The
Colorado students test opt-out movement is really amazing. Just check out the energized, thoughtful high school students in that video, made at one school's testing protest and consider the numbers: 5,000 or more students opted out of the useless Colorado Measures of Academic Success test, which translates to
nearly 40 percent of seniors statewide. There are probably professional organizers out there who could learn a thing or two from these teenagers:
The students have a clear goal: They want Colorado to restrict mandated standardized testing to the number required under federal law (grades 3-8 and 10 in English and math), and no more. [...]
It was clear that these young people thought this through carefully and recognize the importance of being for something even as they were standing together against the test. And so, many protesters spent the testing time working in a food bank or organizing a food drive, while others worked on a email campaign directed at the Legislative Task Force that will be recommending a new policy on testing for Colorado. I asked if adults, including teachers, were helping them behind the scenes, and all three vigorously denied adult involvement.
“We used social media to communicate,” one told me, including Twitter, Google Docs and Google Drive. A Facebook page? I asked. “No, because a Facebook page would have been open to anyone, and we did not want that,” Jennifer told me, and so they created a Facebook Event, accessible only by students. The students told me that they kept their principal in the loop, because they did not want their school to be penalized by the state.
An
open letter from students at a dozen schools is intensely researched and argued, showing exactly the kind of education that isn't measured by standardized tests but should be our goal for America's students.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
- Facebook shuttle drivers vote to unionize.
- Falling wages at factories squeeze the middle class:
For nearly 20 years, Darrell Eberhardt worked in an Ohio factory putting together wheelchairs, earning $18.50 an hour, enough to gain a toehold in the middle class and feel respected at work.
He is still working with his hands, assembling seats for Chevrolet Cruze cars at the Camaco auto parts factory in Lorain, Ohio, but now he makes $10.50 an hour and is barely hanging on.
- On Twitter and interested in labor? Follow @blogwood.
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- Slower service, coming to a mailbox near you.
- Does "made in the USA" actually mean what it says?
The FTC announced Tuesday that they have approved a final consent order settling charges that Made in the USA Brand, LLC, a company providing a "Made in USA" certification seal to marketers, gave out the seal while not actually verifying the claim, nor disclosing that the companies had certified themselves.
- Sounds like information will be limited on the indictment of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship:
Shortly after the indictment was announced, Judge Irene Berger issued a sweeping gag order prohibiting anyone involved with the case, potentially involved with the case, or even many people who are involved with someone potentially involved with the case, from speaking to the media. The gag order extends to the parties, plus “their counsel, other representatives or members of their staff, potential witnesses, including actual and alleged victims, investigators, family members of actual and alleged victims as well as of the Defendant.”
The order also prohibits court personnel from “mak[ing] any statements of any nature, in any form, or releas[ing] any documents to the media or any other entity regarding the facts or substance of this case.” When ThinkProgress attempted to retrieve documents relating to the case from PACER, a public database of documents relating to federal court cases, we were informed that the documents were “not available for viewing by non-court users.”
There are few precedents for a gag order this broad, although there is at least one case involving a similar gag order issued by the judge presiding over a criminal prosecution of actual Nazis.
- Hospital workers fired by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are getting their justice. An administrative law judge has ordered the hospital to reinstate the workers, and:
... ordered UPMC to post a three-page notice informing health system staff that the NLRB “has found that we violated federal labor law” and that the law gives UPMC employees the right to “form, join or assist a union; choose representatives to bargain with [UPMC] on your behalf; act together with other employees for your benefit and protection; choose not to engage in any of these protected activities.”
The posting must include a promise that UPMC won’t engage in surveillance of conversations and meetings between employees and union organizers and it won’t “coercively” interrogate UPMC employees regarding their unionizing activities.
UPMC is appealing.
- Postal workers push back against privatization and post office closures.
- Workers unionizing in Alabama? Yup, at a copper plant, even though urged not to by the state's governor.
- New Hampshire joins national misclassification crackdown.
Education