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Starbucks’ Workers Continue to Organize Across the Country

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2022 //
2

Matthew Cunningham-Cook of The Lever reports that workers at Starbucks are voting to join unions. The Lever is a blog launched by David Sirota, co-author of “Don’t Look Up” and former speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Big events continue to happen on the Starbucks Workers United front. On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in greater Richmond, Virginia, voted to unionize. On Thursday, they won an election at the 100-employee-plus Starbucks Reserve Roastery flagship store in Seattle — one of the largest Starbucks stores to organize so far. Then, on Friday, the shamefully underfunded National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint over Starbucks’ February mass firing of union leaders in Memphis. Then again on Friday, the first Starbucks store in Colorado unionized. Struggling to keep track of it all? Reporters at Law360 developed this tool to track the growth of Starbucks workers’ efforts.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Unions

Jennifer Abruzzo Asks NLRB Board to Ban “Captive Audience” Meetings in Workplace

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2022 //
10

Harold Meyerson writes here about Jennifer Abruzzo’s request to the National Labor Relations Board to ban “captive audience” meetings, in which employers lecture their employees about the dangers of joining a union. Abruzzo is the recently appointed general counsel of the agency, where she has worked for many years. She is in a hurry to restore the original purpose of the NLRB, which was to create a level field for employers and employees.

Meyerson writes in The American Prospect:

By now, it’s clear that Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, is both an originalist and an adherent to the belief that the National Labor Relations Act is a law whose interpretations must have some relation to current realities.

One of those realities is that a succession of Board and court rulings over many decades has eroded the act itself, and with it, the very worker rights the act was written to ensure. One of those erosions is the “captive audience” meeting, which employees are compelled to attend, at which their managers subject them to arguments against their going union. The very fact that attendance is compulsory underscores the imbalance of power between boss and worker, such that the meetings constitute an implicit—and sometimes explicit—threat to the workers. The authors of the NLRA meant to give workers the right to freely choose whether to unionize. Compelling workers to attend these meetings (and forbidding union advocates from holding even voluntary meetings at the worksite), Abruzzo argues, erodes that right of free choice.

In a memo she sent to NLRB staff today, Abruzzo announced she would ask the Board to ban such captive audience meetings for violating both the letter and spirit of the NLRA. The act, she wrote, “protects employees’ right to listen as well as their right to refrain from listening to employer speech concerning the exercise of their Section 7 rights”—that is, their rights to freely choose whether or not to unionize and to have a voice on the job. “Forcing employees to listen to such employer speech under threat of discipline—directly leveraging the employees’ dependence on their jobs—plainly chills employees’ protected right to refrain from listening to this speech,” she asserted.

Today’s memo is of a piece with Abruzzo’s previous memos, all of which seek to restore the NLRA to what its authors intended: an act enabling workers to freely choose whether to organize and, if they do so choose, to bargain collectively. As I’ve reported in my profile of Abruzzo, which appears in our April print issue, she has emerged as the most potent champion of worker rights that the government has seen in a great many years, and as such, by happy coincidence, as the most potent ally of the generation of workers we’ve seen unionizing on campuses, at Starbucks, and now, at an Amazon warehouse.

Abruzzo writes lots of these potentially very impactful memos. I’ll try to keep you posted on them as she turns them out.

Categories Economy, Equity, Unions

Jennifer Abruzzo: Can She Save the Labor Movement?

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2022 //
9

There was a time—more than half a century ago—when labor unions promised to guarantee fair wages, decent working hours, and secure benefits for American workers. Unions raised many people from poverty to the middle class. Yet today, unions—especially in the private sector—are at a low point, due to anti-union activities by corporate America. But recent organizing efforts at two of the nation’s largest employers—Amazon and Starbucks—show promise of change.

One woman is in a position to protect the rights of workers to join a union: Jennifer Abruzzo. The American Prospect has written about her, and I am sharing some of those articles here.

Harold Meyerson wrote:

One gap between American public opinion and American public policy has been growing steadily wider over the past dozen years. Public support for unions rose to a high point of 68 percent last year, while the actual rate of membership in unions, continuing its 70-year descent, hit a new low last year of a bare 6 percent of private-sector employees.

In democracies, the common response to realities so at odds with public sentiment is something like “there ought to be a law.”

In this case, there is. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), enacted in 1935, gave workers a legal right to form unions and bargain collectively. For a decade, it worked as intended, as a previously moribund union movement grew to encompass fully one-third of the nation’s workforce. For the next decade, despite a Republican Congress limiting the law’s scope with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, unions held their own. Thereafter, membership percentages began a slow but relentless decline, as court decisions and the ferocious opposition of American business to worker rights turned the NLRA on its head. Though the Act remained on the books, the penalties employers faced for violating its terms—by intimidating or even firing workers seeking to unionize—were so minimal that employer lawbreaking became common practice and successful unionization campaigns became rarer and rarer.

Eventually, Democrats became aware that the weakness of federal labor law not only triggered deunionization and hollowed out the middle class, but also reduced workers’ support for the Democratic Party. But Republicans are implacably opposed to unions, and a critical mass of Democrats are implacably opposed to abolishing the filibuster and restoring majority rule in the Senate. So while you can write a bill like the PRO Act, which would patch many of the holes in the NLRA, you can’t get it passed, and consequently, you can’t reverse labor’s decline.

Or can you?

Last summer, on a party-line vote, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees union recognition contests and investigates and adjudicates disputes over violations of the NLRA. While not a member of the Board itself (which by custom consists of three appointees from the president’s party and two from the opposition’s), the general counsel functions as the NLRB’s chief prosecutor, directing its roughly 500 attorneys across the nation on what kind of cases to bring and what remedies to seek. It’s a powerful position, but no previous general counsel had used that power quite like Abruzzo has.

