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1) Report: Miami Union $19 Million
in Debt. Brian Peterson is a professor of history
at Florida International University. He also keeps close tabs on public
education in Miami and, as editor of his own e-mail newsletter, Miami
Education Review, he is well-connected to the city’s education
establishment, including the United Teachers of Dade (UTD). UTD held a
meeting on October 29 that featured a visit by AFT Executive Vice President
Nat LaCour. Peterson reported he had a source who attended this meeting and
I am inclined to believe him.
According to Peterson, the regularly
scheduled UTD elections will not take place next spring, and will not take
place at all until after a new UTD constitution is written and approved.
Furthermore, the current AFT administratorship will not be dissolved until
UTD is financially solvent – which may take a long while, considering the
scope of its problems.
Peterson reports that UTD is $19 million
in the red, all of which is due by June 30, 2004. That’s $1,200 to $1,500
per member, depending on whose membership numbers you believe. The only way
to generate the sum in time is to start unloading buildings, including the
notorious UTD headquarters building and Pat Tornillo’s condominium.
AFT claims to already have spent more
than $4 million in Miami in the first three months of its administratorship,
which is now predicted to last another 18 months. And, though UTD is also an
affiliate of both NEA and the merged Florida Education Association, AFT
appears to have exclusive jurisdiction over the Miami fiasco. Neither NEA
nor FEA has issued a press statement on Miami since the Tornillo scandal
hit.
2) Two NEA State Affiliates Endorse
Favorite Dems. Right on the heels of the
California Teachers Association, Vermont NEA also endorsed Howard Dean for
the Democratic presidential nomination. Coupled with upcoming endorsements
from SEIU and AFSCME, Dean can expect substantial union campaign support.
However, support for Dean will not be unanimous.
The South Carolina Education Association
voted to endorse Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and while the Michigan
Education Association has issued no endorsement, MEA President Lu
Battaglieri personally endorsed Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts some months
ago.
Wesley Clark thinks he has found an
issue with which to gain teacher support – the proposed closure of
Department of Defense schools in the United States. Clark spoke out against
the idea last week, but his reasoning runs counter to the current union
conventional wisdom. He said public schools could not afford the additional
students transferring in from DoD schools. The unions are arguing they can’t
afford students to be transferring out (see Item #4 below).
3) It’s Back to the Nineties for CTA.
The détente between Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California
Teachers Association may qualify as the shortest in history. The Governator
chose former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan as his secretary of
education, prompting CTA Associate Executive Director John Hein to resign
from Schwarzenegger’s transition committee.
It’s hard to believe that the
appointment of Riordan alone was responsible for Hein’s decision,
particularly after CTA President Barbara Kerr had called Hein’s position on
the team “very important for all of us and recognizes the high esteem in
which CTA is held within the political arena. It also means the voices of
educators are at the table.”
Hein’s resignation will not affect the
transition, since the 68-member team was more swollen than Arnold’s pecs
anyway. But it does signal that CTA assumes – correctly, I think -- that
California under Schwarzenegger will not be something new and different, but
rather something the union has dealt with before: a state with a liberal
Democrat legislature and a moderate Republican governor, both trying to play
games with a massive budget deficit.
CTA did not like Gray Davis, but it
didn’t need to. As long as Davis was signing the CTA-sponsored bills
cruising through the legislature, he was doing the union a service. Dropping
an additional $1.84 billion on the teacher bargaining table in 2000 wasn’t
chopped liver, either. With Arnold holding the veto pen, the fat years are
well and truly over for CTA.
4) The Double-Edged Sword of
Marginal Per-Pupil Spending. Per-pupil spending is
at once the most helpful, most used, most abused, and most misunderstood
education finance statistic in the public domain. The most popular way of
arriving at it is to divide current expenditures by average daily
attendance. The utility of per-pupil spending in budgeting, analysis or
comparison of expenditures across jurisdictions is self-evident.
We only run into trouble when we use
per-pupil spending as a description of how money is actually spent by the
public education system. Sorry to say, each student does not have an annual
personal budget of $7,800 from which his or her education is purchased. As
with virtually every other economic enterprise on the planet, education is
delivered on the basis of marginal costs – that is, the cost of schooling
the next additional student.
