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The presidents of America’s two largest unions have vowed to fight tooth and nail against a lawsuit now in front of the U.S. Supreme Court which, if successful, could strike down a California law permitting mandatory union membership. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit assert that the mandatory-dues law forces teachers to finance union political positions. Thus, the plaintiffs say, the law violates the First Amendment rights of teachers who disagree with the union’s politics. The Supreme Court granted certiorari for the suit, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, on Tuesday. “We are disappointed that at a time when big corporations and...

Wisconsin unions Monday are once again attacking Republican Gov. Scott Walker, this time over a proposed budget that may result in cuts to tenure for state college professors. With the upcoming budget session, the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee is expected to propose a plan to reform the University of Wisconsin System. While it is not yet finalized, unions warn the plan will cut $250 million in funding and will remove academic protections for professors such as teacher tenure. This latest union battles comes at the heels of a likely announcement Walker will run for president. With his previous labor reforms,...

Powerful public-sector unions are facing another high-profile legal challenge that they say could wipe away millions from their bank accounts and make it tougher for them to survive. A group of California schoolteachers, backed by a conservative group, has asked the Supreme Court to rule that unions representing government workers can’t collect fees from those who choose not to join. Half the states currently require state workers represented by a union to pay “fair share” fees that cover bargaining costs, even if they are not members. The justices could decide as early as next week whether to take up the...

An outraged mom is pleading with her son’s Brooklyn high school: Please educate my child! Annette Renaud, PTA president at the Secondary School for Journalism in Park Slope, is furious that her son got grades of 85 to 95 on his class work but failed Regents exams in the same subjects. “He wasn’t educated,” she said. “He can’t compete with students at Millennium, Brooklyn Tech or Stuyvesant. It’s a joke.” She says conditions are bad at the school, with one teacher allegedly selling jewelry instead of holding lessons and another frying doughnuts and leaving to do his laundry. Just 17...

Thousands of Chicago Teachers Union members and their supporters blocked a downtown stretch of LaSalle Street early Tuesday evening, staging a show of force amid an intensifying contract battle.. "You have to remember that what you're fighting for is not just a fair contract, it is the history of fair contracts," CTU President Karen Lewis told supporters gathered outside the Thompson Center. "And if we have a chance, this is it. This is the time where you have to stand up and tell 'em all, 'No, we're not going to take that.' " **SNIP** Chicago Public Schools says it is...

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the war waged by the Jeffco teachers union against school district staff, particularly those in the communications office, was the most vitriolic in history. We couldn’t figure out why the union would be such abusive bullies to staff members – not even elected officials. And, now, the reason is clear. Documents recently uncovered show that the teachers union and other school staff were using the Jeffco Schools communications department as a de facto campaign headquarters – and had been since at least 2003 (see last picture of memo). With a contentious election...

A federal judge in New York has struck down a test used by New York City to vet potential teachers, finding the test of knowledge illegally discriminated against racial minorities due to their lower scores. At first glance, the city’s second Liberal Arts and Science Test (LAST-2) seems fairly innocuous. Unlike the unfair literacy tests of Jim Crow, LAST-2 was given to every teaching candidate in New York, and it was simply a test to make sure that teachers had a basic high school-level understanding of both the liberal arts and the sciences. One sample question from the test asked...

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., allegedly told his tenth-grade students to find their parents’ sex toys and condoms and take selfies with them for extra credit. A local CBS affiliate reports that two of the students’ mothers, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, had heard about the assignment from a counselor at the school. “It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” Cobene said. According to CBS, the school administration has tried to play off...

A 28 percent enrollment decline in the Hazel Park school district over just five years is among the factors that led Hazel Park High Principal Don Vogt to pink slip 15 schoolteachers. The principal claims many of those are the newest teachers and among the school’s best educators. Vogt's comments were included in a Bridge Magazine article last week that highlighted how the district had turned itself around academically. Recent projections of a rapidly growing deficit, though, triggered layoffs and now threaten to wipe out the high school's new academic success. But if Hazel Park does have to lay off...

Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker spoke about improving education at a conference at Harvard University in July 2012 on Learning from Improving School Systems at Home and Abroad: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance. The conference was hosted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Governor Walker spoke about the reforms he put in place in Wisconsin which gave local school districts the ability to make better decisions for their students while effectively managing their budgets. Click here for the complete video from that conference and here for videos from individual panels. Gov. Walker's...

A Brooklyn teacher who was arrested in 2011 on charges of drugging and raping a middle school student is demanding that the city let her keep her teaching job, according to a new lawsuit. Claudia Tillery, 45, argues in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court that she was acquitted of all criminal charges in April 2014 and the Department of Education’s hearing officer improperly used sealed evidence, DNA tests and the prosecutor’s testimony to toss her from the teaching post she's had since 1996.

Orange County (New Jersey) school board officials voted Wednesday to terminate the employment of a third grade teacher who had her students write "get well" letters to a convicted cop killer. According to NJ.com, Marilyn Zuniga, a third grade teacher at Forest Street Elementary School in Orange, was suspended last month after she had her students write the letters of encouragement to Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is currently serving a life sentence for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Marilyn Zuniga's employment was terminated as part of a larger personnel restructuring agenda. By including Zuniga's termination in a larger...

In my proverbial day, long after the Industrial Revolution but before Kim Kardashian bottomed out the Bell Curve, kids were not coddled nor were they allowed to act like disrespectful, uncouth derelicts in our nation's classrooms. If students gave teachers attitude or let alone cursed – that vulgarity which is commonly tolerated today – they were immediately sent to the office and admonished without refrain. If you refused to leave, or God forbid continued to be a disruptive force, someone would drag you out by your ear and kick your “suspended” ass to the curb; no second thoughts, no regrets,...

An old teacher-licensing test that blacks and Hispanics had trouble passing poses a grave threat to city coffers — $300 million, according to internal budget documents obtained by The Post. Taxpayers are on the hook for cliams by thousands of minority teachers as part of a civil-rights case in which a judge ruled they were illegally fired, demoted or denied jobs for failing the racially discriminatory Liberal Arts and Sciences Test.

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A federal judge is questioning whether a new exam for aspiring teachers in New York is discriminatory against minorities, a case that could derail the state’s efforts to create a more rigorous set of tests for entry into the profession. Black and Hispanic applicants have been passing one of the exams, intended to measure reading and writing skills, at lower rates than white candidates, prompting concerns of decreased diversity in the teaching ranks. The judge, Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan, has asked the state for extensive documentation on the development of the test, which was first...

Alevtina is one of several teachers who lost their jobs in St. Petersburg after being outed by an anti-gay activist. While most resigned quietly, the 27-year-old music teacher decided to fight her dismissal in court — an unusual step in Russia where gays have faced increasing pressure in recent years. The rising anti-gay sentiment has coincided with the passage of a controversial Russian law that prohibits exposing children to gay "propaganda." The law has made it easy to target teachers, because they work directly with children.

ATLANTA (AP) — A group of former Atlanta educators convicted in a test cheating scandal were locked up in jail Thursday as they await sentences that could send them to prison for years. In one of the nation's largest cheating scandals of its kind, the 11 defendants were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their roles in a scheme to inflate students' scores on standardized exams. They include teachers, a principal and other administrators, who were accused of falsifying test results to collect bonuses or keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta public school system. A 12th defendant, a teacher, was...

In one of the biggest cheating scandals of its kind in the U.S., 11 former Atlanta public school educators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering for their role in a scheme to inflate students' scores on standardized exams.The defendants - including teachers, a principal and other administrators - were accused of falsifying test results to collect bonuses or keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta school system.The educators fed answers to students or erased and changed the answers on tests after they were turned in to secure promotions or up to $5,000 each in bonuses, the court was told.However the person...

Full title: Atlanta cheating scandal teachers go to cells in hand-cuffs: Eleven educators face up to 20 years in prison for inflating their students' test scores to get bonus money for their schools . . . and for themselves The 11 teachers, testing coordinators and other administrators were convicted Wednesday of racketeering after a five-year investigation Evidence of cheating was found in 44 schools across the Atlanta school system, with nearly 180 educators involved A racketeering charge could carry up to 20 years in prison and most of the defendants will be sentenced on April 8 The cheating came to...