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It's the beginning of the 2005-06 school
year. So before we get buried in all the new information, controversies and
debates that are sure to arise, let's clear up some items that for various
reasons got lost in the shuffle over the past several weeks.
1) NEA Pledges Additional $5 Million
Against California Initiatives. Mentioned in
passing
in July, EIA was able to confirm that the National Education Association
has pledged up to $5 million more from its Ballot Measure/Legislative Crises
Fund to aid the California Teachers Association (CTA) in its battle to
defeat Gov. Schwarzenegger's education measures and a paycheck protection
initiative scheduled for the November ballot.
NEA already contributed $2.5 million to
the CTA effort in May. NEA also pledged up to $2 million more to the New
Jersey Education Association for its efforts to stop a constitutional
convention in the state.
NEA will collect about $9 million this
year for its initiative fund, with the amounts designated for it increasing
about $2 million annually until the 2009-10 school year. The national union
then disburses the money among state affiliates that apply for it.
CTA raised member dues $60 annually for
the next three years to raise some $54 million against the initiatives, in
addition to the more than $10 million that it already held in its own
initiative fund war chest. In short, if CTA taps itself out of political
money, it will spend about $72 million.
2) Ohio Education Association Plans
Internal PR Campaign. Recent information confirms
what EIA
reported back in April about the Ohio Education Association (OEA) and
its budget and membership situation.
OEA has largely weathered the
budget deficit storm of 2000, but it still hasn't crafted a long-term
solution to the increasing costs of staff retirement and health benefits.
The union has had labor problems in the recent past, and who knows what will
come of its decision to
sue its own staff unions? In the meantime, OEA is expecting some small
membership growth, but in retirees and fee-payers, somewhat offsetting a
slight loss in full-time teachers. Since teachers pay the highest dues, the
trend could compel further budget cuts.
OEA's internal difficulties have
prompted the standard union response: a public relations campaign, this time
aimed at OEA members themselves. The union's October newsletter will contain
a member survey designed to help OEA construct a more positive internal
message to help the rank-and-file understand the union's position on various
issues.
There is some strange circular reasoning
in asking the members to help develop the talking points that will be fed
back to them.
3) Will Massachusetts Teachers
Association Go After Charter Teachers? Last week's
communiqué contained an item on the efforts of the Massachusetts Federation
of Teachers to organize charter school employees in the state. The NEA-affiliated
Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is more ambivalent about the idea,
but the union could also put out feelers. In June, the union's board of
directors created a task force to decide what approach to take with the
state's charter schools. One of the options is to try to unionize them.
There are mixed feelings about this in MTA, but the task force will make its
recommendations to the full board in October.
And in the dog-bites-man category, MTA
created an official policy to oppose differential pay by subject matter or
disciplines. This ensures a never-ending shortage of math, science and
special education teachers. How MTA can negotiate different stipends for
track coaches, band directors and chess club coordinators, but claim getting
more money for math teachers is divisive, speaks more to internal union
imperatives than any real and legitimate difficulty.
4) Detailed Results Show AFT Was
Pummeled in Puerto Rico. The Federación de
Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR) released the local results of the August 18
referendum on disaffiliation from AFT. Disaffiliation won a majority in 12
of the island's 13 regions and 83 of 94 districts. The only significant AFT
support came in the northwest part of the island, while FMPR handily won the
districts with the most members: San Juan, Ponce and Bayamon.
5) National Teacher of the Year
Speech to NEA Delegates. During the NEA
Representative Assembly in July, EIA brought you daily more news and
information than you ever really wanted about what was going on. But I was
remiss in failing to mention the speech delivered by 2005 National Teacher
of the Year Jason Kamras. Kamras didn't design his talk for his audience
and, consequently, he received cheers and applause in some places and some
uncomfortable audience silence in others.
What stood out, however, was at the end
of his remarks, when he discussed his thoughts on how to eliminate the
much-debated achievement gap.
First, he said, "we must set the highest
of expectations for all of our students." Second, "Let us ensure that every
child, in every school across this nation, has an excellent teacher." But
the applause that greeted his statement faded noticeably after his next two
sentences. "And let us proudly embrace a definition of excellence that
places student achievement at the forefront," Kamras said. "We only
strengthen our profession when we support high and performance-based
standards of quality for all teachers in all districts."
