Rallies across the State - Keep Dr. King's Dream Alive

April 4 - Rallies across Oregon

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968 in Memphis where he was standing with sanitation workers trying to unionize. Grassroots actions are happening across the country on April 4 to show the cause endures. Join in!

Unions, civil and human rights activists, students, and other allies will host a range of community and workplace-focused actions. Look to see what's coming together in your area (including events in Salem, La Grande, Newport, Eugene, Portland, and Klamath Falls) - fliers, stickers, resources, teach-in toolkit - let people know about your event - all at the We Are One website.



Portland's April 4 Rally to keep Dr. King's Dream Alive
Locals in Portland will gather at 5:30 p.m., at Portland’s Director Park, SW 9th and Yamhill. The rally, sponsored by the Oregon AFL-CIO, Northwest Oregon Labor Council, and others will be moderated by Carl Wolfson, comedian and host of The KPOJ Morning Show. Locals in other cities are encouraged to work with their central labor councils to organize local rallies.

• View the flyer and details here

• Click here for event details on Facebook


CONTACT US:
Oregon Education Association
6900 SW Atlanta Street
Portland, Oregon 97223-2513

Thank you OEA for bringing us this announcement

Bargaining meeting : Friday, April 1 from 2:00 - 5:00

Now that the budget has been "put to bed", we're back on track to continue bargaining.

We'll be on the 2nd floor of DeJardin, and there will be a sign on the door.

We're scheduled to go 'til 5 pm, so come on over, even if you're late or you can't stay the whole time. Having PTF watching and listening has meant a lot to your Bargaining Team and we need you to be there.

What the Union means to me

I find it amazing that so few people "get" the union. A comment came up on Face Book about the union and it wasn't a positive one. I responded carefully because I see this woman every single week at choir and I really don't want to have hard feelings but it annoyed me. A conversation started between another choir member and I. The conversation ended with her asking why I took a part-time position with no benefits if I needed a job with benefits.

There were lots of answers I could have given and many I know I shouldn't have given. But the real reason for me is that the union - OUR UNION - protects my rights and defines my responsibilities so that I know where my boundaries are and where I am safe.

How about you guys - chime in with what the union means to you!

Ohio is now in the running with Wisconson

March 2, 2011

This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education

I cut and pasted this article in its entirety.

Ohio Senate Votes to Deny Collective-Bargaining Rights to Most Public-College Professors

By Peter Schmidt

A bill narrowly approved by the Ohio Senate on Wednesday contains even worse news for public colleges' labor unions than they had feared: In addition to scaling back the collective-bargaining rights of all state employees, it would effectively prevent many faculty members from engaging in collective bargaining at all, by classifying them as managers, exempt from union representation, if they engage in any of several activities traditionally associated with their jobs.

The language dealing with how faculty members are classified was inserted into the bill Wednesday, just hours before the full Senate vote, as part of a 99-page omnibus amendment introduced Tuesday by the bill's sponsor, Shannon Jones, a Republican.

"We were completely blindsided by it," said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, which has local chapters on eight Ohio public university campuses that represent faculty members in collective bargaining. "We have just started to fight," he said. "We are not going to settle for this."

The classification provision defines as "management-level employees" those faculty members who, individually or through faculty senates or similar organizations, engage in any of a long list of activities generally thought of as simply part of the jobs of tenured and tenure-track professors. Those activities include participating in institutional governance or personnel decisions, selecting or reviewing administrators, preparing budgets, determining how physical resources are used, and setting educational policies "related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research."

The Senate passed the measure containing such language—a bill overhauling the state's collective-bargaining laws—on Wednesday by a vote of 17 to 16, with six Republicans joining all of the Senate's Democrats in opposing it. The bill is expected to have an easier time getting through the Ohio House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a 59-to-40 majority, and to be signed by Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, who on Wednesday issued a written statement applauding its passage by the Senate.

"This is a major step forward in correcting the imbalance between taxpayers and the government unions that work for them," the governor's statement said. "Our state, counties, cities, and school districts need the flexibility to reduce their costs and better manage their work forces, and taxpayers deserve to be treated with more fairness."

More Limiting Than 'Yeshiva' Decision?

