One of the most-hotly debated questions is how strong is the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers compared to the school reform movement. When it comes to the money that is key to political influence, there is no doubt: The NEA and AFT together spend roughly $700 million per year, consistently, on a broad spectrum of political communication activities opposed to reform. This means that the financial (and political) muscle of the two unions is far greater than that of school reform organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst (for which I used to work), Stand for Children, Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the American Federation for Children.
To understand the unions’ advantages, start with the AFT and NEA national budgets. The AFT has 1.6 million members and generated $233 million in revenue (net of borrowing) as of 2013-2014, according to this week’s Dropout Nation analysis of financial data; the NEA had 3.1 million members and national revenues of $387 million in 2012-2013. This total is only the beginning. Although teachers have “unitary dues” where they pay once for national, state, and local affiliates, the state and local portions of the bill vary greatly and can be quite significant. In the state of New Jersey, for instance, compulsory dues come to $936 per teacher, less than $200 of which go to national. In Chicago, the compulsory dues that the AFT’s Chicago Teachers Union deducts from paychecks amount to $1,060 per teacher a year, several hundred dollars more than go to Illinois and national combined. Average dues of nearly $1,000 per year appear quite common.
The $63 million spent by Walton family on ed reform last year < 1/10th amount spent by NEA and AFT.
For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.
Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to families for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.
As official as it looks, ComputerCOP is actually just spyware, generally bought in bulk from a New York company that appears to do nothing but market this software to local government agencies.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign with activist friends of mine. We went to protest in support of Dr. Steven Salaita and the several unions and student groups who were rallying for better labor conditions, for the principle of honoring contracts, for collective bargaining rights, for recognition by the administration, and for respect. It was a beautiful, brilliant rally; I estimated 400 people, many more than I had thought to hope for. And it posed the simplest question facing academics today: who and what is the university for?
The labor unions in attendance that day were fighting for better conditions and more honest, direct bargaining with the university administration, as labor unions in Illinois have fought for decades. Some fought for fair pay and transparent, equitable rules for advancement and compensation. The school’s young graduate union, the GEO, fights simply to be recognized by the university, in an academic world in which universities could not survive without graduate student labor. What was remarkable about the event was how easily and naturally these labor issues coincided with the fight for Dr. Salaita. Some might mistake these issues for disconnected and separate, but in fact they are part of the same fight. The fight for Dr. Salaita is about Palestine, and about academic freedom. But it is also about labor and the rights of workers. It’s about faculty governance in a university system that has seen ceaseless growth in higher administrators and an attendant growth in the cost of employing them. It’s about recognizing that a university is not its endless vice provosts and deputy deans, nor its sushi bars and climbing walls, nor its slick advertising campaigns, nor its football team, nor its statuary. A university is its students and its teachers. To defend Dr. Salaita is to defend the notion that, in an academy that crowds out actual teaching and actual learning in myriad ways, the actual teachers in the academy must preserve the right to hire other teachers, and to honor those commitments once they are made.
Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature
The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.
Post -secondary competency-based education obviously has a lot of momentum, as we have reported on extensively in the past. But the Christensen Institute, a think tank co-founded by Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Jason Hwang to analyze issues in education and healthcare, argues that it’s much more than a trend.
Online competency-based education is the innovation that will shake up higher ed, they say. While most of us had our eye on the fascinating potential of MOOCs, the mixture of online ed and CBE programs has cohered into the much more significant force.
That thesis is laid out in a new ebook co-authored by Clayton Christensen and Senior Research Fellow, Michelle Weise. Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution, available free for download at the institute’s website, argues that “online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers and the right business model.” Inexpensive and cost-effective online CBE programs that are “good enough” are releasing working adults and employers from the tyranny of the credit hour model and can respond to marketplace needs much more quickly than traditional higher ed programs.
This summer, in Missouri, America got an awful tutorial in the realities of racism. We were taught—yet again, through bullets and teargas—what it means to be black in this country. There is much to be done to prevent future Fergusons, of course. But as a teacher, I find myself wondering what our schools can contribute.
In Philadelphia, where I live and teach high school, we have a course that could help to improve race relations. But some students believe that it doesn’t go far enough.
Here in Philly, students are required to take a one-year course in African-American history; if they don’t take the class, they won’t graduate. The scope of the course is comprehensive, focusing not only on resistance and protest traditions, but also on the cultural history of Africa and the African diaspora. This mandate, the first—and virtually the only—of its kind, has been around for almost a decade. But its story begins 40 years before that.
In 1967, a coalition of about 4,000 African-American students held a peaceful demonstration before Philadelphia’s Board of Education building. In tandem with similar movements nationwide, they demanded that the African-American experience be made more visible in their schools. One of their 25 demands was that curricula be expanded beyond the superficial-at-best treatment of African-American history. The protest remained nonviolent until Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo spurred two busloads of his officers to attack the students with teargas and clubs. According to witnesses, Rizzo galvanized his men with a rallying cry of “get their black asses!”
