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1) EIA Exclusive: NEA Loses
Members for First Time in 27 Years. As long as the
teaching force grew, the National Education Association could count on its
membership ranks to grow correspondingly. But with last year's flat
enrollment, tight state budgets and teacher layoffs, NEA faces a situation
it hasn't faced since 1983 - fewer members than the previous year.
While the decrease is bad news for a
union ill-equipped to cut costs, it is very far from debilitating. NEA's
total numbers were down by almost 37,000 members, but more than half of the
loss came from the student ranks. Students must renew their membership
annually, and so can make individual decisions that bear no relation to
their job status.
The ranks of working members ("active")
were more of a mixed picture. NEA showed a small gain (632) in the number of
active education support employees nationwide, but a loss of 15,181 "active
certified" employees, a category that includes teachers, counselors, speech
pathologists, and other professionals. Of these, 13,605 were full-time.
This is a significant number of
teachers, but small relative to the reports of catastrophic force reductions
we have been reading since the school year began. As late as last month, the
California Teachers Association was claiming
20,000 educator layoffs. If true, it would mean the other 49 states
hired as many as 7,000 additional teachers, which seems unlikely.
The loss of full-time dues alone amounts
to $2.2 million - chump change out of the national union's $355.8 million
budget. Even so, a new proposal to create a tiered dues structure based on
salaries may eliminate most of the loss. That proposal has not been
finalized yet, but it could be ready for approval by the NEA Representative
Assembly in July.
2) NEA to Send $1 Million to Kennedy
Institute. The National Education Association
board of directors approved a $1 million donation from the union's
contingency fund to the
Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. The
contribution will be made in $200,000 installments over the next five years.
Among other things, the institute will
have a training program for incoming U.S. Senators. It would be pretty funny
if its first enrollee were
Scott Brown.
3) Guam AFT President Resigns Senate
Seat. The saga of Guam Federation of Teachers
President Matt Rector came to an end as he
resigned his seat in the Guam Senate. You can review what brought him to
this point
here and
here.
4) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from January 11-19:
* I
Have a Dream... or Did I? Excised.
*
Won't Get Fooled Again... Again. Who gets the residuals on these things?
*
NEA Says, "Randi Who?" NEA can't embrace it, can't denounce it, so
ignores it.
*
Hope and Change. No one can create Republican voters the way Democrats
do.
*
Cut to the Chase. AFT's local presidents weren't at the National Press
Club.
*
"I feel like I'm going to throw up." No platitude recession.
5)
Quote of the Week #1.
"We really don't have adequate position control and we don't know where our
funding comes from for all these positions." - Los Angeles Unified School
District Inspector General Jerry Thornton, upon learning that the district
spent $200 million more than budgeted on employee salaries, despite laying
off more than 2,000 of them. (January
14 Los Angeles Times)
Quote of the Week #2. "I was surprised too when I read the headlines
and the press accounts. But when I read Randi's speech on the AFT website, I
discovered that the media stories were wrong. In fact, Randi offered a far
more complicated and nuanced proposal than what was widely reported." -
Diane Ravitch, analyzing AFT President Randi Weingarten's National Press
Club speech in "What Randi Really Said and Meant." (January
16 Huffington Post)
Quote of the Week #3. "What happened to the reform agreement brokered
by [former Gov. Gray] Davis and the education establishment a decade ago to
help poor children who need good public schools the most? ... Despite big
payouts to under-performing schools, the ones that continually failed to
improve outcomes for schoolchildren (and there are hundreds of them) never
faced any serious consequences. Instead, in the middle of the decade, when
the rubber met the road and the number of schools facing sanctions started
to grow, a new negotiation took place." - Margaret Fortune, member of the
California State University Board of Trustees, referring to the California
public school accountability system enacted in 2000. (January
3 Sacramento Bee) |
