From the AFT/Alliance Chief

Editorial

I work extremely hard at what I do. I believe in public education and the teachers and school employees who provide it. Bargaining and negotiating for the best deal for students, teachers and school employees in a non-collective bargaining state is very difficult.

In other places where collective bargaining is legal, employees are allowed to ratify the contract to make it binding. Not so in Texas. This creates a non-democratic environment for Dallas ISD employees that is not healthy.

Being the majority organization, elected by employees to represent them, is a great responsibility. Alliance/AFT works hard at delivering the things our members and non-members tell us are important. Loyal members of the minority organizations or members of no-organization are free to criticize us without accountability or responsibility. These organizational entities are not required or expected to deliver anything.

Finally, public education will soon be extinct if, as an institution, it does not respond to the complaints articulated by the parents of the students in our schools. They vote with their feet. They are walking out of our public schools and selecting other venues for educating their children.

In sum, public school can not remain the same. We must work at improving, changing it; making it more responsive to parents and students.

There is the old saying that we have all heard: If you keep doing what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

We can’t afford that in public education. Teachers and school employees can and must make a difference in the seed of democracy: public education.