|
1) Nadeau Resigns
from NEA Executive Committee.
Wayne Nadeau of Vermont resigned his seat on the NEA Executive Committee in
response to mounting internal opposition. Nadeau had been under the gun for
over a week after Vermont newspapers learned his teaching license had been
suspended for having sex in his classroom with a female teacher’s aide.
Shortly after the story
hit, Nadeau sent a “Dear Colleagues” letter to NEA officials and the union’s
board of directors in which he stated, “I deeply regret the hurt,
embarrassment, and discomfort that actions of the past have caused my family
as well as my professional colleagues.” He referred to the incident as “a
past indiscretion of mine with a female co-worker.” The July 17 memo also
implied that Nadeau was ready to ride out the storm. “Regrettably, past
events can’t be erased, but I sincerely hope that my present and future
actions will reinforce the confidence that has been placed in me as a member
of the NEA Executive Committee,” he wrote.
But Nadeau
miscalculated the level of umbrage taken by his NEA colleagues. The story
received a lot of play on talk radio in Oklahoma, a state where the union is
especially sensitive to the effects of NEA controversies on its membership
numbers. But evidently the wheels were already turning. The new president of
the Oklahoma Education Association, Roy Bishop, sent out a press release on
Wednesday calling on Nadeau to step down. “The Oklahoma Education
Association and its members are devoted to high standards, teacher quality
and building respect for the profession,” he said. “We don’t believe Wayne
meets these criteria and call on him to resign immediately.”
On Thursday, Nadeau
tendered his resignation to NEA President Reg Weaver, who notified state
affiliate officers that Nadeau had concluded “it will be impossible for him
to function effectively as a member of the Executive Committee and to
achieve the goals he set for himself when he ran for the position.”
The Executive Committee
has the authority to fill vacancies in its ranks between elections, and is
expected to appoint someone to Nadeau’s seat at its next official meeting in
August. An obvious choice would be Mark Cebulski of Wisconsin, who was the
next highest vote-getter for the seat at NEA’s 2003 convention earlier this
month. However, the Executive Committee can appoint any member, who would
serve until July 2004. At that time, convention delegates will vote for
someone to serve the remaining two years of Nadeau’s term. The appointee,
should he or she decide to run for the rest of the term, would have the
significant advantage of incumbency.
The focus of the story
now shifts from Nadeau to the way NEA and its affiliates handle information.
Nadeau wasn’t the only one caught with his pants down, and now the union is
struggling to cover itself. Some of EIA’s union readers are expressing
skepticism that NEA – and especially Vermont NEA – had no knowledge of
Nadeau’s “indiscretion.” But EIA’s own sources confirm that the union was
unaware of Nadeau’s suspension, and that Vermont NEA had no clue why Nadeau
had retained a union attorney. So when the story broke, NEA acted on
instinct, defensively. “The matter is closed,” said NEA spokeswoman Kathleen
Lyons. “The Vermont Department of Education has taken care of the matter,”
said Vermont NEA President Angelo Dorta. Apparently, enough people within
NEA disagreed with this sentiment to force Nadeau to change his mind about
resigning.
But why didn’t
they know? Well, Vermont NEA was victimized by the very confidentiality laws
they champion. Non-disclosure policies are meant to protect the innocent
from baseless charges, not to enable both the district and the school
employees to cover up embarrassing but true incidents.
More importantly, the
Nadeau case illustrates NEA’s ongoing inability or unwillingness to deal
with bad news. Visit the NEA web site today and try to find a single mention
of this two-week-old story. Or the Vermont NEA web site. The Vermont
newspapers ran with the story, but the only national attention has been
through Internet outlets. Vermont NEA still hasn’t taken an official
position, a failure which will bite back when members ask questions at the
start of the school year. There is no doubt in my mind there will be NEA
delegates who voted for Nadeau this year who will show up for the 2004
convention wondering where he is and why they are voting for someone else to
fill out his term.
They didn’t know
because they really didn’t want to know. Wayne Nadeau counted on that, and
he was only done in by what amounts to a stroke of bad luck and an obscure
public records request. Are there others like him? Do you really want to
know?
2) Catholic High
Resists Michigan Union. Teachers
at Brother Rice High School in Birmingham, Michigan, want an election to
determine whether they should join the Michigan Education Association. This
would hardly be newsworthy if it weren’t for the fact that Brother Rice is a
Catholic high school.
School officials took
their case to the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, where they
claimed negotiating with the union would violate the Establishment Clause of
the First Amendment. Such challenges have had mixed success in the past, but
are becoming less likely to succeed as Catholic schools rely more and more
on lay faculty instead of clergy.
We will see more
stories like this in the future, as unions react to vouchers and membership
losses, and Catholic school teachers react to lower salaries and fewer job
protections when compared to those of public school teachers. But teachers’
unions in Catholic schools will remain an anomaly. Unions operate most
effectively when they can apply similar strategies in one district after
another. Flexibility in unique environments is not their strong suit, and an
archdiocese can be a more formidable foe than even the most defiant school
district.
3) Nevada Amicus
Briefs Funnier than Seinfeld.
Not content with the farce produced by its first amicus brief that led to a
national political uproar (see last week’s EIA Communiqué), the
Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) filed another, this time to
prevent the case from receiving a rehearing by the Nevada Supreme Court.