For two years, I commuted to a ground-level room in a building in the Bronx a few days a week to teach GED preparation courses. My students were 17-to 24-year-olds with some sort of criminal record. We used to make jokes about the mice running across the ceiling tiles above us to lighten the mood. But we were hidden under an apartment building. I was teaching and my students were learning in a shithole. The clouded windows were covered by cracked venetian blinds and there was a poster on the wall with a handsome young man holding a baby that read, “Today’s a good day to be a dad.”margin-ad-right
I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.
Let’s call her Alice. One of us has known her for years. She earned her Ph.D. in the mid-1990s when academic jobs were scarce, and she wound up an academic gypsy. She left graduate school to take a one-year full-time academic appointment, but then found herself cobbling together part-time teaching jobs at different community colleges in a large metropolitan area, earning a couple of thousand dollars for each course she teaches. She is a dedicated teacher, but her annual income is between $30,000 and $40,000.
Alice owes $270,000 in student loans. She only borrowed about $70,000 to pay for grad school, but she’s never been able to afford much in the way of payments, and after consolidating her loans and accumulating interest charges for years, she’s watched her debt roughly quadruple.
If Alice taught students in a low-income high school or was a recent graduate, she would be eligible for various programs that would allow her to discharge at least some of her debt. But since she graduated at a time before income-based repayment and loan-forgiveness programs, there is no federal program to help established part-time community-college faculty discharge their old student-loan debts.
The nation’s largest teachers union plans to spend between $40 and $60 million in this year’s election cycle, two sources at the National Educational Association told BuzzFeed News.
On Monday, the American Federation of Teachers, which has about half the membership of the NEA, said it would spend about $20 million in the same time frame. Those numbers encompass all election spending, from Senate races down to local ballot measures.
While AFT President Randi Weingarten said they are spending more this year than they’ve spent in any cycle before, NEA Political Director Karen White said her union’s estimate is roughly on par for what they usually spend in non-presidential election years.
In an internal memo White sent last week to top NEA leaders, she wrote that education is “emerging as a top issue” in some of tighter gubernatorial races and in the country as a whole.
There are currently six prominent paths for achievement-minded recent college graduates: financial services, management consulting, law school (still), med school, and grad school/academia. The sixth is Teach for America, which continues to draw approximately 5,000 graduates (and 50,000 applicants) a year from universities across the country.
Milwaukee’s long-running school voucher program that allows certain children to attend private and religious schools at taxpayer expense has saved Wisconsin more than $238 million since its inception in 1990, according to a new study by a national voucher advocacy group.
That’s not a surprisingfinding — vouchers are generally lower in cost than public school education.
But the study’s more provocative point is that the savings from those voucher programs in Milwaukee and other cities are passively plowed back into public schools or other public programs.
Author Jeff Spalding, the director of fiscal policy and analysis at the foundation, said he lacks the data to track exactly where those savings went in each state, but said it’s just common sense that government savings from vouchers would naturally flow into other public purposes, such as schools, roads, law enforcement or health care.
Critics pounced on that reasoning, noting that taxpayer dollars to private schools in the form of vouchers siphon resources away from the public schools.
Also, the study predates new rules in Wisconsin that allowed more students to use vouchers, both by expanding the Milwaukee program and establishing the Racine and statewide private-school voucher programs.
The statewide program is now funding vouchers predominantly for students who were already attending those private schools.
Parents who home-school children with significant emotional, social or behavioral problems would have to file progress reports prepared by special education program teams, under a proposal being considered by the governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission.
Commission members acknowledged Tuesday that the proposal, contained in a tentative section of the panel’s final report, could be controversial and prompt opposition from parents of home-schooled children across the state.
But the commission, which is preparing its final report to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said tighter scrutiny of home-schoolers may be needed to prevent an incident such as the December 2012 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The murders were carried out by Adam Lanza, a disturbed 20-year-old who had been home-schooled by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also shot to death on the morning of his murder spree.
After my assignment at the high school I took on various short-term sub assignments. These seemed relatively straightforward compared to the difficulties I had been through. In fact, I was reluctant to start subbing at first, but after the first few times, I started to regain my confidence.
I had applied to various full time jobs for teachers and was waiting to hear. As the school year approached November and I was subbing more, the TV and the internet were full of discussions about the JFK assassination, which was approaching its 50 year anniversary. Like most people, I recall what I was doing at the infamous moment: I was taking a Spanish test. I remember girls in the class crying, and later, when passing in the hall, seeing the woodworking/drafting teacher outside his classroom, seemingly distant, whistling “Hail to the Chief ”.