The teachers’ unions have proven time
and again they understand the concept, because they use it to argue against
vouchers and charter schools. Siobhan Gorman of Washington Monthly
recently asked NEA President Reg Weaver how vouchers could “drain money from
public schools” if those public schools no longer had to educate that child.
“Did the heat bill go down? Did the light bill go down?” Weaver replied.
Last week, teachers’ unions in New York
and Massachusetts echoed this argument in calling for a moratorium on the
establishment of charter schools in their respective states. The
Massachusetts Teachers Association stated that when a student enrolls in a
charter school, the school receives funding in the form of the average
per-pupil expenditure. The regular school that lost the student, however,
does not save the average per-pupil expenditure, but only the
marginal cost of educating that student.
So far, so good for the unions. They
make a clear and defensible point about the difference between fixed and
marginal costs of education. But they fail to consider the reverse
corollary. All public schools are funded in reference to average
per-pupil expenditures. If a school system’s marginal costs are low (as the
unions are claiming), each new student who enrolls in a regular public
school brings with him or her revenue in excess of costs, or, as economists
like to call it, profit.
In their eagerness to score points
against private and charter schools, the unions are playing with dynamite.
Do they really want the public to make funding decisions on the basis of
marginal per-pupil spending? Do they really want to argue that charter
schools are eating into their “profit?”
5) Marysville Strike Reduced
Enrollment. Teachers in Marysville returned to
work after a 49-day strike, the longest in Washington State history, despite
the lack of a contract settlement. State law requires 180 school days so
those strike days will be made up and employees will not lose pay.
Nevertheless, the strike had an indirect negative effect on salaries.
When school resumed on October 22,
enrollment had declined 5.4 percent, by far the largest drop in the local
area. The district will now receive $2 million less than it had budgeted for
the 2003-04 school year. The district’s director of finance said the missing
students were now in neighboring districts, private schools, or being
home-schooled.
6) Non-Union Teachers Stage Job
Action. I’ve been covering teachers’ unions for a
long time, but this is a new one on me.
Last Tuesday, over 200 St. Louis public
school teachers apparently held a sickout to protest the district’s new sick
leave policy. On Wednesday, 152 teachers extended the protest to a second
day. The sickout was unique in that it was staged by teachers who do not
belong to the local union, which is affiliated with AFT.
In fact, the job action is partially a
protest against the union, which negotiated a contract that included a
provision restricting the accumulation of sick days. Strikes and other job
actions are illegal in Missouri and the sickout was not sanctioned by the
union. District officials plan to ask teachers for doctors’ notes.
7) “Take Charge and Steer Things.”
On October 6, EIA reported on a proposal within the Cleveland Teachers Union
(CTU) to eliminate the practice of having four committee chairmen, appointed
by the president, sit on the union’s 24-member executive board. The proposal
was strongly opposed by CTU President Richard DeColibus, but it was approved
by CTU’s House of Delegates. After the vote, DeColibus reacted this way:
“While this is undeniably more
democratic, the net effect is to reduce the presidency of the union to a
weak, ineffective and irrelevant position. Being one of twenty with all
being exactly equal sounds wonderful until you start to deal with difficult
and controversial issues; then, you need someone to take charge and steer
things in a given (hopefully correct) direction…. Hey, if you want a weak
and indecisive union, this is America and you’re entitled to it. That’s what
you will have in April when you’re stuck with a brand new president who has
no authority to govern.”
8) Quote of
the Week.
“How much has the town offered? How much is the union demanding? Are they
discussing ways to help the town get control over escalating health
insurance costs? Are there other unresolved issues? No one is saying
because, as this newspaper reported Tuesday, ‘neither side could disclose
specific information about what is being negotiated. The ground rules for
negotiating state that nothing can be released until a contract is signed.’
In other words, the people who will be responsible for paying for the next
teachers’ contract – the taxpayers of Seymour – have no right to know
anything until the deal is signed, sealed and delivered.” – from the editors
of the Waterbury Republican-American, describing contract
negotiations in the town of Seymour, Connecticut. (November 7 Waterbury
Republican-American) |
