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1) NEA Will Not Challenge NCLB’s
Parental Notification Provision. The National
Education Association has been playing catch-up during the entire
legislative and implementation history of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
The union spent most of 2001 first trying to kill the bill, then trying to
alter it to a form more to NEA’s liking. It failed on both accounts, the
exclamation point coming when Sen. Ted Kennedy addressed the NEA board of
directors and asked them to stop trying to amend the bill in conference
committee. NEA took no position on the final bill, but has been relentless
since its passage in trying to get it altered to include more money and
fewer strings through legislation, administration, regulation and
litigation.
So it stands as news that NEA will not
legally challenge one of the law’s most controversial provisions: the
notification of parents when certain teachers do not meet the law’s
definition of “highly qualified.”
In a confidential memo dated May 7,
2003, NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin concluded that to overturn the parental
notification terms would require a violation of some provision of the U.S.
Constitution. “We find no such violation,” he wrote.
Chanin also recited a truth that EIA has
emphasized in the discussion of NCLB: the U.S. Government has to buy its
authority over education. Chanin noted that “neither the parental notice
requirement – nor, indeed, any of the other requirements in NCLB – are
‘imposed’ on the states in a legal sense. NCLB has been enacted on the basis
of Congress’ Spending Power, and states can avoid this and other statutory
requirements simply by declining to accept federal Title I funds. If the
states decide to accept such funds, however, then they must also accept the
conditions that Congress has attached to them.”
Chanin goes down the list of possible
legal arguments and rejects them all as doomed to fail – including the use
of state privacy laws or the banning of parental notification in a
collective bargaining agreement. “In sum, we see no way for a school
district to avoid complying with the parental notice requirement,” Chanin
declared. He then advised NEA’s state affiliates to focus their attention on
ways to “minimize the potential damage.” Specifically, he suggested they
“present the information in as positive a light as possible.” The memo
included some sample parental notification letters.
Chanin explained that districts and
unions share a common interest in presenting the information in the most
favorable light possible, since parental notification “has the potential to
diminish the public’s perception of and support for the school district,”
and that in many cases, the format and content of the notification letter
could be considered a mandatory, or at least a permissive, subject of
collective bargaining.
2) Time for Teachers to Pay the CTA
Piper. Local officials and elected representatives
of the California Teachers Association (CTA) used to engage in harsh
disputes over the state dues level. To avoid these battles, the union
generated a formula by which dues would be automatically set. As the policy
stands now, dues rise annually by a percentage equal to the increase in
salary of the average California teacher, averaged over the previous three
years. In other words, if the average state teacher salary rose by 10, 6 and
5 percent over the last three years, next year’s dues will be 7 percent
higher.
During the tenure of Gov. Gray Davis,
this proved to be quite a windfall for CTA. Class size reduction, coupled
with statewide double-digit raises in 2000-01, brought the union annual dues
income of well over $150 million.
But with membership growth flattening,
and the state budget in deficit, CTA is evidently rethinking the idea. A
proposal has been submitted to the union’s State Council budget committee to
“modify” the formula for setting dues. The exact nature of the modification
has yet to be revealed, but EIA suspects its purpose is not to reduce state
dues.
3) Pennsylvania Staff Pickets Union
Conference. The Pennsylvania State Education
Association (PSEA) House of Delegates met in Pittsburgh over the weekend and
while the results of their deliberations have yet to filter down to EIA,
delegates were met by picketing PSEA employees outside the Pittsburgh
Hilton. Staffers from neighboring NEA state affiliates also walked the line,
holding signs calling on PSEA to “act like a union” and “practice what you
preach.”
PSEA managers and employees have reached
a standoff in contract negotiations, leading the staff union to accuse PSEA
of engaging in anti-union tactics, while PSEA managers claim staff
compensation costs have driven the union into a multi-million dollar
deficit.
The bitter contract negotiations were
expected to be a major point of debate for the PSEA delegates, who act as
representatives of the union’s 140,000 active members.
4) Cleveland Teachers Union Poll
Backfires. Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU)
President Richard DeColibus informally polled the readers of his biweekly
newsletter to learn their preferences for the Democratic presidential
nomination. He listed the nine candidates, but added the options “no
preference at this point,” “don’t like any of them,” and “like Bush more
than any of them.”
