On Thursday the 14th of 2008, St. Valentine's Day, NYC's Students are Taking Action.

In response to the City and State's recent education budget cuts, a group called Students Against Budget Cuts has organized a protest on the steps of City Hall.

This is no surprise to me. These cuts have sent a shock down the spine of NYC's student body to larger extent than any education issue since the cell phone ban. Students feel betrayed. We feel as though the State and City are disrespecting us and demeaning our status as learners.

If NYC Students were to hold a primary election tomorrow, I bet that we'd have a clear winner: Barack Obama, the candidate I will be casting my first ever vote for on February 5th. (In fact, when the NYC Student Union held a member primary, Barack Obama garnered all but two votes.)

I won't go to much into my initial reasons for supporting him besides saying that I really like his potential as a uniter and the possible historical and international impact of his election. As per education, and why I think he would he would be the best in that category, my answer, besides his great policies (which include a strong push for less high-stakes testing,) is Patriotism.

It always surprises me how my fellow students always seem to take much more moderate and pragmatic positions on many of today's more controversial education issues than I would expect.

At last weeks New York City Student Union meeting, the issue that came up was Mayoral Control of NYC schools, which Albany can either reinstate or let sunset in 2009. While much of what we hear on the issue from other members of the education community (parents, teachers, activists) is outright condemnation, most students were supportive of the idea of Mayoral Control.

I've been on the fence about the issue for a while now, but after hearing my fellow students arguments, I am convinced that Mayoral Control is not the devil after all.

What is our role, the student's role, in our society?

As it stands now we are the constant object of the education discussion sentence. My english teacher told me (and mind you, this was last year... in my junior year of high school,) that a simple sentence contains three parts: the subject or actor, the verb or action, and the object or that which is acted upon

As in: "The Department of Education (that's the subject) puts (the verb) children(the object) first (I guess that's an adjective)."

In the American education debate, we are acted upon by many subjects: The Department of Education, who treats us like products, numbers that need to be manipulated so that they can look real good, the City, that treats us as criminals who need to be babysat by the NYPD for a couple of hours a day, and our Teachers, who people assume can snap their fingers and turn us into brilliant astrophysicists ready to herald in a new age of American economic glory.

A few days ago, walking to the train after an NYC Student Union meeting with some of my fellow students, it struck me to ask "Why has the debate on the NYC DOE's Progress Report program garnered so much attention?" Why have so many newspaper articles been written on it, so many people been riled up about it? It's just a silly report card program right? Aren't there so many important issues out there?

Well, yes and no.

While there are more urgent issues facing our schools, especially class size, this issue gains its importance because it very thoroughly defines the main theme of Klein/Bloomberg's tenure running our schools: The Search for Results. Under this administration and probably in many other school systems around the country, the focus of broad educational policy will be measurable results. These results will set the agenda for individual schools and school systems as a whole.

As of this year my younger brother is no longer a public school student. Like me, he attended public elementary and middle schools, however, when it came to choose a high school, he and my parents decided that he would do better at a private school. Fortunately, they made a good decision for my brother. He is now at a school that he loves, he really succeeds in and he feels does a good job in educating the students.

Out of curiosity, I asked him what the difference was between the public school he had attended and his current school in terms of educational value. His answer was quick and simple: the adults in the building have time to care about the students.

In the NYC education system, the first step to improving schools is creating a situation in which educators have time to care about the students. This can only come for significant reductions in class size and teacher load.

The key factor in both the transmission of knowledge and the growth of a student as an individual is trust. This trust is necessary to build the relationship between a teacher and student in order to achieve these goals. To run a school effectively, there must be an atmosphere of trust between teachers and administration. This principle of trust as the mortar that holds together our education system also applies to the relationship between the DOE, the City and the members of individual schools, specifically the teachers.

The City's new initiative to fire more teachers is a betrayal of this trust. The DOE's new Teacher Performance Unit, a group of five lawyers headed by a former District Attorney, has been given the goal of helping Principals create cases against tenured teachers and getting rid of young, unsuccessful teachers before they get tenure.

Today, it was reported that the DOE's plan to install cell phone lockers outside of several schools has been put on hold. This plan, (thought by many, myself included, to be a waste of money) was created as a possible resolution to the Cell Phone Ban, the contentious rule that states that NYC students are not allowed to have their cell phones in school, even if they are turned off.

In short, the ban is wrong because it puts students, who commute up to 4 hours per day, into an unsafe situation because it takes away their main line of communication with parents and the police in the event of an emergency. This is in turn contributes to distrust between students and that makes the already difficult tasks of teaching and learning slightly more impossible.

My name is Seth Pearce. I am a senior at LaGuardia High School and a member of the NYC Student Union (http://nycstudents.org), a citywide, student-run and created, education advocacy organization. I am writing to you to express both my support for your new school Progress Report program and my criticism of some of its parts.

At last week's NYC Student Union meeting, students from schools around the City discussed the Progress Reports. Some students supported them and others didn't. There was, however, a general agreement on the need for accountability in our schools.