Conference speakers urge activists to share ideas and energy to improve their schools and communities

If Edward J. McElroy, Lorretta Johnson and Neil Abercrombie can’t get you fired up, you might need to check your pulse. Those three lively speakers—the AFT president, the union’s national PSRP leader and a Democratic congressman from Hawaii—used different words and styles to spread a similar message to their audiences at the AFT’s annual PSRP conference, held April 28-30 in Washington, D.C. Their message: Get more involved in your union, in politics and in the broader community.

While the conference theme of “Tell All the World … It Takes a Team To Make Education Work” focused on the value of spreading the word about the important work of PSRPs, the main speakers pushed the PSRP activists to go a step further and educate everyone from their co-workers to members of Congress about what needs to be done to improve public education and, in fact, to make the country better for all working people. As Johnson put it, “When we stand together, we can do anything we want to.”

McElroy opened the conference by reminding the audience about some of the “outrageous” policies and trends that the AFT and its members face every day. The list starts with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which the AFT president said has taken the worthwhile idea of standards and accountability in schools and ended up arbitrarily labeling successful schools as “failing.” That’s not only unfair to the people who work in those schools, he said; it’s demoralizing to students and staff alike. It’s equally outrageous, he added, that the tax burden in this country has shifted from millionaires to the middle class while NCLB has never been funded at the promised levels.

The constant push by opponents of public education to spread vouchers, McElroy said, is about far more than school jobs. The real danger, he noted, is that vouchers will destroy the legacy of public education for all. That legacy is one reason our country is as strong as it is. Voucher advocates “are in danger of ripping up one of the important foundations of a democratic society,” he said.

Likewise with retirement security—including both pensions and retiree health insurance—“We should be very angry about what’s going on,” McElroy declared. While employees in the public sector have managed to hold on to those benefits better than private sector workers, “we’re in danger of losing them unless we pay attention.” Private sector pensions are disappearing rapidly, and “unless we get upset about that, we’re going to lose ours.”

In part, the answer is to get even more involved in politics through programs such as the AFT’s Activists for Congressional Education (ACE) program, which connects local activists to their elected representatives through regular meetings on key AFT issues. But more than that, McElroy said, “We’ve got to grow. Without members, no one pays attention to you.” The AFT’s organizing committee has been working hard on a set of recommendations to make this happen. (See story on p.7.)

Organize for victory
One measure of the AFT’s success at the ballot box  might be electing more lawmakers like luncheon speaker Abercrombie, a member of Congress who once helped organize teaching assistants at the University of Hawaii for the AFT. “Aren’t you tired of playing defense all the time?” he asked. “Don’t you want to go on the offense?” That will only happen if the AFT and its allies work harder than ever to take back the House and Senate and White House “for the working people of this country.” The first step, he urged, is to make sure everyone in the union is registered to vote and they get to the polls. If they don’t, he said, “they’re committing a sin against the members and against working people.”

“My plea to you today,” he added, “is let’s organize and let’s have a victory in November for working people.”

As she does each year at the conference, PSRP leader Johnson reported on the organizing and membership successes of the PSRP division, which remains the fasting growing in the AFT. Since the 2005 conference, the union has chartered 12 new locals, won 22 representation elections and brought about 4,000 new PSRPs into the union. Another piece of good news, Johnson said, is that about 95 percent of the AFT’s paraprofessional members nationwide have met or exceeded the new job requirements that were included in NCLB. While the requirements posed significant challenges to AFT affiliates and their paraprofessional members when the law was passed, the union turned them into a positive force for upgrading the status—and sometimes the pay—of paraprofessionals in schools.

A number of conference workshops highlighted the successful efforts of AFT locals to generate community support around issues they face in schools and colleges. These efforts included grassroots lobbying—in a district without collective bargaining—for the first PSRP pay raise in years, a community college local’s mobilization of immigrant communities to save jobs and promote human and civil rights, and an ongoing media and community campaign by a support staff local that ultimately led to success at the bargaining table.

Another plenary session took the “Tell All the World” theme even more literally. The session focused on “a day in the life” of individual schools in Texas, the Republic of Georgia and South Africa. (See this issue’s cover story for more.) Participants benefited from a rare insight into how schools in two other countries, as well as a U.S. district with a strong AFT presence, work—not only for teachers but also for students and support staff.