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

I can’t say I subscribed to Santayana’s often-misquoted statement, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but recent events are leading me to rethink that position.

* This morning’s Wall Street Journal contained an editorial entitled “Teachers’ Pets (Cont’d),” which was a response to NEA’s response to WSJ‘s January 3 editorial. Today’s piece fleshed out more precisely the LM-2 categories — what money went where and for what reasons — but failed to acknowledge that the $65 million in “contributions, gifts and grants” is not equal to the amount that NEA gave “in its members’ dues to left-liberal groups last year,” as the original piece stated. That amount requires more information than is present in the LM-2, and one’s precise definition of “left-liberal group.”

But this back-and-forth between WSJ and NEA has a long and storied history. The earliest manifestation I can find begins on January 14, 1985, when the WSJ editorial page reported on the nomination of William Bennett as U.S. Secretary of Education. “The National Education Association, the once-powerful teachers’ union, has already come out against him,” the Journal reported.

On January 23, NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell corrected the paper, stating that “NEA has taken no position on the nomination of Dr. Bennett.” (Even now this should be news to NEA members.) The Journal printed its response the same day: “Oh.”

Ultimately, it didn’t matter because NEA and Bennett were fated to be mortal enemies, and they were.

* John Stossel’s “Stupid in America” caused a major uproar when it aired on January 13, but as I write this I have in front of me a transcript of Stossel’s “Public Schools in Bad Shape” from November 12, 1999. It is essentially the same report — but with a teacher test instead of a student test. Stossel has been heavily criticized for bias, but it’s not good news for public schools that he can basically rerun a six-year-old report and no one accuses him of being out-of-date. Agree with his conclusions or hate his guts, the situation is still pretty much the same as it was in November 1999.

* AFT and its largest local, the United Federation of Teachers, dove headfirst into the blogosphere, and is receiving kudos for doing so. Our good friends The Education Wonks, one of the nation’s leading education blogs, are unofficially soliciting NEA to create a comments-enabled blog of its own.

But old-timers (?!) like me remember that NEA experimented with such an idea once before, and the outcome wasn’t exactly to its liking.

Back in early 1998, NEA was gathering support for the Principles of Unity, the document that would usher in a merger between NEA and AFT. As part of its education process (or sales pitch, for the cynics out there), the union established a Unity message board, where members and non-members alike could share their opinions of the merger.

Nothing remains of that board, though you can still see references to it on Google’s cache. But my memory and the archives of documents I have from that time indicate that most of those who posted were vehemently opposed to the merger and said so in no uncertain terms.

“There has been no discussion of what I fear is a very realistic scenario,” wrote one NEA member. “There seems a lot of visceral hatred of the AFL-CIO out there (I’m not one). If merger passes, how many members, or whole affiliates, will disaffiliate and form one or more national organizations? Will we not end up more divided and disunified?”

It would be easy to overstate the effects of the Unity message board, but the sheer volume of anti-merger postings could not have helped NEA in its goal to merge with AFT. Delegates to the 1998 convention ultimately voted it down by a large margin. Perhaps NEA doesn’t want a repeat of that experience.

* An Associated Press story has probably reached your local newspaper by now: “NY Union-Run Charter School Draws Scrutiny.” It states that the UFT charter school “is believed to be the nation’s only charter school operated by a teachers union.”

Well, it depends on your definition. The CIVA Charter High School in Colorado, the Integrated Day Charter School in Connecticut, and the Lanikai Elementary Public Charter School in Hawaii still exist, though NEA terminated its connection with them years ago.

The three schools were part of what was to be a six-campus Charter Schools Initiative launched by NEA in 1995. NEA hired a UCLA research team to “document and assess key learnings” from the schools. The union provided money, technical assistance and PR.

“NEA members at the six sites will have empowering opportunities for professional growth, parents will have access to real educational options for their children, Associations will be able to help members expand their participatory and leadership roles, and the school-community tie will be strengthened,” reads an NEA brief on the initiative.

But a proposed school in Georgia never got off the ground, its Arizona school never opened due to lack of enrollment, and its California school was an unmitigated disaster. The San Diego school board refused to renew its charter when it expired in 2003.

The UFT charter school — if UFT heeds Santayana’s warning — is not doomed to repeat NEA’s history, and may indeed run a successful charter school. But it is astonishing how quickly NEA’s Charter School Initiative, ballyhooed in 1995, was flushed down the memory hole.

* The Boston Teachers Union delivered its 32-page contract proposal to the school district, and it has an unusual provision. The union wants the Boston Public Schools to send letters to charter school parents twice a year, trying to get them to switch to a regular public school.

“Teachers, the union said, would then agree to help the School Department organize a week of open houses targeting students already in charter schools and volunteer their evenings to staff the events,” according to the Boston Globe.

