The Nation | American Federation of Teachers New Jersey, AFL-CIO

ALEC’s Latest Actions

February 01, 2012

Ben Adler

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that has been leading recent coordinated attempts to move state laws rightward, has some busy minions in the New Hampshire state legislature. In the past week, they introduced seven pieces of ALEC’s model legislation.

These include bills that are plainly counter-productive, such as an act to eliminate payments for additional children of parents on welfare. According to Granite Progress, “This legislation would eliminate support services for newborn children whose parents are utilizing TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families).” How that will break the cycle of the poverty or give the disadvantaged children of poor people a more fair shot at becoming productive citizens is unclear. It seems to proceed from the false premise that people decide whether to have children on the basis on minuscule increases in aid they may receive. In any case, it punishes children for the perceived sins of their parents.

Some of the other proposals are just doctrinaire right-wing ideology, such as instituting a tax credit to divert money from public education to private school vouchers.

More>>

Occupy Education

December 21, 2011

Liza Featherstone

“Mic check! MIC CHECK! Let the Puppet show begin! LET THE PUPPET SHOW BEGIN!”

The demonstrators who held the floor at a December 14 meeting at Newtown High School in Corona, Queens, were part of Occupy DOE (Department of Education), a mix of veteran teachers, parents and Occupy Wall Street activists that is bringing the language and tactics of OWS to the grassroots fight against neoliberal education reform.

The demonstrators explained why the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), which had convened the Queens meeting, is an illegitimate, undemocratic body. New York’s PEP replaced elected school boards when Bloomberg established mayoral control of the school system. It is a parody of a school board: at its meetings, members of the public make impassioned speeches, but nothing they say makes any difference. The majority of the panel’s members are appointed by the mayor, and the PEP has never, in all its existence, rejected any of his proposals.

More>>

Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear

December 18, 2011

Josh Eidelson

Every afternoon last week, students, teachers, and neighbors gathered to hold classes on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza. Everyone was welcome. They sat on the ground, or on what are now called the Mario Savio Steps. Topics included the economics of debt, the poetry of persecution, and Chilean student movement. There has also been a massage train and a gospel chorus. “There are no walls,” said graduate student Michelle Ty, “And it’s free.” You could call it a public university. The irony, not lost on these students or their East Coast counterparts, is that they’re supposed to already have one.

More>>

In Post-Rhee DC, Achievement Gaps Remain Staggeringly Wide

December 10, 2011

On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed critical of school choice policies in Washington, DC. As Matt Yglesias very fairly pointed out, the author, Natalie Hopkinson, failed to cite student achievement data to back her claim that residential segregation and the expansion of the charter school sector have left many DC families with only “mediocre” public school options. Thankfully, on Wednesday the federal government dumped a mass of new NAEP test score data from the nation’s largest cities, including DC. NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is the gold standard in education research: the only exam overseen by the federal government and adminstered to a random selection of schoolchildren annually, with no rewards or punishments attached to corrupt the scores.

I spent this morning diving into the new NAEP numbers in an effort to paint a more complete picture of student achievement in DC over the past decade, which included the three tumultous years of Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship. While white, black and Hispanic children all made modest test score gains in DC since 2003, the Rhee agenda has not significantly narrowed achievement gaps between the various demographic groups, nor has it brought disadvantaged DC youth up to the national average scores for peers of their same race and class in other cities.

More>>

‘Dear Jenny: I Fired Your Mom and Put You to Work to Help You “Rise.” Love, Newt’

November 28, 2011

John Nichols

The picture is of elementary-school age girl mopping the hall in front of a row of lockers.

“Dear Jenny,” reads the accompanying text, “I fired your Mom and put you to work to help you ‘rise.’ Love, Newt.”

A postscript adds: “Hope you don’t miss your house, food and health care too much. You’ll thank me in 30 years, if you survive. Promise!”

The new ad campaign from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees goes to the heart of the matter. Former House Speaker and—at least for this week—Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich really does want to fire school janitors and hire kids to mop the halls, clean the restrooms and fix the boilers. Gingrich claims this switch-up will help elementary and high-school age children “begin the process of rising.”

The real point of the proposal is to destroy public-sector unions. And he is willing to end collective bargaining rights obtained during the New Deal era and in the years since, as well as child labor laws passed during the Progressive Era of a century ago, in order to achieve a political end.

More>>

How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools

November 21, 2011

Lee Fang
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

More>>

Little Love for Labor

September 13, 2011

Josh Eidelson

I didn’t learn much about the labor movement in high school. At best, it was taught like suffrage—a long-ago response to long-ago problems. At worst, it was taught like prohibition—curious, misguided, and painfully anachronistic. Most of the time, my history classes didn’t discuss the labor movement at all.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one.

Last week the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank endowed by the American Federation of Teachers, released a report, American Labor in US History Textbooks, documenting the movement’s compressed portrayal in our major textbooks. It offers a stark assessment: “If, while driving to school, students happen to see the bumper sticker: ‘Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend,’ that may be more exposure to American labor’s historic role as a force for social progress than they will ever get in the classroom.”

More>>

Right-Wing Billionaires Invest in Wisconsin’s Recall Elections

August 10, 2011

John Nichols

August 8, 2011

As co-chair of Wisconsin’s powerful legislative Joint Finance Committee, Alberta Darling was charged by Governor Scott Walker with cobbling together the most anti–public education budget in Wisconsin history. And Darling delivered, with a plan to slash $800 million in funding for public schools across Wisconsin while at the same time scheming to shift tens of millions from the state treasury into the accounts of private schools.

Darling was not just doing the governor’s bidding, however.

She was delivering for American Federation for Children (AFC), the powerful national network of billionaire campaign contributors that has been pouring millions into school privatization fights across the country.

AFC is not just shaping the agenda in Wisconsin. Like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which produces model legislation designed to shape state agendas on a host of policies, AFC outlines legislative goals, crafts specific proposals and then works with allied legislators and governors to implement it’s agenda.

It is in the forefront of high-stakes school “choice,” voucher and privatization fights in Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana and the District of Columbia.

Organized by Michigan billionaires Dick and Betsy DeVos, Americans for Children is officially nonpartisan. But Dick DeVos is a former Republican nominee for governor of Michigan and Betsy DeVos is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Together, they have poured tens of millions of dollars into the ideological and electoral infrastructure that supports school privatization.

More>>