Mike Maurer, director of the AAUP's department in charge of union organizing, on Wednesday called the reclassification provision in the measure "virtually unprecedented."

At private colleges, many faculty members are already legally classified as managers, and are thus precluded from collective bargaining, as a result of a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the decertification of a faculty union at Yeshiva University. But that ruling did not cover public college faculties, and no states have legislated such a change, Mr. Maurer said.
In an interview, Mr. Maurer said the Ohio measure would actually have a more drastic impact on faculty members at public colleges than the Supreme Court's decision 31 years ago, in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, had on faculty members at private institutions. The Yeshiva decision applied only to full-time faculty members who are determined to have significant control over managerial functions such as hiring, designing curriculum, and awarding tenure, and leaves such faculty members free to organize and operate collective-bargaining units if the college where they work does not petition the National Labor Relations Board to decertify their union. The Ohio measure, by contrast, appears to automatically preclude from collective bargaining those faculty members who engage in any management activities at all, Mr. Maurer and others said.

"It is trying, in essence, to put every faculty member in the managerial level," said Jack Fatica, a professor of accounting at Terra Community College, in Fremont, Ohio, and the president of the Terra Faculty Association, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that represents faculty members on that campus.

"It is going to basically take the union away from people," Mr. Fatica said. If presented a choice between belonging to a union or having a say over aspects of their job such as curricular decisions, most faculty members will give up their union membership, he predicted.

Mr. Nelson of the AAUP quipped that about the only faculty members who would qualify for union membership under the Ohio measure are a few "on life-support machines in hospitals."

No-Strike Rule

Although the bill no longer contains a flat-out prohibition against collective bargaining by public employees, as it did originally, it nonetheless contains a long list of other provisions that the employees' unions oppose. For example, it prohibits public employees from striking, providing fines and jail time for those who do so. While allowing unions to negotiate their wages, hours, and terms of employment, it does not let them negotiate in many other areas, such as the setting of health-care and pension benefits.

The bill contains what appears, on the surface, to be a victory for public colleges' part-time faculty members and graduate-student employees: a provision that for the first time includes them in the state's collective-bargaining law and therefore allows them to form bargaining units. But Matthew A. Williams, vice president of the New Faculty Majority, an Akron-based national advocacy group for adjunct faculty members, said he suspects the provision was inserted in the bill because otherwise part-time faculty members and graduate students who work for colleges would have retained the legal right to stage strikes.

"We have been fighting for parity, but we never thought it would come in this form," Mr. Williams said. "If you don't have the ability to strike, where is the negotiating leverage?"

Where faculty members are precluded from collective bargaining because of their involvement in management activities, they might end up having less say over management than they did before. That is because the union contracts at many Ohio public colleges cover a long list of management-related issues, such as the rules governing faculty searches, the mechanisms for ensuring due process for faculty members who face discipline, and the criteria for awards of merit pay.

"You bargain, to some extent, over how much you are going to be paid. But just as big a deal as that is how it is distributed and whether it is going to be distributed in a fair way," said Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University and a member of the board of the Ohio state conference of the AAUP.

http://chronicle.com/article/Ohio-Senate-Votes-to-Deny/126565/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Press release from Dennis Van Roekel

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                         CONTACT: Anitra Speight, NEA Communications

March 9, 2011                                                                                             202-822-7823 or 202-492-1281; aspeight@nea.org

                                                                                                                                              

Wisconsin Senate strips workers’ collective bargaining rights

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel reacts

WASHINGTON—In a blatant abuse of power, Wisconsin Republican lawmakers dealt a blow to the working class tonight with passage of the anti-union provisions of Gov. Walker’s Budget Adjustment Bill on an 18-1 vote. No Democratic Senators were present. The bill strips collective bargaining rights for public workers. The Wisconsin Senate requires a quorum to take up any measures that spend money. But Republicans on Wednesday split from the legislation a proposal to curtail union rights, and a special conference committee of state lawmakers approved that bill a short time later.

“Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers met in the dark of night, in a near-empty Capitol, and stretched their authority to the breaking point in an attempt to ram through legislation that the public does not support and that will harm thousands of the American working class,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “Its legality is dubious. Its intent is mean spirited. It is perhaps the most grievous example of how democratic decision making should not take place. The Governor and his legislative minions should be ashamed of what they’ve done.”