Just two weeks after she was confirmed in late July, Abruzzo sent out her first memo to staff attorneys, a common practice for new general counsels, laying out the kind of cases attorneys should file. Her stated intention was to reverse the Trump-appointee-dominated Board’s anti-worker rulings that, she wrote, had “overruled legal precedent.” But she added that she also wanted to pursue other cases “not necessarily the subject of a more recent Board decision, [that] are nevertheless ones I would like to carefully examine,” because they, too, ran counter to the NLRA. For example, in cases where employers refused to recognize a union even though a majority of workers had indicated through signing affiliation cards that they wished to form one, she advised the Board attorneys to consult the Joy Silk Mills case for the appropriate remedy.

“Even labor lawyers had forgotten about Joy Silk,” says Catherine Fisk, a professor of labor law at the University of California, Berkeley. And no wonder: The Joy Silk ruling, which was promulgated in 1949 by a Board dominated by Harry Truman’s appointees, was substantially overturned in 1969 in a Supreme Court case known as Gissel, and the NLRB, dominated by Richard Nixon’s appointees at the time, wasn’t inclined to defend the Truman Board’s remedies.

Under Joy Silk, employers who refused to recognize a union’s legitimate majority status had been compelled to recognize the union and to enter into bargaining with it, except in rare instances. Under Gissel, employers who refused to recognize a union’s legitimate majority status were compelled merely to run or rerun an election among their employees to determine union status, except in rare instances. That enabled employers to delay recognition and bargaining, in some cases for years, and to intimidate workers from voting in a union in a much-delayed election.

The abandonment of Joy Silk made a huge difference in employer behavior. As a 2017 article in the Santa Clara Law Review documented, eliminating Joy Silk’s standard for the remedy when employers refused to recognize their workers’ pro-union preference led to an immediate increase in employer violations of the NLRA’s letter and spirit. In the five years before Joy Silk was struck down, charges of employer intimidation totaled about 1,000 cases a year. Once the softball remedies of Gissel became the standard, charges exploded to a peak of 6,493 in 1981, after which they fell along with unionization efforts generally. Under Gissel, intimidation became the norm.

Abruzzo believed it would take going back to Joy Silk to make workers’ right to form unions—a right ensured by the NLRA—real again. Many employers, Abruzzo told me, are “abusing [the law’s] processes in order to coerce employees to change their minds and vote against the union, where it obviously enjoys majority support.” When Joy Silk was the standard, “there were many more elections that were untainted” by employer intimidation. And if the company, under a revived Joy Silk, enters into a bargaining process that it prolongs by stalling and refusing to reach an agreement, Abruzzo further believes the NLRB should compel it to compensate workers for what they would have made under a promptly negotiated contract, “if the employer had bargained in good faith from the start.”

Nothing in the PRO Act, or any labor law proposal over the past few decades, even touches on reviving Joy Silk. As one union official puts it, “we have a general counsel that’s pushing the envelope beyond what unions themselves have been pushing for.”

THE JOY SILK MEMO was just the beginning for Abruzzo. In short order, a flurry of other memos followed.

She called for increasing employers’ “back pay” payments to employees that they’ve illegally fired to include payments for the financial sacrifices the employees made due to the firing, such as withdrawals from 401(k)s or taking out loans. Her new standards also required employers to compensate unions for the expenses they incurred in fighting their employer’s illegal behavior. She proposed treating employers’ “captive audience” meetings, in which workers are invariably compelled to hear management’s case against unionizing, as an unfair labor practice, for which an appropriate remedy would be allowing the union to hold meetings with workers at their worksite as well. She recommended that costs to workers and unions be paid in full in any settlement agreements, while eliminating any “non-admission of guilt” language from such settlements to establish a pattern of violations if such were to exist. She recognized student athletes in lucrative college sports as employees under the NLRA. She ensured rights, protections, and remedies for immigrant workers under the NLRA.

And she instructed attorneys to hasten remedies under the NLRA’s 10(j) section by more frequently seeking cease-and-desist injunctions against offending employers. Abruzzo encouraged filing these injunctions not only when a worker in an organizing drive was illegally fired, but when an employer threatened to fire such workers, or to shut down the worksite if the workers go union. Both of those actions are also illegal under the NLRA. Abruzzo’s goal is to make sure that efforts to unlawfully thwart employees’ rights to form a union can “be nipped in the bud” while the organizing drive is still proceeding.

The Biden administration is clearly the most pro-union administration in American history, with its backing of the PRO Act, its recommendations for greater worker rights in the federal government, its extension of higher wage standards on federally funded projects, its preference for unionized companies in its domestic production bill, its groundbreaking demand for a fair union affiliation vote in a Mexican factory under the terms of the revised NAFTA, and the president’s own pro-worker message to the employees at Amazon’s Alabama warehouse. Even without Abruzzo’s efforts, this would be a significant step forward in the posture of a presidency toward the labor movement.

But few observers would dispute the assessment of Celine McNicholas, a former NLRB special counsel who is now the general counsel and director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, who tells me, “Installing Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel will be the most impactful action that the Biden administration took in its first term for working people.”

JENNIFER ABRUZZO HAS SPENT 23 of her 58 years as an attorney at the NLRB, starting out as a field attorney in the Miami office, rising to the position of deputy attorney for the Florida region, then moving at the Board’s request to its Washington, D.C., headquarters, where she rose to be deputy general counsel during the Obama administration. During the Trump years, she rotated out of government to the Communications Workers of America (CWA), where she served as special counsel until the Senate confirmed her nomination last summer.

Abruzzo grew up in a working-class family in the (then as now) working-class neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. Her father was an electrical engineer at ConEd; her mother was an X-ray technician at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Both were union members. Jennifer, her parents, and her siblings (she’s the eldest of four) lived in a three-room apartment. “Not three bedrooms,” she clarified. “Three rooms. But I had a roof over my head and food on the table, and having those union benefits definitely helped us.”

She attended parochial schools, then went to college at New York state colleges: SUNY Binghamton and SUNY Stony Brook. An early marriage brought her to Miami, where she had her son, divorced, and went to work in the human resources department of a South American–oriented branch of Deutsche Bank.

“I was divorced with a young child and needed to support us both,” she said, “so I ended up going to law school, the University of Miami Law School, at night,” while working at the bank during the day. No labor law classes were available at night, but Abruzzo took an evidence class with Michael Fischl, a former NLRB attorney who taught labor law in the daytime.

