Education Secretary Arne Duncan takes part in “Taking Action: Creating Model Emergency Management Plans for Schools, Institutions of Higher Education, and Houses of Worship”, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building South Court Auditorium, Feb. 27, 2013. The meeting was held as part of the President’s plan to protect our children and communities by reducing gun violence. Answering questions were, from left: John McDonald, Executive Director of Security and Emergency Management, Jefferson County Public Schools; Marleen Wong, Associate Dean, University of Southern California School of Social Work; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; Major Ian A. Moffett, Miami Police Department; Robert Fein, Forensic and National Security Psychologist; and Natalie Hammond, Teacher, Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Yesterday, over 100 leaders from across the country came to the White House to join Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano for a discussion about how to make our schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship safer through the creation of high-quality emergency management plans.

Secretary Duncan noted that, “Some tough lessons we’ve learned over time, some inspiring lessons as well, but if we can all learn from each other, learn together, and go back home to our communities, it makes me hopeful about where we can go despite the tremendous challenges we face.”

On January 16^th, President Obama, through an executive action, directed the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, Justice, and Health and Human Services to work together to create model emergency management plans for these communities. Yesterday’s event helped inform the agencies’ work to implement that executive action. The President’s plan to reduce gun violence includes a total of 23 executive actions, as well as specific proposals that he has called on Congress to act on right away.

The event included three panels focused on the emergency management needs of schools, institutions of higher education, and houses of worship, and lessons learned from past mass shootings. The panels were moderated by Secretary Duncan, Secretary Napolitano and Richard McFeely, an Executive Assistant Director at the FBI. A range of experts from the law enforcement, mental health, faith, education and emergency management communities, as well as survivors of gun violence, participated in panels and contributed to a robust audience discussion.

Many of the panelists noted the importance of not only having high quality emergency plans in place, but making sure all key parties, from law enforcement, to teachers, to clergy, are involved in formulating these plans. It’s important that all perspectives are included so that all key players have an in-depth understanding of the plan, can train others on the plan, and can execute the plan in case of emergency. As Secretary Napolitano stated, “It’s hard to do a lot of this for the first time in a crisis.”

Wrapping up the day, Secretary Napolitano said that “We’ll take the ideas, the thoughts, the suggestions, and build them into the plans that we are working on with our colleagues…This will be an ongoing dialogue. We don’t stop with a session.”

On January 17, the day after the President released his gun violence prevention plan, the Vice President spoke to the U.S. Conference of Mayors about the plan. Last week, the Conference officially endorsed the President and Vice President’s proposals.  

Vice President Joe Biden addresses the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, at the Capital Hilton, in Washington, DC, Jan. 17, 2013. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann).

On January 24th, the Vice President participated in a “Fireside Hangout” hosted by Google, talking with Google+ users from across the country about the Administration’s plan to reduce gun violence. Catch up on that conversation now: 

On January 25th, the Vice President traveled to Richmond, Virginia to hold a roundtable discussion with experts who helped improve Virginia’s background check system after the Virginia Tech shooting. Along with Secretaries Napolitano and Sebelius, Senator Tim Kaine, and Congressman Bobby Scott, they talked about what still needs to be done to make sure that there is a criminal background check for every gun sale in America.

The roundtable discussed the need to make sure states and the Federal government are making complete information available to our background check system about those who aren’t allowed to have guns. The President’s gun violence plan includes four executive actions to do just that. But to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, we also need Congress to pass new legislation requiring background checks for all gun sales, with common-sense exceptions for cases like transfers between family members.

On Monday, January 28th, the President and Vice President, along with members of the Cabinet, met with police chiefs and sheriffs from across the country about their work on the ground to reduce gun violence. Police chiefs from Aurora, Oak Creek, and Newtown shared their personal stories and the lessons they have learned from responding to and recovering from a mass shooting. Our plan would give law enforcement additional tools to prevent and prosecute gun crime by making gun trafficking a Federal crime with serious penalties, helping communities put 15,000 cops on the street, and taking other common-sense steps.

