The "Denim for Dollars, Dollars for Scholars" campaign has raised money to provide scholarships to graduating seniors planning on attending college. If you wear denim on Fridays, you are encouraged to donate a dollar to the MTA Scholarship fund. Lynn Ryan (@ Appleby) and Tammy McDougal (@ the HS) will be collecting the donations. These scholarships are made possible because teachers love denim on Fridays! (Click on heading to see 2011 recipients)

Welcome to nmcft.org. We are a union of certificated professionals dedicated to providing the best possible educational outcomes for our students, and the most productive and fair working conditions for our members.

AFT affiliates in Alabama recently announced a multifaceted campaign to address the very serious issues facing the state's public school students and its communities. In the coming months, union members will be engaging elected officials and community members in a variety of initiatives designed to improve conditions and provide much-needed financial resources for Alabama's public schools.

A Los Angeles Times series that rated thousands of elementary school teachers based on their students' average test score gains rattled the education world -- including many who study teacher effectiveness for a living.

At the core of the provocative newspaper report is a new method of teacher evaluation with an esoteric name -- "value-added" -- and a complicated statistical formula. This measurement is designed to estimate the average progress a teacher's students made during a given school year, compared to other teachers, as captured by standardized tests.

At a time when officers of the Mendocino County Federation of School Employees, (AFT Local 4345) bargaining team conceded to furlough days, a freeze in pay, and increased health care premium costs for classified and certificated members at the bargaining table, management of the Mendocino County Office have had their calendar years increased. About 15 union members and staff came to Monday's board of trustees meeting looking for answers which they said were not available to the negotiations team and not disclosed until Sept. 2.

NYSUT website information

California recently signed into law the federal jobs bill that Congress passed in August.  The spirit and intent of the law is to retain, recall and hire classroom staff in light of our challenging economic times.  This money cannot be used to establish, restore or supplement a rainy day fund, supplant state funds to establish a rainy day fund, reduce or retire a state debt or supplant funds to rduce or retire a state debt. 

The GJUHSD will be receiving approximately $450,000.  It would be morally bankrupt and ethically wrong for the Distirct to fail to use this money this year.  If this money is set aside the families of employees will suffer, academic programs will suffer, and student learning will be negatively impacted (due to a possible rise in class size). 

LAFSE Officiers 2010-2012

Union leader makes several stops during Sept. 8th trip to Charleston

Standardized exams — the multiple-choice, bubble tests in math and reading that have played a growing role in American public education in recent years — are being overhauled.

Over the next four years, two groups of states, 44 in all, will get $330 million to work with hundreds of university professors and testing experts to design a series of new assessments that officials say will look very different from those in use today.

The new tests, which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described in a speech in Virginia on Thursday, are to be ready for the 2014-15 school year.