Fischl, now a law professor at the University of Connecticut, recalls that he taught that evidence class “with a heavy labor and employment law emphasis.” In a class of roughly 100 students, he says, Abruzzo “stood out for her thoughtfulness and the depth of her engagement,” so much so that she was invited to join a social justice and legal theory book group with other faculty members and students.

“It’s hard enough to work and go to law school at the same time,” Fischl says. “Add to that being a single mom. I’m reminded of that line about Ginger Rogers, that she did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.”

When an attorney’s position came open in the NLRB’s Miami office, Fischl recommended Abruzzo for the job, though she’d had just a year in private practice. At the NLRB, she spent a good deal of her time representing immigrants from both Central and South America, as well as Haiti.

“What drew me to the NLRB?” Abruzzo says. “Coming from a union household helped, but what that instilled in me was a very strong work ethic, and also being empathetic towards others who might not have as much as we did … I just wanted to ensure that I did everything I could to ensure that people were treated equitably.”

“I WOULD DESCRIBE JENNIFER as the master mechanic of the NLRB,” says Jody Calemine, the general counsel and chief of staff at CWA. “She’s worked there at every level, she knows what works, what doesn’t work. She has encyclopedic knowledge of the case law, knows all the arguments inside and out, and she truly believes in the Act.”

When McNicholas worked as an NLRB special counsel while Abruzzo was deputy general counsel during Obama’s presidency, “she helped me figure out how the agency worked,” McNicholas says. “All the regional offices are overseen by general counsel’s division of operations. She brought a field perspective to the job.”

Abruzzo’s attentiveness to the concerns of the Board’s far-flung staff is already the stuff of legend. Her zeal to make the NLRA work again has won her a particular following among the many young attorneys who work there.

“I’ve seen her with her young attorneys,” says Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney in private practice who represents unions and workers who are misclassified by their employers as independent contractors rather than employees. “They see this general counsel who is brilliant, who believes in the Act, who articulates their beliefs so eloquently and who works so hard.”

One of those young attorneys is Aaron Samsel, who works in the Board’s Washington headquarters. After going to work for the Board right out of law school, he left during the Trump presidency, but when Biden nominated Abruzzo for the general counsel’s post, he decided to go back. “Among all my colleagues, both staff attorneys and supervisory attorneys, there’s this feeling of profound relief to have a general counsel who they feel has their back,” Samsel says. “She really listens when people bring concerns to her, and she understands it all. She can get into the minutiae of handling a case.”

That understanding of how workers and employers actually interact in an organizing campaign underpins many of Abruzzo’s directions to her staff. Her directive on filing 10(j) injunctions against employers threatening their workers during organizing campaigns is based on her knowledge that the long-established practice of winning back-pay settlements for illegally fired workers years after they’ve been fired does nothing to stop such conduct when it’s being used to thwart a unionization campaign. “10(j) injunctions are the teeth of the Act,” says Gutman Dickinson, who under its terms has won a number of such cease-and-desist orders and orders to reinstate fired workers, “and Jennifer completely understands that.”

The understanding of how workers and employers actually interact in an organizing campaign underpins many of Abruzzo’s directions to staff.

Abruzzo’s memos take aim not just at the timing but also at the insufficiency of the penalties the NLRB has commonly assessed against employers—chiefly, offering back pay to illegally fired workers and posting a notice somewhere in the worksite that the employer has been found in violation of the NLRA and made such a payment. Abruzzo points out that the Act doesn’t allow for punitive damages, so that truly enforcing it requires that fired workers be made financially whole. That means making the employer cover all loans, credit card fees, and withdrawals from savings and retirement funds that the worker has been compelled to make.

The NLRB should be looking, Abruzzo told me, at “how can we put people back to the way it was before all this unlawful activity occurred, at whether there’s been emotional distress that can be particularly linked to an unlawful discharge, in much the way our sister agencies [like, for instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] seek such compensation.”

Harvard labor law professor Ben Sachs explains, “For decades, the lament of labor lawyers and organizers has been that the NLRA remedies are like a bad joke, so weak that it’s economically rational for employers to violate the law. Now, she’s done something that really wasn’t in the collective legal imagination: figured out how to increase remedies without congressional action. She’s found a number of ways to do exactly that.”

“Making employers who’ve broken the law pay the union back for its organizing expenses could be of major importance,” Sachs says. “She’s been imaginative in an arena where many of us were just lamenting.”

Another remedy that wasn’t in the collective legal imagination is Abruzzo’s proposal to declare captive audience meetings an unfair labor practice, the remedy for which should be enabling unions to hold their own meetings with workers, at the worksite. She also has called for making employers provide unions with the home addresses of workers during organizing campaigns, a remedy that’s particularly important at a time when an unprecedented number of employees are working from home.

In her memos, Abruzzo has said Board attorneys should file cases based on the argument that the misclassification of workers as independent contractors when they are actually employees is in itself an unfair labor practice under the NLRA, for which the Board can provide a remedy that states the workers are employees and thus eligible to unionize. The Trump-dominated Board had ruled that such misclassifications were not an unfair labor practice. That’s one of the Trump rulings, Abruzzo has stated, that violates the NLRA and should be overturned. And on March 17th, following Abruzzo’s memos, NLRB attorneys filed a complaint against a port trucking company at the Los Angeles harbor for the unfair labor practice of misclassifying its drivers, which, if upheld by an administrative law judge, would compel the firm to compensate them for lost wages and expenses and to provide a union with access to the drivers in an organizing campaign.

Misclassification is at the heart of the gig economy and, increasingly, the economy at large. Depending on the “common sense” standard of whether, say, a driver of a company’s trucks is an employee or a contractor, such a ruling could affect such mega-companies as FedEx, Amazon, Uber, and Lyft, not to mention countless smaller employers.

Abruzzo is taking on worker misclassification, a critical issue for port truckers.

