The number of debt-free college plans beginning to circulate can be confusing, but the core message is simple: Higher education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and without the cost of crippling debt.
The leaders of five major unions issued a statement expressing their disappointment with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear a case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, that challenges fees non-union members pay.
In an event at the AFT, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) reached beyond recent calls for student loan forgiveness and free community college to urge the nation not just toward lower or more manageable debt, but toward an entirely debt-free education.
Adjunct faculty lack many things: office space, opportunities for professional development, influence over course content and fair pay. But what rises to the top of this litany of deficits is respect.
The fact that student debt continues to soar is troubling enough. Now there is clear evidence that it also deepens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Thanks to two Florida AFT members, a school bus driver and monitor, 18 schoolchildren safely escaped a fiery bus on the way to school.
The AFT has joined a broad coalition of organizations, from its sister unions to Student Veterans of America, from the National Young Farmers Coalition to Jobs with Justice and the Center for American Progress, to demand that elected officials take action and address college affordability within the next six months.
In her latest column appearing in the New York Times, AFT President Randi Weingarten praises the promising action of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where Democrats and Republicans came together to unanimously pass a bill to overhaul No Child Left Behind.
The presidents of the nation's two largest teachers unions offered a solid shared vision for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act at a Washington, D.C., meeting with state policy chiefs and in a joint keynote address to a nationwide audience of classroom educators participating in Share My Lesson's third annual virtual conference.
From grass-roots lobbying on Capitol Hill to a telephone town hall meeting, the AFT focused intense activity and energy in the first days of March on the all-important reauthorization of the keystone federal law for K-12 education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.