Senator Patrick Leahy chaired a hearing last week at which several witnesses explained why the President’s proposals are so important. Two of those witnesses, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly, also came to meet with President Obama at the White House on Wednesday. 

President Barack Obama greets former Rep. Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, in the Oval Office after they testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence, Jan. 30, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Finally, Vice President Biden personally called on Congress to act when he traveled to the Hill last Thursday to meet with Democratic Senators. Congress is already making progress on passing key components of the President’s plan. Multiple bills that would take steps to reduce gun violence have been introduced in the Senate. The Vice President urged his former colleagues to continue this progress, work quickly, and take the bold action this moment demands.

There is more activity to come. Today the President travels to Minnesota to discuss his plan. We will continue to provide updates as we go forward.  

For more information:

• Read more about President Obama's plan to reduce gun violence
• Watch: Vice President Biden's Google+ Hangout on reducing gun violence
• Watch: Four kids ask President Obama to take action on gun violence

Vice President Joe Biden holds an event on College affordability with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at Maury High School in Norfolk, Virginia, April 3, 2012. (Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)

Ed note: This post is updated with a correction to the number of children who would lose access to Head Start.

Yesterday, the Vice President had a powerful message for the graduating seniors, parents, and teachers at Maury High School in Norfolk, Virginia – one that students across the country should hear and one that drives this Administration’s commitment to higher education. He told the Maury students:

You are the most qualified generation in history. And we have an obligation. We have an obligation to equip you or at least give you the opportunity to go out and plumb that potential.

For months now, Vice President Biden has been traveling around the country talking about the importance of college and the need to make it more affordable. But the graduating seniors and parents the Vice President spoke to and heard from yesterday know all too well that college isn’t as accessible as it used to be. And when college isn’t accessible, the potential of the next generation is at risk. As a result of rising tuitions and the tough economy, more and more families are facing difficult choices about how or even if they can finance a college education for their children.

As the Vice President said yesterday, that’s why this Administration has consistently focused on making college more affordable and accessible for low-income and middle-class families. Since President Obama and Vice President Biden took office, this Administration has supported college affordability and access through multiple measures:

• We increased the maximum Pell award from $4,731 in 2008 to $5,550 today. Nearly 10 million students go to college with the help of a Pell grant each year.
• We made our education spending go further by ending subsidies for banks that act as middlemen for federal student loans.
• We created a tax credit that provides up to $2,500 per year – that’s $10,000 over four years – to help students and their families pay for tuition, fees and books. An estimated 9.4 million families are expected to claim this tax credit for 2011.
• We reformed the way students pay back their federal loans, so students will be able to cap their monthly payments at 10 percent of their discretionary income. This will help make sure that graduates aren’t forced to choose between paying for food or rent or their college loans. 

And we aren’t done yet. The President and Vice President continue to call on Congress to permanently extend the $2,500-per-year tax credit for college costs, which is set to expire at the end of the year. We want to double the number of federal work-study slots over the next five years and expand the Perkins loan program to serve 3 million students. And we want to stop interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans from doubling  this summer, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

These proposals would mean a lot for the Maury High students the Vice President spoke with yesterday and millions more across the country. Unfortunately, the budget that Republicans just put forward would go in the exact opposite direction by cutting investments in key education programs like Pell Grants and work study.   

If enacted, the House Republican proposal would reduce the value of Pell Grants for nearly 10 million students nationwide. In Virginia, students would see their grants cut by an average of $850.  Nationwide, almost 1 million fewer students would receive any Pell Grant at all by 2014. And 129,000 work-study positions would be eliminated nationwide, including 2,570 in Virginia.

The cuts Republicans want would hit our youngest kids too – by 2014, 250,000 children would lose access to Head Start, and lose with it the opportunity to start kindergarten ready to succeed. That includes 3,700 children in Virginia. The state would lose over $100 million in funding for elementary and secondary education, including funding for special ed for students who need a bit more help. Nationwide, $4.8 billion in these essential funds would be cut. These kinds of cuts would be felt in states across the country.