As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein points out, due to the need to win support from Southern senators, the NLRA initially excluded farm and domestic workers (that is, Black workers) from the law’s guarantees. As a result of the civil rights and kindred movements, some New Deal measures, like the minimum wage, were finally extended to some of those workers in recent decades. This triggered a new tactic from employers, Lichtenstein says. “The guarantees of labor law have been chipped away to exempt other people: managers, and now ‘independent contractors.’ That exempts more and more people from New Deal standards and rights. It’s been a Republican project.”

Making misclassification a violation of the NLRA would go a long way, then, to revive not just the NLRA, but an entire suite of legal obligations—like the minimum wage and payments into the Social Security and unemployment insurance systems—that companies now evade by refusing to acknowledge their workers actually work for them.

BOTH THE QUALITY AND the quantity of Abruzzo’s directives have dazzled the labor and legal communities, while alarming management-side attorneys. At a recent American Bar Association meeting that Abruzzo addressed, one corporate lawyer was overheard remarking, “We may have to find a different country.”

Abruzzo’s suggested reforms certainly mark a departure from previous practices under Democratic as well as Republican administrations. In the assessment of one longtime union official, “the Board under Bill Clinton viewed the Act largely as they received it, accepting as precedents the interpretations that had watered it down. The Board under Obama sought to update the law to meet new developments in the economy, as they did in their joint employer ruling saying that the parent company shared in the liability of its franchisers if they violated the Act, a ruling that the courts subsequently struck down. With Abruzzo under Biden, the agenda is now to get rid of all the erosions of the Act that have essentially ended the worker rights the Act created and secured.”

NLRB veterans generally believe the Democratic majority on the current Board will establish rulings that are based on Abruzzo’s arguments. “The majority will likely be sympathetic to all her proposals,” says Wilma Liebman, who chaired the Board during Obama’s presidency. Liebman is concerned, however, that the Board may be stretched by the sheer number of precedent-challenging cases that Abruzzo brings before it.

Some labor attorneys are concerned for a different reason: that Abruzzo’s agenda is both too ambitious and too well publicized. “I’m surprised at how public she’s been about it all, putting out her theories step by step,” says one. “Does the publicity heighten the possibility that rulings will be challenged more quickly in the courts? She may be giving employers an unnecessary head start.”

The courts, after all, can overturn NLRB rulings, and no court since the 1920s has been as anti-labor as the Supreme Court is today. Every attorney and union official I’ve spoken with for this piece has been gloomy about the prospects of some of Abruzzo’s policies passing muster with such avowed union-haters as the Supreme Court’s Sam Alito and his five Republican colleagues. They point out, however, that it normally takes many years for NLRB rulings to reach the Supreme Court (“They’re too busy right now outlawing abortion,” one lawyer said), and that during that interval, Abruzzo’s suggested policies can make it significantly easier for workers to prevail, particularly the generation of young workers at universities and Starbucks and tech companies, who in growing numbers are moving to win a voice at work. A case in point: Shortly after she sent out her memo calling captive audience meetings an unfair labor practice, the union seeking to organize Amazon’s warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, put out a press release alleging just such violations, quoting her memo to bolster their case.

That may be one more reason, in addition to her determination to restore the worker rights encoded in the NLRA, and her general sense of justice, why Abruzzo looks to be in such a blessed hurry.

Categories Economy, Unions

Los Angeles: Teachers at 4 Charter Schools Plan to Strike Today

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
9

This just in:

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES
ADVISORY FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 28   

On-site Contact
Rosalina Cardenas 

C: 213-280-1144

E: rosalina@cardenasgroup.net


Follow Up ContactGlenn Goldstein

Organization & Field Services, AFT
C: 510-735-4815
E: ggoldste@aft.org

Charter educators to strike on Thursday, April 28, as management continues to deny right to unionize

Educators demand Alliance College-Ready Public Schools begin negotiations on the educators’ first contract after three years and multiple PERB violations

Educators at four Alliance College-Ready charter schools will be going on a one-day Unfair Labor Practice strike on Thursday, April 28, in response to the Alliance Board of Directors continued refusal to negotiate the educators’ first contract after multiple orders by the Public Employment Relations Board to bargain.

WHAT: One-day Unfair Labor Practice strike

WHEN & WHERE: Thursday, April 28, 2022

· MAIN EVENT (rally with speakers, followed by march) — 11:30 a.m.
2301 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007 (MAP)

· Picketing starts at 7:15 a.m. Main picket location is Gertz-Merkin 6-12.
2023 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007

WHO: Teachers, counselors, and education professionals from Alliance College-Ready charter schools, and rally speakers (below).

· Emcees: Brittany Cliffe and Erin Belefski (UTLA Alliance educators)

· Jamie Garcia, UTLA Alliance educator from Burton Tech High School

· Jackie Goldberg, LAUSD School Board Member District 5

· Gloria Santos & Manuela Chaidez, parents of Alliance students

· Ron Herrera, President of the LA County Federation of Labor

· Jeff Freitas, President of California Federation of Teachers

· Cecily Myart-Cruz, President of UTLA

VISUALS: Strike picket signs, banners, educators leafleting the community, rally, speakers, DJ, march after rally to school for afternoon picket.

A supermajority of educators at the four Alliance charter schools (Alliance Burton Tech, Alliance Gertz-Merkin, Alliance Leichtman Levine Family Foundation ESAT, and Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School) voted to unionize over three years ago with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). Since that time educators have gone on multiple occasions to the Alliance Board of Directors to get the board to begin negotiations, but they have refused to bargain.

On February 28, 2022, the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) announced that Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is in violation of the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA) for refusing to bargain with educators and once again ordered Alliance to negotiate.

However, the schools’ leadership have yet to meet with the educators to negotiate for their contract. 

Teachers, counselors, psychologists, and parents at the schools are coming together to ensure the highest quality of education at Alliance. Educators love their schools and students, and they believe that — through the collective voice that union membership and the bargaining process provides —  they can advocate for small class sizes, teacher and counselor recruitment and retention, health and safety, and a commitment to social, emotional, and educational support for students that will help build the schools Alliance students need and deserve.

