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AFT’s NCLB Petition Delivers 10,000 Voices to Capitol Hill
AFT vice president Antonia Cortese personally delivered the union’s “NCLB: Let’s Get it Right” petition—signed by nearly 10,000 AFT members and supporters—to Capitol Hill in May. She brought the petitions to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, at a meeting at Clinton’s Senate office.
The petition underscores the AFT’s longstanding role in working to promote high standards of learning and teaching, and its active commitment to closing the achievement gap. The participation of so many AFT e-Activists in this campaign sent a strong message to lawmakers that inadequate funding of the law, coupled with its rigid implementation and lack of a fair system of assessment and accountability, are undercutting its original promise.
“The voices of parents and educators need to be heard as we move toward reauthorization of NCLB,” says Clinton. “We will need to work together to address concerns about NCLB so we can give all children the opportunity for a high-quality public education and give educators the tools they need to accomplish this task.”
The AFT’s fight to “get it right” is just beginning. The union will be delivering the petition to other key lawmakers who will be involved in reauthorizing NCLB.
Also in May, the AFT sent a follow-up letter to the U.S. Department of Education seeking clarification on whether states will be granted more flexibility—as they have with teachers—in meeting employment standards for their paraprofessionals.
Wisconsin pharmacist gives Legislature dose of reality
Tim Jensen knows how to save money. He knows how to save jobs. And, in his own way, he’s working on saving the world.
Last year, Jensen helped convince the Wisconsin Legislature to turn back a budget plan that would have snatched state jobs away and privatized prison healthcare at enormous costs to taxpayers.
For a year and a half, he and other members of Wisconsin Science Professionals testified before legislators about the importance of keeping 130 prison healthcare jobs in the state. Had they failed, Jensen, a prison pharmacist who helps supply medication for 21,400 inmates incarcerated in 42 different prisons, would have lost his job.
And the state would have lost money. Jensen showed that at just one already privatized prison, Sand Ridge, retaining state-employed pharmacists would have saved taxpayers $6 million.
For state employees, “cost control while providing the highest quality care possible has always been our mission,” Jensen says.
Last January, the Department of Corrections announced that efforts to contract out prison healthcare would be dropped.
But Jensen is also out to save the world. Every year, he brings his pharmaceutical expertise to rural Chiapas, Mexico, to administer medication in clinics for indigenous people.
The conditions he typically sees there are far different from those in the prisons: Respiratory ailments are common, the result of indoor fires used for cooking. “After about three days living in the camps I’m wheezing myself,” says Jensen. Varicose veins and arthritis show up in older people who work hard at subsistence farming in cold mountain air. Eye infections are also frequent; Jensen cures them with a tube of ointment that would cost $4 in the United States.
Jensen’s work in Chiapas, he says, is an extension of his work in the United States. “I guess it’s my philosophy of life, to help the underdog.”
Union and Colorín Colorado Sponsor Learning Festival
The AFT and its affiliate in Austin, Texas, organized a daylong learning festival at an Austin elementary school earlier this spring to provide free resources and help for teachers and parents of English language learners (ELLs).
On hand to welcome participants and provide support throughout the day were Education Austin president and AFT vice president Louis Malfaro, and NEA vice president Rita Haecker. (The union is a merged AFT-NEA affiliate.) The festival—dubbed “On Your Marks, Get Set … Let’s Learn!”—included presentations for staff from researchers and experts on ELL instruction. There were also workshops on building literacy at home and storytelling sessions with nationally renowned children’s author Amada Irma Perez. Participants received free instructional resources, new hardcover and paperback books for children, and many other giveaways.
The event was organized in cooperation with Colorín Colorado, a Web site (whose name is based on a children’s rhyme popular in Spanish-speaking countries) for parents and educators to help primarily Latino English language learners build literacy skills.
“As education professionals we want the same thing for our students as their parents—a better future,” Malfaro says. “Making academic success a reality for every child doesn’t take magic, but it does take commitment, focus and a great deal of collaboration between parents and school employees. That is exactly what this event is meant to highlight.”
