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

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) announced last night its support of Proposition 89, an initiative on the November ballot that would establish public financing of political campaigns in California, and limit contributions to candidates who don’t qualify. It would also hike the corporate income tax to pay for it.

The measure was crafted by the California Nurses Association, and is backed by the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, NOW, the Teamsters, Greenpeace, SEIU and the Sierra Club.

The opposition to Prop 89 includes the California Taxpayers Association, California Chamber of Commerce, California Retailers Association, Small Business Action Committee, the Reason Foundation, and the California Republican Party.

Oh, and the California Teachers Association, UTLA’s parent union.

UTLA’s press release contains a quote from Paul Huebner, vice chair of the union’s Political Action Council of Educators:

“We can never outspend the big corporate donors and millionaires and political
action committees. But we can get our members more involved in politics for the
benefit of our democracy. That includes enabling more teachers and more working
people to be able to run for office and win.”

But CTA’s press release from last month contains a quote from CTA President Barbara Kerr:

“Prop. 89 is poorly written and full of unintended consequences. It does nothing
to enforce current campaign contribution limits or to limit how much the
wealthiest citizens can spend on their own campaigns, while limiting the
participation of small businesses, labor unions and non-profit organizations in
the political process. This is not real reform.”

This should be entertaining.

John J. Miller has an excellent article in the October 9 National Review about the decline of military history in the higher education curriculum. Titled “Sounding Taps,” the article also has the subheads of “A Dying Breed” and “Taking Cover,” all of which speak to the pessimistic tone Miller takes regarding the study of war in our nation’s universities.

As someone who once made a (pretty poor) living writing military history, I don’t subscribe to Miller’s pessimism. As he describes, military history is popular with students when it’s offered, the bookstores overflow with military histories, and we have a large supply of cable television channels that do a fine job with the subject. And the expertise of “armchair scholars” – Civil War buffs and their equivalents – is vast and lively. There are otherwise normal people out there who can show you how to build a trebuchet. You won’t get that kind of knowledge at Dartmouth.

In short, the market more than compensates for the lack of formal instruction in the halls of academe.

In this, military history actually has a great advantage over other aspects of history (not to mention other academic subjects). If college doesn’t teach about Napoleon, a student has a large menu of alternate avenues of knowledge. He or she doesn’t have the same options when it comes to the Congress of Vienna, or iconoclasm, or the caste system, or the invention of the clock.

Despite the unceasing efforts of the National Education Association and the state of Connecticut to find something unconstitutional about the No Child Left Behind Act, and to back up those efforts with member dues and taxpayer dollars, respectively, their track record is getting worse and worse.

U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz dismissed three of the four counts brought by Connecticut, allowing the court to review only allegations that the U.S. Department of Education arbitrarily rejected some testing amendments sought by Connecticut. NEA supported the Connecticut lawsuit.

Connecticut, as NEA before it, will appeal the dismissals. Why not? It’s not their money.

Probably the most popular product turned out by both NEA and AFT is the average teacher salary rankings. Both unions use the figures to argue for higher teacher pay, and they receive a great deal of press coverage each and every time they are released.

So it’s absolutely fascinating to see the reaction in Louisiana to a report by the Education Estimating Conference that the average K-12 teacher salary in the state is $42,100. The EEC computed the statistic using figures supplied by the NEA and AFT salary rankings, then added recent increases ($1,500 per teacher across-the-board this year).

The Shreveport Times went to the state unions for a response, and got this:

Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan said the problem with averages is “if you have $2 and I have none, we average $1 each, but I can’t still buy a candy bar.”

Monaghan added that the average teacher salary is higher because there are fewer young teachers, and that averages only cause problems because they present a “theoretical situation.”

Tom Tate, government relations director of the Louisiana Association of Educators, said “setting an average is somewhat misleading,” because the state’s larger parishes, where a majority of teachers are employed, pay better than the many smaller parishes that have fewer teachers.

What’s next, an explanation of how a 5 percent increase is a smaller raise for a new teacher than it is for a veteran teacher?

Hey, union dudes, what do you think averages are? It can get a little tedious to publish the actual salaries earned by each of the 4 million individual teachers in the U.S. So your parent unions use averages to ease comparisons. Here is a little refresher.

Tomorrow is Count Day in Michigan. If you want to know what this means in practical terms, read this, but make sure you take your antacid first.

This morning the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the case of Washington v. Washington Education Association, which concerns the use of agency fees for political purposes without consent. This isn’t good news for NEA.

In other, completely unrelated news…

Click here to read:

1) NEA/AFL-CIO Partnership Still Under Construction
2) NEA Executive Committee Member Pleads No Contest to Ethics Violation
3) Union Ties Trump Political Correctness
4) Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss the Paradigm Shift
5) Maine NEA Affiliate Donates to Idaho Initiative Campaign
6) Man Bites Dog Story in Indiana
7) Last Week’s Intercepts
8) Quotes of the Week