Blog
MEA Voice Magazine – December 2019
Click to view online. In this issue: ICYMI – Save with Staples Above and Beyond From Discouraged to Empowered: My Story of Union Advocacy Member-Organizers Make A Difference Innovation: Place-Based Education – One Chapter at a Time My View: Three — ‘Read or Flunk’ Rules Inspire Fear How Do We Solve Educator Shortages? Union Bargains […]
Member Spotlight: Amber Guerreiro
Amber Guerreiro felt exhausted one Friday night, so the Greenville Middle School teacher wrote her thoughts down, titled “A Day in the Life of a Teacher,” and put it on Facebook. She thought a few teacher friends might relate. Her post went viral with more than 108,000 shares. What was it that resonated with so many people? […]
Union Bargains Improvements in Flint
Five years after accepting dramatic concessions to help pull Flint Community Schools out of deficit spending, the district’s teachers have overwhelmingly approved a contract that raises pay, lowers class sizes, and restores MESSA health care benefits, among other improvements. In addition, added provisions aim to create a new educator pipeline through a tuition reimbursement plan for long-term substitute […]
How Do We Solve Educator Shortages?
If you put a bunch of educators in a room and ask them to solve what ails public education these days, you might expect they would produce a pretty darn amazing set of recommendations. Lansing grades 7-8 teacher Erika Bushey reports out on her group's recommendations for recruiting and retaining educators. Expectation confirmed. Over several weeks this fall, [...]
Opinion: To address literacy, understand link with poverty
December 18, 2019 By PAULA HERBART/President – Michigan Education Association Some of us remember the old “Reading is Fundamental” ad campaign, which encouraged parents to read to their children. Today, that fundamental is even more critical, especially in light of how poverty and lagging literacy levels intersect. Too often, lawmakers look for “silver bullet” solutions […]
My View: Three—‘Read or Flunk’ Rules Inspire Fear
“I know my child struggles in reading, but will she pass third grade?” These gut-wrenching words were tearfully repeated many times to me during parent teacher conferences this October. I tried to encourage parents to focus on inspiring a love of reading in their child. I tried to share where benchmark scores, classroom observations, and assignments indicated […]
Watch MEA’s Mallory Rivard in Miss America Pageant
MEA member Mallory Rivard emerged the winner in a preliminary round of this year’s Miss America pageant, earning a $1,500 scholarship award for her top score in the overall interview round. A first-grade teacher in Bay City, Rivard was crowned Miss Michigan in June. She is the first winner in Miss Michigan pageant history to […]
Funding, Literacy Top Launch Michigan Recommendations
Amid a contentious political scene nationally, a diverse group of Michigan leaders from the education, business, civic, and philanthropic realms – often at odds in the political arena – have spent the past 18 months seeking common ground on education policy. On Wednesday, the unusual coalition known as Launch Michigan released its first set of […]
Innovation: Place-Based Education One Chapter at a Time
By Brenda Ortega MEA Voice Editor When MEA member Bob Thomson goes to a conference to present data from his “place-based” teaching approach in Alpena Community Schools, educators in attendance tend to doubt they could follow in his footsteps. “If all I do is share the size of this, what it looks like and all the partners […]