NEA President: Leaving Chester Upland Students in Limbo a “Dereliction of Duty”

By Kevin Hart The students of the Chester Upland School District, one of the poorest districts in Pennsylvania, deserve the security of knowing that their schools will have the funding to remain open for the entire school year. That was the message delivered by National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel after a $3.2 million [...]

Educators Will Work Without Paychecks to Keep Broke District From Failing

By Kevin Hart When Bonita Davis’ husband passed away in August, she faced the same fears and anxieties that would grip any new single parent. The bills didn’t stop coming. She wondered how she would continue supporting her two children in college. And Davis, a sixth-grade teacher in the Chester Upland School District in Chester, [...]

NEA’s Litigation Against Anti-Worker Laws Showing Results

By Michael D. Simpson, NEA Office of General Counsel NEA and its state affiliates have filed a flurry of lawsuits challenging a wide range of anti-union and anti-worker state laws enacted recently. Some preliminary results are in, and while all of these lawsuits are still pending, NEA’s batting about .660 so far. Arizona — On the plus [...]

Anti-Worker Law SB 5 Repealed in Ohio

By Miguel Gonzales and Tim Walker Ohio voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a referendum to repeal Senate Bill 5 (on the ballot as Issue 2), a controversial bill signed into law by Gov. John Kasich last spring. The bill was designed to silence the voices and strip away the collective bargaining rights of public workers. [...]

Longer School Days That Work

By Cindy Long From Chicago to Houston to Washington, D.C., districts around the country are beginning to experiment with longer school days as a way to raise academic achievement. A pioneer in this effort is Massachusetts, which launched a statewide extended school day program in 2005. Ferryway School is one of Massachusetts’s success stories. While [...]

Michigan Lawmakers Push “Right to Work” – But Only for Public School Employees

By Robert McNeely A bill was introduced in the Michigan state senate on Thursday that would apply so-called “right to work’ laws exclusively to public school employees represented by the Michigan Education Association (MEA). MEA President Steven Cook denounced the bill, SB 729, as a blatant political attack on school staff  and the wrong answer to the state’s [...]

NCLB Gets Curiouser and Curiouser

By Alain Jehlen Eighty-nine percent of Florida’s schools are subpar according to No Child Left Behind. But there’s a way thousands of Florida students can quickly become “proficient”: move to another state. These are just a few of the recent signs that Alice in Wonderland has come to America’s public schools as the 2014 deadline [...]

Recall: Wisconsin Voters Unseat Two Republican Senators

By Cynthia McCabe In an unprecedented series of Wisconsin recall elections on Tuesday, two Democratic challengers knocked off Republican state senate incumbents — a sign of continued citizen outrage over efforts by Gov. Scott Walker to effectively eliminate collective bargaining for public workers in that state. Democrat Jennifer Shilling defeated Republican Sen. Dan Kapanke. Democrat Jessica [...]

Wisconsin Democrat Wins Recall Election

On Tuesday, Democratic incumbent Dave Hansen easily retained his seat by a more than 30-point margin in the first of nine recall elections being held in Wisconsin this summer. Republican David VanderLeest was easily defeated 66 percent – 34 percent after running a furious two-week campaign once the expected Republican challenger and seated assemblyman John [...]

Wisconsin Prepares for High-Stakes Recall Elections

By Tim Walker Every day for two weeks in March, Jim Niemeier, a retired educator from Waupun, Wisconsin, stood outside his local post office, talking to people as they walked in and out. He did this for eight hours each day in sometimes bitterly cold weather. Usually he would have better uses of his time, [...]

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