The Group Insurance Commission took no action on Friday, Jan. 30, when it met to discuss options to close a projected deficit for the current operating year. The options could affect health insurance costs for tens of thousands of educators, other public employees and retirees.
In anticipation of the meeting, the MTA asked members to e-mail the commissioners and urge them to lobby for a supplemental FY 2015 budget that would close the funding gap and adopt a budget for FY16 that fully funds current benefits for GIC subscribers.
To date, each member of the GIC has received more than 6,000 e-mails from MTA members. We thank you, but we need to keep up the pressure.
Much of the GIC's anticipated deficit, an estimated $120 million, is due to an insufficient appropriation by the state. The rest is traceable to spending an estimated $45 million to $75 million in claims costs exceeding premiums.
We need to continue to remind the commissioners that a lack of adequate and transparent funding by the state should not result in unfair burdens on public service employees.
MTA members - alone or with others - are encouraged to attend the commission's annual public hearing next week on Wednesday, Feb. 4, at 12:30 p.m. on the sixth floor of the Hurley Building, 19 Staniford St., Boston.
MTA members who have not already done so are encouraged to click here to send an e-mail to members of the commission.
Click here for additional information on the projected deficit and options that have been proposed to close the shortfall.
Again, we thank you for all you do for your students, for public education and for your communities.
I hope this finds you all well, safe and dug out from the snowstorm.
Despite the weather, our educating and organizing efforts continue. Members have made a great response to the call for e-mails to the Group Insurance Commission regarding possible changes to health insurance. These changes could have wide-ranging impacts.
Action on MTA-Supported Bills
Now I need you to put the same effort into contacting representatives and senators about MTA's legislative agenda. It is ambitious and includes MTA-supported bills calling for a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing and Commonwealth charter schools, securing due-process rights, strengthening our colleges and universities and instituting a living wage, among other items. Please contact legislators before Monday, Feb. 2, and ask them to sign on to co-sponsor one or more of the bills.
You can read more about the legislation here and then, with one click, send e-mails to your state representative and senator.
The Senate's Listening Tour
New Massachusetts Senate President Stan Rosenberg has planned a listening tour across the Commonwealth so that the senator from each district can meet with constituents to hear which issues people are concerned about.
This is an excellent opportunity not only to speak up as an individual, but to bring a group of educators and community members to stand together - for public education, for the well-being of our communities and against mandate madness. The impact of one person speaking is multiplied when we stand together. Our sisters and brothers of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO will be organizing to attend as well.
The first meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 4, at Holyoke Community College, 303 Homestead Ave., Holyoke. Another meeting will be held Monday, Feb. 9, on the South Shore. Stay tuned for the specific location of that meeting and the times and locations of several more that will be held around the state.
NCLB Reauthorization
Now is also the time to let Congress know where we stand on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind. You have untilMonday, Feb. 2, to tell the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee your story about how testing impacts students, teachers and school communities and how we can hold states accountable to ensure that every child has an equitable opportunity for learning. All students deserve a rich and varied curriculum with arts and physical education, licensed educators, small class sizes, well-stocked libraries and more. Read more about it here and take action, or contact the committee by e-mailing fixingNCLB@help.senate.gov.
'Black Votes Matter'
For those of you in the Boston area and for others willing to travel, please consider attending this lecture at the Museum of African American History in Boston at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 12. Bob Moses, a civil rights activist, organizer of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and founder of the Algebra Project, will be speaking on the subject of "Black Votes Matter." I heard Moses speak some years ago about the relationship between sharecropper education and the development of the SAT. I have never forgotten his challenging and moving words. More information is available here.
Responding to TS GOLD
We continue to hear from members across the state about their outrage regarding the Massachusetts Kindergarten Entry Assessment, otherwise known as TS GOLD. We have put together recommendations for local actions here. We also encourage locals that wish to speak back on this mandate to review these action items, organize and consider connecting with other locals in their region to take concerted action.
