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Education partnership focuses on staffing
needy schools
Report offers framework for giving poor students access
to top educators
Ensuring that the nation’s neediest students have access to effective teachers and school leaders is essential to improving low-performing schools and closing the achievement gap. A report released this summer by the Learning First Alliance—a permanent partnership of 12 national education associations, including the AFT—provides a framework for reaching that goal. The report, A Shared Responsibility: Staffing All High-Poverty, Low-Performing Schools with Effective Teachers and Administrators, documents serious staffing inequities, finding that our nation’s poor and minority students are least likely to have access to the best teachers and administrators. In response, the report lays out a comprehensive set of steps to help the nation’s poorest and lowest-performing schools attract and retain the most qualified staff. A Shared Responsibility focuses on eight areas, including school leadership, professional support, incentives, funding and working conditions.
The framework is designed to help educators, policymakers and community members work together to recruit and retain highly effective teachers and leaders for the neediest schools. A Shared Responsibility “reflects an unprecedented consensus among educators,” says Gerald Tirozzi, alliance board president and executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese calls the report “an ambitious, comprehensive blueprint for bringing our most skilled educators to the students who need them most.”
“Through the Learning First Alliance, organizations representing groups as diverse as teachers, principals, school board members and superintendents have pulled together to tackle a fundamental problem in American education,” Cortese adds.
The Learning First Alliance says it will actively promote substantive collaboration among national organizations, their state and local affiliates, and individual members to address the underlying causes of school staffing inequities.
Other members of the alliance include the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, Council of Chief State School Officers, Education Commission of the States, National Education Association, National PTA and the National School Boards Association.
The report is available at www.learningfirst.org/publications/staffing/.
AFT joins call for protecting young workers
Federal legislation would revise child labor laws
On the day in June that the Child Labor Coalition (CLC) released a report criticizing the U.S. government for its indifference to protecting working children, the AFT joined others on Capitol Hill to support the Youth Worker Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.). AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese, who is co-chair of the CLC, noted that every year, 230,000 teens are injured in the workplace and every five days, a teenager dies on the job.
The CLC report found that in the years following the 1999 U.S. ratification of the International Labor Organization Convention 182, which called for immediate action to eliminate the worst forms of child labor, the United States has failed to correct child-labor deficiencies and may not be keeping commitments under this international treaty.
Possible U.S. violations include: inadequate enforcement of child labor laws, outdated regulations on hazardous occupations and machinery, and continued exposure of young farm workers to dangerous levels of pesticides. The Youth Worker Protection Act would serve as a comprehensive revision of federal child labor law and strengthen workplace protections for teens.
“Today’s America is very different from the nation of 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was first adopted,” says Cortese. “If we are serious about our children’s success, then we should make sure they spend most of their time in school, not on the job. And when they are in the workplace, they must be protected from harm and exploitation.”
States pay dearly for NCLB data collection, recent survey finds
States are groaning under the weight of unfunded data-collection requirements imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.A recent report by Education Week reveals that NCLB prompted more than a dozen states to dramatically up their investments in powerful and expensive data systems that they hope will give schools new strategies for raising student achievement and meeting the adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirement under the three-year-old law.
The newest installment of the newspaper’s annual “Technology Counts” report reveals a major shift in technology spending, with 15 states reporting that NCLB has influenced their decisions to allocate more money to data collection.
“States and school districts are spending millions of dollars to build online student-data systems that will offer teachers what policymakers hope will be the information needed to craft clear-cut strategies for raising achievement,” the report observes. “The biggest impetus for putting money into such data systems is arguably the expansive reporting requirements and ambitious student-achievement goals” under NCLB.
The move comes at a time of tight budgets, however. State technology directors in 44 states and the District of Columbia say inadequate funding or competition from other priorities are the biggest budgetary challenges they face. And the problem is compounded by the fact that the Bush administration and Congress have underfunded NCLB by more than $200 billion.
“Lack of federal funds/cuts to federal funding” was the challenge most often cited by state technology directors in the survey.
“States are betting the farm on new data-management systems in hopes of keeping up with No Child Left Behind,” said Education Week editor and publisher Virginia B. Edwards.
The report is available at www.edweek.org/tc05.
