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Immigrants are
the backbone of our
country and
this city's economy. Respecting immigrant's rights to equal
access
to services and protecting immigrant's basic civil and human
rights
regardless of immigration status is vital in a city like NY.
Whether
it be providing adequate translation and intrepretation services at
hospitals, ensuring access to driver's licenses, fighting for
immigration reform and legalization, creating opportunitites for civic
integration or improving access to educational opportunity, our city
has a responsibility to create an atmosphere of inclusion
and justice
for all those who live in it and help to build it.
Immigrant Rights Top of page WHEREAS, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the labor movement led the fight for universal access to primary and secondary education as a basic social right; and WHEREAS, in the 1950s and 1960s the civil rights movement established the right of all Americans to equal access to public education; and WHEREAS, in the 21st century a college education is a prerequisite for effective labor force participation and economic security for workers and their families; and WHEREAS, the lack of access by growing numbers of Americans to postsecondary education severely limits democratic participation in the economic and political processes of the United States and results in a tragic loss of diverse human potential; and WHEREAS, deep cuts in state appropriations to public higher education institutions, including the historically black institutions and those that serve large numbers of Hispanic students, along with the failure of federal student aid to keep up with tuition increases; and WHEREAS, 39 percent of student borrowers leave school with an unmanageable debt with the average debt for borrowers at public colleges being $14,300, two and a half times as high as it was in 1990; and* WHEREAS, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, at the current rate of enrollment of blacks in institutions of higher education, college graduation parity with whites will not be reached until 2075; and** WHEREAS, studies have shown that the GI Bill was one of the most successful programs in the nation's history and that every $1.00 invested in this program on those who otherwise would not have attended college produced a $6.90 return in increased national output and tax revenues; and WHEREAS, the Collective Bargaining Congress of the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP Rutgers Council of AAUP, AFT locals such as PSC/CUNY Local 2334, Local 1789/Seattle Community Colleges, the New Jersey AFT Council of State Colleges, as well as the California Faculty Association, civil rights organizations, and community groups have embarked upon a national campaign to achieve free tuition and fees for anyone meeting the admissions criteria at any public postsecondary educational institution: RESOLVED, that the AFT support the campaign for the right of all Americans to have access to a fully funded free public higher education; and RESOLVED, that the AFT assist in mobilizing broad public support for this right. * "Heavy Debts for a Degree," O. Winslow, Newsday.com, March 22, 2004 " ** "The State of the Dream," United for a Fair Economy, March 23, 2004 Top of page Depleted
Uranium - The Agent Orange Of The Iraqi War
What is depleted uranium? It is the isotope U238 which results when the high level, radioactive, fissionable isotope U235 is extracted from natural uranium. It is used in munitions, tank armor and the ballast of cruise missiles. The U. S. Department of energy also plans to recycle massive quantities of radioactive waste (1,250,000.000 pounds of D.U.) into the commercial marketplace for reuse in consumer products. A March 25 N. Y. Times article states that" slightly radioactive buildings materials, cars, furniture, cooking utensils and other items as well as bullets and tanks will be produced and sold with no warning labels." Yet, exposure to so called "minute" doses of D.U. is known to carry risks of cancer, leukemia, genetic defects and a host of other illnesses associated with impaired immunity. D. U. is available in large quantities. It has high density, it is cheap, easily available and it burns on impact. It can also injure or kill military personnel or civilians not subject to the weapons immediate impact. However, when it does impact a target surface, a large amount of kinetic energy is dissipated as heat. This results in smoke with a high concentration of D.U. particles which if inhaled or ingested are severely toxic. Particles of uranium smaller than 5 microns in diameter can become permanently trapped in the lungs. Once trapped, a small particle of this size can cause damage to surrounding lung tissue. It exposes that tissue to 1360 rem per year, 800 times the annual radiation dosage permitted by federal regulations for external whole body exposure. Particles not trapped in the respiratory system may be ingested and can travel to the kidneys (one of the organs most sensitive to D.U. destruction) and the reproductive organs. D. U. bullets wounded and killed Gulf War soldiers and left many with embedded fragments. The U. S. Army has been developing D. U. munitions for over 30 years. In operation Desert Storm where D. U. bullets were first introduced, U. S. forces fired 940,000 small caliber and 4000 large caliber D.U. rounds in combat. Since the Gulf War none of the more than 600,000 pounds of D.U. have been cleaned up. No responsibility has been taken for the exposure of veterans and active U. S. forces now in the area or the exposed populations of Kuwait and Iraq. D.U. shells used by American and British forces have been targeted as the cause of increasing amounts of cancer in Iraq, with hospital wards filled with children suffering serious malignancies. Many of these children were unborn at the time of the Gulf War. Since that war, U. S. forces deployed to Somalia with D.U. munitions five years ago, the Air Force shot D. U. penetrators in Bosnia four years ago and evidence is now accumulating that D. U. was used in the Balkan war as well. Many environmental and health groups are concerned that the use of D.U. in the Balkans will result in some of the same environmental and health consequences that occurred in Iraq and Kuwait after the Gulf War. A recent scandal erupted in Japan after the U. S. military command there admitted that U. S. forces had test fired and left behind