What Does High-Quality Early Childhood Education Look Like?

By Mary Ellen Flannery Some children arrive in kindergarten classrooms and they don’t recognize their own names above the coat hook. They struggle to hold a pair of scissors. They’re not sure how to flip the pages of a book. The sad truth is these children, born into poverty and deprived of a high-quality early [...]

The ‘Right To Work’ Assault on the Middle Class

By Mary Ellen Flannery As right-wing Indiana lawmakers move forward with “right to work” legislation (RTW), their effort to kill the voice of private-sector unions specifically, NEAToday spoke with Professor John Russo, NEA Higher Ed member and coordinator of the Labor Studies Program at Youngstown State University in Ohio, to find out what this means [...]

Despite Title IX, Inequity in Girls’ and Women’s Sports Persists

By Mary Ellen Flannery Nearly 40 years after the federal Title IX law emerged to level the playing field for women-athletes, it’s becoming clear that the law is a little bit like that first-round draft pick who’s just not living up to the hype. “There is still a long way to go before Title IX’s [...]

Community Colleges Need School Modernization Funds

By Mary Ellen Flannery It’s hard to prepare students for 21st century careers when they’re sitting in 20th century classrooms, laboratories, and job-training facilities at aging community colleges across the country. That’s why educators like Derrick Griffey, a math instructor at Gadsden State Community College in Alabama, so strongly support President Obama’s Fix America’s Schools [...]

Is the U.S. Falling Behind in Higher Education?

By Mary Ellen Flannery The United States, once the global leader in the production of a most singular resource—its talent pool of college graduates—is losing ground to emerging nations like South Korea and China. The recent, “Education at a Glance,” an annual report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), found that about [...]

NEA’s Eskelsen to Serve on White House Commission on Hispanic Education

By Mary Ellen Flannery In August, President Barack Obama appointed Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association, to the White House Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, a high-powered panel that will advise him on creating vital learning opportunities for the nation’s growing population of Hispanic students. “I’m not really into titles, but this [...]

Red Flag: Public Colleges Hiring Too Many Part-Time Faculty

By Mary Ellen Flannery A recent red-flag letter to Miami Dade College from its accreditors, which warned that administrators have relied too heavily on part-time faculty, isn’t so much an indictment of the college as it is of the state’s right-wing governor and state legislators. This year, even while handing away billions of dollars in [...]

Protect Pell Grants: Protect the Middle Class

By Mary Ellen Flannery Cutting the Pell Grant program – the ticket to the American Dream for 9.4 million college students this year alone – is exactly what you don’t want to do in an economic recession, said a panel of U.S. Senators, college presidents, and students on Tuesday. “This is America’s future,” said Sen. [...]

How to Make Better Math and Science Teachers

By Mary Ellen Flannery There was one kid who never showed up to algebra class at his Washington State middle school. Then one day, he sidled in and his classmates showed him how to use the classroom’s new hand-held technology. “He’s been coming to class every since,” his teacher said. It’s hard to resist a [...]

DREAM Act Supporters Make Their Case to the US Senate

By Mary Ellen Flannery “I am an American in my heart,” Michigan student Ola Kaso told Senators on Tuesday in the first-ever hearing on the DREAM Act, a bill that would provide a much-needed pathway to citizenship for some undocumented students who attend college or serve in the military. The hearing, available on webcast and [...]

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