Worth Reading
Across the country, educators, students and parents are standing up and speaking out for public education. Here are some stories you might have missed:
Researchers oppose Duncan proposal for teacher education:
MTA members’ actions have never been more important than they are right now. We have a broad and powerful political agenda driven by the need to “Reclaim Education” and crafted from direct input from members. Most of the actions we will ask you to take over the next several months will involve less than five minutes spent sending a message to your legislators through MTA’s automated system.
The Westin Waltham-Boston 70 3rd Avenue Waltham, MA 02451
Reclaiming Public Education Forums held throughout Massachusetts, MTA members
have said they are ready to act to improve conditions in our schools. Bargaining is an
important tool in creating the schools our students, educators and communities deserve.
Leaders of successful bargaining and organizing efforts in Portland, St. Paul and Chicago
will share their experiences.
Topics will include:
Creating organizing structures that work at the building level.
Forging coalitions that strengthen union power.
Bringing big issues that members care about to the bargaining table.
Putting all the pieces together to build an effective contract campaign.
The following important message is being sent to all MTA members.
From: Barbara Madeloni, President, and Janet Anderson, Vice President
Subject: Oppose unfair changes to GIC health insurance
Greetings:
Please take action right away to fight unfair changes to health insurance for educators, other public employees and retirees.
E-mail members of the Group Insurance Commission and urge them to lobby for support for a supplemental budget for FY15 that closes the GIC funding gap, and ask them to adopt a budget for FY16 that fully funds current benefits for GIC subscribers.
Further, please urge the commissioners to oppose proposed plan design changes in health insurance for state and municipal employees, their dependents and retirees.
Due to chronic underfunding by the state and increased claim costs, the GIC anticipates a budget shortfall of $160 million to $190 million for the current operating year.
The MTA is strongly opposed to any attempt to close this significant shortfall on the backs of educators, other public employees and retirees.
The time for action is short. The next GIC meeting will occur on Jan. 30, and it is possible that any decisions made by the GIC ultimately would affect all MTA members.
Any changes adopted by the GIC would be implemented effective July 1, 2015, for all GIC participants. Plan design changes could subsequently affect municipalities even if they are not in the GIC.
Please click here to send an e-mail message to commissioners urging them to seek full budget funding and stating clearly that a lack of adequate and transparent funding by the state should not result in unfair burdens on public service employees.
Click here to see options that the commission will entertain at its meeting on Jan. 30. Members are encouraged to attend this meeting, which will begin at 8:30 a.m. in the GIC offices on the fourth floor of the Charles F. Hurley Building, 19 Staniford St., Boston.
In addition, members are encouraged to attend the GIC’s annual public hearing at 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 4, on the sixth floor at 19 Staniford St., Boston.
Thank you for taking immediate action on this urgent matter.
Fernando Reimers, Ed.M.’84, Ed.D.’88, Ford Foundation Professor of Practice in International Education and Faculty Director, International Education Policy Program, HGSE
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the nation's largest teachers' union, will discuss the future of teacher unionism in the United States. She will touch on current controversies including the anti-testing movement, the Common Core state standards and the Vergara case. She will comment on the education reform role of teachers’ unions and her agenda for leading the National Education Association. After her presentation, she will discuss these issues with a panel and the audience.
February 11th at 3:30 Chenery Middle School Educator Licensure (108)
Description
This workshop explains the regulatory requirements covering licensure. It is appropriate for all educators who hold Temporary, Preliminary or Initial stage licenses or who are working under waivers. Trainers explain how a teacher moves through the stages of licensure from Preliminary to Initial to Professional. The presenter will explain how the educator documents his/her progression through each stage and the roles and responsibilities of both the educator and the district.
Topic
Professional Practice
Audience
PreK-12 Teachers
Time Frame
1.5 hours
Division
Training & Professional Learning
Readings/Resources/Websites
MTA produced materials provided at workshop.
Notes
PreK-12 educators with an Initial or Preliminary license ONLY
Professional License Renewal (109)
Description
This workshop explains the regulatory requirements covering professional license renewal (formerly recertification). The trainer explains the requirements for relicensure for those who hold a Professional License. The presenter will explain how the educator documents his/her professional learning to renew all professional licenses held.
