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1) Teachers Head Back to School; Union Officials
Head to the Sky Box. In case you missed it,
Bloomberg.com reports, "Seven unions, including the American Federation
of Teachers and the National Education Association, have stepped in to help
pay for the Democratic National Convention in Denver after the host
committee announced in June it was $10 million short of its fundraising
goals. The host committee, as a private organization, can accept unlimited
corporate, union and individual contributions. And while presumptive
Democratic nominee Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee are
refusing contributions from registered lobbyists, the ban doesn't apply to
the convention."
The
Los Angeles Times adds, "In exchange, donors could get stadium
skyboxes for Obama's acceptance speech and other perks."
So, if you're interested in what your dues money is
buying, head over to the
Invesco Field web site and click the link to watch a video of the
stadium tour (Real Player required). The luxury boxes turn up at around the
2:30 mark and the
keg room appears at about 3:45.
2) Public Schools Must Accept All Students.
We hear it all the time. But the
Education Law Center in Pennsylvania discovered that some school
districts "improperly demand a child's Social Security card, a parent's
photo identification or court custody order, or inquire into immigration
status as a condition of enrollment."
According to ELC, out of Pennsylvania's 501 school
districts at least 162 districts have either policies or practices that
violate the state's enrollment laws.
3) Eye-Opening Stats and the Imponderable Question
of the Week. When the start of the school year approaches, news outlets
like to bunch factoids together, some of which are actually very
interesting.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer tells us that 40.6
percent of Cleveland elementary students and 54.4 percent of high school
students
missed more than 15 days of school. One school had 98.4 percent of the
students who had missed more than 15 days.
The Associated Press provides a lot more, the best
being the
comparisons to days gone by:
Percentage of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds enrolled in
school:
1965: 10 percent
2006: 66 percent
Children ages 3-5 who were read to by family member at
least three times in past week:
1993: 78.3 percent
2005: 85.7 percent
Percentage of students who can handle rigorous material
at their grade level, 2007:
Fourth-grade math: 39 percent
Eighth-grade math: 32 percent
Fourth-grade reading: 33 percent
Eighth-grade reading: 31 percent
We've accepted this as useful for so long I hesitate to
mention it for fear of cheesing people off, but the imponderable question of
the week is this: Does reading to kids actually turn them into readers?
I don't mean making books available to them, or helping
them with their reading. Nor am I questioning the value of
bonding or stimulating imagination by reading (or telling) a story. I'm just
wondering if there is any empirical evidence that reading to a child
stimulates reading or leads to better comprehension?
4) Where Have I Heard This Before? Last week,
the Wisconsin Education Association Council informed its members that the
union "supports legislation to prohibit a school board from requiring, as a
condition of employment, that a
teacher reside within the school district in which he or she works."
That's not unusual. Among the reasons WEAC cites is
that "this residency requirement makes it more difficult for (Milwaukee
Public Schools) to attract and retain the teachers who can make a difference
in Milwaukee."
It's hard to argue with that. Both new and veteran
teachers must make career decisions based on the residency requirement. This
is an obstacle most other public school teachers do not have to face.
But when the National Commission on Teaching and
America's Future performed a detailed study of teacher turnover in five
school districts in June 2007, it
failed to mention the residency requirement – even though the study
examined 59 other variables and two of the five districts (Milwaukee and
Chicago) have a residency requirement.
No one seemed very interested in the omission at the
time, perhaps because NCTAF recommended buckets of new spending for teacher
mentoring and retention. We might also ask how the two major school
districts in a study coincidentally both have a rare teacher residency
requirement.
But if WEAC can come to a conclusion about its relation
to teacher retention, then perhaps we're not too far from a realization that
teacher retention is a lot more complicated than just salary and working
conditions.
5) Scheduling Note. The next communiqué will
not appear under Tuesday, September 2.
6) Last Week's Intercepts. EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from August 8-18:
*
A Dog Named NEA. I don't make this stuff up, folks.
*
Diving Is Deep. Thank you again,
Captain Obvious!
*
Holes in NEA's Denver Doughnut Diplomacy. How not to explain away
envelopes full of cash.
7)
Quote of the Week.
"We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a
secret-ballot election." – George McGovern on the Employee Free Choice Act.
(August 8
Wall Street Journal) |
