PreK-12 Articles

Overview

PreK-12

News for educators and support staff working in early childhood through high school.

California Teacher international privatization

A Tale of Hope and Caution: How three Latin American nations are defending public education

By Joshua Pechthalt, CFT President

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.

California Teacher student assessment Common Core Standards

A year of transition: Preparing for the Common Core standards
New law temporarily suspends most testing, gives educators and districts time to prepare

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.

Article Local Action

Berkeley local unions fight for fair contract, cooking and gardening program

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. 

Article Local Action

Daly City elementary schools honor collective bargaining
Local 3267 commemorates significant union event

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.

Article

New CFT White Paper calls on three experts to describe what makes quality education

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.

California Teacher Leadership Conference

CFT launches member discussion of “quality public education”
Union explores partnership of community and educators to launch quality public education campaign

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.

Article

Negotiating the new Diastat law
Puts employees in position of performing medical procedures

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.

Article teacher evaluation

Opponents of evaluation bill want invalid tests to be measure of teacher evaluation effectiveness

By Gary Ravani, President, EC/K-12 Council

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.

California Teacher teacher evaluation

Legislature fails to pass meaningful teacher evaluation bill
Opponents don’t care about validity of test scores, only scapegoating teachers

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.

California Teacher

Arizona outlaws core Mexican-American Studies program
Tucson High School teacher recounts story of textbook and curricula ban

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.