The cost would be $100,000.

“Charter school principals and advocates say they do not have a problem with the school system attempting to recruit charter students, as long as charter schools are allowed to do the same in regular public schools,” reports the Globe.

I’d love to read those letters.

Dear Charter School Parent:

We miss you. Won’t you return to the city schools? For one thing, our teachers’ union is striving mightily — at the local, state and national level — to shut down your charter school. Why not beat the crowds when it finally succeeds?

Join us for an evening of cookies, coffee and wouldn’t-you-like-to-invest-in-a-timeshare-style propaganda while we explain why choosing the best school for your child is our job, not yours.

Cordially,

Your Superintendent and Union President Standing Behind Him Holding a Big Stick with a Nail in It.

* Update: High school Spanish teacher Fernando Del Pino resigned yesterday after it was revealed he had shown the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin in class. School officials learned that Del Pino had shown other movies in class, though they didn’t release a list of titles.

He can add this one to his collection.

* The number of public school students identified as having “specific learning disabilities” has nearly quadrupled in the last 30 years and constitutes nearly 43 percent of all students with disabilities. This category includes those with dyslexia and other disorders that interfere with the ability to perform school work.

How students obtain or don’t obtain a disability designation in order to receive special education services is sometimes a matter of controversy. That controversy now seems to have spilled over into the other categories of disabilities, as two stories that appeared today illustrate.

Fourth-grader Brentson Duke has a severe peanut allergy. He had an attack last September from accidental exposure to peanuts at school. While officials of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools considered what to do, they paid for seven weeks of home instruction for Brentson. Now, after staff training on Brentson’s condition and a notice to other parents, the district cut off those funds and expected Brentson to return to school — an option Brentson’s mother was not prepared to risk. She removed Brentson from public school and is now home-schooling him.

“It’s not cheap,” she said. “But if it’s keeping him from dying, I wouldn’t care if it were $20,000.”

School officials, backed by an opinion of the state attorney general, say Brentson’s allergy does not qualify as a disability.

“I have no doubt, no anything, that we’ve not gone far beyond what we had to do,” the school principal said.

Indiana high-schooler Nicky Ontiveros ran into a similar problem — except his affliction is leukemia. Despite the fact that Nicky undergoes chemotherapy and radiation treatment and is under constant threat of infection, the attorney representing the Porter Township Schools stated that Nicky’s leukemia does not meet the definition of a disability under state law. The school system denied Nicky home tutoring services on that basis. Nicky’s parents have gone to court.

Complicated diagnoses and suitable responses are guaranteed to cause battles among reasonable people — think of the bitter three-way fights between hospitals, patients, and HMOs. The delivery of special education services suffers from the same problem: the desire of those involved to make a complicated problem simple by asking, “Will we make money or lose money?”

* Here are the results of EIA’s Really Official Super-Accurate Poll. Presented with the opportunity to answer the question “Who is the Ohio Education Association trying to kid?”:

8 said “anyone who has never heard of self-selection”
3 said “the public”
2 said “the members”
1 said “the press”

and 489 people who visited Intercepts since the poll was posted decided not to vote at all, illustrating the problem of self-selection.

* A new report by the Nevada Policy Research Institute takes on the much-neglected issue of school district size. Read it here.

* Wal-Mart has 325 job openings for its new store just outside Chicago’s city limits. About 25,000 people applied. Still waiting for the news to appear here. Wake up!

* The January 26 Contract Hits is up, featuring Sumner County, Tennessee.

This wouldn’t have happened if someone would just market a Ritalin dart gun.

Missoula, Montana, high school business teacher Dan Kucera is accused of giving a student the business.

District officials in Fayette County, Kentucky, suspended high school Spanish teacher Fernando Del Pino for showing the R-rated movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin to students Monday.

The school policy on videos requires parental consent before an R-rated movie can be shown. But administrators were also upset about another small but salient point.

“The movie certainly wasn’t in Spanish,” said Lisa Deffendall, spokeswoman for Fayette County Public Schools.

For now, students will have to content themselves with watching this.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that five teachers at San Leandro High School in the Bay Area refused to hang a classroom poster designed by the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, defying a district mandate.

The poster includes gay pride symbols and designates the classroom as a “safe space.” The teachers, who were not named in the story, said displaying the poster would violate their religious beliefs.

This story has a lovely confluence of controversial issues: homosexuality, religion, school district mandates, tolerance, diversity, political correctness, classroom displays and academic freedom.

EIA wonders if the San Leandro Teachers Association will defend, as it is wont to do, the right of these teachers to run their classrooms in the way they see fit, in light of a one-size-fits-all mandate from school administrators. If not, would the union stand silently by if the district required teachers to hang posters touting the “Students in Free Enterprise” program?

Probably not.