small amounts of D.U. rounds on an uninhabited island near Okinawa. The Japanese Diet condemned the action and received an official apology from the United States. Now the army is trying to mask its use of D.U. overseas. The Department of Defense had known for many years that human exposure to D.U. can result in serious, long term health problems but refuses to acknowledge publicly increasing numbers of illnesses identified in civilians and veterans who had come in contact with this substance. The Military Toxic Project newsletter stated in 1997" D. U. harms not only troops and rescue workers on the battlefield but also the communities near the uranium mines, the workers who process uranium and manufacture the D. U. weapons, the communities whose land is contaminated by D. U. weapons testing and warfare and the communities who ultimately serve as D.U. repositories." Uranium mining in the Southwest where the Navajo Nation resides has caused the death from lung cancer and other illnesses of most of the 2000 Navajo uranium miners who worked in the four comers (northeast Arizona, northwest New Mexico, southeast Utah, and southwest Colorado) from 1947 to 1971. Yet few Navajo widows have been compensated. From 1946 to 1968 more than 13 million tons of uranium were mined on the Navajo reservation to make atom bombs. Despite evidence that cancer is ravaging the Navajo communities and that birth defect rates are abnormally high, the U. S. government has denied funding for a complete epidemiological study. The numbers of victims exposed to D.U. is incalculable and is in violation of the International Laws of War. D.U. weaponry has been listed by the United Nations Human Rights Sub-committee on the Preventions of Discrimination and protection of Minorities as among those "weapons of mass destruction or with indiscriminate effects." Its use causes widespread, long lasting and severe contamination to the sites of production testing and use. The D.U. issue must be addressed by the international community and steps must be taken to halt its proliferation and stop its production and use. It is important to educate the public about the perils of D. U. Organizations should pass resolutions advocating the banning of D.U. weaponry and campaign against using D.U. for military and commercial purposes. Local and state governments must be urged to pass resolutions to ban D.U. and we should demand from Congress that the production, testing, manufacturing, proliferation and use of D.U. weapons must be halted. And finally we should pursue the establishment of an independent international scientific and medical commission to analyze the health situation in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and in other areas where D.U. was more recently used and the health problems affecting more than 10,000 Gulf War veterans and their families. This analysis should include radiological tests and risk assessments for all battle fields where D.U. had been utilized. On January 7, 1998, the office of the Special Assistant on Gulf War illness acknowledged "The failure to properly disseminate information (about D.U.) to troops at all levels may have resulted in thousands of unnecessary exposures." This must not happen again! Top of page Segregated
Schools: Shame of The City
by Jonathan Kozol 16 Jan 2006 Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20060116/202/1718 Stuyvesant High School is one of the most vivid symbols of the consequences of decades of systematic racism in the United States. Black and Hispanic children make up about 72 percent of the citywide enrollment in the New York City public schools. At Stuyvesant -- the most prestigious public school in the city -- they make up less than six percent of enrollment. In fact, the percentage of black kids who go to Stuyvesant has decreased dramatically in the last quarter century. Twenty-six years ago, black students represented almost 13 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant; today they represent 2.7 percent. I'm not implying that the administration at Stuyvesant is made up of racists -- they must be remarkable people to run such a wonderful school. Black and Latino students do not have access to Stuyvesant because they have not been adequately prepared to compete with the other students applying for a limited number of spots. What the racial gap in admissions represents is the devastating end result of the failure to educate black and Latino children effectively from the age of two and a half up to their 8th grade year. It is impossible to improve the inferior quality of the education that minority children receive without confronting the fact that they are attending increasingly segregated schools; separate is still unequal. Yet that is exactly what New York policymakers are trying to do. Until it begins to follow the lead of several smaller cities across the country, New York's school system will continue to fail to serve the majority of its students. Martin Luther King, Jr. January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968 "We've got to come to see that the problem of racial injustice is a national problem. No community in this country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Now in the North it's different in that it doesn't have the legal sanction that it has in the South. But it has its subtle and hidden forms and it exists in three areas: in the area of employment discrimination, in the area of housing discrimination, and in the area of de facto segregation in the public schools. And we must come to see that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South. " Martin Luther King, Speech at the Great March on Detroit in 1963. THE RESEGREGATION OF
AMERICAN SCHOOLS
Segregation has returned to public education with a vengeance, as a result of years of federal policies that started in the early 1990s when the US Supreme Court and the local federal courts began to rip apart the legacy of the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegration ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated schools has dropped to its lowest level since 1968. New York State is the most segregated state for black and Latino children in America: seven out of eight black and Latino kids here go to segregated schools. The majority of them go to schools where no more than two to four percent of the children are white. Only Illinois, Michigan, and California come close to this abysmal record. The level of segregation statewide is due largely to New York City, which is probably the country's most segregated city When it comes to residential integration and school integration, New York has an undeserved reputation for progressive values. For the last 40 years it has been one of the most regressive cities in America, in many ways unaffected by the Brown decision. The courts never tried to integrate New York, and the major media, including the New York Times, consistently opposed any drastic measures that would significantly integrate the city's system. BLOOMBERG AND KLEIN'S
