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

Joe Williams at The Chalkboard amplifies a vital point made over at the AFT NCLBlog about the 38th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Lots of people happily express strong opinions about charter schools, but don’t know what they’re talking about. A majority of respondents to the poll believe charter schools are not public schools, are free to teach religion, can charge tuition, and can screen students by academic abilities.

It’s true in other areas of the poll as well. Fifty-five percent of respondents admitted knowing “little or nothing at all” about the No Child Left Behind Act. Fifty percent of public school parents knew little or nothing at all about NCLB.

In at least one case, the poll itself is contributing to their ignorance. The questions about solving teacher turnover problems (Table 27) began with the pollster stating, “During their first five years of employment, almost half of new public school teachers leave the profession.”

This statistic, through the unending efforts of the teachers’ unions, is so ingrained in the public folklore that it is impossible to get anyone to even examine it. It comes from a single source: Richard M. Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, who examined the federal government’s school and staffing surveys, the latest of which covers the year 2000-01. In a March 2006 report titled Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Shortages, Ingersoll created a table (Figure 7 on page 22) purporting to show that 46 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years.

No one has bothered to mention that Ingersoll himself calls the statistic “only a rough approximation,” arrived at “by multiplying together the probabilities of staying in teaching” and not accounting for those who later reenter teaching, which “have been found to be as much as 25 percent of those who had earlier departed.”

Though Ingersoll’s estimate must be respected, there is no empirical evidence stating half of new teachers leave the profession within five years.

The poll results should be sobering for all of us who spend our professional lives writing and talking about education, regardless of the side we’re on. Our “students,” it seems, aren’t paying attention in class.

“It would help morale.”

Lech Walesa announced that he is leaving Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement because of a dispute over the organization’s political policies.

“He has not been paying membership fees since the end of last year,” a leading Solidarity member, Jerzy Borowczak, told the AFP news agency.

No word on whether Walesa lost his liability insurance, whether he took his action during a 30-day window allowed for resignations, or whether he will be forced to pay agency fees.

According to the Washington Times, “Former Washington Teachers’ Union Treasurer James O. Baxter says he isn’t healthy enough to start serving Thursday a 10-year prison sentence for embezzling dues from public school teachers.”

Mr. Baxter says he has a neck injury that may require surgery.

You may recall that Baxter’s cohort Gwendolyn Hemphill also developed a strange ailment prior to imprisonment – she started seeing a character from a 1975 TV horror movie.

Fortunately, Intercepts can vouch for Mr. Baxter. Here is a photo of the incident in which he received his neck injury.

Click here to read:

1) NEA Sends $2.2 Million to Michigan for K-16 Funding Initiative
2) It’s August, So Ohio Staff Union Must Be Preparing to Strike
3) Buffalo Union Staffers Firing in Both Directions
4) Save the Planet, But Don’t Unionize
5) CTA Charter School Web Site Uses Low-Key Approach
6) Quote of the Week

The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) signed on three new members to its board of directors, one of whom will raise some eyebrows in teacher union circles.

Joan Baratz-Snowden was, until recently, the American Federation of Teachers’ Director of Educational Issues.

“ABCTE has moved from an organization supporting a specific ideology to a group that is interested in furthering the teaching profession with rigorous professional standards for teachers,” said Baratz-Snowden in an ABCTE press statement. “ABCTE recognizes that it takes more than just a test to certify an excellent educator and is implementing systems to support teachers entering the classroom from alternate routes.”

Of course, AFT hasn’t ever said much about ABCTE and its alternative path to teacher certification, but its colleagues over at NEA have excoriated the organization’s mission as “demeaning to the teaching profession.” But even NEA hasn’t publicly bashed ABCTE since 2004, so either ABCTE is making headway with its opponents, or hell is slowly freezing over.

Chad Radock, president of the Fitchburg Teachers Association in Massachusetts, left his history teaching position because he decided not to take a required course to renew his teaching credential.

“I was tired of jumping through hoops,” Radock said. “I could’ve come back, the option was there, but I chose not to.”

Radock told the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise that taking the course would have been too expensive. But he also told the paper that he “plans to attend law school instead of seeking a teaching job elsewhere.”

If the certification course was too expensive, how is he going to pay for law school?