A Thousand Letters to Tom Corbett
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This is a cross-post from Working America’s Main Street blog.
Working America members, teachers and unemployed Pennsylvanians on both sides of the state delivered more than 1,000 handwritten postcards to Gov. Tom Corbett’s regional offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. We wanted Corbett to know the drastic, widespread and ultimately disastrous results of the budget cuts he enacted last year. We wanted him to make good on the rhetoric used in his first year, which called for “shared sacrifice.”
There has been a great deal of sacrifice. But it has not been shared. It has been targeted, acute and painful. And while the brunt has fallen on students, low-income families and public workers, 70 percent of Pennsylvania’s businesses pay nothing in income taxes.
“The budget cuts have added to the pool of unemployed workers by contributing to the elimination of 14,000 jobs in education alone,” says Mary Karscig, an unemployed nurse and Working America member who wrote to Corbett. Some 21,000 Pennsylvanians lost their jobs due to budget cuts alone, many of them due to nearly $900 million slashed from public education. We’ve written about the many school districts in Pennsylvania now facing the fiscal brink, with the bankrupt Chester Upland School District as a sign of things to come. The New York Times reported yesterday that 75 percent of Pennsylvania classrooms now have more kids than they did in 2010.
“I feel worried about the impacts of these cuts on my job search, and I am even more worried about their impacts on my son’s job search,” says Mary.
She adds: “My son will go wherever there is a job, and there is a pretty high chance he’ll have to move out of state.”
AFL-CIO Joins Re-enactment of 1965 Selma to Montgomery March
The AFL-CIO is joining with civil rights, community and labor partners in the re-enactment of the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Ala., civil rights march that will focus attention on new attacks on voting rights, immigrants, workers’ rights and education.
Speaking, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this morning, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters:
The onslaught of coordinated attacks on workers’ rights, voting rights, public education and immigration reform is an affront to our democracy. During the difficult economic times that so many of our communities are facing, we would much rather see our state legislators spending their time focusing on job creation…as opposed to deconstructing our fundamental rights.
The five-day march will begin on Sunday March 4 in Selma in remembrance of 1965’s “Bloody Sunday” when more than 600 marchers calling for enactment of the Voting Rights Act were met by hundreds of local and state police with billy clubs and tear gas. Read the rest of this entry »
Important Note for Recent Union Plus Scholarship Applicants
Tom Chiancone, Union Plus Scholarship Program Manager, sends this report on recent problems some people had applying online for a Union Plus scholarship.
If you tried to complete the Union Plus Scholarship application prior to the Jan. 31 deadline, please accept our apologies for any problems you may have experienced submitting your application in the past couple of days. Our partner’s online application system had trouble handling the recent extremely high volume of activity, but we’ve worked with them to resolve the issues.
We have a record of all applicants who logged in or attempted to log in to the application system since Jan. 29, 2012 and our provider sent an e-mail to all applicants at 12 pm ET on Feb. 1, 2012. This e-mail noted that your application has been re-opened and you have until 5 p.m. (EST) Friday, Feb. 3 to login to complete and submit your application. NOTE: E-mails were sent to the email address provided during the set up your scholarship login ID. Read the rest of this entry »
Poverty Underlies Education System’s Shortcomings
Here’s a letter to the editor in The Hill by Diann Woodard, president of the School Administrators (AFSA), the only national education union representing principals, assistant principals and school administrators.
The failure of our education system lies not within the walls of the public schools that serve children in crisis, but with the policymakers and policies in place that ignore the fundamental causes of low student achievement: unfair funding formulas, poverty and unproven education policies (“For America’s children, education outlook grows only dimmer,” Jan. 23, by Juan Williams).
Families are increasingly falling into poverty, experiencing a lack of housing and unable to provide adequate health care and nutrition for their children. These children need increased services, yet often do not receive them because of budget cuts, bureaucratic hurdles and gross inequities in state and local funding formulas.
Public schools welcome these children, for our doors are open to all. We do not hand-select the brightest, the ones with involved parents, or the students who will make us look good on half-hour media specials. Their time at school might provide their only stable environment, and we provide it with only a fraction of resources afforded to more affluent districts and private schools.
Why the Tucson Ethnic Studies Ban Matters
Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at DemocraticDiva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.
Hundreds of high school students walked out of their Tucson, Ariz., schools Monday in a coordinated protest against the banishment of the district’s acclaimed Mexican American Studies program. This from Common Dreams:
In recent days, administrators and board members have issued a series of conflicting and inaccurate statements and carried out the extreme actions of confiscating books in front of children.
Last week, a recently hired assistant superintendent from Texas told Tuscon students to “go to Mexico” to study their history–nevermind that most of their families have been in the United States for decades.
If you are not familiar with the Tucson Mexican American Studies saga, Sunday’s New York Times
editorial summarizes the current situation nicely and says in part:
The Tucson Unified School District has dismantled its Mexican-American studies program, packed away its offending books, shuttled its students into other classes. It was blackmailed into doing so: keeping the program would have meant losing more than $14 million in state funding. It was a blunt-force victory for the Arizona school superintendent, John Huppenthal, who has spent years crusading against ethnic-studies programs he claims are “brainwashing” children into thinking that Latinos have been victims of white oppression.
