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1) Coverage of NEA Representative Assembly Begins
July 2. For the 12th consecutive year, EIA will provide daily
gavel-to-gavel coverage from the floor of the National Education Association
Representative Assembly in San Diego. For those of you who are new to the
communiqué, you should know that distribution works a little differently
that week.
There will be no e-mail communiqués from the
convention. I will blog each day's events on
Intercepts, which you can check at your convenience, or you can
subscribe to the blog's
RSS feed. If you absolutely insist on e-mail, go to the Intercepts
page, where you can sign up for blog updates via e-mail. You need only
provide your e-mail address. Feedburner will send you a confirmation e-mail
once you complete the verification. The rest is automatic. You'll get one,
and only one, e-mail per day with the full text of the content I have added
to the blog that day.
There will be no communiqué next Monday, though blog
posts will continue daily, as usual. The first convention report will be
posted Thursday night, July 2 and each evening thereafter until the
convention closes on July 6. You'll get in-depth reporting, analysis and, I
expect, photos and video of the proceedings. After the convention is over,
and as the summer wears on, additional material from the convention will be
part of your regular weekly communiqués in July and August.
Few fireworks are expected, and it's unclear whether
the trusteeship of the Indiana State Teachers Association will even be
addressed. NEA has no restrictions on seating delegates from such
affiliates, unless they fail to pay their national dues. We can assume that
despite its other difficulties, ISTA is current.
The only other issue that may arise from the
trusteeship is the directive of NEA by-law 8-12 a., which states a
trusteeship may be established "for the purpose of (i) correcting corruption
or financial malpractice or (ii) restoring democratic procedures." The
establishment of a trusteeship is prima facie evidence of NEA's belief that
corruption or financial malpractice took place in Indiana, although, at last
report, no one has been formally or publicly accused of anything.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will hold a
town hall meeting on July 2 with the delegates, and NEA Friend of Education
awardee Linda Darling-Hammond will speak on July 4.
I will be available via e-mail for your questions and
comments during the convention, but please make allowances for delays in my
response. Delegates and guests are welcome to visit with me by the press
section (left of the stage as you face it), but be aware I am restricted
from wandering around the convention floor. As always, conversations with me
at the convention are kept in confidence - not for publication unless you
explicitly authorize it.
2) Vox Populi, Vox Nihili.
Take a look at this interactive map. It shows the results of the
California special election of May 19 regarding Proposition 1B, which would
have required the state to provide an additional $9.3 billion in funding to
the public schools. The measure went down to a 62-38 defeat, and lost in all
but three of California's 58 counties.
NEA and the California Teachers Association spent more
than $10 million to pass 1B, when they could have just saved their money
because
Democratic legislators just introduced a bill that would spend the money
anyway. Jim Sanders of the Sacramento Bee reports:
"Democrats also argue that 1B was rejected for reasons
other than school funding – voters were angry that the Legislature hadn't
solved the state's budget crisis, and they didn't like that 1B would take
effect only if Proposition 1A were passed to extend some newly imposed taxes
for up to two years."
These folks are too dim-witted to understand election
results, so it's hardly surprising that they might believe the union's
claims that California "ranks dead-last in the nation in per-pupil
spending," or that reducing school bus routes "risks
students' lives" because they might begin "walking in dangerous
neighborhoods or along treacherous routes."
Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously
that
districts do not have to allow unions to place campaign flyers in teachers'
mailboxes at school.
3) Court Rules Teaching Seventh-Grade English Is Not
a Civil Rights Violation. If you want to know why the
Indiana State Teachers Association (ISTA) has money trouble, you might
ask the union how much it spent on the case of Sharon Lucero.
Lucero had been teaching AP English in the Nettle Creek
school district, but in 2004 administrators assigned her to teach
seventh-grade English instead. In response, Lucero filed two Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaints and a union grievance,
claiming "gender and national origin discrimination." The union grievance
went all the way to arbitration, where the arbitrator dismissed it, ruling
her reassignment could not be considered a reprimand.
Lucero sued Nettle Creek in January 2005, claimed she
incurred medical expenses for treatment of physical and emotional stress,
and filed a 147-page brief with 245 tabbed exhibits. The district court
granted summary judgment in favor of Nettle Creek, which Lucero appealed to
the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week,
the Seventh Circuit upheld that decision.
The
full opinion is available here, and it's worth reading all the way
through. I don't know how much Nettle Creek was forced to spend on the case,
but the money surely could have been put to better use, maybe even saving a
new teacher's job.
Oh, I forgot to mention Lucero sits on the board of an
ISTA regional council.
4) Pigeon-Holed. There is a bill in the
Massachusetts legislature that would require pigeons used in motion pictures
to be "licensed and banded." I'm unsure what "banded" means in this context,
or whether it's meant to say "bonded," but the
Boston Herald interprets it to mean unionized - "no
fly-by-night scabs stealing scenes," the paper reports.
The
commenters are having a blast with this one, including my personal
favorite, "What about the squirrels? They can't all work for
ACORN."
The threat to unionize pigeons is not without
precedent. Back in 1997 Local 70 of the Teamsters told the trustees of Mills
College in Oakland the school could no longer use non-union goats to
manicure the lawn. In a grievance letter, the Teamsters offered to represent
the goats "in the same aggressive forceful manner we do every other member."
(See
page 6 here for further details.)
5) Contract Hits. Wherein we highlight a
contract provision from the current agreement between the National Education
Association and its largest staff union. This is Article 18, Section 8:
"The [staff] Union President, Vice-President,
Secretary, Treasurer, Grievance Committee Chairperson and Chief Shop Steward
shall be continued in active employment by NEA regardless of their relative
seniority, provided that there is bargaining-unit work that they are
qualified to perform in any Job Category. Preference among the aforesaid
Union officials shall be in the order in which they are listed herein (i.e.,
highest priority to President, etc.)."
6) Last Week's Intercepts. EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from June 15-22:
*
The Turn of the Screw. Education Week gets disarmed.
*
Today's Bad Timing Award. Maybe virtual charters aren't a way around
unions after all.
*
Report: Weingarten to Step Down in NYC. This was inevitable, since
she only makes $350,000 a year.
*
That Is One Fast-Spinning Revolving Door. Hello, I must be going.
*
Win One, Lose One. I can't confirm these numbers, so I throw them out
here and will happily correct them if I'm wrong: Of the roughly 4,600
charter schools in the U.S., about 110 are unionized.
7)
Quote of the Week.
"The teachers union, and its president, however,
ought not to paint themselves as selflessly taking one for the team when, in
reality, it only did it kicking and screaming." – Jack Spillane,
columnist for South Coast Today in Massachusetts. Spillane was
commenting about a claim by the Fairhaven Educators Association that it
voted to "take three days without pay next year to help the Fairhaven
schools." In fact, the union negotiated a reduction in contractually
required work days in exchange. (June 21
South Coast Today) |