EDUCATION REFORMS
The position of chancellor of New York City schools is an almost impossible job. I sometimes think that job was created so that one man or woman in New York could die for our sins every year. Like it or not, Chancellor Joel Klein's real job description is to mediate the separation of the races and put the best possible face on a flagrantly unequal system. The Bloomberg administration's educational reforms have been centered on mayoral control of the schools. This probably gives the mayor and the chancellor better tools to approach the problems in the schools, and it is to their credit that they have used this power to get rid of the rote and drill, stimulus-response curriculum that was being used in failing schools across the city. But we have wasted too much time in the last 20 years fiddling around with governance arrangements. The fact is that whether the school systems I visit are governed directly by the mayor independently, or through an appointed school board or an elected one, virtually all cities face the same calamity: a devastating gulf in the quality of education offered to minority kids as opposed to white kids. NEW YORK CITY AND
SMALL SCHOOLS
Alleged panaceas have been introduced repeatedly in every urban district since I first walked into a classroom in 1964. Every five years there's a "solution" to the problems of separate and unequal education -- a solution that never addresses the problems of either separate or unequal. The newest magic pill that is being advertised is small schools, and it is one that Bloomberg and Klein have bought into. Small schools are usually less chaotic than big schools; they are sometimes more intimate and relaxed than big schools. But the small school concept, which no one is proposing for the schools in white suburban districts, is essentially an anti-riot strategy for segregated children, an anti-turbulence measure, a short-term solution to perceived chaos in large segregated schools. Small, segregated, and unequal schools are only an incremental improvement over large, segregated and unequal schools. They don't address the basic issues. In fact, in New York City small schools are being used, intentionally or not, in ways that widen the racial divide. On the one hand, we're seeing small schools that cater to very artistic, upscale Greenwich Village families. These schools are overwhelmingly attractive to white people. On the other hand, we're seeing a proliferation of so-called small academies for black and Latino students with names like Academy of Leadership, or the Academy of Business Enterprise. (In some other cities such schools are explicitly given names like the African American Academy). These schools tend to be even more segregated than larger ones. At this point New York City, like many cities in America, is rolling out small schools as this year's trendy attempt to do an end run around inequality and segregation. It is not going to work on a significant basis. I predict that within ten years the entire small schools movement will collapse and be declared a failure. REFORMS THAT ADDRESS
THE REAL PROBLEM
Today, Bloomberg and Klein are trying their best to sweeten the pill of segregation rather than confronting it. But they have to confront it, and smaller cities have offered a model of how to do so. The metropolitan New York City area is one of the most adamantly resistant sections of the nation, in which there has never been any serious attempt at voluntary integration programs between the city and the suburbs. This is in great contrast to St. Louis, Milwaukee, Boston, and several other cities, all of which have successful suburban integration programs for inner city children. While some of these programs were initially begun under court orders, others (Boston's, for example) are entirely voluntary and are supported by the parents of the suburbs because they believe that integrated schooling is of benefit to their own children. In virtually all of the urban-suburban integration programs, the high school completion rate and graduation rate for black students average 90 to 95 percent or better, and the overwhelming number of these black kids go to college. There are waiting lists for all these programs; in St. Louis there are four applicants for every opening. It is only about a fifteen minute ride from a typical, segregated Bronx neighborhood to one of the very first suburbs to the north of the Bronx -- Bronxville, for example, one of the most affluent communities in the United States. It spends nearly $19,000 per pupil, compared to $11,600 in the Bronx. It has zero percent poverty in its public schools. Only one percent of its students are black or Latino. It would be a very short ride for almost any Bronx child to go to school in Bronxville or any of the other suburbs immediately to the north. The chancellor and the mayor ought to be advocating for cross-district integration with the 40 or 50 affluent suburban districts that immediately surround New York City. Admittedly, this step would take extraordinary political audacity. If he wanted to take a really visionary stance, Mayor Bloomberg could also turn small schools from institutions that reinforce segregation into places that help break it down. He could provide incentives for small schools to be created with the explicit goal of bringing the poorest children and the richest children, black, Latino, white and Asian children together in the same classrooms. If he were to take that step, and use the small school concept to achieve that goal, then he would have left behind a really decent legacy. He would have begun to make a serious dent in the intense racial isolation that continues to make New York the shame of the nation. Jonathan Kozol is the author of seven books on urban education, and the winner of the National Book Award. His most recent book is "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America." Top of page |