Our Union Brothers and Sisters of Watertown Fire Local 1347 have been without a contract for over 5 years. After going through the collective bargaining process, the Watertown Town Council voted 8-1 not to fund the arbitrator’s decision. Actions like this undermine the inherent fairness of the process and threaten the livelihood of hard working union families everywhere.
Local 1347 needs our help to show their council and all others that working families demand that the collective bargaining process is honored. This is a fight that threatens collective bargaining and affects all of our families. We need all available union members to send a clear message before next Tuesday’s Town Council meeting.
Please make every effort to attend or send a representative from your Local.
How to Run as a Town Meeting Member for your Precinct
RUNNING FOR TOWN MEETING MEMBER IN BELMONT
Are there issues facing Belmont that you feel strongly about? Would you like to be more involved in the budget and in setting priorities? Are you willing to spend some time studying the issues and discussing them with your neighbors? Then consider becoming a Town Meeting Member.
The Role of Town Meeting
Town Meeting is the legislative body of Belmont. Town Meeting authorizes major policies of the town, votes on the budget, and approves amendments to the Town General By- Laws and Zoning By-Laws.
The town is divided into eight voting precincts, and there are 36 Town Meeting Members (TMMs) from each precinct. TMMs serve for three years, and each year twelve seats in each precinct are up for election. Occasionally, seats for one or two year terms become available if an incumbent moves or leaves office.
Town Meeting convenes on the fourth Monday evening in April. Typically, there are three or four sessions scheduled for consecutive Monday and Wednesday evening. Special Town Meetings may be called at other times of the year as needed.
How to Get on the Ballot
Only Belmont residents who are U.S. citizens may run for office. You can obtain nomination papers in January from the Town Clerk's office at ground level of the Town Hall. You need to obtain and submit enough signatures of registered voters from your precinct to allow the certification of at least 25 signatures. It is advisable to submit at least 30 signatures. Return the signed nomination papers by 5 PM of the filing deadline. Verify the submission date with the Town Clerk as, depending on the date of the election, the submission deadline can be as early as February 12. (Actual date of February 14, 2011.) A list of registered voters in each precinct is also available from the Town Clerk for a fee. Precinct maps are downloadable from the Town Clerk's web page.
Your Campaign
Now you must let your neighbors know that you are running for TMM and why you should be elected. Tell your friends. Will they help you by distributing your campaign leaflets or emails? Some candidates prefer to mail a postcard or brochure. You can buy labels with the addresses of registered voters in your precinct from the Town Clerk's office.
The Belmont Voter Guide
All candidates for TMM whose name makes it onto the ballot will receive a Candidates' Questionnaire from the Belmont League of Women Voters. Each candidate is asked to comment briefly on specific town issues. Your name and response will appear in the Belmont Voter Guide, which the League mails to all Belmont households one week before the April election. Be sure to submit your reply in time to be included.
Candidates' Night
Generally two weeks before the election, the Belmont League of Women Voters sponsorsCandidates Night. The public and all persons seeking elective office are invited. In the first part of the program, TMM candidates have the opportunity to speak informally with Belmont citizens. The second part of the program, which is broadcast on local cable TV, begins with the introduction of the TMM candidates, precinct by precinct. Due to time constraints, TMM candidates do not address the audience. Following the TMM introductions, the forum focuses on the candidates for town-wide office.
Election Day
On Election Day, you may want to introduce yourself to citizens as they come to vote. Connecting a friendly face to a name on the ballot can make a difference! Be sure that you and all your campaign signs, buttons, and literature remain at least 150 feet from the polling place.
Before Town Meeting
Elected TMMs will receive a Town Meeting Member Handbook and a Warrant packet by mail from the Town Clerk. A copy of Belmont's Annual Report is available through the Board of Selectmen office or on the Town website. Plan to attend the Warrant Briefing sponsored by the Belmont League of Women Voters held the week before Town Meeting. This informal review of the Warrant articles is a good place to ask questions without having to worry about parliamentary procedures.
Write-in Campaigns
If you miss the filing deadline, you may run for TMM as a write-in candidate. The following information is required for a write-in vote:
- Candidate's name
- Candidate's street address
- Office the candidate seeks
- Length of term of office
If you are distributing stickers for voters to affix to the ballot, the stickers must be no larger than 1.5 inches by 0.25 inches.