Over the coming months, the Vice President will continue to talk about our obligation to invest in the potential of the next generation. And he will continue to fight back against proposals, like the House Republican budget, that roll back investments in our young people and threaten to limit their opportunities to succeed.

Maureen Tracey-Mooney is Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Vice President

These educators represent 150 school districts, and they came together to talk about how to use labor-management collaboration to improve student achievement and transform schools. Each participating district was required to bring each of these kinds of leaders, so that all the decision makers were at the table. Even more, in order to be selected each team had to commit to continuing this work beyond just a few days in Denver, pledging to address tough issues like evaluation, professional development and top to bottom accountability.

Too often we talk about what divides teachers and school district leadership. This conference, called by the Department of Education and co-sponsored by the national organizations of many of the stakeholders represented, showed the enthusiasm for this kind of collaborative work. In some places, collaboration between labor and management on these issues has been working for years or even decades, sometimes at the very cutting edge of reform. At the conference, I got to hear many of the stories, too often not told, of this kind of successful work between school districts and unions.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan participates in a panel with heads of some of the conference’s co-sponsors: George Cohen, Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service; Michael Casserly, Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools; Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers. Denver, Colorado, February 18, 2011. (by Department of Education)

The team from Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, was particularly inspiring. While Montgomery County has historically been a wealthy community, a decade ago the district saw that the county had become highly urbanized, with the county as a whole becoming a majority minority community. Schools were divided into two de facto districts: one very wealthy set of schools with good student performance and one very poor set of schools with low student achievement. In response to this inequity, a broad team of district leadership – including labor (representing teachers, support staff and administrators), the superintendent and the school board began to put in place a plan to close the achievement gap in their district. The group met every two weeks to make decisions together about the budget and school policies, so every member of the team had a full understanding of where there were resources (and where there were not).

This team gradually put into place a professional growth system for teachers, administrators and support staff, with the aim of improving performance at all levels of the district. For teachers, the evaluation system is focused on improving teaching, with a year of evaluation – which includes student data -- followed by two years of targeted professional development. Evaluation is used not as a tool to punish teachers but to improve teaching and student performance. As a result of these growth opportunities for support staff, the district has seen 454 support staff move into careers as teachers or supervisors.

Their work is achieving results. In 2000, Broad Acres Elementary School, the highest poverty school in the district, was also the lowest performing elementary school. The district and the unions together designed a plan to transform the school, including training, teachers working together in teams and teacher leadership. In just three years, Broad Acres Elementary went from being one of the worst performing schools in the district, to having student achievement levels on par with schools serving far wealthier parts of the county.

Another powerful example was ABC Unified School District in Los Angeles County.  In response to a 1993 teacher strike, the local teachers union and ABC Unified decided they had to find a better way, and began the difficult discussions necessary to forge a partnership.  The partnership has particularly focused on teacher recruitment and retention and funding teacher-selected, school-specific, research-based instructional programs. Their work together is yielding results. Every year since the partnership began, the district’s score on California’s Academic Index has increased. In a district with 41% of students on free or reduced priced meals, the graduation rate is 89%, well above the national rate of 74.9%.

The trust built by this partnership has also created the space for additional needed reforms. One middle school in the district was recently identified as eligible for the Department of Education’s School Improvement Grant funding, which helps fund transformations at the nation’s 5% lowest-achieving schools.  In accepting the grant, 100% of the teachers within the school voted to move to a system where student achievement would become part of the teacher evaluation and compensation – something ABC Unified had not previously done.  Recognizing this choice could bring needed resources to students and teachers, the partnership supported this as an opportunity for improvement, rather than as an aberration to be blocked.

All these achievements for students were brought about not by telling teachers what to do but by giving them a seat at the table. As Secretary Duncan has said, “When folks build trust, when everyone moves outside of their comfort zones, collective bargaining itself can be a tool for positive change, rather than a tool to maintain the status quo. That's the kind of forward thinking we need.”

