Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Before we get too worked up again about teachers’ unions vowing to organize charter school employees, we need to remember that this is an expensive undertaking in both money and manpower for the unions. Only the largest charter schools or networks are worth the trouble.

The Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania was one such target, since it employs roughly 500 teachers and others who would be eligible for union representation. The Pennsylvania State Education Association instituted a major campaign last fall, creating a web site and an online forum for those involved to debate back and forth. Agora responded with its own web site, highlighting PSEA’s less-than-friendly attitude about cyber schools.

There will be a lot of argument in the coming weeks about what exactly were the deciding factors, but there can be no arguing about the results. Two hundred employees voted in favor of the union, and 214 voted against.

PSEA calls this “a margin of only 8 votes,” by which it means if eight No votes had voted Yes instead, the union would have won. This tends to cloud where it failed in the election. The problem wasn’t that PSEA failed to swing 8 votes from No to Yes, it’s that it failed to get 15 non-voters to vote Yes.

The San Diego Education Association is having its troubles, as reported previously. But now – to employ the cliché – it has been taken to another level.

Ousted SDEA vice president Camille Zombro appears to be the driving force behind The Breakfast Club Action Group, a faction of the union that is very unhappy about the organization’s direction and governance. Zombro composed an open letter blasting president Bill Freeman for “taking dramatic and abrupt steps to systematically dismantle the very foundation of the powerful union we have built: our democracy, our transparent communication with membership, and our tough stance in defending our jobs and our contract.”

She called the dismissal of executive director Craig Leedham “a political purge” and said the union is “in a tailspin.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune and the Voice of San Diego both got wind of the letter and their stories naturally concentrate on the effect the union’s turmoil will have on contract negotiations and school district operations. But there is plenty more to chew on from The Breakfast Club as it pertains to the California Teachers Association and the larger union movement.

First there’s the post about SDEA’s relationship with its own employees. It contains this segment:

When Craig became the Executive Director, he turned down a forty-thousand dollar salary increase that would have matched his salary to his predecessors, and instead took only a one-percent increase over what he’d been making. He has since pushed to further decrease his own salary and the salary of SDEA staff by negotiating nine furlough days. That might sound like a lot, but not when you find out what the top of the professional staff salary schedule is: $131,560 a year. That’s right. For some of you, SDEA staff literally half your age are making literally twice your wage.

This isn’t to say that our employees don’t deserve fair wages and benefits- of course they do. But there’s fair, and then there’s ridiculous. And it’s no small wonder Craig has some popularity issues with the staff when he directly attempted to reduce those ridiculous staff salaries.

Teacher union officers are notorious for their inability to comfortably combine their roles as labor representatives and managers of a private entity. While urging SDEA not to accept reduced salaries in order to mitigate teacher layoffs, the author also wants SDEA’s unionized staff to accept reduced salaries and furlough days.

It gets even more ironic in “The Bell Curve: Why CTA Is Really Our Frenemy.” The post provides a rare glimpse into the often-strained relationship between NEA locals and state affiliates. I urge you to read the entire post, but I provide an excerpt here:

For the past six years, SDEA has intentionally deemphasized our relationship with our state affiliate CTA (the California Teachers Association) and focused on doing things our own way. Here’s why.

SDEA employs our own staff, who work directly for us and not for CTA. This is big deal because CTA’s staffers tend to be very conservative in their advice to local unions. Theirs is a traditional union model where “expert” staff provide services to “grateful” members (remember, we pay their very large salaries!). They see state lobbying instead of local organizing as the most important role of the union. CTA staff analysis of school districts’ budgets also tends to line up with the districts’ own analysis, which as we know is wrong every single year.

…So why do CTA staff continually advise concessions that so often turn out to be unnecessary? Because when you’re talking to a CTA staff person, you are also talking to a CSO member. CSO stands for California Staff Organization, and that’s the union that all of the CTA professional staff belong to. They have a personal, material interest in the health of CTA’s budget, because that’s where their own wages and benefits come from. The truth is that when SDEA/CTA members give concessions, it doesn’t hurt CTA’s budget. In fact, CTA keeps passing dues increases despite the concessions teachers are taking statewide. But layoffs do hurt CTA’s budget a lot. And when teachers’ jobs disappear, CTA staff jobs disappear. That’s why CTA staff (CSO members) advise teachers that year after year, we should take concessions to avoid layoffs. It’s not just that they have some altruistic interest in saving your job. They want to save their own. It’s too bad CTA staff don’t take a page out of SDEA’s book and realize it doesn’t have to be layoffs OR concessions. We can (and do) fight both!

The obvious response to this is that SDEA should continue to remain as independent of CTA as possible. The advice we get from CTA staff benefits CTA staff, but it sure doesn’t seem to benefit CTA members.

It’s emphasized in the original: It’s not just that they have some altruistic interest in saving your job. They want to save their own.

When I write that unions have their own self-interests at stake, which may or may not coincide with the self-interests of the people they represent, it’s called anti-union. It’s refreshing to hear it from unionists who believe their own organization isn’t combative enough.

