales in another Bronx race (CD 15, formerly Ritchie Torres’s seat) and has contributed over a million dollars to groups that favor charter schools, including one called New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany. Walton does not live in New York.
Join the Working Families Party phone-banking effort this Thursday on behalf of Mino Lora.
I’ll leave you with the final verse of Marge Piercy’s poem, The Art of Blessing the Day:
Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.
Grab your axe. We’ve got work to do!
with love,
L