Kronberg informed EIA that the union "will continue to do our bargaining at the bargaining table, not in the media." The staff union countered that Kronberg’s refusal to return to the bargaining table precipitated the strike in the first place.

In what has become standard NEA affiliate preparation for staff labor unrest, NEA-Alaska executives hired security guards for union headquarters and barred weekend access to the computer system. The first day of the strike, management collected the staff’s laptops, phone cards, health insurance ID cards, and building keys, even though the locks had evidently been changed. "This is a perfect example of not practicing what you preach," said NSO-Alaska President Willie Anderson. For its part, the staff union has already filed several unfair labor practice charges against NEA-Alaska.

The NEA-Alaska Delegate Assembly is scheduled to meet Thursday through Saturday to pass the budget and set other policies. It’s likely the staff will picket the Anchorage event. "If they’re still on strike, we’ll run it without them," said Kronberg.

+ Will AFL-CIO Face the Truth? The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on union membership last Thursday, which showed the percentage of American workers belonging to unions fell to 13.5 percent, its lowest share since World War II. Not only did the percentage decline, but the absolute number of union members fell by 200,000, even while the economy boomed. Despite these sobering statistics, the story is not the decline of union membership -- a trend that has been steady for most of our lifetimes. There are two more important interrelated stories provoked by the BLS report. The first is the deluded nonsense we heard after last year’s BLS report, which showed a net gain of 265,000 members in an economy that had created 2.7 million new jobs. "Turning the corner" was the theme from AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney. "Today’s data show we are winning the battle in earnest," he told the Wall Street Journal. This year’s data show that around that corner was just another corner.

The second story is one that deserves a lot of attention, not only from union members and researchers, but economists, sociologists and public policy experts. The most unionized sector of the entire U.S. economy (at 43.2 percent) is local government -- a category that includes police officers, firefighters, and, of course, public school employees. Though the released BLS data do not separate these occupations, a reasonable estimate of the percentage of local public school employees who belong to unions is somewhere in the 70-80 percent range. EIA’s own research suggests that NEA/AFT membership is growing at roughly the same rate as the public school employee work force.

Should present trends continue, we will see in our lifetimes the total number of public sector union members overtake the total number of private sector union members. We may also see a labor force in which public school employees are the only growth sector in union membership. The implications of such a trend are enormous. First, we will have a private sector almost devoid of unions, being regulated by a large plurality of unionized government employees, whose unions’ membership growth will be directly tied to the size of government itself. For organized labor, it will mean either dragging the NEA into its structure in order to bolster its failing numbers, or it will mean the education unions will engulf the AFL-CIO, effectively putting it out of business and replacing it with a new coalition dominated by the NEA (or, more likely, by a merged NEA/AFT).

The time may come when teachers’ unions may be the organized labor movement, which lends a whole new light to issues such as merger, new unionism, merit pay and professionalism.

+ Class Size Research Finally Bears Real Fruit. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Alex Molnar has come under deserved fire on these pages for research that comes to predetermined conclusions. However, he is to be commended for his most recent evaluation of Wisconsin’s Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) program. For once, Molnar went beyond cheerleading for the $55 million SAGE program, and investigated why there were such inconsistent results within the program itself, and why the gains achieved in first grade could not be duplicated in the second- and third-grades.

After observing successful SAGE teachers, Molnar’s researchers concluded that "First-grade teachers in higher-achieving classrooms emphasize basic skills and processes through modeling, drill and practice. Classroom management of teachers in higher-achieving classrooms is firm and decisive, but also positive and nurturing." Conversely, researchers found that first-grade teachers of lower-achieving classrooms tend to believe that the primary advantages of reduced class size are the "opportunity to develop critical thinking, to permit students to choose their activities, and to use more activities and problem-solving lessons."

These findings suggest that there may be room for a grand compromise on class-size reduction. If Molnar’s findings are applicable elsewhere, it would confirm what seems to be intuitively obvious: Class-size reduction does matter, but it only matters significantly when teachers emphasize basic empirical instruction and firm discipline. Constructivism, on the other hand, greatly offsets any gains, leading back to the obvious question associated with any class-size reduction program: Is it worth the enormous expense involved without a coinciding demand for instructional quality? And it leads to another question: Why not implement the inexpensive instructional reform first, in the larger classrooms, then observe the effects of class-size reduction on the margins?

+ New Voucher Supporter: Mayor Daley? Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley suggested the city provide parents with vouchers for after-school programs, such as tutoring in reading or math, or classes in sports or the arts. "My theory is that anything you do to help educate your child should be something that the government helps you with financially," Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times.

+ Nevada Union Members Deserve a PR Refund. After 18 months of promoting its business tax initiative, a Nevada State Education Association poll shows that 67 percent of state residents have never heard of the idea. The union claims 61 percent of those surveyed support the measure once it is explained to them. But the Las Vegas Review-Journal took the time to explain exactly how the explaining went. Those polled were told the proposed tax was an "excess profits tax" that would provide funding "to recruit and retain qualified teachers, raise teachers’ salaries, improve school technology, modernize classrooms, reduce overcrowding, and ensure safe and healthy environments for learning." A Review-Journal poll in June described the same measure as one that would "generate revenues to fund public elementary and secondary education." That poll found 56 percent opposition to the tax initiative.