Kamras called on the delegates to
"embrace programs that recognize excellence in the classroom and encourage
highly effective educators to remain in our most underserved schools."
Kamras is a product of the Teach for America program, which trains college
graduates who want to teach and places them in low-income communities. Dave
Levin and Mike Feinberg (see item #8) are also Teach for America alumni. It
appears alternative certification also means alternative ways of thinking.
That's a good thing.
6) Not Enough Thought Amid the
Action. EIA traditionally has stayed away from
examining higher education because the situation is fundamentally different
than that of K-12. But NEA does have some college faculty members, and they
have their own representation, caucuses and publications in the union.
Last year, EIA
ran an item headlined "Call for Lefty Papers" on Thought & Action,
the NEA Journal of Higher Education because the journal wanted essays
"to address the ominous questions" about whether higher education would
become "a support system for the national security state."
Since that time, Thought & Action
had an overhaul. It expanded its editorial board to 47 members and added
several new features, including an interview section. But it will still
deploy the same knee-jerk leftism. The first interview subject is the
world's most famous left-wing crank, Noam ("Under capitalism we can't have
democracy by definition") Chomsky.
7) Las Vegas Teamsters Will Get to
Argue in State Supreme Court. It has been three
years since anything significant happened in Las Vegas regarding the efforts
of Teamsters Local 14 to gain a union representation election to replace the
Education Support Employees Association, which happens to be affiliated with
the Nevada State Education Association and NEA (search the EIA archives for
"Teamsters" for a half-dozen items on the battle).
It has been a long, slow slog through
the Nevada court system, but a hearing will be held before the Nevada
Supreme Court next month. At stake are the membership and affiliation of
some 8-10,000 bus drivers, custodians and other support employees who work
for the Clark County School District.
8) AFT President to Meet with KIPP
Co-Founders. EIA doesn't pretend to know what this
is about, and will not characterize it as either a good thing or a bad
thing, but it does seem to be an important thing. AFT President Ed McElroy
will meet with KIPP school co-founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg on
Wednesday. The KIPP charter schools may very well be the best-known and most
effective charter schools in the country.
9) Why Even Hostile NEA Members
Should Read the EIA Communiqué. By every
measure, EIA's readership among teacher union members, leaders and staff is
soaring. Even if they don't agree with the views presented here, they can
still find out something useful. If Keith Pickering-Walters, president of
the Livermore Education Association and representative to the California
Teachers Association State Council, had been an EIA reader, he might have
avoided this embarrassing gaffe in his April newsletter, recently forwarded
to EIA.
In an article headlined "Paid Signature
Gatherers?" Pickering-Walters described his experience when confronted by a
bounty hunter outside his local supermarket, soliciting signatures for one
of the governor's initiatives. After "disrupting her activities" (as he put
it), Pickering-Walters learned to his horror that the young lady was being
paid a bounty for each signature she gathered. "It's one thing to volunteer
to collect signatures for a good cause," he concluded. "It's another to pay
someone to collect signatures for someone else's cause."
Of course, Pickering-Walters' article is
only a faux pas if you already know that his own members' dues have been
paying bounty hunters for years (here
and
here are the last two times) and the bill runs into millions of dollars.
This raises some philosophical
questions: Is something a misstatement if, through ignorance, no one
recognizes it as wrong? Since his readers are blissfully unaware of CTA's
own spending habits, is EIA actually "creating" an error where one didn't
previously exist by drawing attention to it? If a tree falls in the forest
and no one is there to hear it, can't it still crush your cottage? For these
and other imponderable questions, read the EIA Communiqué and the
daily EIA blog,
Intercepts (cheap plug).
10) Scheduling Note.
The next EIA Communiqué will appear on Tuesday, September 6.
11) Quote
of the Week.
"Calling itself an education association is like calling the
United Auto Workers union a driving association." – Columnist Patrick
Chisholm, referring to NEA. (August 24 Christian Science Monitor) |
