Redesigned Dallas schools take "giant steps forward"
PSRP union in Alaska affiliates with AFT
Michigan union blocks unaccountable charter schools
Guam teachers fight to defend contract
Bilingual education 30 years later
Collective bargaining is a lesson students like to learn
NY students have their say on the school budget
Supreme Court gives green light to Texas redistricting plan

Redesigned Dallas schools take "giant steps forward"

Janet Wilharm’s first-graders sit at desks covered with black and white spotted fabric that looks like cowhide. Bobbi Witherspoon’s high school students line up dental instruments, preparing to clean classmates’ teeth at the school’s dental clinic. And Luis Martinez beams as he reaches into a file cabinet and pulls out a tape made by one of his former students when she was 15—future Grammy Award winner Norah Jones.

What these Dallas classrooms have in common is that they are located in some of the finest public schools in that city—and in the nation.

“You walk into these schools, and you can just tell they’re topflight,” says AFT president Sandra Feldman about a December visit to several schools in Dallas. “There’s enthusiasm and creativity evident everywhere you look. The kids are so energized by this, and it shows in their test scores.”

The schools the AFT president visited are representative of innovative and redesigned public schools that can be found nationwide. And with the right combination of teachers and school-related employees, supportive principals and school superintendents—and resources—these success stories can be replicated elsewhere, Feldman points out.

Wilharm, her whimsical desk covers, and some impressive teacher-training programs can be found at Leila Cowart Elementary School. For the past 12 years, Cowart has had a partnership with the University of North Texas, and some of the university’s education majors spend much of their senior year at Cowart—interning in classrooms, taking university courses in dedicated portable classrooms and student teaching.

“In the PDS (professional development school) program, I learned a lot of what I now use in my classroom,” says third-grade teacher Nikia Barnett. The school also pairs mentors with rookie teachers, a practice Barnett describes as “invaluable.”

A few miles away, Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center features breathtaking views of the downtown skyline and an equally extraordinary collection of six magnet high schools under one roof. The schools focus on the health professions; government, law and law enforcement; business and management; education and social services; and science and engineering. The sixth magnet is for talented and gifted students.

The health professions magnet—for aspiring doctors, dentists, nurses and veterinarians—features a dental clinic and lab, an industrial kitchen (where students learn about hospital food preparation), a “hospital room” with rows of beds occupied by mannequin patients, and a physical therapy room featuring state-of-the-art equipment.

The business and management magnet has a functioning Wells Fargo bank run by student bank tellers and account managers.

And students in the government and law magnet conduct mock crime scene and arson investigations using a fully equipped forensic lab and determine a defendant’s fate in a mock courtroom.

This magnet, says one of its teachers, has become a favorite—following in the wake of the popular television show “CSI,” which features crime scene investigators and fascinating forensics.

Feldman also visited the city’s Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, which houses one of the country’s few theater design programs, a dance studio and a comprehensive music program with two recording studios.

Music teacher Luis Martinez proudly handed visitors “Giant Steps Forward,” a two-disc CD featuring 17 works performed and either composed or arranged by six of the performing art’s high school’s students.

There are schools throughout the country that could benefit from the same kind of resources and support to improve student achievement that these Dallas schools have, Feldman points out. “The goal is to get every public school to be the kind that raises achievement and makes learning fun.”

PSRP union in Alaska affiliates with AFT

A group representing about 1,400 white-collar paraprofessionals and school-related personnel in the Anchorage public school district voted in December to affiliate with the AFT/Alaska Public Employees Association (APEA).

Members of the formerly independent union, known as the TOTEM Association of Educational Support Personnel, voted overwhelmingly for AFT affiliation. The vote to change the group’s constitution and bylaws required at least a two-thirds approval, and more than 70 percent voted yes.

TOTEM and APEA have worked cooperatively for years. When TOTEM went on strike several years ago, APEA members from the Anchorage school district made sure they didn’t do any work normally done by TOTEM members. TOTEM members have also attended AFT meetings and conferences.

As the largest local in the Anchorage school district, TOTEM was seen by many other unions in the state as a ripe target for raiding. Local president Val Woods says that even though her members liked being independent and their union was vibrant, they also realized they needed a stronger voice in tough times. The actual affiliation campaign was a whirlwind effort completed in under three weeks.

“The AFT is more aligned with what we believe and where we want to go” than some other unions that have sought to affiliate the group, Woods says. “The AFT has a much more positive approach to things, and that is important.”

With this victory, the AFT now has nearly 7,000 members in Alaska. APEA president Bruce Senkow says the TOTEM affiliation adds welcome diversity to the statewide union, which will help “broaden our reach, our voice and our influence in public policy arenas where decisions are made about the issues that are most important to our members.”

Michigan union blocks unaccountable charter schools

Debate over charter schools continues to rage in Michigan—months after the Michigan Federation of Teachers & School Related Personnel (MFT&SRP) and the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) thwarted a plan to expand the number of charter schools in the state.