###

 

About Alliance Educators United

 

Alliance Educators United is a movement of dedicated and passionate teachers, counselors, and education professionals in the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools committed to fulfilling the mission and vision of a college-ready education for all Alliance students. We are forming a union with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to have a collective and effective voice in the decision-making processes at our Alliance schools.

 

About UTLA

 

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is 35,000 educators in Los Angeles dedicated to quality public education

Categories Los Angeles, Unions

AFT Endorses Regulatory Reform of Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2022 //
13

The American Federation of Teachers released the following statement about the U.S. Department of Education’s proposals to reform the federal Charter Schools Program, which grants $440 million annually to open or expand charter schools. Authorized in 1994, when there were a small number of charter schools, the CSP has never been reformed in its nearly three decade history. The industry captured the program and glossed over widespread waste, fraud, and abuse in federally-funded charter schools.

The AFT wrote:

For Immediate Release
Wednesday, April 20

Contact:
Andrew Crook
607/280-6603
acrook@aft.org AFT Responds to Department of Education on Charter School Regulations

WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Education responding to proposed regulations on Charter Schools Program grants.

The text of the letter follows, and it can be read online with additional footnoting and formatting here.

~April 11, 2022

Ms. Porscheoy Brice

U.S. Department of Education

400 Maryland Avenue SW

Washington, DC 20202-5970

Dear Ms. Brice,

The American Federation of Teachers welcomes the opportunity to comment on the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations to the Charter Schools Program grant programs. These proposed regulations represent a positive development for America’s children, and if fully implemented, these improvements to the Charter Schools Program grant applications will not only advance equity, but also move to restore charter schools to their original purpose by integrating them into the broader education community.

We applaud the department’s proposed regulations, which seek to improve community integration of charter schools. We also applaud the department for taking steps to prevent for-profit charter schools—which studies have shown underperform, compared with both public schools and their nonprofit counterparts—from receiving charter school grants. These steps will undoubtedly improve educational outcomes for children in both charter and traditional public schools. As a union of 1.7 million educators, healthcare workers and public service workers, including educators at more than 250 charter schools, we appreciate that the department is seeking to increase collaboration between charters schools and traditional public schools

The AFT strongly supports the department’s collaboration priority:

We appreciate that the department is recognizing the need for collaboration between charter schools and district schools. Charter schools were originally intended to be vehicles for experimentation and collaboration, not walled gardens within our education system, and these proposed regulations reflect that the charter industry has strayed from that original intent. As a union of education professionals, we have concerns over the pervasiveness of noncompete and nondisclosure agreement practices in charter schools and the chilling effect that such agreements are already having on charter-district collaboration. 

We recommend that the Charter Schools Program grant applications be modified to have applicants certify that they will void all such noncompete/nondisclosure provisions, if they exist, during the life of the grant.

Noncompete clauses, which prevent charter teachers from taking jobs in traditional public schools for a set period of time (or within a geographic region proximate to the charter school), are obvious barriers to the department’s proposed priority of fostering district-charter collaboration. For example, according to Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian’s recently released book The Privatization of Everything, Summit Academy Schools of Ohio sued 50 teachers in three years for violating noncompete clauses.

There have been repeated suggestions that, beyond chilling collaboration, nondisclosure agreements prevented charter school teachers from blowing the whistle on fraud and malfeasance occurring at their schools.

We would ask that, in support of this priority, the CSP grant application be modified to include a certification by applicants that they either 1) do not utilize nondisclosure agreements and/or noncompete agreements at their schools, or 2) will void all such agreements for the life of the grant.

Collaboration between district schools and charter schools would be enhanced by putting district schools and charters on the same footing with respect to enrollment requirements:

Practices at certain charter schools have the effect of filtering out some subpopulations of students, leading to the concentration of higher-needs students in district schools. This behavior includes the counseling out of special education students; the use of entrance barriers that disincentivize enrollments of English language learners, low-income students and students with disabilities; and a reluctance to backfill when students leave the charter school. Charter schools that create enrollment barriers for ELLs, students with disabilities and low-income students are often already doing so in violation of federal law, but other disparate policies are not currently unlawful. The interests of district-charter collaboration would be furthered by asking applicants to disclose whether they engage in discriminatory enrollment practices.

Practices that exclude certain students from charter schools create divisions between district and charter teachers and administrators. In our experience, the prevalence of these practices varies significantly across the country and is unfortunately common in some states. The ACLU examined charter school enrollment barriers statewide in both Arizona and California, finding that more than 20 percent of California charter schools and 50 percent of surveyed Arizona charter schools utilized exclusionary enrollment practices.

These practices included denying applicants on the basis of prior academic performance, requiring application fees, capping special education enrollments, discouraging immigrant applicants and requiring parent volunteer hours.

While many exclusionary charter application practices amount to violations of the letter or spirit of the law (or both), charter schools are permitted under federal law to decline to backfill student vacancies created as a result of a student withdrawal or expulsion. When charter schools refuse to backfill vacancies, it both compounds existing student population disparities between district and charter schools and creates new ones. Student mobility is associated with lower student performance, so limiting midyear entrants gives charter schools an advantage that comes at the expense of the district schools that are required to accept all enrollments.

To preserve the department’s proposed priority of fostering district-charter collaboration, we suggest amending the proposed regulations to request that charter school applicants disclose information about their application, selection, turnover and backfilling practices. Specifically, applicants should certify that application materials are available in all languages spoken in the community; that they do not cap the number of students with a disability (or the type of students with a disability they accept); and that they do not charge a fee for applicants. If applicants currently operate charter schools, they should disclose annual student turnover figures for the past five years. The regulations should also be modified so that charter school applicants disclose whether they use admissions tests, consider past academic or behavioral issues during admissions, and backfill vacancies either midyear or between school years, and they should require applicants to disclose how they have recruited students from diverse populations across their catchment areas.