“In exercising the nuclear option to impose their will on Wisconsites, Governor Walker and Senate Republicans attacked middle class families, from students to seniors, in their state,” said Van Roekel. “This is an affront to teachers, nurses, students, firefighters, construction workers and other everyday people who stood up, spoke out, and learned how much their voice mattered to their elected leaders.   The response will be unified and the collective voice of millions of working Americans from all across this nation will only grow louder.”

Van Roekel added, “Just listen to Brad Lutes, a  physical education and health teacher in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.  He summed it up: ‘We can’t be defeated. There’s not really an alternative. You can take away my collective bargaining rights. You can take away my pension and some of my health care, but the one thing you can’t take away from me is my vote. I think that’s how a large majority of Wisconsinites and Americans feel right now.’”

# # #

The National Education Association is the nation’s largest professional employee organization, representing

3.2 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators and students preparing to become teachers.

Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants

March 11, 2011

Memorandum

TO:              Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants

FROM:         Dennis Van Roekel, NEA President

RE:              Sign-Ups for www.EducationVotes.org  Volunteerism

Our union, State Affiliates, teachers, school support staff and public education face unprecedented attacks. Collective bargaining, pensions, fair dismissal procedures and collective bargaining are under fire everywhere it seems.

Now is the time to use every tool at our disposal to fight back, and nothing will be as important as the activist database we’re building on EducationVotes.org. When members sign up to volunteer on the site, they enter into a database that gives us immediate access to up-to-date information in every state about volunteers. Any state affiliate can access these volunteers for phone banks, rallies, town hall meetings and more.

This database will be crucial in the fight to protect our students, our members, strengthen our association and engage in the state battles we are fighting nationwide.  But we cannot do it without you!

Unfortunately, early returns on sign-ups show that right now we don’t have many of you with us!  As of March, only 11 percent of Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants had signed up on the site.  Eleven percent of you!  We must do better.  Take 30 seconds right now, head to EducationVotes.org and fill out the box on the top right corner of the site that says “Join Now”.

At the regional conferences I challenged each of you to sign up five colleagues when you returned home.  If you have already signed up five people – please email me personally at DVan_roekel@nea.organd let me know who they are. When each one of you recruits five volunteers, you help expand our network in your region by more than 4,000 people.  That’s 4,000 new, valuable recruits ready to mobilize when an urgent need arises.

War has been declared against us, and we cannot lose if we mobilize and act as a unified force.

Members and students across the nation need your support and leadership now more than ever. Sign up is easy and it is something everyone can do to help.

Thank You.

Letter from Hannah Vandering, OEA Vice President

Pacific Region Delegates,

Thank you again for attending the Pacific Region Leadership Conference, it was great to have such an amazing group of leaders represent  OEA!  I am sorry this took so long, we had a little glitch in getting the email addresses.

Here is the information we agreed to share with all of you:

•         Link to PRLC site – If you signed up for the Groupsite you should have access to all of the information (in the file cabinet under the share tab.  If you did not sign up for the site and would like the information please go to prlc@nea.org<mailto:prlc@nea.org> and request an invitation to join the group site.

•         PowerPoint from our meeting (see document list ----> )

•         Directions to sign up for the leader letter – please send an e-mail to webadmin@oregoned.org<mailto:webadmin@oregoned.org> and just ask to subscribe to the  Leader Letter, Janine will sign you up

•         Foundation form (see document list ----->, payroll deduction and one-time donor)

•         Information on Wisconsin, the attached document is old, but good information.  For the latest news from our brothers and sisters from the  Wisconsin Education Association you can go to www.weac.org<http://www.weac.org>.    You can also check our website www.oregoned.org<http://www.oregoned.org>  or friend us on Facebook.

Johanna Vaandering | OEA Vice President |Phone (503) 684-3300 | Fax (503) 624-5814

Inspiring article about Community Colleges

Julie Black just wrote a very inspiring article about CC teaching. It resonated with my soul and I'm sure it'll resonate with yours as well. She writes about her love of teaching at a CC in her community. It's published in this issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education Blogs.

Please click on the link below for the full-text.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/community-college-changed-my-life/28153#disqus_thread

If you can't wint them over, sign them up!