STARTING in the
mid-1990s, education advocates began making a simple argument: National education standards
will level the playing field, assuring that all high school graduates are
prepared for first-year college classes or rigorous career training.
While there are
reasons to doubt that claim — it’s hard to see how Utah, which spends less than
one-third as much per student as New York, can offer a comparable education —
the movement took off in 2008, when the nation’s governors and education
commissioners drove a huge effort to devise “world-class standards,” now known
as the Common Core.
Although the Obama
administration didn’t craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using some of
the $4.35 billion from the Race to the Top program to encourage states to adopt
not only the Common Core (in itself, a good thing) but also frequent,
high-stakes testing (which is deeply unpopular). The mishandled rollout turned
a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over
high-stakes testing. The misconception that standards and testing are identical
has become widespread.
At least four states
that adopted the Common Core have opted out. Republican governors who initially
backed the standards condemn them as “shameless government overreach.”
Gov. Bobby Jindal of
Louisiana, a Republican and a onetime supporter of the Common Core, sued his
own state and the United States Department of Education to block the standards
from taking effect. When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, recently announced
his decision to “actively explore” a 2016 run for the White House, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition because
of his embrace of the Common Core.
Rebellions have also sprouted in
Democratic-leaning states. Last spring, between 55,000 and 65,000 New York
State students opted out of taking tests linked to the Common Core. Criticizing
these tests as “unproven,” the Chicago schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett,
declared that she didn’t want her students to take them.
In a Phi Delta
Kappa/Gallup poll conducted last spring, 57 percent of public school parents
opposed “having teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards
to guide what they teach,” nearly double the proportion of those who supported
the goals. With the standards, the sheer volume of high-stakes standardized
testing has ballooned. “The numbers and consequences of these tests have driven
public opinion over the edge,” notes Robert A. Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair
and Open Testing, known as FairTest.
Students are terrified
by these tests because the results can jeopardize their prospects for
advancement and graduation. In New York, the number of students who scored
“proficient” plummeted by about 30 percentage points in 2013, the first year of
testing. Some 70 percent scored below the cutoff level in math and English; the
2014 results in math were modestly better, but the English language scores
didn’t budge.
Many teachers like the
standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of
memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving.
But they complain that test prep and test-taking eat away weeks of class time
that would be better focused on learning.
A Gallup poll found
that while 76 percent of teachers favored nationwide academic standards for
reading, writing and math, only 27 percent supported using tests to gauge
students’ performance, and 9 percent favored making test scores a basis for
evaluating teachers. Such antagonism is well founded — researchers have shown
that measurements of the “value” teachers add, as determined by comparing test
scores at the beginning and end of the year, are unreliable and biased against
those who teach both low- and high-achieving students.
The Obama
administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity
would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest
states, better teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention
to the needs of the surging population of immigrant kids. Instead, the
administration has emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven
reforms. The Education Department has invested more than $370 million to
develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing.
Questioning those
priorities can bring reprisals. During the search earlier this year for a New
York City schools chancellor, Education Secretary Arne Duncan lobbied against Joshua P. Starr, the
superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Md., in part because he had
proposed a three-year hiatus on high-stakes standardized testing.
Last year, Mr. Duncan said that opposition to the Common Core
standards had come from “white suburban moms who realize — all of a sudden —
their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school
isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
He has only recently
changed his cavalier tune, acknowledging, “Too much testing can rob school
buildings of joy and cause unnecessary stress.”
It’s no simple task to
figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how to link
talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning
around the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder.
It requires creating new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams
and, because these tests are designed to be taken online, closing the digital
divide. It means retraining teachers, reorienting classrooms and explaining to
anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile.
Had the public schools
been given breathing room, with a moratorium on high-stakes testing that
prominent educators urged, resistance to the Common Core would most likely have
been less fierce. But in states where the opposition is passionate and
powerful, it will take a herculean effort to get the standards back on track
David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California,
Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth
of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”
