Acknowledgements The New York Community Media Alliance would like to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Carnegie Corporation NY, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation for their support of this work. Their vision and commitment to make education available to all children and help ensure equal opportunity to a secure future for them, and in particular for immigrant and low-income; their willingness to fund capacity building in ethnic and community media – somewhat counterintuitive – allowing for the exploration of engaging ethnic media as an active partner and advocate in the education of the children in their communities; and their belief in our organization’s work and the trust that we could get the job done, all formed the foundation of the three-year project. stAff NEW YORK COMMUNITY MEDIA ALLIANCE Juana Ponce de León .................................................. Author Lauren Stoler ............................................................... Fellowship Coordinator, 2008-2009 Jehangir Khattak ......................................................... Communications Manager, 2010 Garry Pierre-Pierre ....................................................... Fellowship Editorial Leader Jennifer Cheng ............................................................ Designer RADIO BROADCAST Deepa Fernandes ........................................................ Executive Director, People’s Production House Abdulai Bah ................................................................. CNPI Program Associate, People’s Production House ETHNIC AND COMMUNITY MEDIA FELLOWSHIP TABLE OF CONTENTS REPORT Evaluation 4 Program Syllabus 13 Fellows 18 Seminar Speakers 19 Organizations 20 ARTICLES BY CATEGORY 21 Budget Cuts 22 Community Involvement and Programs 33 Ineffective Communication 46 Challenges Facing Students 58 Parental Power Beyond DOE 75 Parents Struggle with School System 96 Profiling Alternative Schooling 112 Safety 126 Sensitivity to Cultural Traditions 140 Success Stories 152 Radio Pieces 163 INDEX OF ARTICLES 164 Listed by community evAluAtion Ethnic and Community Media Fellowship – Developing an Education Beat 2008-2010 Juana Ponce de León, Executive Director, New York Community Media Alliance September 15, 2010 REPORT Background In the fall of 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation approached the New York Community Media Alliance seeking help to organize education forums in immigrant communities in New York City. At issue was parental participation in the children’s education and the foundation was considering strategies to address the low rates of involvement and erode at cultural and language barriers that appear to be at the crux of the problem. The NYC public education system, the largest in the country and arguably the most complex, given the diversity of the student population and the fact that more than 150 languages are spoken among them, make the task on addressing the students’ education issues daunting. Although the DOE has put great effort in trying to involve immigrant parents in their children’s education, a July 2009 report by Center for NYC Affairs, The New Marketplace – How Small-School Reform and School Choice Have Reshaped New York City’s High Schools, states: “For many immigrant parents, the very idea of high school choice is a foreign one. They aren’t used to the notion that parents have options. Some are fearful that advocating for their child may be seen as a challenge to authority. Mothers, in particular, may not be accustomed to advocating for their children in the way that the New York City high school application process often requires. Many women from Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East are taught to be deferential both to their husbands and to school officials, making it difficult for them to assume the activist role necessary to take advantage of school choice.” Lourdes Ruiz, a Brooklyn mother from Ecuador whose daughter was rejected from all seven schools she applied to, said, “Here, I am like a blind person.” Immigrant parents have the right to request and receive school information in a language they can understand, yet a 2009 report by Advocates for Children, Empty Promises, shows that many of the parents remain shut out of school activities and leadership opportunities. “[O]ver one third (37%) of the parents surveyed did not receive translated notices to attend parent-teacher conferences. Sixty percent of parents surveyed were not aware of the translation and interpretation services available to them.” Parents are uninformed and hand-tied at a moment when school reform is affecting English-language learners adversely and putting immigrant children at risk of not completing their high school education. According to the AFC report: “The DOE’s new small high schools, charter schools, and multiple pathways programs to serve overage students have all failed to account properly and adequately for the needs of ELLs and have, in many cases, excluded ELL students (13% of the student population). This exclusion of ELLs has come at a severe cost. While the general graduation rate climbed to 52.2% in 2007 from 46.5% in 2005, the rate for ELLs dropped from 28.5% to 23.5% over the same period. As of 2007-08, there were only 17 ELL-focused schools in all of New York City. Such a limited number of schools cannot serve the needs of the more than 41,000 ELL high school students in the City.” The Strategy NYCMA proposed an alternative strategy to community forums for the delivery of information on the public school system and the school reform spearheaded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor NEW YORK COMMUNITY MEDIA ALLIANCE 4 ETHNIC AND COMMUNITY MEDIA FELLOWSHIP evAluAtion Joel Klein, and committed to developing a sustainable media model to facilitate the provision of this important information to immigrant and ethnic communities that would have traction beyond the life of the grants secured to support this work. The model, addressing the need for parents to become informed and involved in the student’s education, makes deliberate use of an information infrastructure already in place, the local newspapers serving immigrant and ethnic communities, to deliver well-sourced, pragmatic and frequent information on education, vetted by community leaders – oftentimes, publishers, editors, and journalists have leadership roles in their communities – in a language they understand, to help empower parents to become advocates for their children’s education. NYCMA believes in the vigorous promotion of independent community publications, with special emphasis on publications serving low-income communities, communities of color and immigrant communities. In New York City the ethnic and community print media alone consists of close to 350 weeklies and 26 foreign-language dailies, reaching a readership of approximately 3.5 million city residents, including more than 90 ethnic communities; the network is an important and extensive media player. Although not uniformly progressive, these publications can be characterized as mission-driven and play a critical role in organizing, advocating and promoting civic engagement in the communities they serve. Sixty percent of these publications are distributed regionally and 40 percent are distributed nationally. In particular for ethnic publications, their growing online presence broadens the reach of their coverage to national and international audiences, where their extended communities reside. The New York City Mayor’s Office on Immigrant Affairs estimates 1.8 million city residents have little or no English-language skills, a fact that helps to underscore the vital service that the many ethnic newspapers provide their communities by bringing news on policy, services, and social issues to readers who are not consumers of English-language mainstream media. This flow of information makes it possible to help integrate immigrant communities, marginalized by language and culture, to the larger society, and who often do not access services offered by community organizations that work on public education issues. The Objectives • To build the editorial capacity of the publications – by informing the informers and promoting networking opportunities with leaders in the education field inside the DOE and advocacy organizations – to provide well-sourced and frequent coverage on education to their readers. • To empower parents to involve themselves in their children’s education more efficiently, by informing them how the public education system functions, and of their rights and their children’s rights to a good education. • To develop a replicable ethnic and community media model focused on public school education that addresses the language and cultural barriers that hamper parent involvement in their children’s education. • To provide insight to supporting foundations, government agencies and advocacy groups on concerns and issues on education in immigrant communities and communities of color through Fellowship coverage translated into English and disseminated through NYCMA’s award-winning weekly online publication, Voices That Must Be Heard. The Premise Sustained coverage on public education in local newspapers can bring vital information to immigrant and low-income communities, helping parents to familiarize themselves with the education system and to alleviate NEW YORK COMMUNITY MEDIA ALLIANCE 5 ETHNIC AND COMMUNITY MEDIA FELLOWSHIP evAluAtion some of the cultural and language barriers, and