CIF members are committed to participating in the struggle for justice in public education. Our current organizing initiative, Project to Challenge Segregation and for Justice in OUR Schools, grew out of the Escuela Popular de Mujeres/Women’s Popular Education Program and is one such endeavor that emerged from our lived experiences. As we came together to discuss, among other things, our expectations of how life would be in the U.S., we agreed that one of our primary expectations was for our children to access the public education system here. What we shared were the experiences we ended up having, which included limited and inequitable access to our district’s public elementary schools and discrimination within many of the schools our children attended.

After a long process of building our community’s power and making our voices heard and, subsequently, a victory with the implementation of an admissions lottery that took away the power of administrators to handpick students, we began to confront, in a comprehensive manner, the many challenges we face in our schools and in our communities.

Segregated and Unequal: The Public Elementary Schools of District 3 in New York City
CIF Testimony for Hearing on Mayoral Control September 2008