CFT Labor in the Schools Committee, October 2009, bottom row, left to right: Kenadi Le, Adrienne Denny, Marchand Russell, Ed Wang (CFT staff); top row:  Fred Glass (CFT staff), Bill Morgan, Diane Bush, Tom Edminster, Jose Colon, Jim Miller, and Gerald Vanderpot.  Not shown:  Linda Tubach, John Delloro, Joel Flores, Lori Minor, Sheri Pavelka, Bill Shields, and Sandra Warmington.

Collective Bargaining Education Project
The Collective Bargaining Education Project (CBEP) was founded in 1997 to promote education about how labor and management resolve workplace conflicts through the methods developed in collective bargaining negotiations. Utilizing a simulation/role play method, the award-winning program brings lessons throughout the year to high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere. More...

Golden Lands, Working Hands
An award-winning ten-part, three hour video series that originally aired on California PBS stations, this curriculum brings labor history alive for high school and college students.  Praised by educators, labor leaders, and students, GLWH explores California history from the point of view of its working families.  More...

Speaker's Commission on Labor Education
Founded by Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg in 2001, the Commission helps students understand the role of the labor movement in history and contemporary society. Its projects have included legislation, exhibits, and supplementary Social Studies curricula approved by the California Department of Education.  Each year the Commission supports Labor History Week with events and information throughout the state.  More...

Education and Labor Collaborative
The Education and Labor Collaborative was founded by a group of progressive university teacher preparation professors interested in why there is little labor education in K-12 social studies, and dedicated to remedying that problem.  Members of the CFT Labor in the Schools Committee serve on its advisory board.  It has held two conferences and published a book, Organizing the Curriculum, on the topic.  This year's conference (click here for a report) was held at Antioch University and in the offices of United Teachers Los Angeles April 24-25, on the theme of "Teaching for a new 'New Deal.'" In March 2008, several CFT Labor in the Schools Committee members traveled to the United Federation of Teachers offices in New York to join like minded educators and labor activists in the first conference.  More...

National K-12 Labor Education Conference
The Labor in the Schools Committee proposed a resolution at the 2008 CFT convention to call on the AFT to sponsor a national K-12 Labor Education conference and task force.  Thanks to networking at the Education and Labor Collaborative conference in New York, a similar resolution then passed the United Federation of Teachers.  Working together, the CFT and UFT helped the resolution pass the summer 2008 AFT convention in Chicago.  A similar resolution passed the national AFL-CIO convention in September 2009.  Pledges of support have come from the United Association for Labor Education and the International Labor Communications Association.

Around the Committee
Committee members Bill Morgan and Fred Glass presented at the "Reviving the New Deal" conference in San Francisco in October 2008.  But the driver behind the conference was another Committee member, Bill Shields of CCSF Labor and Community Studies.  The conference marked the 75th anniversary of the New Deal, and its enthusiastic participants agreed that nothing would work better to help the United States move forward than to revisit the programs that helped lift the country out of the Great Depression....Committee co-chair Linda Tubach brought the Collective Bargaining Education Project to Kentucky in October.  Working nonstop for two days, she ran the LAUSD program for a hundred high school students....The hyperproductive Bill Morgan put the finishing touches on the text for the Committee's elementary curriculum, Mission Labor.  A bilingual English/Spanish pamphlet for fourth grade social studies, the curriculum should be ready for publication by the end of 2009....And Phyllis Chiu's smash hit, Yummy Pizza Company, is being revised as the Yummy Strawberry Company, set for rollout in December as well.