Here is a great article by the Boston Globe's Joanna Weiss.
www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2011/02/27/unions_are_losing_the_pr_battle/

Because of copyright I can't cut and paste the article but please take a moment to read it, it won't take you very long.

Her contention is that, yes, sometimes the unions have overstepped their bounds but that they represent the middle class in the economic struggle. One union in Massachusetts is starting to sign up low-paid staff to a new union in an effort to help remember this.

Her tag line is wonderful: If you can't win them over, sign them up!

Ohio Senate Votes against Collective Bargaining Rights to Most Public College Professors

Chronicle of Higher Education

The link to this article is to the right -->

March 2, 2011

By Peter Schmidt

A bill narrowly approved by the Ohio Senate on Wednesday contains even worse news for public colleges' labor unions than they had feared: In addition to scaling back the collective-bargaining rights of all state employees, it would effectively prevent many faculty members from engaging in collective bargaining at all, by classifying them as managers, exempt from union representation, if they engage in any of several activities traditionally associated with their jobs.

The language dealing with how faculty members are classified was inserted into the bill Wednesday, just hours before the full Senate vote, as part of a 99-page omnibus amendment introduced Tuesday by the bill's sponsor, Shannon Jones, a Republican.

"We were completely blindsided by it," said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, which has local chapters on eight Ohio public university campuses that represent faculty members in collective bargaining. "We have just started to fight," he said. "We are not going to settle for this."

The classification provision defines as "management-level employees" those faculty members who, individually or through faculty senates or similar organizations, engage in any of a long list of activities generally thought of as simply part of the jobs of tenured and tenure-track professors. Those activities include participating in institutional governance or personnel decisions, selecting or reviewing administrators, preparing budgets, determining how physical resources are used, and setting educational policies "related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research."

The Senate passed the measure containing such language—a bill overhauling the state's collective-bargaining laws—on Wednesday by a vote of 17 to 16, with six Republicans joining all of the Senate's Democrats in opposing it. The bill is expected to have an easier time getting through the Ohio House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a 59-to-40 majority, and to be signed by Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican, who on Wednesday issued a written statement applauding its passage by the Senate.

"This is a major step forward in correcting the imbalance between taxpayers and the government unions that work for them," the governor's statement said. "Our state, counties, cities, and school districts need the flexibility to reduce their costs and better manage their work forces, and taxpayers deserve to be treated with more fairness."

More Limiting Than 'Yeshiva' Decision?

Mike Maurer, director of the AAUP's department in charge of union organizing, on Wednesday called the reclassification provision in the measure "virtually unprecedented."

At private colleges, many faculty members are already legally classified as managers, and are thus precluded from collective bargaining, as a result of a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the decertification of a faculty union at Yeshiva University. But that ruling did not cover public college faculties, and no states have legislated such a change, Mr. Maurer said.

In an interview, Mr. Maurer said the Ohio measure would actually have a more drastic impact on faculty members at public colleges than the Supreme Court's decision 31 years ago, in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, had on faculty members at private institutions. The Yeshiva decision applied only to full-time faculty members who are determined to have significant control over managerial functions such as hiring, designing curriculum, and awarding tenure, and leaves such faculty members free to organize and operate collective-bargaining units if the college where they work does not petition the National Labor Relations Board to decertify their union. The Ohio measure, by contrast, appears to automatically preclude from collective bargaining those faculty members who engage in any management activities at all, Mr. Maurer and others said.

"It is trying, in essence, to put every faculty member in the managerial level," said Jack Fatica, a professor of accounting at Terra Community College, in Fremont, Ohio, and the president of the Terra Faculty Association, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that represents faculty members on that campus.

"It is going to basically take the union away from people," Mr. Fatica said. If presented a choice between belonging to a union or having a say over aspects of their job such as curricular decisions, most faculty members will give up their union membership, he predicted.

Mr. Nelson of the AAUP quipped that about the only faculty members who would qualify for union membership under the Ohio measure are a few "on life-support machines in hospitals."

