As part of AFT’s ongoing effort to build
alliances with educators and trade unionists around
the world, President Randi Weingarten led an AFT delegation in
May to meet education union leaders and other unionists in
Brazil, Argentina and Chile. I joined them as we looked at their
multi-year effort to defend and expand public education, and to
develop a response to attacks.
Tanya Golden is looking forward to changing how she teaches.
“Before, my curriculum was an inch deep and a mile wide with too
many things to cover. I had to keep moving even when my students
weren’t ready. Now I can teach more for understanding,” says the
sixth grade teacher in her tenth year at ABC Unified School
District, southeast of Los Angeles.
The faculty and classified AFT local unions in the Berkeley
Unified School District rallied on May 8 before a district board
meeting. With state funding to the district on the rise,
educators say the district can provide more for its employees,
especially since it is holding $7.9 million in its ending fund
balance.
The workers are also trying to save the successful cooking and
gardening program threatened by cuts to the federal program,
Network for Healthy Californians.
David Berliner began criticizing the school reform industrial
complex when he co-authored The Manufactured
Crisis 17 years ago. He brought his case, strengthened
by new statistical evidence, to delegates at the CFT Convention.
CFT Vice President Melinda Dart, president of the Jefferson
Elementary Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 3267, presents a
plaque to district Superintendent Bernardo Vidales. The plaque
commemorates the occasion when leaders of the AFT local
occupied the board room, a key moment in the history of
collective bargaining in the Daly City district.
A new CFT White Paper summarizes the union’s public support for
recommendations to build quality education that are based on
sound research and best practices as recommended by three
educational experts. The experts in the paper
titled “What makes quality public education? Ask the experts. That’s what the education union did,” are widely published and have presented to
CFT members and countless other progressive organizations.
Making schools community hubs is key to the union’s campaign for
quality public education, CFT President Joshua Pechthalt told
participants at the Leadership Conference. Connections with
community members comprise the CFT’s greatest strength and he
encouraged educators to mine those ties.
Seattle’s Garfield High School teachers made the momentous
decision in January to refuse to administer the state-mandated
Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test — and it began with a
discussion in the teachers’ lounge.
The passage of SB 161 last year allows administration of a
prescription dose of valium by a non-medical K-12 school employee
volunteer to students with seizure disorders. CFT opposed this
legislation because we believed it placed school employees in the
position of performing tasks better performed by medical
professionals. Nonetheless, it is now law.
Showing their hand, opponents of the much-debated AB 5, A Best
Practices Teacher Evaluation System (Fuentes), stated in
testimony to a state Senate hearing yesterday that they are
opposed to a provision that the tests used to measure academic
growth be “valid and reliable” for the curriculum, the pupil
being taught, and for the purpose of teacher evaluation.
How could a bill that would have improved the teacher evaluation
process die in the California Legislature? Assembly Bill 5, “A
Best Practices Teacher Evaluation System,” fell victim to faulty
assumptions and reasoning that defies logic. And our schools are
poorer for it.
Over the past year CFT was a proud participant in developing the
recommendations of Superintendent Tom Torlakson’s Educational
Excellence Task Force and we applaud the results of this lengthy
process.
In 1988, the late Albert Shanker, then president of the AFT,
introduced the notion of charter schools to the American public
in a Press Cub speech in Washington, DC. Charter schools have
received support across the political spectrum.
Conservatives supported charter schools for a variety of reasons;
they believed that:
Teachers at Ohlone Elementary School were greatly relieved
when Arysta LifeScience, a Japanese chemical company, announced
on March 20 that it would no longer sell methyl iodide in the
United States for use as a pesticide.
A few days before she traveled to CFT
Convention in San Jose, María C. Federico Brummer received an
email at 8 p.m. from the Tucson Unified School District. It
contained a list of newly banned books that the district wanted
packed by noon the next day. During class, her students watched
her comb the cabinets and remove classroom sets of the affected
titles.
Linda Darling-Hammond applauded teachers who are struggling
with classes of 35, and even 45 students, sometimes without desks
or textbooks, while the misplaced focus on teacher evaluation has
become a drum beat.