National News

On April 29, 2008 the Oakland Education Association held a press conference supporting the ILWU May Day Action Against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Oakland Education Association President Betty Olson-Jones spoke along with representatives from UBC CWA UPTE, UTU 1740 and ILWU.  Cindy Sheehan, candidate for Congress against Nancy Pelosi, also spoke.  See the press conference here. 

Here’s a link to an excellent 33-page paper that systematically dismantles the case for basing education on standardized tests.

http://www.mcte.org/journal/mej07/3Henry.pdf 

*****Another Top Priority Read! 

NCLB is dead. It will not be reauthorized — not this year, not ever.

Our No. 1 education program is incoherent, unworkable, and doomed. But the next president still can have a huge impact on improving American schooling.

by Richard Rothstein

The next president has a unique opportunity to start from scratch in education policy, without the deadweight of a failed, inherited No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. The new

By Jack Gerson
Sept. 30, 2007

Teacher turnover is soaring in urban school districts and inner city schools across the country. It’s commonplace for schools to lose more than one-fourth—and sometimes more than one-half—of their teachers, year after year after year. Since studies consistently show a strong positive association between teacher experience and student learning, this exodus of teachers from low-income schools makes the sad state of our inner city schools

May 16, 2005
By JESSIE MULDOON

THE NO Child Left Behind Act is the Bush administration’s deeply flawed legislation that claims to be the solution to the many problems of public education. Signed into law in January 2002, it won bipartisan support–most notably, from liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.

NCLB promised to close the achievement gap between middle-class suburban students and those at under-funded inner-city or rural