No-Strike Rule

Although the bill no longer contains a flat-out prohibition against collective bargaining by public employees, as it did originally, it nonetheless contains a long list of other provisions that the employees' unions oppose. For example, it prohibits public employees from striking, providing fines and jail time for those who do so. While allowing unions to negotiate their wages, hours, and terms of employment, it does not let them negotiate in many other areas, such as the setting of health-care and pension benefits.

The bill contains what appears, on the surface, to be a victory for public colleges' part-time faculty members and graduate-student employees: a provision that for the first time includes them in the state's collective-bargaining law and therefore allows them to form bargaining units. But Matthew A. Williams, vice president of the New Faculty Majority, an Akron-based national advocacy group for adjunct faculty members, said he suspects the provision was inserted in the bill because otherwise part-time faculty members and graduate students who work for colleges would have retained the legal right to stage strikes.

"We have been fighting for parity, but we never thought it would come in this form," Mr. Williams said. "If you don't have the ability to strike, where is the negotiating leverage?"

Where faculty members are precluded from collective bargaining because of their involvement in management activities, they might end up having less say over management than they did before. That is because the union contracts at many Ohio public colleges cover a long list of management-related issues, such as the rules governing faculty searches, the mechanisms for ensuring due process for faculty members who face discipline, and the criteria for awards of merit pay.

"You bargain, to some extent, over how much you are going to be paid. But just as big a deal as that is how it is distributed and whether it is going to be distributed in a fair way," said Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University and a member of the board of the Ohio state conference of the AAUP.

National Library Workers Day

NLWD is a day for library staff, users, administrators and Friends groups to recognize the valuable contributions made by all library workers.

What is NLWD? (podcast)

How will you celebrate
National Library Workers Day?

2011 Themes

• Talk about pay equity (and inequities) by using ideas from The Better Salaries and Pay Equity Toolkit
• Submit a Star above – Tell everyone what makes a library employee special by submitting your favorite worker’s name and why they are wonderful to the NLWD site.
  • Nominate a Great Library School Student!
  • Nominate a Great Student Worker!
  • Nominate a Great Supervisor!
  • Nominate Yourself!
• How will you celebrate? – Look at our celebration ideas page for suggestions from us and other libraries.

PRLC Conference Report #2

Here is the 2nd report from Jennifer.

NEA PRLC Conference Report #2

Saturday, February 26, 2011
Jennifer Rueda

I arrived around 8:00am for a surprisingly good continental breakfast. I couldn’t locate my colleagues, Adriana Aristizabal and Ivan Imancinelli because my phone had died. But I knew they were there.

The first session I attended was the English Language Learner (ELL) Culture and Equity Framework (ELL inclusion). (The NEA has an English Language Learner Culture, Equity and Language Training Module for Closing Achievement Gaps.) Although the focus was on successful support of ELL’s in K-12, I thought I might get something out of it and I was right.

I (re-) learned how our monolingual society rushes ELL’s thru the K-12 system, leading to a poor foundation in their academic English and heritage language. In addition, the student’s home culture and language are ignored or even crushed. In many teacher training schools, sound ELL pedagogical methods are taught; however, these are thrown out in favor of an English-only curriculum.

The presenters said school districts tend to look at ELL’s thru a “deficit view”, when it would behoove us to view every student thru an “assets view”

Deficit view: ELL’s are	Assets view: ELL’s are
Culturally and linguistically deprived	Culturally and linguistically enriched
Failing or low achieving	Unrecognized or underdeveloped abilities
At-risk	Resilient
Unmotivated	Engaged and self-motivated

The presenters feel that power, wealth and status are unequally distributed among cultural groups in the U.S. We were encouraged to reflect on how those unequal power relations affect our teaching and interactions with our students.

*******************************************************************

Session number 2 was quite fun, uplifting and heartwarming. It was called “Taking Action to Create a Culture of Health” and it was presented by the OEA Choice Trust, the Oregon Public Health Division and Griffin Creek Elementary School (Medford area). First we paired up and examined some signage out in the hall. We learned about lifestyle choices that affect health and healthcare costs, such as:

· 8% of OEBB members accounted for 62% of total medical expenses

· Chronic conditions account for 25% of the OEBB healthcare costs (2009)

· High cholesterol accounts for 20% of the OEBB healthcare costs (2009)

· Arthritis accounts for 19% of the OEBB healthcare costs (2009)

· 41% of OEBB claims paid were preventable or modifiable

· 34% of OEBB members are overweight

· 28% of OEBB members are obese (these figures align nationally)

· HOWEVER, across OEBB claimants and employed& insuredOregonians, 62 - 63% are trying to lose weight.

