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

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten gets tweaked by both the New York Daily News and the New York Times for failing to come up with an answer to the question: What is 1/3 and 1/4?

Weingarten’s response: “You take your paper, your pen, you add it up, you get to the fractional whatever.”

I’m not generally in favor of attempts to embarrass adults with pop quizzes on school subjects (or other general knowledge). They might be ignorant, or they might simply have discarded such general knowledge in exchange for extremely specialized knowledge in their chosen field of endeavor. Nevertheless, one would expect Weingarten to be able to multiply three and four in her head.

Weingarten’s gaffe had the unfortunate effect of burying the point of the question, which was that adding fractions with different denominators is part of the sixth-grade standards for New York State schools.

That’s not a standard. That’s a surrender.

I don’t know how long it takes to fire a teacher in Miami-Dade, but officers of the United Teachers of Dade were able to suspend, dismiss and expel former Secretary-Treasurer Pamela Sturrup in less than two months. See what can happen when you don’t have union representation?

Sturrup had been brought up on charges of dereliction of duty after she accused UTD’s officers of signing a promissory note without Sturrup’s knowledge or the knowledge of the executive board (see Item #3). She was suspended at an emergency session of the union’s executive board four days later.

A trial committee of UTD members heard evidence and ruled against Sturrup, and the findings were affirmed by the UTD board. Sturrup has the right to appeal to the union’s Council of Stewards, but she has hinted she will seek legal remedies.

Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal (pay site), has penned a column in which he refers to blogs as “pretty awful,” “downright appalling” and — well, it just gets worse from there.

Rago makes the mistake of lumping blogs the same way many of us lump “the mainstream media” (myself included). And I’m sure that even as I write this, he’s being drawn and quartered on many of those blogs.

But you don’t have to agree with Rago’s dismissive tone to recognize that most of what he says is right on the mark. For example:

“Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the
digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead,
they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking
at the scraps.”

There are notable exceptions (which Rago doesn’t note), like the burgeoning military blogosphere and sites like Iraq the Model, which provide perspectives not widely available in the traditional press. But for the most part, he’s right. No one’s expecting a blog to compete with CNN in the news-gathering field, but certainly the blogosphere would benefit from more people writing about what they know, rather than what they read in the New York Times.

And yes, I recognize the irony of commenting about a newspaper story in a blog entry that states we have too much of that.

Tom Robbins of The Village Voice narrates the sordid tale of Brian McLaughlin, the former head of the New York City Central Labor Council, currently under federal indictment on 43 racketeering charges. The headline I’ve used above is a quote from an unnamed “veteran unionist” to account for some of McLaughlin’s off-the-books spending.

McLaughlin will enter the hall of shame inhabited by Pat Tornillo, Barbara Bullock and other notorious crooks who used their union offices for personal gain. You can find criminals in every field of endeavor, but lousy financial oversight makes repeated appearances in union crime.

Robbins writes:

“Technically, McLaughlin was accountable to an executive board, composed of more
than 30 representatives of the city’s largest unions. But according to several
board members (many simply didn’t bother to attend the monthly meetings), there
was little discussion of the council’s own operations. ‘I never went to a
meeting where they approved an expenditure,’ said one member. ‘I don’t remember
ever seeing an audited financial statement.’”

Pretty good old-style labor reporting by Robbins. And read his sidebar on the future of the New York City Central Labor Council. Great quote: “Trying to figure out the council’s shifting alliances takes a Kremlinologist.”

In the comments section of yesterday’s story about NEA disavowing the NCLB dismantling petition, Philip Kovacs of the Educator Roundtable accuses NEA of having “an informant inside of our group who was leaking internal documents.”

I’m hardly in a position to criticize anyone for doing THAT.

However, there’s always “fighting fire with fire.” Hans Moleman, use the dead drop!