The two AFT affiliates combined forces to fend off a suburban millionaire’s $200 million offer to build 15 charter high schools in Detroit—an offer embraced by Republican lawmakers. The demise of the initiative came on the heels of a union rally at the state Capitol in Lansing last fall, which drew 5,000 DFT and Michigan federation members, as well as members of the Graduate Employees Union/AFT at Michigan State and other public school supporters, community activists and political leaders.

“We went [to Lansing] for our students, for all of our students,” says DFT president Janna K. Garrison, an AFT vice president. “Our dedication to the welfare of Detroit schoolchildren is what motivates everything we do in this union.”

According to a survey conducted by the Detroit branch of the NAACP, 57 percent of the city’s residents opposed millionaire Bob Thompson’s charter school proposal, The Detroit News reported.

In the weeks leading up to the rally, the DFT and the MFT&SRP lobbied state lawmakers, ran radio ads opposing legislation that would have paved the way for Thompson’s charter school plan, and mobilized their supporters. The unions’ efforts, combined with the collapse of a deal between Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Republican legislative leaders, prompted Thompson to withdraw his multimillion-dollar offer to build the schools.

“Our position is that more charter schools means more money pulled from public schools that are making the grade,” says MFT&SRP president David Hecker. “We don’t want all charter schools to go away, because not all charter schools are bad. We want to contain the number of new charter schools until they work—until they at least come up to the level of the public schools.”

Guam teachers fight to defend contract

Negotiators for the Guam Federation of Teachers are engaged in a struggle against an education policy board that wants to strip language from the teachers’ contract dealing with everything from class sizes to seniority to the school calendar.

The AFT-affiliated GFT represents more than 2,000 teachers and other staff on the Pacific island. As the union’s chief negotiator Matt Rector told a local TV station, “The union came in with reasonable, sound proposals on how to improve a teacher’s working conditions and to improve education in general,” while the policy board’s negotiators proposed gutting the contract. “It’s amazing what they’re proposing.” Management’s proposal would have reduced the current 60-page contract to six pages.

The union responded in late December, just a week before the contract was set to expire, by filing an unfair labor practice against the Guam Education Policy Board and board negotiators for refusing to bargain in good faith.

Bilingual education 30 years later

Three decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lau v. Nichols, ruled that school districts had an obligation to provide limited English proficient students with an appropriate and accessible education. Although the high court mandated no particular instructional program, it did require school districts to provide bilingual instruction to these students as a means of ensuring equal access to educational opportunities.

Educating English language learners (ELL) continues to be a national priority. There are 4.6 million English language learners attending U.S. schools today. The National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) is a leader in the fight to ensure that these students—and those who teach them—have the resources they need to be successful. Delia Pompa, NABE executive director, addressed the January meeting of the AFT PreK-12 Teachers program and policy council.

“Our organizations have a number of common interests,” Pompa, a former teacher and AFT member told PPC members. Perhaps foremost, she said are “the interests of [ELL] students and their teachers.”

Pompa described NABE as a membership and advocacy organization that represents educators and parents of English language learners. Accusations that NABE, which has more than 5,000 members and affiliates in 28 states, “pushes for teaching kids only in their native language” are totally wrong, she said. “Our message is not about any particular approach or program” for educating English language learners.

Pompa pointed out that 40 percent of these students were born in the United States, and about three-quarters of them attend high-poverty schools. About 77 percent of these students speak Spanish, she said.

The growing number of English language learners in our nation’s schools “has implications for curriculum, testing and teacher training,” stressed Pompa, who said that a NABE survey showed that many teachers “don’t feel adequately prepared to work with English language learners.”

Pompa also noted that there is “still a huge achievement gap,” with 72 percent of English as a second language students scoring below basic in reading.

NABE supported the No Child Left Behind Act, Pompa told the PPC. But her association, like the AFT, believes there are aspects of the law “that need to be modified and fixed,” she added.

“We think the implementation [of NCLB] is lacking and that more technical assistance and resources have to be put in place in order to help states, school districts and schools meet the letter and the spirit of the law.”

Collective bargaining is a lesson students like to learn

What started out as a one-day field trip for high school students is now a full-time job for former high school social studies teachers Linda Tubach and Patty Litwin, coordinators of the Collective Bargaining Education Project, a joint program of United Teachers Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The joint labor-management endeavor, launched in January 1998, takes lessons about collective bargaining, labor history and labor law into a different classroom each week. Students are divided into a union negotiating team and a management negotiating team, and real-life labor relations professionals facilitate mock bargaining sessions. The classroom program evolved from the California Federation of Teachers Labor in the Schools Committee’s Collective Bargaining Institute—an annual field trip for select high school students, which Tubach and Litwin also continue to coordinate.

The classroom program, which received the AFT-Saturn/UAW partnership award in 2003, is more rigorous than the field trip event and meets all California academic standards, Litwin explains.

But the fact that it lives up to students’ expectations and standards is why both the in-class and field trip programs continue to thrive. “Students get very excited and very involved, because the outcome depends on their efforts,” says Litwin. “It is a student-centered lesson that is really engaging and produces pretty high levels of achievement.” Teachers get really excited when they see students who don’t usually participate much in class suddenly begin to “talk, state opinions and take leadership roles,” Litwin adds.

