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

Click here to read:

1) “AFT Calls Higher Education Teaching the Wal-Mart of the Professions”
2) Tiananmen Square Activist Speaks to Delegates
3) Action Taken on Resolutions
4) Guam Guy’s Very Specialized Role
5) Today’s Commie Commentary
6) Quote of the Day

Big thanks to the Massachusetts NEA delegate who stopped by the Boston Convention Center with two knishes for me. If you don’t know what those are, well, that’s why we need to expand ethnic diversity training.

AFT John came over and introduced himself, and while we’re not likely to agree on the big issues, we came to the mutual conclusion that good grammar was, er, good.

Click here to read:

1) AFT Passes Strong Pro-Israel Resolution
2) Send In the Pols
3) Dues Increase Passes
4) In Support of Union Schools 2.0
5) Today’s Commie Commentary
6) Quote of the Day

For another take on the AFT Convention, visit the completely disinterested AFT NCLBlog, where they are down on my Jesuit education, but yet have mastered the art of hagiography.

Click here to read:

1) McElroy’s Keynote Speech Covers the Bases
2) National Dues Increase on the Agenda
3) Upcoming AFT Resolutions
4) In Support of Union Schools
5) Fair and Balanced
6) Quote of the Day

Every time I attend a union convention, I learn something new. This year, at the opening session of the 2006 AFT Convention in Boston, I learned from AFT Secretary-Treasurer Nat LaCour that the Boston Tea Party, and demonstrations against the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre were “labor-related protests.” In other words, the Founding Fathers were proto-union activists!

Of course, it’s due to my bourgeois upbringing and fascistic Jesuit education that up until today, I thought the Townshend Acts, the Stamp Act and the Tea Act caused unrest and ultimately revolution because they were unpopular taxes forced upon small business owners by a distant and unresponsive government who treated Americans not as equal participants but as squawking geese to be plucked for their hard-earned cash.

We better get that labor education curriculum in the schools quickly, so that today’s students don’t grow up with the misapprehensions I did.

EIA travels to Boston today for the American Federation of Teachers Convention. The first report will appear on the Convention page of this web site. Time and energy permitting, other tidbits will appear daily on Intercepts.

While I experience the earthly delight that is modern air travel, amuse yourselves with these:

* The Record continues its series on public sector unions in New Jersey with a penetrating look at teacher tenure. The story has many pungent quotes, but my favorite came from New Jersey Education Association rep George Lambert, who said:

* The New York Times editorial board dissects the U.S. Department of Education’s public/private school comparison study and comes to the conclusion that “on average, American schoolchildren are performing at mediocre levels in reading, math and science — wherever they attend school.”

The Times also singled out NEA President Reg Weaver’s quote about public schools doing “an outstanding job” and said that position “seems absurd.”

* The apotheosis of AFT’s blog also stalled a bit. The union’s bloggers predicted that the public/private school study would be released on a Friday and they were right, if two weeks off on the date. This got the blog a mention in the New York Times’ story on the report’s release and pats on the back all around.

But the theory behind the prediction was, in the words of AFT’s bloggers, “So, if the report comes on this pre-holiday Friday, we can surmise that in the topsy-turvy worldview of the Bush Administration, when students in public schools outperform students in charter schools and private schools, it’s bad news to be buried at the bottom of the news cycle. Ugh.”

As with all bad conspiracy theories, the evil schemers are credited with being both fiendishly clever and incredibly stupid. Burying an unfavorable education report until a summer Friday might be fiendishly clever, but burying it until a few days before you introduce a $100 million national school voucher program is incredibly stupid.