I continued to sub, and by January, TV and the internet were focusing on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan. While Kennedy’s assassination is irrevocably linked in my mind to a Spanish test, the Beatles’ U.S. debut is linked to Mr. Dombey’s algebra class where I recall many discussions about the Beatles taking place. I can recall both the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with complete and unrelenting clarity.
By the third week in January, I was eating lunch during a sub assignment, and was at a point where I had accepted that my age was probably preventing me from being hired as a full time teacher. At that moment, my wife called me on the cell phone to tell me that the principal of the Lawrence Middle School was desperately trying to reach me, and that they had a long-term sub assignment for teaching math.
As previously reported, Governor Walker’s Act 10 requires public sector unions, except police & fire, to participate in an annual recertification election to enable Union members to retain representation by their Union. The election by all MTI-represented District employees will be conducted between November 5 and November 25, via telephone or on-line balloting (details forthcoming when received from the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission).
MTI Faculty Representatives and EA Building Representatives at every school/work location have been asked to recruit colleagues to assist in building awareness of the importance of the recertification election, and to make sure that staff at their school/work location VOTE in the recertification elections.
These individuals are being referred to as MTI Member Organizers and will be essential to successful recertification elections. The Union needs Member Organizers from every bargaining unit (MTI, SEE-MTI, EA-MTI, SSA-MTI & USO-MTI). Retired union members are also encouraged to assist in organizing. Assuring that each and every person vote is of great importance, because Act 10 requires that to win recertification, the Union must win 51% of all eligible voters.
If you are willing to support your Union by serving as a Member Organizer, or have additional questions about what this entails, see your MTI Faculty Representative/EA-MTI Building Representative, or contact MTI Assistant Director Doug Keillor (keillord@madisonteachers.org; 257-0491). Additional information will also be available at a MTI Member Organizer Q & A Session on Saturday, October 4, from 10:00-11:30 a.m., at MTI Headquarters.
Reasons for Recertification #2: Preserving and Protecting Your Collective Bargaining Agreements – MTI has successfully negotiated Collective Bargaining Agreements which preserve the vast majority of Contract rights and benefits for both the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years and provide the Union the means to enforce those rights and benefits.
Eight years ago, a community health report from the Fox Valley uncovered an alarming trend among local high school students: one in four reported experiencing depression, and more than one in 10 had attempted suicide.
An experiment soon followed that placed licensed therapists with expertise in children’s mental health in elementary, middle and high schools.
“We decided if students had trouble making their appointment (at community clinics), let’s bring the appointment to them,” said Mary Wisnet, one of the program’s officers.
On the days that I drive the middle school carpool, I purposely choose a route that takes us past a huge river. Some mornings, the water looks like glass; others, it reflects the moody clouds above with choppy waves – either way, it’s gorgeous. Every time we drive past it, I point it out to my car full of 12-year-olds: “Look at the water today. Isn’t it beautiful?” No one in the car looks up. They are all looking down at their phones, playing games with each other, texting a friend or watching a YouTube video. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will get a mercy grunt out of one or two of them in reply.
It struck me recently, after one of my quiet carpool rides, that my generation of parents – we of the soon-to-be or recently 40 year old Gen X variety, the former latchkey children of the Cold War and an MTV that actually played videos, former Atari-owners who were raised by the the Cosby Show and John Hughes, graduated high school with the kids from 90210, then lumbered through our 20s with Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey and flip phones – is perhaps the last to straddle a life experience both with and without the Internet and all its social media marvels. After all, I didn’t even learn to use e-mail until I was 19 and a sophomore in college in 1993, and only for a slightly cringe-worthy reason: a cute boy at another college asked me to e-mail him.
Nationally, black males account for 2 percent of the teacher population. Blacks in total represent 8 percent of all teachers; Latinos, 7 percent; and Asians, 2 percent. My 3-year-old son could have approximately 50 different teachers by the time he graduates from high school. How many times should he expect to see an African American male teacher before graduation? This is a “Common Core” question I struggle with.
In a seminar titled, “How Do We Get More Black Male Teachers in America’s Classrooms?” At the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 44th Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., an audience member asked, “Are colleges even recruiting black male teachers?” As someone who is charged with building a teacher prep program, I can say most universities aren’t built to recruit from black communities.
Black and brown people represent 30 percent of the population. But they represent 15 percent of teachers, and that figure is in decline. Woodrow Wilson reports that if current trends hold, the percentage of teachers of color will fall to an all-time low of 5 percent by 2020. But today for the first time in American history, the majority of public school students are of color.
Advancements in technology will make banking very personal within the next decade—it may require your eye or finger to pay for shopping and your social network profile may determine your access to credit, the Daily Mail reports.
Banks may request access to clients’ Facebook account and see whether users have a stable friends network—a sign they may be less of a credit risk than users who change friends frequently, financial technology expert Gi Fernando told the Daily Mail.