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

You can’t make this stuff up…

UPDATE: The debate rages.

If you want to know why Joe Williams is my favorite education reporter, today’s work provides the reason.

First, you need to go here for a story published by the New York State United Teachers that we all thought was an early April Fool’s joke at first glance, but turned out to be genuine.

Joe picked up the story and highlighted it on The Chalkboard.

But then Joe went the extra mile and did a little background work, and the result is a thoroughly entertaining and well-crafted examination of the burgeoning phenomenon that is Jack Powell Zucchini.

Perfect reading for a Friday. Don’t miss it.

I’m not much of a bandwagon-jumper-onner, but I can’t help but notice that Matthew Ladner is offering to buy a steak dinner for the first person who “can send me two random assignment school-choice studies showing significant declines in either academic performance or parental satisfaction.” Ladner will even throw in drinks and dessert.

In response, Sherman Dorn will give a $100 book store gift certificate to the first person who can provide “the name of a single public secondary school this year where the school had been subject for at least five years to high-stakes testing policies and where there were more students using copies of Shakespeare’s plays in classes than using test-prep booklets (or their electronic equivalent) this year in reading or English.”

These seem like lame ideas to me, but I’m willing to give it a go.

I will pay for a flight to Sacramento and an overnight stay in the downtown Sheraton to the first person who can provide me with the most recent Huttleston report (if you don’t know what that is, you can’t get hold of one, so fuhgeddaboutit). While here, my wife and I will invite you into our home, where I will cook you your choice of my famous melanzane con due formaggi or my equally spicy Thai Cowboy Steak with Roasted Tomato and Chile Salsa.

You have to agree to be photographed so that we can document the dinner, but we can put one of those little black rectangles or fuzzy blue circles over your face to hide your identity before publishing, if you wish.

Former NBA star Kevin Johnson will appear on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about the charter schools run by his charitable foundation, St. Hope, Inc.

Johnson is as much a competitor for charter schools today as he was in his glory days as a point guard for the Phoenix Suns. And his nemesis — in fact, maybe his lone opponent — has been the Sacramento City Teachers Association (see this Quote of the Week).

Johnson is too classy to badmouth the teachers’ union on Oprah, but I doubt if he’ll sidestep the issue of who manned the barricades when St. Hope applied to convert Sacramento High School into a charter.

No airdate has been set, but Johnson’s appearance will only boost the charter school movement in California and nationwide.

Regarding this story, we now know what happens when corporate liberals are caught behaving like capitalists.

Members of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) voted to authorize a strike if a contract settlement cannot be reached. Well, not all of them, because of the estimated 6,000 members, only 2,500 bothered to vote. But I digress.

UESF President Dennis Kelly described for the San Francisco Chronicle his experience at the last strike vote in 1979:

“The teachers union last held a strike vote in 1979 — also in Kezar Pavilion. Kelly was an English teacher then. On Wednesday, he recalled sitting in the audience looking at the union’s leaders seated at a table in the front, beams of light from the windows shining down on them. ‘I remember pointing out to people that the light was shining on them like in a medieval painting,’ Kelly said. ‘You knew they had to be right.’”

Perhaps, but maybe it was God’s way of giving them the third degree.

Priceless…