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

Hundreds of Detroit Teachers Warned of Pending Layoffs

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1) Report on Charter Schools and Unions Misses the Point
2) NEA to Return to Puerto Rico?
3) Hawaii “Affirmation Vote” Ignored
4) Maryland Union Charges Candidates for Endorsement Mailings
5) Halle Berry to Play Teacher
6) NEA: 2008 Will Be the Big Enchilada
7) Scheduling Note
8) Last Week’s Intercepts
9) Quote of the Week

If you go to page A3 of this morning’s Washington Post, you can read a headline we have seen a hundred times before:

Political Backlash Builds Over High-Stakes Testing

with the subhead:

“Public Support Wanes for Tests Seen as Punitive”

and the paragraph:

“But teachers unions and some parents groups have argued that an overemphasis on the tests has reduced education to rote drills and needlessly heightened stresses on elementary students, and that the reported test gains have been illusory, overstated or short-lived.”

But if you read to page A3, you probably also saw this headline on page A1:

Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback

with the subhead:

“SAT Helps Return Grammar to Class”

with these paragraphs:

“Those concerns, and a growing consensus among scholars that many high school graduates ‘can’t write well enough to get a passing grade from a professor on a paper,’ drove the addition of a third section to the SAT, upending decades of balance between reading and math, said Ed Hardin, a content specialist at the College Board.

“The new section introduced a long-form essay and — less publicized — a series of multiple-choice responses that test how well students can assemble and disassemble sentences.”

Are the results of standardized tests misused? Probably. Is test preparation crowding out a broader curriculum in some places? Certainly. But we seem to get an awful lot of stories like the one on Post page A3, while the page A1 story is a rarity. The phenomenon of tests “driving the curriculum” doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

* The Jewish Journal in Los Angeles declares victory in the UTLA Human Rights Committee Café Intifada dust-up (See Item #11).

* The New York Central Labor Council gives Brian M. McLaughlin a unanimous heave-ho.

OK, now it’s beyond parody.

Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times spent time with a variety of New York labor officers to hear what they had to say about the racketeering indictment of New York City Central Labor Council President Brian M. McLaughlin.

* “We have to get union leaders and union members thinking all the time about organizing,” said Ed Ott, the council’s acting executive director.

* “We have to focus on what the labor movement is all about – working to make sure that the next generation of workers is better off than this generation,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers.

* “We have to find new ways to do things,” said Stuart Appelbaum, a member of the labor council’s board.

But these profiles in courage pale in comparison to New York State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes. Here are two paragraphs from Greenhouse’s story:

“‘We also want to have some ethical practices and procedures that make some
sense and have some real teeth,’ said Mr. Hughes, who has pushed for ethics
seminars for state and city union leaders.

“Mr. Hughes declared that no future head of the labor council should
simultaneously hold a political office. ‘This job requires full attention from
that individual,’ Mr. Hughes said. ‘You can’t have two full-time jobs and expect
to get it done.’”

Are we to understand that the old “ethical practices and procedures” allowed for theft, bribery, abuse of power and fraud? Will the seminar include helpful hints like “Don’t Use Union Funds to Pay Your Country Club Membership Fee?”

Does Mr. Hughes really believe the problem was that McLaughlin wasn’t devoting himself full-time to union duties? For a quarter-million dollars in annual compensation? It’s more likely McLaughlin’s stealing of campaign funds saved the labor council from losing more money to his schemes.

I direct you again to the text of the indictment. Outside of the money crimes and shakedowns, McLaughlin allegedly would redirect union workers – while they were being paid by contractors – to act as his personal serfs. Per the indictment:

“Some of these assignments included: doing major and minor construction
projects; installing and removing appliances; painting; changing light bulbs;
hanging picture frames; shoveling snow; hanging Christmas lights; fixing
plumbing; removing garbage; changing locks; cleaning out a barn; searching for
and capturing one or more rodents in McLAUGHLIN’s basement; and moving furniture and household items in Albany and Queens, using Company 3 equipment.”

Union workers also chauffeured around members of McLaughlin’s family, picked up medication at the pharmacy, picked up his dry cleaning, picked up his shoes from a shoe-shiner, took his car to the car wash, and took his dog to the veterinarian — all while they were on the clock for a contractor.

If you saw this stuff on The Sopranos, you’d snort in disbelief.

In an idea so monumentally bad even the teachers’ union pans it, a special committee of the New Jersey legislature is studying a plan to consolidate the state’s 616 school districts into 21 county school districts, thinking that this will reduce New Jersey’s notoriously high property tax burden.

It’s conceivable that merging a 300-student school district with a 600-student school district might result in cost savings. It’s folly to think that merging a 30,000-student district with a 60,000-student district will result in anything other than another bloated, yet politically powerful, government bureaucracy.

I’ve been reading the Continental Op stories by Dashiell Hammett for fun recently, but I’ll be putting them down for tonight in order to read a much more entertaining story of crime, corruption and subterfuge. I’m speaking, of course, of the 186-page indictment of Brian M. McLaughlin, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, on 43 federal racketeering charges.

According to federal prosecutors, McLaughlin siphoned off $2.2 million from virtually every organization with which he was involved – from unions, from his own state Assembly reelection fund, and even from Little League baseball teams.

It comes as no surprise to me to learn that McLaughlin worked his way through the ranks of my old union, Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (he allegedly stole $140,000 from IBEW).

Joe Williams, tongue planted firmly in cheek, preempts the forthcoming explanations for McLaughlin’s behavior.