This week’s conference lifted up great examples of districts where management and teachers unions are working together to turnaround schools. The partnerships on display at the conference prove that progress is being made through collaboration.  In fact, some of the best outcomes come when teachers, staff, principals, superintendents and school boards collaborate together. Too often that’s not the story that gets told. The Middle Class Task Force will continue to lift and highlight these successes.

For more information on this week’s conference, go to http://www.ed.gov/labor-management-collaboration/conference.

Maureen Tracey-Mooney is Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Vice President.

For years, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has been overly restricted in its use of a powerful tool to protect the health and safety of our nation’s miners: putting a mine on a “Patterns of Violations” (or POV) status and using the additional enforcement tools that determination brings with it. The current system makes it much too difficult to identify such patterns -- too hard for both mine operators and the workers who need the protection this new rule would provide.

In the 30 years since the Mine Act’s passage no mine has ever been placed on a POV. That means that mines we know are consistently putting workers in danger are allowed to continue bad practices without making the needed systemic changes to protect workers. The current regulatory interpretation of the Mine Act fundamentally undermines its intent: to provide MSHA with the tools it needs to protect workers.

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking takes critical steps to address flaws in the current rule and reflects the intent of Congress when it wrote the POV statute. Current regulation says that only final orders or citations against a mine can be used to determine if there is a POV. MSHA hasn’t been able to put mines on a POV because mines often contest their citations, leading to lengthy delays before a citation is made final.

To fully understand the scale of these challenges and the way they are used to avoid enforcement, you have to look at the numbers. In November of 2010, there was a backlog of roughly 88,000 contested violations; as a result of this backlog, the average contested violation took over 500 days to become final (even with substantial new resources dedicated to resolving the backlog). From 2006-2010, fewer than 1% of these citations were reversed. As a result, it’s virtually impossible for MSHA to review a mine’s recent compliant history when determining whether there is a POV. The proposed rule would eliminate the requirement that MSHA use only final citations, eliminating lengthy delays in enforcement that endanger workers.

For mine operators that want to do the right thing, the new proposed rule would make it easier for them to comply with the law and avoid a POV. It would simplify the POV criteria, improve consistency in its application and provide a searchable database mine operators can use to track their compliance. It would also provide special consideration for operators that monitor their compliance while taking proactive measures to protect workers.

Too often, we let the myth persist that work place accidents just happen; that they are unavoidable, particularly in industries like mining. That’s just not true. With effective safety measures and strong enforcement, accidents can be avoided. Today’s proposed rule represents a significant step towards providing miners with the safe workplaces that they deserve and that is their right.

Maureen Tracey-Mooney is Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Vice President

In the midst of our excitement at their rescue, it is important to remember that many, many more miners lose their lives each year, not just to accidents at mines, but also to the greatest threat to American miners: black lung disease.

Sadly, because deaths from this painful disease don’t have the sudden, devastating impact or bring the media attention that mine explosions generate, black lung has gotten less attention than it deserves.

The truth is, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, black lung prevalence has only increased in recent years. In fact, over the past decade, black lung has taken the lives and devastated the families of more than 10,000 coal miners.  It’s not just affecting our older workers, either – more and more, we’re seeing this disease appear in our younger miners as well.

That’s why last year the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) launched a campaign to take on this critical issue.

MSHA took its latest step in this ongoing effort last week when they proposed a new rule that helps protect miners from the disease by reducing their exposure to its cause – respirable coal dust.  The rule would set lower limits for how much respirable dust workers can be exposed to in the mine, improve rules about sampling the air for dust to provide a better understanding of the danger workers face on any given shift, and expand medical check-ups outside of the mine so that miners can take proactive steps to protect their health. To find out more about the rule, click here.

As the Vice President said in response to the new proposed rule, "In America in the 21st century, workers should not have to risk illness or death in order to provide for their families … This rule will provide today's miners with long-overdue protections against needless threats to their health."

Maureen Tracey-Mooney is Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of the Vice President