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

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1) EIA District Statistics Show Enrollment, Hiring and Spending Largely Unrelated
2) Ohio Coalition Has Odd Idea of Funding Reform
3) Albuquerque Spends on Priorities
4) Free Membership Until Your First Paycheck
5) First Salvos Fired in Missouri Collective Bargaining Wars
6) NEA Defies Retired Staffers
7) Last Week’s Intercepts
8) Quote of the Week

“I hope we’re at a tipping point. I do hear more and more people starting
to say things they’ve never said before about change, about education. Public,
private, charter — it doesn’t matter. It’s about what works. There are good
schools with unions and there are good schools without unions. We just need more
good schools no matter who’s running them.”

NEA addressed the results of the Center on Education Policy’s report on NCLB by urging caution.

“If anything, this report should sound an alarm that we are drawing conclusions without all the facts,” reads the NEA release, adding, “Our students are looking to us to untangle the lines and clear the confusion.”

The union’s newfound respect for research discipline is comical, coming from an organization that once extrapolated Hawaii’s school construction needs from South Carolina’s data (second item here), and put a price tag on America’s school technology needs with statistics from three states.

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten thinks we need a Manhattan Project and a Marshall Plan to improve public education.

Uh, didn’t the Manhattan Project obliterate before the Marshall Plan rebuilt?

Due process denied. A contentious board vote. Teachers picket and take their noisy protest inside the building. Office doors are locked against them. The police are called.

Just another labor action? Though the tactics are familiar, the target was unusual. This protest was at the headquarters of the Teachers Association of Long Beach in California.

Watch the highly entertaining QuickTime video on the web site of the Long Beach Press Telegram.

Who says schools districts and teachers’ unions never collaborate?

If you read nothing else today, read this editorial by Locke High School teacher Bruce William Smith about what really happened after the petition was submitted to convert Locke to a Green Dot charter school.

Short version:

“We had a mandatory after-school meeting, at which representatives from the LAUSD and the teachers union attacked the plan for three hours. Green Dot was barred from participating.”