Unions can help facilitate a collaborative school atmosphere, and regulations should be modified to reward applicants who pledge to support their workers’ right to organize:

Collaboration between district school and charter school teachers would be easier if both groups were on the same professional footing. Unfortunately charter school teachers are often underpaid, and turnover in the industry is alarmingly high. Some charter schools operate with teaching staffs that are largely uncredentialed. Many operators in the charter school industry seem to have abandoned any attempt at employee retention, choosing instead to focus on building recruitment “pipelines” to solve the rapid turnover of their teaching force. The department’s laudable goal of fostering collaboration between district and charter schools will be difficult in high-turnover conditions and where significant disparities exist between district school and charter school staff.

We have seen, however, how beneficial it can be when charter and district teachers belong to the same union. In Chicago, several charter schools in the city are organized with the Chicago Teachers Union, with charter and district teachers belonging to the same union. The Chicago Teachers Union QUEST Center brings together both charter and district teachers for professional development courses. Unions can be the space where collaboration across district schools and charter schools can occur—but when charter teachers want to organize a union, their school management often stands in the way. In furtherance of the department’s stated goal of district-charter collaboration, as envisioned within these proposed regulations, we submit that the proposed regulations should be modified to reward schools that pledge not to interfere with teachers who wish to exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively.

The AFT respectfully requests that language be inserted into the grant application to allow applicants to make a good-faith certification that they will remain neutral in any union organizing effort for the term of the grant award.

We applaud the department on the introduction of a community impact analysis and recommend a few minor improvements:

The AFT supports provisions that would have applicants analyze the impact of charter expansion on the schools that the applicant is, or would be, drawing students from. The focus on preventing charter school expansion from undermining district desegregation efforts is a welcome metric, and we are pleased to see it included in the impact analysis. We would suggest that the regulations be expanded to include an analysis on the fiscal impact of proposed charter growth.

Charter school growth is universally understood to negatively affect the financial condition of the sending districts. Credit ratings agencies and academia have reached a consensus on this point. The ratings agency Moody’s has opined that charter school growth can drag down the finances of their host districts, writing that “charter schools can pull students and revenues away from districts faster than the districts can reduce their costs.” Districts, being unable to reduce costs as quickly as they lose funding for charter schools, are left with diminished resources for students in their public schools. That finding has been bolstered by academic research, which has endeavored to estimate the net fiscal impact of charter school growth on district finances.

While charter school proponents have suggested that charter competition will improve district resources, academic and credit rating agency opinion has coalesced around the opposite conclusion.

Moody’s has said that “A city that begins to lose students to a charter school can be forced to weaken educational programs because funding is tighter, which then begins to encourage more students to leave which then results in additional losses.’’ University of Michigan researcher David Arsen has conducted research in Michigan that supports this conclusion, noting that “contrary to expectations, Michigan school districts respond to charter competition by devoting a smaller share of their spending to instructional services.”6 Faced with decreased revenues, which “decline more rapidly than costs in districts losing students to charter schools,” school districts are simply unable to free up the resources needed to improve education for the students remaining in traditional public schools.

For far too long, the Charter Schools Programs grant programs have ignored the economic reality of charter school growth and its impact on the resources available to traditional public school students. When charter schools expand, traditional public school students are left with fewer resources. We urge the department to amend its community impact analysis guidelines to ask applicants whether a credit rating agency has identified charter school growth as a credit negative for the sending district(s) from which the proposed (or current) school intends to draw its students.

We appreciate the proposed regulations’ increased attention to the problems of the for-profit charter school industry: The proposed regulations’ focus on tightening disclosure regulations around education management organization contracts is well-warranted and consistent with ensuring that CSP funds are allocated to high-performing charter schools. The for-profit charter school industry is disgraceful, and charter operators should not be able to evade the eligibility requirements of the Charter Schools Program by utilizing complex organizational structures and service contracts.

Research shows that for-profit virtual charter schools—which comprise a significant portion of all for-profit schools—are poorly serving America’s students. Additionally, a recent National Education Policy Center study found that for-profit virtual charter schools underperform compared with their nonprofit and publicly run counterparts, suggesting that profit-seeking itself undermines educational success.

We appreciate the department’s proposed regulations:

We thank the Department of Education for these proposed regulations, which will significantly improve outcomes for students in both charter and traditional public schools. While this comment contains some minor suggestions we feel would make these proposed regulations more robust, the substance and spirit of the proposed regulations are a welcome indication that the department is serious about unifying a fractured education system and improving educational outcomes for all children, regardless of the type of public school they attend.

Sincerely,

Randi Weingarten

President, American Federation of Teachers

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The American Federation of Teachers is a union of 1.7 million professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.

Randi Weingarten Fedrick C. Ingram Evelyn DeJesus
PRESIDENT SECRETARY-TREASURER EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
Communications Department • 555 New Jersey Ave. N.W. • Washington, DC 20001 • T: 202-879-4458 • F: 202-879-4580 •  www.aft.org

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Who Is Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro?

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2022 //
14

Have you lost faith in our elected officials? Let me introduce you to my personal hero. Rosa DeLauro. I have met with her several times, and she was always attentive and thoughtful. I love her values, and I love her too. It’s a very small tribute to this great woman, but I take this opportunity to add her to the blog’s honor roll for standing up forcefully to the bullying of the charter lobby.

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro is one of the most powerful members of Congress. She is a Democrat from Connecticut. She is an outstanding liberal who fights for children and working people.

Please read her bio.

Rosa DeLauro is the Congresswoman from Connecticut’s Third Congressional District, which stretches from the Long Island Sound and New Haven, to the Naugatuck Valley and Waterbury. Rosa serves as the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee and sits on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and she is the Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, where she oversees our nation’s investments in education, health, and employment.

At the core of Rosa’s work is her fight for America’s working families. Rosa believes that we must raise the nation’s minimum wage, give all employees access to paid sick days, allow employees to take paid family and medical leave, and ensure equal pay for equal work. Every day, Rosa fights for legislation that would give all working families an opportunity to succeed.

Rosa believes that our first priority must be to strengthen the economy and create good middle class jobs. She supports tax cuts for working and middle class families, fought to expand the Child Tax Credit to provide tax relief to millions of families, and introduced the Young Child Tax Credit to give families with young children an economic lift.