More background and a disclosure: I ran (sadly, unsuccessfully) against John Huppenthal for State Senate in 2006. That was also the year Republican Tom Horne was reelected to his second term as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction. Killing the Mexican American Studies program – often referred to as MAS or “ethnic studies” – was really Horne’s crusade from the beginning.
It all started in 2006, when famed labor organizer Dolores Huerta addressed a Tucson high school assembly. Huerta is known for being feisty and pulling no punches – ideal qualities for a labor organizer – and in her characteristic style at the assembly she made the blunt observation that “Republicans hate Latinos.” Read the rest of this entry »
AFT Joins Partnership to Improve Schools, Lives, in Rural West Virginia
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AFT and West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin announced they are leading an unprecedented public-private partnership to improve educational opportunity and address complex social and economic problems in the Central Appalachia community of McDowell County, W.Va.
Gov. Tomblin and AFT President Randi Weingarten announced the “Reconnecting McDowell” initiative, which includes more than 40 partners in a comprehensive effort that will take place over the next three to five years. Says Weingarten:
McDowell County is an American story that deserves a new chapter. Given the challenges, being conventional won’t be good enough. We will be flexible, creative and entrepreneurial, and will take risks.
McDowell is the southernmost West Virginia county and has suffered devastating economic and social problems due to the decline of the coal economy in recent decades. As reported by the Washington Post, 80 percent of the students in the county’s Anawalt Elementary School meet the state’s definition of poor. Read the rest of this entry »
Unions’ Partnership with Oregon’s Cool Schools Means Green Schools and Jobs
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The labor movement, the union-owned financial services company Ullico and the state of Oregon are partnering in a $15 million “Cool Schools” initiative that includes repairs, rebuilding and energy retrofits. Says AFT President Randi Weingarten:
We’re gratified that in working together, we can ensure that our children have access to facilities which help them reach their potential.
The partnership of government, unions and businesses will work with to identify appropriate investments in Oregon public schools and infrastructure of up to $15 million.
Already the Cool Schools initiative—launched by Gov. John Kitzhaber (D)—has:
- Performed state-of-the-art audits of nearly 400 schools
- Negotiated with 12 school districts on up to $11 million in low-cost energy retrofit financing
- Made commitments to lend $4.7 million to eight school districts, improving 28 individual schools. Read the rest of this entry »
Report: Without More Investment in the Young, Middle Class Could Disappear
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In “The State of Young America: The Databook,” the economic experts at Demos demonstrate that by virtually every measure, the fortunes of America’s young people are falling under a deluge of debt, shrinking opportunity, rising costs of living and lack of access to health care. Writing with members of the Young Invincibles think tank, the authors write:
The path that each young person takes during their young adulthood often largely determines whether they end up in the middle class as older adults. Given the nation’s current anemic levels of investment in young people, the existence of our future middle class is severely imperiled.
The Databook looks at the well-being of 18- to 34-year-olds across the span of a generation in such areas as income, higher education and family life. Notable among the findings is that as the business environment became increasingly hostile to unionization, the fortunes of young people fell. Today, the Databook tells us, only 10 percent of young people have union representation, compared with 20 percent in 1980. Consequently, with few exceptions, only those who have attained a bachelor’s degree have seen their incomes rise over the course of the past three decades. (Once exception would be those who find their way into a trade union apprenticeship.) Read the rest of this entry »
Get Education Rebates with Union Plus Credit Card
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Jennifer Wright Dorr of Union Plus reports on the Union Plus Credit Card’s education rebates.
Sharon Wallace, of Ewing, N.J., a 32-year member and activist of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1036, recently learned that being a Union Plus Credit Card holder pays—$250, in fact. Wallace, a state government environmental engineer, received a $250 rebate for paying her college expenses with her union credit card as part of the Union Plus Education Rebate program.
Rebates of $250 are available until Dec. 31, for union members using their Union Plus Credit Card to pay for $1,000 in higher educational expenses—tuition, school supplies, books, test preparation and tutoring. Smaller rebates also are available to those who incurred fewer expenses.
The education rebate helped Wallace defray the cost of attending the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where in May she received a Master of Science Degree in Civil Engineering. Says Wallace:
It’s expensive to go to college, so whatever you can do to save money really helps. The process is easy and the rebate comes quickly—so fast, in fact, that I really wasn’t expecting it. I hope card holders take advantage of the program before it ends at the end of this year.
Housing Bust Caused Deficits, Not Public-Sector Contracts, Study Finds
When housing prices began to take a dive, revenues to state and local governments plummeted. Housing construction shuddered to a halt, creating ranks of unemployed workers who began drawing unemployment benefits rather than paying local taxes on their previously middle-class salaries. The businesses of suppliers and service-providers to contractors were forced into downturn. And many states continued to cut taxes, causing a perfect storm of budget woes for the states.
Yet who got the blame for this economic morass? Public-sector employees and their unions, who have been made the scapegoats for a budget crisis that had nothing to do with them—convenient targets for the right-wing forces that seek an end to unionization in all sectors.
“The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits,” a new study released today by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California,Berkeley, makes clear the real causes of the state- and local-government budget crisis. Using data compiled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, authors Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs and Laurel Lucia show that when the impact of the housing bust is added into tables that purport to link public-sector labor contracts with state-level budget crises, public workers’ compensation becomes statistically insignificant. (Study is available here in PDF format.)