The in-school program reaches about 3,000 students a year. The annual field trip event to UTLA headquarters usually involves about 100 students.

Litwin says one of the main questions people ask about the program is whether it’s biased. Her observation: No. “Students are learning about collective bargaining as a problem-solving process, and both labor and management goals are represented fairly and equitably,” she points out. “Who wins and loses is a matter of perspective—and we approach it from a variety of perspectives.”

The student labor-management teams tackle issues as wide-ranging as wages, medical benefits, career ladders, promotions, sex and race discrimination, health and safety issues, and child care.

The next step is taking the program on a road show, of sorts. This summer, Tubach and other California teachers familiar with the Collective Bargaining Education Project curriculum will head east to the nation’s capital to train Washington, D.C.-area teachers who are working with the Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO to start a similar program in the area.

“It’s what I love to teach because it empowers the students to have an influence and prepares them for their futures,” says Tubach, “plus, I don’t have homework to grade anymore.”

NY students have their say on the school budget
A class action

Students generally aren’t invited to weigh in on a school district’s budget. But seniors in the class of 2003 at Poughkeepsie High School in New York not only  voiced their opinions, the board of education was so impressed it earmarked funds for student initiatives at the school.

Most of the students in Rick Keller-Coffey’s class on participation in government already were familiar with the school district budget because the AFT member uses it as a tool to help his students “talk about government in a philosophical sense.”

So, when district officials asked students for input in planning the 2003-04 school district budget, Keller-Coffey seized the opportunity to do more than just talk. And with a little guidance, so did his students.

“I told them, ‘You are a constituency that is traditionally not represented. Here’s a chance to represent yourself as an organized body,’” says Keller-Coffey, who has taught social studies for 16 years and is the political action coordinator for his AFT local, the Poughkeepsie Public Schools Teachers Association.

The students plunged in and created a 57-question survey dealing with an array of student concerns ranging from college scholarships to artificial turf for the football and soccer fields. Nearly 600 of the school’s 1,100 students completed the survey, and Keller-Coffey’s students tabulated the results.

The students presented budget recommendations to the Poughkeepsie board of education in March 2003 that were based on the survey results. The top three student concerns: getting into and paying for college; the dilapidated condition of the school, especially its bathrooms; and the need for more courses. The kids came up with cost-effective and easily implemented solutions, such as creating a course on applying to college, offering grants for school beautification and providing a wider variety of courses.

District and school officials as well as the board of education were impressed with the students’ work. The board allotted $25,000 for student initiatives at Poughkeepsie. And the students received citations for their work from New York Gov. George Pataki and Assemblyman Joel Miller. The project’s success has sparked interest at other schools, including Yale University.

Although the seniors who developed the budget recommendations graduated last May, Keller-Coffey’s current students are keeping the project alive. They have formed the Council for Student Initiatives, which is keeping tabs on students’ interests and issues as well as finding ways to influence next year’s budget.

In retrospect, Keller-Coffey says the project grew into something more than he or his students ever anticipated. Keller-Coffey surmises: “I think they liked the idea of having their opinions being heard and being treated like adults.”

One thing is certain, he says. “When I look back on my teaching career, this will definitely be a highlight. I’m not trying to create politicians; I just want my students to know what’s going on in their communities.”

Supreme Court gives green light to Texas redistricting plan

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block a Republican redistricting plan in Texas that ultimately could have big implications for effective state government and for the future makeup of Congress.

The high court on Jan. 16 let stand lower court rulings that allowed the Texas Legislature to take the extraordinary step of redrawing congressional boundaries for this year’s elections. Congressional redistricting traditionally is done after the 10-year census, but the GOP-controlled state Legislature pre-empted the process last year and redrew congressional lines to bolster the party’s chances of picking up six or more seats in Congress. The new boundaries have sparked charges of gerrymandering not only from Democrats but also from many minority groups, who say the move will weaken their voice in Congress.

Among the opponents of the state redistricting bill was the Texas Federation of Teachers. TFT warned that the blatantly partisan move could weaken the chances of getting Social Security reform and other key legislation through Congress. Beyond that, allowing one party to pursue congressional redistricting whenever it feels it has a political advantage is a high-risk game that weakens state government’s ability to do its job, TFT stressed.

State documents reveal that private attorneys have billed the state more than $1.3 million for fees associated with the redistricting. The attorneys typically charged $300 to $400 an hour, plus transportation and meal expenses. Critics have charged that money being spent on lawyers could have been used to fund health coverage for more than 1,200 low-income children for a year, the Scripps Howard news service reports.

“The lack of necessity for doing this was astronomical,” TFT communications director Ted Molina Raab said of the redistricting. For months, the partisan redistricting fight threw state government into turmoil—and fed the media with news of redistricting opponents in the Legislature fleeing the state to block the action. The wrangling, special legislative sessions and hearings that went into redistricting sapped time and energy the Legislature could have used to work on education, healthcare and other important issues, TFT said.

The U.S. Supreme Court, while refusing without comment to hear an emergency appeal, may still consider the Texas redistricting issue later this year.

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