Education
An Education System Built For All of Us
Our success and prosperity depend on our public schools’ capacity to serve as beacons of light and hope in our communities, as nurturing institutions that support all students – Black, Native, Latinx, South Asian, Pacific Islander, white & low-income – to become contributors to the present and future.
Access to Quality Education
Quality education means a lot of things, including safe conditions conducive to learning, and having decent books and materials. It means good teachers trained to teach the kids they see every day. And now, under our state’s new education finance reform law, there are standards we can use to measure that quality. We work with parents, students, teachers and community groups to make sure those standards are met.
Our Sacramento office is among the few with full-time staff devoted to making real the education rights of California’s students, especially low-income students, English language learners and foster youth. We are key members of coalitions that speak for more than a half million students and parents from throughout California.
Public School Funding & Accountability
California currently has the 5th-largest economy in the world, yet its insufficient commitment to funding public schools lands it in the bottom third of the nation in per-pupil spending. Debts are owed to the generations of young people of color and families whose promise of an equal education has gone unfulfilled. We must reimagine our education system as a powerful oasis that can contribute to the resolution of longstanding societal injustices.
Together, students, families, educators, communities, and electeds can reckon with the history of exclusion and racism in public education and build a system that provides healing by honoring our differences as our greatest strengths; inspires us all to take responsibility for the state and quality of our public schools; and provides hope, opportunity, and reminders of infinite possibilities.
Plentiful funding and resources must be committed to creating this vision of historically, culturally and linguistically responsive and abundantly funded schools.
