The bad news is that with each passing day our elected officials reach a new low. Whether it is cutting school funding, lowering teacher standards, privatizing public schools or inventing new ways to interfere with what is working in the classroom, the Legislature just keeps increasing the pace in the race to the bottom. The […]
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The budget the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) has passed onto the Legislature restores some of the money that Scott Walker cut from public schools, but in many other ways takes a very bad thing and makes it even worse. Many of us wouldn’t have thought that possible. Now we have to fight against JFC’s budget […]
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The Region 6 representative assembly (RA) is set for May 30 in Madison, and the annual WEAC RA was held a couple of weekends ago in Milwaukee. Last year’s Region 6 RA saw the creation of our new organization and set the parameters for this first, highly successful, year. If you are not a Region […]
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The news out of Washington that the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) has moved out of the education committee and onto the Senate floor is good news indeed. The changes the Senate committee is recommending would be a marked improvement upon the disaster that is the so-called No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB). […]
Read More...Martin Luther King Jr. and others have keenly observed that the arc of history is long, “but it bends toward justice.” It is a way of saying that good ideas usually win—but not always right away. Four years ago, our union and others organized some of the largest and most sustained pro-labor rallies this nation […]
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Election results do not happen by accident. Almost every election is a mixed bag, but yesterday’s elections were quite good for Region 6. That is because we worked hard and succeeded. The results are still coming in, but we already know the overwhelming majority of the pro-education candidates and referendum initiatives that were recommended by […]
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At this moment the members of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee (JFC) are making life altering decisions about the future of Wisconsin’s public schools, the students who attend them and the staff who work in them. That is not an overstatement. JFC members have the authority to decide whether and to what extent to change […]
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Last week I wrote about how much success the unions throughout Region 6 have had in community organizing and local elections in the last few years. We are doing a lot more of it and getting much better at it. In making this point I wrote that there is sometimes no chance that we can […]
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As the president of Region 6, I was interviewed recently by the Wisconsin State Journal on the topic of our unions’ increased influence and involvement in local community affairs and elections. I did my best to emphasize that local involvement is crucial because that is where so many important decisions about schools are made. It […]
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When most observers first looked at the budget Governor Scott Walker released on February 3 they called it a “freeze” for public schools and were thankful it wasn’t worse. Then they looked closer and discovered that Walker concealed a $127 million cut to public schools in the budget that he failed to mention in his […]
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