Rosa has also fought to stop trade agreements that lower wages and ships jobs overseas, while also protecting the rights of employees and unions. She believes that we need to grow our economy by making smart innovative investments in our infrastructure, which is why she introduced legislation to create a National Infrastructure bank.

Rosa is a leader in fighting to improve and expand federal support for child nutrition and for modernizing our food safety system. She believes that the U.S. should have one agency assigned the responsibility for food safety, rather than the 15 different agencies that lay claim to different parts of our food system. Rosa fights against special interests, like tobacco and e-cigarettes, which seek to skirt our public health and safety rules.

As the Chair dealing with appropriations for Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education, Rosa is determined to increase support for education and make college more affordable for more American students and their families. She is also fighting to protect the Affordable Care Act so that all Americans have access to affordable care. Rosa strongly believes in the power of biomedical research and she is working to increase funding so that we can make lifesaving breakthroughs in science and medicine.

Rosa believes that we have a moral obligation to our nation’s veterans and their families, and her concern for these heroes extends to both their physical and mental well-being. Rosa supports a transformation in how the Department of Veterans Affairs is funded, including advanced appropriations for health services, to ensure its fiscal soundness; and she successfully championed legislation to guarantee that troops deploying to combat theaters get the mental health screening they need both before and after deployment, as well as championed legislation that now provides assistance to today’s Post-9/11 veterans choosing to pursue on-the-job training and apprenticeship programs.

Rosa belongs to 62 House caucus groups and is the co-chair of the Baby Caucus, the Long Island Sound Caucus, and the Food Safety Caucus.

Soon after earning degrees from Marymount College and Columbia University, Rosa followed her parents’ footsteps into public service, serving as the first Executive Director of EMILY’s List, a national organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in elected office; Executive Director of Countdown ’87, the national campaign that successfully stopped U.S. military aid to the Nicaraguan Contras; and as Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd. In 1990, Rosa was elected to the House of Representatives, and she has served as the Congresswoman from Connecticut’s Third Congressional District ever since.

Rosa is married to Stanley Greenberg. Their children—Anna, Kathryn, and Jonathan Greenberg—all are grown and pursuing careers. Rosa and Stan have six grandchildren, Rigby, Teo, Sadie, Jasper, Paola and Gus.

Download Congresswoman DeLauro’s Biography

Download Congresswoman DeLauro’s Official Photo

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and I in 2018: My hero.

Categories Connecticut, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Honor Roll, Justice, Supporting public schools, Unions

Massachusetts: Starbucks Employees Vote to Unionize

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2022 //
25

Employees at two Starbucks in Massachusetts have voted to join a union. There are 9,000 or so Starbucks. More of them in the state and other states are considering unionizing. Is a revival of unions in the private sector beginning?

Baristas at the two locations first petitioned to unionize in December, inspired by similar action at cafes in Buffalo, New York. A total of 15 Massachusetts Starbucks — and nearly 200 across 29 states — have since taken steps to form a union.

Employees at two Boston-area Starbucks cafes voted unanimously to formally unionize Monday afternoon — a first for the coffee giant in Massachusetts.

Categories Equity, Unions

Amazon Workers in Staten Island, New York, Warehouse Vote to Unionize

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2022 //
16

This could be a historic moment for the American labor movement. Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, voted to join a union.

NEW YORK — Workers voted Friday to unionize an Amazon Staten Island warehouse, a historic decision that marks the first successful U.S. effort at the e-commerce giant and a major victory for the domestic labor movement.


Amazon, the country’s second-largest private employer, has long fended off attempts to unionize workers at its warehouse — a highly prized target among traditional labor groups who have seen membership wane in recent years.

But a small, upstart independent union led by a former employee of the Staten Island warehouse mounted the first successful campaign to unionize Amazon workers, breaking many of the traditional organizing rules and relying on workers‘ momentum.

The vote could start a cascading effect on other Amazon warehouses in the country, labor experts say, encouraging others to consider unionizing. That could transform the way the e-commerce giant conducts business and prioritizes the treatment of workers.


The Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island will need to ratify a contract to become union members, the next step in an already lengthy process that former Amazon worker Chris Smalls began last year as leader of the Amazon Labor Union.

A separate union vote brought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in Bessemer, Ala., was tallied Thursday. The union failed to secure the vote, but it was close enough that the number of contested ballots that are still pending could change the result. The final result won’t be decided for weeks or months.

Categories Unions

Eric Blanc Reports on the Minneapolis Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2022 //
6

Eric Blanc wrote a book about the teachers’ strikes titled Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics.

He is in Minneapolis now covering the teachers’ strike that started last Tuesday.

He writes in The Nation:

Thousands of educators are on strike in Minneapolis, two years into a pandemic that has pushed public education to a breaking point across the country. With the future of education in unprecedented limbo, the stakes are high—and not just in the Twin Cities.

Public schools were in crisis well before Covid-19. Especially in predominantly non-white, working-class school districts like Minneapolis, decades of underfunding, privatization, high-stakes testing, and low educator pay made it increasingly difficult for teachers and support staff to provide the education their students deserve.

In the Twin Cities and beyond, the past two years have reversed Red for Ed’s political momentum and exacerbated structural stressors and inequities, resulting in increased educator outflows from the profession and increased familyoutflows from public schools. By late 2021, a quarter of teachers, and almost half of Black teachers, indicated in national surveys that they were considering leaving their jobs. Over the past 18 months, Minneapolis Public Schools have lost over 640 teachers and support professionals.

Schools have lacked basic resources necessary to address students’ mental distress in the face of pandemic conditions, the police murder of George Floyd, and subsequent social unrest. In line with a growing trend of progressive unions to “bargain for the common good,” one of the Minneapolis strike’s major demands is for every school to be provided with a social worker and counselor every day, as well as increased hiring of school psychologists. “As educators, we have been saying ‘What about the kids?’ for decades,” explains Greta Callahan, president of the teachers’ chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. “And right now we’re at a place where we can no longer allow students to pay for the mistakes made by those at the top.”

