Interfaith Working Group Principles for Quality Education

We, the member organizations represented in the Interfaith Working on Education, recognize that public education has reached a crisis in too many communities in New York While New York State is under court mandate to adequately fund schools in New York City, we recognize the challenges as statewide and propose the following principles to guide our discernment and advocacy.

• All persons are created in God’s image, with common human dignity.
  The persistence of poverty and racism are measures of the extent American society falls short of recognizing the universality of human dignity. Reducing these evils are basic steps toward establishing common humanity as a reality.
• Equal opportunity is an important secular expression of common human dignity.
  Many factors conspire to deny and confer dignity. Opportunity denied is dignity denied. Equal opportunity is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition toward the manifestation of human dignity.
• God’s image is actualized by people reaching their God-given potential.
  Growth to potential is an individual and collective responsibility.  These responsibilities are complementary, and neither is to be minimized as a justification for abdication of responsibility.
• Public education is the social baseline of equal opportunity.
  Many approaches to education can facilitate children’s growth to their potential, but only a strong public education system can, in our society, begin to approach equal opportunity for all.
• Government bears a major responsibility for ensuring basic education.
  Because public education is a basic system without which equal opportunity cannot be realized, government becomes the primary resource through which equal opportunity, and therefore common human dignity, can be realized.

We therefore support:

• adequate funding so that all able students meet Regents standards,
• universal pre-kindergarten,
• staff adequate to ensure reasonable class size
• adequate, up-to-date resources (e.g. books, computers) in safe buildings, and
• incentives to attract excellent teachers to urban and rural districts.

New York has an historic opportunity to meet these goals. We urge the Governor and Legislature to meet the July 30th court deadline for reform with educational support statewide.