Click here to read:

1) Teacher Union Election Post-Mortems

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quotes of the Week

The National Education Association has named liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as its 2012 Friend of Education. Previous winners include the 14 fugitive Wisconsin Democrats, Diane Ravitch, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy.

I hope they checked with Krugman’s mom first.

Too often we equate strong or weak unions with strong or weak collective bargaining laws, but the Alabama Education Association continues to successfully resist one major education reform effort that has worked its way past 40 other teacher union state affiliates – charter schools.

A major effort to pass a charter school law had the backing of the governor and the state senate, but died in the House education committee.

“This is a victory for the schoolchildren of Alabama and the underserved public schools all over the state,” said Dr. Henry Mabry, executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association. “We don’t need to dilute even further the precious little funding for our elementary and secondary students to gamble on the unproven model of charter schools.”

Never underestimate the power of more than 18,000 phony Twitter followers.

The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation released a report finding that taxpayers are spending millions of dollars in salary and benefits for people who aren’t doing any public work. In fact, they’re performing union work – a large portion of which involves extracting more money from said taxpayers.

The report revealed some union officers received attendance bonuses and overtime, a non-teacher received a teacher’s salary, and doctorate scale was paid to someone without a doctorate. In some instances where unions were supposed to make some reimbursement, those payments were not made.

None of this should come as a surprise to readers of this blog. Union release time on this scale is common practice throughout the U.S. But the union defense of these perks is wearing thin.

“The purpose of such agreements is to promote labor harmony within districts by making it possible for problems to be addressed and resolved cooperatively rather than through adversarial processes,” said New Jersey Education Association president Barbara Keshishian, apparently with a straight face.

Al Ashley, president of the Camden firefighters’ union, has his own complaints. “I work very hard,” he said. ”The stress levels have been bananas ever since the talk of layoffs started, through the layoffs, and now after the layoffs.”

All the more reason for Ashley to do someting much less stressful – like running into burning buildings.

Camden police union president John Williamson said, “My phone starts ringing at 5 a.m., and sometimes it doesn’t stop ringing  until 2 a.m.”

Ah, the Reg Weaver Defense!

The notion that union officers are providing a service to their employers is beyond ludicrous – it’s insulting. I’ll subscribe to it the first time a superintendent is able to fire a union president for failing to properly represent his or her members.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) and its union allies spent more than $4 million in an attempt to make Kathleen Falk the Democratic recall nominee against Gov. Scott Walker. They ended up paying about $17.47 per vote for a 24 percentage point defeat in a primary where Falk lost her home county by a two-to-one margin.

We’ll now have four weeks in which we’re supposed to forget all that has gone before, in favor of the new narrative as Walker faces off against Democratic nominee Tom Barrett.

In a post-election press release, WEAC declared: “Wisconsin voters have spoken, selecting Tom Barrett to run against Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election. The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) will immediately unify its membership to support Tom Barrett as we stand together to reclaim Wisconsin.”

And that’s all they had to say about Tom Barrett. But what can they say? On April 20, WEAC told its members:

Did you know that in 2006, Kathleen Falk earned 50,000 more votes than Tom Barrett did when he ran at the top of the ticket in 2010? Falk is a proven vote getter, statewide, and is the strongest candidate to defeat Governor Walker in the upcoming recall elections…. Kathleen Falk, is the only candidate having the support of an independent and effective “get out the vote” grassroots organization. Wisconsin for Falk has offices across the state and is reaching thousands of voters each day through phone calls and door canvases.

In a series of frequently asked questions, here was the union’s answer to the question “Can Kathleen Falk win?”:

Yes. This election and the circumstances surrounding it are unique and represent an entirely different playing field from previous elections. It will be a close election, and Kathleen Falk has previously garnered a good percentage of the vote across the state. She’s a strong and viable candidate who provides a stark contrast to Scott Walker because she values our members and working families. She has a strong campaign team and her intensity and passion match that of our members over the past year. When meeting with educators, her commitment to the issues we care about resonates and she receives standing ovations. Kathleen Falk has the ability to bring a winning message to voters.

And in a campaign flyer, here’s WEAC’s rundown of Tom Barrett’s positions:

School Funding – Hasn’t offered a school funding plan. In the past, supported a gradual increase in state funding (returning to two-thirds state funding of public education) as the budget climate improved.

School Privatization – Favors expanding voucher programs and increased taxpayer support for private schools.

Act 10 to Eliminate Collective Bargaining – Used Walker’s Act 10 “tools” to impose a new health care plan and raise premiums on most city workers, failing to extend any of the city’s collective bargaining agreements. Called for the inclusion of police and fire units under Act 10.

For his part, Barrett has his own selective amnesia. Milwaukee Public Radio‘s coverage of Barrett’s acceptance speech quotes political analyst Amber Wichowsky as saying: “You did not hear much in that speech about restoring the collective bargaining rights.”

So despite being the driving force behind the recalls, WEAC and friends are already in the position of making the best of a bad situation. Their best-case scenario is exchanging a Republican governor whom they hate for a Democratic governor who will ignore them on crucial issues. Call it the Obama Quandary.