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

California Senate Bill 92 is the latest attempt to strangle the establishment of charter schools by severely limiting the power of the State Board of Education to issue charters. L.A. Weekly reports on the origin of the bill:

“Oddly, the man behind Senate Bill 92 is self-described charter-school supporter and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, who represents a Los Angeles district where 52 charter schools operate, and where Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa touts charter schools. The Mayor’s Office declined to comment on Núñez’s bill. Written by Rick Simpson, Núñez’s deputy chief of staff, Senate Bill 92 was probably instigated behind closed doors by the California Teachers Association, according to Larson, a powerful union with an anti-charter-schools history. Simpson acknowledged to the L.A. Weekly that he spoke to the Education Coalition, which includes CTA, before writing the bill.”

What L.A. Weekly didn’t mention, and perhaps didn’t know, is that Simpson used to work for CTA, as its lobbyist in the Capitol.

A CTA spokesperson stated that the union doesn’t have an official position on SB 92, adding, “We’re not opposed to charter schools.”

If I’m losing my mind, I’ll just admit it and move on, but remember the NEA conspiracy flow chart that was bandied about the blogosphere (and in the EIA Communiqué)?

I got an e-mail from someone who told me my link was broken and, sure enough, when I clicked it I got a 404 message from WordPress.com, the home of NEA’s NCLB blog. I tried a number of work-arounds and was able to access it (once) from a different IP address. But now nothing works.

The direct link is http://nclbchange.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/diagram.pdf.

Well, it could be a glitch, or it could be NEA removed it from the site, but I could have sworn there was at least a sentence referencing the chart and a link to it in NEA’s blog entry of August 2, headlined “Bush Cronies Profited While They Halliburton-ized Public Schools.” Now the sentence and the link are missing as well. The Google cache has already been updated, so that’s no help.

So, again, if I’m screwing something up or there’s a simple explanation for this, I offer my preemptive apologies. But if NEA is in the habit of sanitizing its blog, that’s worth noting for future reference.

Click here to read:

1) NEA Republicans Meet in Minneapolis
2) Invoking Godwin’s Law in Alabama
3) Teacher Quality Enhanced by Hiring More Teachers?
4) Three More NEA Locals Seek AFL-CIO Affiliation
5) Last Week’s Intercepts
6) Quote of the Week

The students at Cathedral High School in Indianapolis have a back-to-school tradition.

I could have written a long, tedious post about the shenanigans in Alabama over two-year college faculty members serving in the state legislature, but Flashpoint provides what amounts to a Babelfish translation of a recent e-mail blast from Alabama Education Association honcho Paul Hubbert on the topic. Classic.

I thought the brouhaha within the Teachers Association of Long Beach (TALB) had simmered down once Executive Director Scott McVarish had been reinstated, but now comes word that a member of the board of directors is suing the union’s president for libel and slander.

Board member Dale McVey accuses TALB President Michael Day of claiming in an e-mail that McVey and four other board members “illegally voted to remove” McVarish.

Because of this, the lawsuit states, McVey “has suffered loss of reputation, shame, mortification, humiliation and hurt feelings all to his general damage in a sum to be determined at trial.”

There has been more than enough shame, mortification and humiliation to go around in this story, and the lawsuit will only add to it.