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

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1) Nearly One-Third of AFT Employees Earn Six-Figure Salaries
2) Membership Numbers Not Adding Up
3) Adequacy Lawsuit Dismissed in Nebraska
4) Statewide Teachers Contract in Vermont?
5) Nebraska Pipeline
6) Headline of the Year
7) Maine Local Treasurer Charged with Felony Theft
8) Scheduling Note
9) Quote of the Week

I don’t make these stories up, friends, I just pass them along.

* The Visalia Times-Delta in California has some wonderful quotes from local teachers’ union officials about their failure to file PAC disclosure reports for school board races.

“I flat out didn’t know I had to file until today,” said Pat Twiford, Visalia Unified Teachers Association political action committee chairman. “We are teachers first and all this stuff is on our time. I don’t even know where to go about deadlines or filings.”

“I never really kept much track of contributions,” Twiford said. “I was unaware the contributions had to be reported. I don’t deal with this too much.”

Teachers union president Karl Kildow said he was unaware if the PAC filed a report with the city clerk’s office. “It is my understanding that the committee sent it to the state Elections Office and the state told them to file it with a local entity,” Kildow said. “If they did, I’m not sure.”

* David Shreve of the National Conference of State Legislatures told a Nevada legislative committee yesterday that “there is no evidence that paying public school teachers more money will lead to better performance by students.” He was immediately taken to the woodshed by the local representatives of the education establishment, one of whom — Teresa Jordan — said there is a “weak correlation” between teacher pay and improved student performance. She blamed the weak correlation on the fact that teachers’ pay is based on level of education and years of teaching experience.

“However, Jordan said, research shows if pay increases are based on other factors — on which she did not elaborate — then students will perform better,” the Las Vegas Review Journal pointedly reported.

* A little history lesson from West Salem, Wisconsin.

* The San Dieguito Union High School District is in some hot water for allowing a school literary magazine to publish racy photos of high school junior Monterey Salka — not only because the magazine didn’t get the consent of Ms. Salka’s parents, but because the magazine apparently violated the exclusive marketing rights that modeling agency Pulse Management hold over Ms. Salka’s image.

“(The students) took pictures of a client that was under exclusive worldwide contract with some of the most prestigious firms on the planet without permission from agents who have exclusive marketing rights,” said Stacey Eastman, president of Pulse Management. Ms. Salka has appeared in Vogue, Teen Vogue, Cosmo Girl and Seventeen.

G-rated photos of Ms. Salka appear here and here.

* Headline of the Day: “Coon arrest changes Baldwin-Whitehall school board election dynamics.” You think?

* Bulletin board mania in Hackensack. A new Contract Hits is up.

NEA New Mexico released the results of a poll this morning that show state residents want to use a state budget surplus to “improve public schools.” Who conducted the poll? Just “a national advocacy group called Communities for Quality Education.”

You could do an EIA archives search to learn about CQE, but all you need to know is contained in this March 29, 2004 story, back when the organization was called America Learns. EIA has been outing CQE as a union front ever since.

A reporter from the Purbalite, the Baldwin High School student newspaper, shows herself ready for a career in print journalism as she provides her take on the Beverly Coon/Ronald Grimm baking bed scandal.

Google “single standardized test” and you’ll get a couple hundred scolding comments about how “using a single standardized test as the sole determinant for graduation, promotion,tracking and ability grouping is not fair” and that “test development experts agree that it is not appropriate to use performance on a single standardized test for making high-stakes decisions for individuals,” et al.

The Sweetwater Union High School District in southern California has taken these comments to heart, and requires students to “write reflective essays, compile classroom work samples and make their case for graduation before an interview panel to earn their diplomas.” District administrators consider the senior portfolio “an in-depth gauge of students’ abilities that can’t be captured in a fill-in-the-bubble exam.”

But there’s a constituency that objects to the portfolios: the students. According to a story in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune, some students consider the portfolios “a last-minute scavenger hunt to assemble transcripts, letters of recommendation, job applications and work from their high school years.” One student testified before the school board and called the portfolio “busywork” that interfered with preparation for Advanced Placement exams.