Shortages of support staff, substitutes, and teachers in Minneapolis and St. Paul have deepened the difficulties of those educators who remain. This is especially the case for educational support professionals (ESPs), half of whom are people of color. “If we’re going to talk about racial justice, we have to talk about how we treat everybody in our system,” explains Shaun Laden, president of the educational support professionals’ chapter of Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. “The district doesn’t treat our members of color and our hourly workers with the dignity and respect that they deserve.” Faced with increased work burdens and a less-than-living wage—many ESPs make as low as $24,000 a year—it is not surprising that Sahan Journal found a 22 percent vacancy rate for Minneapolis ESPs, with many choosing instead to work at McDonalds or as FedEx delivery drivers. Unions are demanding that the starting pay for 90 percent of ESPs be bumped up to $35,000.

Of course, teachers are striking for higher pay but much more is involved. Open the link and read on.

Categories Minneapolis, Teachers, Unions

Minneapolis: Union Plans Strike on Tuesday

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2022 //
9


For Immediate Release
March 7, 2022

Contact:
Natasha Dockter
Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and
Education Support Professionals
natasha.dockter@gmail.com
651-387-5681


Minneapolis educators to strike Tuesday for safe and stable schools

MINNEAPOLIS, March 7, 2022 – The educators of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Education Support Professionals will go on strike Tuesday for the safe and stable schools students deserve. Despite days in public bargaining and mediations, including more than 65 hours in the last week, the district continues to refuse to work with MFT to create systemic change and remains entrenched in the unacceptable status quo. 
 
President Greta Callahan of the MFT teachers chapter, President Shaun Laden of the MFT ESP chapter and the presidents of Education Minnesota, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association will attend a news conference at 7:30 a.m. Tuesdayoutside Justice Page Middle School, 1W. 49th S., Minneapolis.
 
The members of the MFT will begin picketing outside their schools and other worksites at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. The membership will come together for a large rally at 12:15 p.m. at the Minneapolis Public Schools Nutrition Center, 812 Plymouth Avenue North, Minneapolis, before marching approximately 1 mile to the MPS Davis Center, 1250 W Broadway Ave, Minneapolis.
 
Logistics:
Picketing begins at schools and other worksites at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday
News conference with MFT presidents and state and national presidents 7:30 a.m. Tuesday at Justice Page Middle School, 1W. 49th S., Minneapolis
Rally starting at 12:15 p.m. Tuesday at Minneapolis Public Schools Nutrition Center, 812 Plymouth Avenue North, Minneapolis
Laden said:  “This bargaining campaign started with the very simple idea that for the education support professionals who are told every day that our schools can’t run without us, one job should be enough. We’re the most racially diverse group of educators in a district with administrators who say they care about racial equity. We have been demanding that the administrators at the bargaining table put their money where their mouth is and they have refused. Now is the time for the school board to intervene and settle a deal that pays ESP a starting wage of $35,000 a year.”
 
Callahan said: “For almost two years, we’ve been trying to reach agreements around safe and stable schools for students and those closest to them, but the administration has stubbornly defended an unacceptable status quo. We are the defenders of public education and we’re not going to slow down, or give up, until we make real progress addressing the mental health crisis in our schools, reducing class sizes and caseloads so students are receiving the individualized attention they need, and increasing educator compensation so that we don’t continue to lose staff, especially educators of color, to surrounding districts and other professions.”
 
Denise Specht, president of Education Minnesota, said: “Nearly 90,000 educators across Minnesota are standing with our union family in Minneapolis because what they’re fighting for is what we’re all fighting for: Schools that will give every student the chance to pursue their dreams. The same issues are being negotiated all over the state, from living wages for ESPs, to more mental health supports for students, to managing the crushing caseload for SpEd teachers, to recruiting and retaining more teachers of color,  to creating time for educators to give their students enough individual attention. We’re in a rich state with a $9.25 billion surplus. No educator should have to fight this hard for the schools our students deserve, but if that’s what it takes, we’re with you.”
 
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said: “With over $250 million in pandemic relief funds, the time is now to invest in the safe and stable schools that Minneapolis students need now more than ever. The three million members of the National Education Association are proud to stand with our siblings in Minneapolis. The last two years have demonstrated that the status quo is not good enough. Minneapolis students and their families have weathered a pandemic, continued police violence, and an economic system that has left students, their families, and educators behind. These students deserve class sizes small enough for one-to-one attention as well as investments in mental health services and social-emotional learning.  MPS must also invest in systematic changes that improve the recruitment and retention of educators of color as well as a living wage for education support professionals. Education support professionals represent a critical workforce in our schools providing essential supports students depend on. MPS has the resources to make these investments. The question is whether they value Minneapolis students as much as their educators do.”
 
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said: “The federal government has provided an unprecedented amount of recovery funding to school districts to address problems related to the pandemic, including student recovery, staff shortages and school safety. There is no excuse for districts to make cuts in light of this historic infusion of funds. And the economy is showing real signs of growth. Indeed, Minnesota just announced a $9.25 billion surplus.
 
“Our kids, their families and educators have been through tremendous challenges in the last two years; they have done their share to navigate the rough seas together. Educators and students should be the priorities, and districts should provide the conditions and environment they need to succeed. School districts should respect their educators and ensure that students have the programs and services they need to thrive,” Weingarten said.
 
The union’s safe and stable schools agenda includes:

  • Paying a living wage for education support professionals to stabilize this critical workforce, because students need the stability of working with one paraprofessional throughout the school year. For ESPs, this means raising the starting salary from about $24,000 a year to $35,000 through increases in hours and rate of pay.
  • Making systemic changes to improve the recruitment and retention of educators of color, which benefits all of MPS.
  • Improving student-to-mental health professional ratios because students shouldn’t have to wait weeks for an appointment with a counselor or social worker.
  • Lowering class sizes because students learn best when their classrooms aren’t overcrowded and underfunded.
  • Paying competitive salaries for licensed staff to stop the exodus of teachers from MPS. State data show the average salary of Minneapolis teachers is ranked 28 out of 46 districts in the seven-county metro area.

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Categories Minneapolis, Unions
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