“We got 281 responses,” DeColibus wrote,
and the results were:
No preference – 82
Don’t like any of them – 39
Like Bush – 34
Dean – 31
Kucinich – 29
Lieberman – 15
Moseley Braun – 12
Gephardt – 12
Kerry – 7
Clark – 6
Sharpton – 6
Hillary Clinton (write-in) – 4
Edwards – 3
The results apparently jarred DeColibus
into a minor math error (the votes total 280, not 281) but he recovered in
time to explain that his unscientific poll “doesn’t mean what it appears to
mean,” pointing out that Bush received only 12 percent of the total vote.
True, but it’s still interesting that in a poll requesting CTU members’
favorite Democrat for President, Democrats actually running for President
could muster only 43 percent of the vote.
5) Juneau Contract Ratification
Saves NEA Alaska Cash. The members of the Juneau
Education Association ratified a one-year contract after nearly a year of
negotiations. The deal increased the salary scale by two percent, increased
the district contribution to health insurance coverage, and increased weekly
prep time. On the other hand, some layoffs are expected.
The 340-member local had already made
preparations for a strike, signing an agreement with NEA Alaska to set up a
strike fund composed of $40,000 from the local and $200,000 from NEA Alaska.
The strike was averted, but the one-year duration of the deal ensures that
negotiations for next year will begin almost immediately. In the meantime,
the Juneau local plans to keep the strike account open.
6) The Gulag Was Not a Christmas
Fireplace. In preparation for his book, Glasgow
University professor of communications Greg Philo wanted to test the
knowledge of college-age students on history and current events. He sent a
series of questions to a random selection of 750 students in Britain,
Germany and the United States. His findings included the discovery that only
5 percent of British students and 8 percent of Americans could identify what
the Gulag in the former Soviet Union was. Germans did somewhat better, with
30 percent knowing the answer.
In the unlikely event any of these
students come across the EIA Communiqué, here are a few excerpts from
a letter written to the Bolshevik Party by three labor camp prisoners, dated
December 14, 1926:
“If you complain or write anything, they
will frame you for an attempted escape or for something else, and they will
shoot you like a dog. They line us up naked and barefoot at 22 degrees below
zero and keep us outside for up to an hour. It is difficult to describe all
the chaos and terror that is going on in Kemi, Solovky, and the other
sections of the concentration camp. All annual inspections uncover a lot of
abuses. But what they discover in comparison to what actually exists is only
a part of the horror and abuse of power, which the inspection accidentally
uncovers. One example is the following fact, one of a thousand, which is
registered in GPU and for which the guilty have been punished: they forced
the inmates to eat their own feces…. Everything described above is the truth
and we, ourselves, who are close to the grave after three years in Solovky
and Kemi and other sections, are asking you to improve the pathetic,
tortured existence of those who are there who languish under the yoke of the
OGPU’s tyranny, violence, and complete lawlessness.”
7) Quote of the Week #1.
“Evil, I guess.” – Washington, DC fifth-grade teacher Christine Davis,
explaining why her students would make up a story about her carrying a gun
in class and threatening them with it. Police determined Davis did not have
a gun, but are still investigating whether she threatened her students.
(December 5 Washington Post)
Quote of the Week #2.
“Teachers are not fat and ugly.” – Virginia Education Association President
Jean Bankos, complaining to the editors of the Richmond Times-Dispatch
about a cartoon that appeared in the paper. (December 2 Richmond
Times-Dispatch)
Quote of the
Week #3.
“English is an adventure. It cries ‘Havoc,’ over Caesar’s body, and it
ranges the moors with Heathcliff and King Lear. It’s Cal East of Eden
and Hamlet mad north-northwest. It’s Fitzgerald in Paris and Thoreau at
Walden Pond. It’s Coleridge and Whitman, Aeschylus and O’Neill and The
Human Comedy, star-crossed lovers and Sons and Lovers. But
English is first a code, a code we have to share in common if it’s to make
sense to anybody. That code has to rest on uniform spelling standards,
punctuation rules, and grammar conventions. Otherwise the code breaks down,
and our written language remains a foreign language, a degenerated
collection of indecipherable marks on a page.” – Peter Berger (http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-12-01-03.htm). |
