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New study: NOLA charter schools deliver inequitable educations

A new study from Stanford University says that the proliferation of charter schools in New Orleans has “created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage, operating in a hierarchy that provides very different types of schools and to different types of children.”

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BESE okays controversial test scoring

BESE Report - October, 2015

With elections looming and several members facing tough re-election fights, the last thing that members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education wanted was a contentious issue in this week’s meeting.

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AFT-Wisconsin State Employee Council: Proposed civil service changes will increase corruption

The State Employees Council of AFT-Wisconsin issued the following statement today in response to proposed changes to state civil service law, and urged Wisconsinites to contact their legislators to oppose this attempt to weaken civil service:

The recent Republican proposal to reform Wisconsin’s Civil Service rules is an attempt to degrade the work of state employees, and will only serve to introduce more corruption into state government.

The Civil Service System was created to counteract the influence of politicians on state jobs.  Allowing politicians to essentially appoint public employees

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Republicans threaten state civil service protections

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports today that Scott Walker and Republicans in the state legislature have hatched a scheme to weaken Wisconsin's civil service protections, which have prevented politicians from using government jobs as patronage for their supporters and from firing employees for political reasons for more than a century.  Under the guise of "modernization," Walker and his supporters are proposing to weaken just cause protections, eliminate the state civil service test, shorten the appeals process for workers being disciplined or fired, and centralize all state hiring under

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UW merger with tech colleges a bad idea

Be sure to check out the op-ed by retired Milwaukee Area Technical College instructor and former Local 212 Executive Vice-President Charlie Dee that lays out why the secretive plan to merge the Wisconsin Technical College System and the UW Colleges would be a disaster: "The first thing a responsible committee would do is research what happened when other states tried this. It would discover that mergers in Minnesota, Georgia, Alaska, Connecticut and New Jersey have failed to produced expected savings, but instead have created myriad problems."

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AFT-Wisconsin member and Marine veteran calls on Scott Walker to apologize

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When Scott Walker compared 100,000 peaceful protestors - teachers, parents, police officers, fire fighters, students, nurses, and more - to the terrorists in ISIS, it hit home for William Schuth, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and a member of AFT local 3220, the UW-Madison Teaching Assistants' Association.  William has created a petition calling on Walker to apologize for his remarks: "Gov. Walker, veterans and service members who risked their lives to fight terrorism deserve better than that. Americans who speak up for their rights deserve better than that. Please, Gov. Walker, show some courage: publicly take ownership of your disrespectful comments and apologize."

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