THEREFORE (here’s the positive, upbeat message), school wellness programs are good investments. They improve health and health behaviors. They lower healthcare costs, create fewer work-related injuries, improve morale, improve retention of employees, and improve productivity. For every $1.00 spent, $5.00 is recovered.

Griffin Creek Elementary School has received the OEA Choice Trust Wellness Grant for the past two years (going on three) and they have seen many, many benefits:

· Staff lost 300lbs

· Developed stronger and more flexible bodies

· Became a 100% non-smoking campus

· Changed to healthy snacks, soups, salads and veggie bags

To comply with the grant, Griffin Creek has to keep good fitness data (and fitness journals) as they were required to turn in results to OEA Choice Trust later. Griffin Creek found that they need a variety of activities, a variety of incentives, an emotionally safe place and the acceptance that everyone starts their fitness journey from a different point. In addition, the wellness program should be designed by each individual school since each school is unique. Schools can use the “Blueprint for Wellness” found at OEA Choice Trust’s website. There are eight steps which must be followed and, of course, a commitment. Data must be collected and outcomes given back to OEA Choice Trust.

In order to reach their goals, Griffin Creek partnered with their local YWCA, who performedpre- and post-BMI and fitness tests, health screenings, and then designed individual exercise plans. Griffin Creek also purchased equipment with their grant money- scales, weights, stretch bands, rollers, pedometers, blood pressure cuff, and etcetera.

In addition, the staff of Griffin Creek organizes:

· Monthly 2k runs

· Lunch time intramurals

· Cooking classes

· “Boot camp” 2x week

· Money incentives

· Fruit and veggie-eating challenges

· Water-drinking challenges

· Physical-fitness challenges (sit ups, push ups, etc)

· Local walks and hikes

Resources:

· www.neaprlc.org

· www.stretchware.com(classroom stretching and moving exercises)

· www.jamschoolprogram.com

· www.OEAchoice.com

· www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/worksite (public health)

· Holly Spruance hs@oeachoice.com

****************************************************************************************

Next I went to the luncheon, where we had more good food and a fantastic speaker. The speaker was Yong Zhau Ph.D. who is currently Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education (College of Education at the University of Oregon), where he also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE). In essence, his talk focused on transforming our current, perhaps broken public education to a creative, world-class system that produces students ready for life in the age of globalization.

Entrepreneurship and creativity do not come from government planning, standardized curriculum, or standardized testing. On the contrary, government planning, standardized curriculum, and testing tend to work against both entrepreneurship and creativity. Moreover, entrepreneurship and creativity are much more than a set of prescribed knowledge and skills. They are more spiritual, psychological, social, and cultural than simply cognitive skills. Therefore we cannot wait until they grow up and provide a crash course on entrepreneurship and creativity. We have to start young and deliberately work to develop what is needed for entrepreneurship.http://zhaolearning.com/

According to Dr. Zhau, what matters in public education is:

· Diversity of talents

· Tolerance

· Creativity

· Entrepreneurship

· Passion

He says “We need people to invent jobs, not hire a workforce”. He also said the strength of American public education is that it:

· values individual talents

· inspires passion and respect

· tolerates deviation

· cultivates entrepreneurship.

Because of these traits, Dr. Zhau said many Asian places, such as Singapore, South Korea, Japan and China are leaving standardization and ranking behind to become more like the American public education system. It’s up to us not to let the “reformers” change American public education into the old Asian system.

Dr. Zhau’s slides can be found on his website, http://zhaolearning.com/ or here: http://zhaolearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/NEAPacific2011.pdf

*******************************************************************************

Next it was time to visit a session entitled “Bargaining in Times of Economic Crisis”. Unfortunately, the room was packed and they would let no-one else in. I went back and found my colleagues, including Camilo Sanchez, a Skills Development instructor. We discussed the conference and some issues facing part-time instructors until 4:30pm, when we all went home to walk our dogs (Well, Ivan and I did, at any rate).