The supermajority
debate lost its immediate crisis status when one of the fifteen Nevada
Assembly Republicans changed his vote. The tax increase thus passed with a
two-thirds majority in both houses. The only thing on which both sides agree
is that the issue is not going away. Supporters of the supermajority want
the state Supreme Court to withdraw its opinion. Last Thursday, NSEA filed
its opposition brief.
One of the complaints
is that none of the parties to the original suit sought the type of “relief”
the court provided. NSEA was happy to address the question:
“Certainly the radicals
were not going to suggest such a possibility, since it was only because of
the Gibbons Initiative that they were able to maintain an effective veto
power over any tax proposal. Nor, for sound political reasons, were the
Governor, the Attorney General or the legislative majority likely to suggest
that the Gibbons Initiative ought to be struck down or given a limiting
construction. After all, the Initiative had been highly popular with the
voters, and if the voters were so eager to disenfranchise themselves and
most of their fellow citizens, who were the politicians to argue? For these
reasons, it was left to the Education Associations to argue in their amicus
brief that the Court ought to take a hard look at the Gibbons Initiative.”
There you go, Nevadans.
You voted for the supermajority. Neither your governor, nor your attorney
general, nor your representatives of either party saw fit to challenge your
decision. Thank heavens the Nevada State Education Association was there to
straighten out your moronic impulses. Express your appreciation at your
earliest opportunity.
4) Quote of the
Year? Every so often, someone is
able to state in a simple sentence a profound, if obvious, truth about
American public education. The most recent example comes with a
soon-to-be-released report from the University of Washington about the
nation’s superintendents and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). But the
ramifications of the quote go beyond that topic. In fact, where you stand in
education’s political battles shouldn’t affect your recognition of the
statement’s wisdom.
The Associated Press,
in reviewing an advance copy of the report, talked to Jim Harvey, a
researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a division of the
University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.
“The public discussion
about what schools are supposed to do isn’t reflected at all in the internal
dynamics of the schools,” Harvey said.
Lay the blame where you
will, but the debate over what public schools ought to be doing is
not the same as the debate over what they are doing. What Harvey
calls the “internal dynamics” are what give us the schools we have, not the
well-intentioned remedies of lawmakers. When the public policy and internal
education worlds collide, there is a lot of heat and smoke, but it’s usually
the public policy that gets obliterated. Each world makes fundamentally
wrong assumptions about the other.
The policy world fails
to recognize that public education is a unique institution in American life.
It rarely responds to the reward/consequence model that most of the rest of
us live by. The chain of command is amorphous. Most of the people who pay
for the service don’t use it. Many of the people who use it don’t pay for
it. Its support functions take on a life of their own, sometimes supplanting
the education mission. Subjective employee evaluations are misused and
abused by administrators, but at the same time objective measures are
derided as inadequate by employees. Finally, though we are all interested
and involved in the debate over public education, a very tiny few of us ever
see it at work under normal circumstances.
Lawmakers only see
schools under controlled conditions. Parents visit on open school night, and
some may even observe a few classes. How many have attended a staff meeting?
How many have seen a substitute teacher work? How many have visited the
detention classroom? How many have read or examined the textbooks? How many
have attended an in-service or other professional development seminar? The
public, and its representatives in government, labor under assumptions about
public education that may not be accurate.
School employees and
their unions often make the “walk in our shoes” argument. At the 2003 NEA
convention, President Reg Weaver told the delegates they should not allow
their achievements “to be swept away by people who would not last a day in
our classrooms, nor would they know what to do on a school bus, or in a
cafeteria with our students.”
The education world may
be right about that, but fails to recognize the implications. If the public
really understood the internal dynamics of public education, it might
respond with sympathy and greater funding. But it might instead conclude
that the system is too dysfunctional to repair. Yes, if a parent, a
politician or a reporter taught your class for a day, he or she would
probably screw up royally. But what if, instead of recognizing the
monumental task you face everyday, that person simply refused to acknowledge
his deficiencies, and insisted on teaching your class for a week, or a
month, or a year? What if instead of seeing he was damaging each student’s
opportunity for a good education, he insisted on remediation while he
figured things out? How would you get rid of him?
A lot of the bitterness
in the public education debate comes from two sides arguing loudly in
different languages about which direction to go. It’s impossible to choose
wisely if we don’t know where we are.
5) Quote of the
Week #1. “Is there gay math?....
What next? Maybe we should have schools for chubby kids who get picked on.
Maybe all kids who wear glasses should have special schools. It’s
ridiculous.”– New York Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long, on the opening
of New York City’s first public high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered students. The school expects an enrollment of 170 students by
September 2004. (July 28 New York Post)
Quote of the Week
#2. “Oh sh--.”– California
Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, upon discovering an open microphone was
broadcasting throughout the Capitol remarks being made in a private
discussion by legislative Democrats. One lawmaker suggested that Democrats
may want to “precipitate a crisis” in the budget this year in order to
bolster support for a proposed ballot initiative to lower the supermajority
threshold needed to pass a budget to 55 percent. Goldberg herself said,
“What you do is you show people that you can’t get to this without a 55
percent vote.” (July 22 San Francisco Chronicle) |
