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In Focus

Looking Backwards: 10 Key Trends That Have Affected Education Over The Last Decade

It seems like every semester comes with its own set of challenges, seemingly more daunting every year. In fact, crisis-all-the-time is our new normal, the zeitgeist of our era. While it would be easy to point to our current national political climate as the central factor in our increasingly difficult educational landscape, the fact is that many of the trends that helped to shape the present were long in the making. Thus, as we head into a new decade with the future on the line like it never h ...

Key Wins from Our Contract Settlements

February 5, 2020

As a result of our last several contract settlements, we have made a lot of big gains for both our classified professional and faculty members. Our AFT Guild negotiating teams worked hard to improve our working conditions on multiple fronts from safety issues, to job protections, to leaves, to pay increases and a host of other improvements. More specifically, some of the key wins in the most recent contracts include: Safer Classrooms: Our latest agreements require inside locking doors or an alt ...

Union Density in the United States Continues to Decline: What Does this Mean for American Democracy?

February 5, 2020

If you’ve been paying attention to the news about labor over the last year or so, you’d think we were in an era of a resurgent union movement. We’ve seen a wave of inspiring, militant teachers’ strikes from West Virginia to Los Angeles along with a successful autoworkers’ strike against General Motors and lots of other signs of life from grocery workers’ actions to pushes for minimum wage increases across America. Unfortunately, the latest numbers on union membership paint a more disappointing ...

Middle Class Racism

October 31, 2019

A core problem in discussions of racism IS the focus on individual attitudes rather than on structural inequities. hat do you picture when someone refers to the “Trump’s base”? If you’ve watched television coverage of his rallies or read any of the dozens of articles in which reporters and commentators try to explain Trump’s appeal, then you probably imagine white people wearing “MAGA” hats and t-shirts chanting “Lock her up” or “send her back” in an arena in a mid-size Midwestern or Southern ci ...

CFT Legislative Update 2019

October 30, 2019

INTRODUCTION September 13, 2019 marked the end of the first year of the two-year legislative session. The legislature will be on Interim Recess until January 6, 2020. The governor had until October 13, 2019 to sign or veto those bills that made it to his desk. An unprecedented 10 CFT-sponsored/co-sponsored bills passed the legislature and made it to the governor’s desk for his consideration. Subsequently, the governor signed 8 of CFT’s sponsored/co-sponsored bills and vetoed 2 of them. Six of CF ...