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

Eduwonk displays an e-mail from a Washington Teachers Union (WTU) source that offers some details about the Parker/Saunders split. Andy Rotherham suspects AFT complicity, and while the national union has shown itself to be capable of such a scheme, it would be a deep plot indeed if AFT were behind Saunders. After all, Saunders just sued AFT President Ed McElroy as well as Parker.

To throw off the scent, perhaps? Nah, I don’t buy it. Nevertheless, Andy is right to draw attention to this. If AFT reestablishes an administratorship over WTU, you can say goodbye to Michelle Rhee’s program. Randi Weingarten’s first act as AFT president will not be to get rid of DC teacher seniority.

In yesterday’s post about paying teachers not to teach, I noted that United Teachers of Dade President Karen Aronowitz was upset by the number of teachers who are acting as quasi-administrators for the district. She suggested they be sent back to the classroom.

Good for her. Maybe she can start the ball rolling by sending back to the classroom the 14 UTD employees who are being paid by the district to do union work, instead of teach.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way a particular education issue will pop up at the same time in unconnected places. It’s a different phenomenon from pack journalism, where news outlets are aware of other news outlets reporting on something, and then they report on it, too. These are independent stories on an underreported topic that suddenly appear all at the same time.

We’ve seen it happen with performance pay, school lunches and childhood obesity, and the shortage of minority teachers. The most recent media wave concerns paying teachers who don’t teach.

The first and most prominent story on the problem, of course, is connected to The New Teacher Project report that revealed New York City was spending $81 million to pay teachers who weren’t actually holding jobs. This caused a firestorm of debate in the city, rebuttals by the union, and Internet screaming by everyone. The controversy also revived discussion of New York City’s “rubber rooms,” which contain an entirely different set of teachers who don’t teach.

A similar issue arose in Birmingham, Alabama, where the school board discovered it was paying almost $96,000 a year in supplements to 63 employees without knowing why.

The Detroit Public Schools has its own twist. The district has a $45 million deficit, partly because a number of teachers whose jobs were declared “excess” or “surplus” due to falling enrollment were never let go. That was good news for them, but bad news for the district because it wasn’t receiving funds to pay them anymore. Other areas of the budget were raided to pay these teachers, until the house of cards started to collapse.

“The teaching staff should have gone down as we closed schools and lost students,” said school board president Carla Scott, explaining that layoffs didn’t keep pace with declining revenues. “For the first time in two years, we actually know what’s going on. We should have been in crisis mode for the last 10 years.”

There’s enough ammo for all sides. In Miami, United Teachers of Dade President Karen Aronowitz wants to solve district budget problems by putting teachers back in the classroom.

”It’s a dirty little secret that happens inside the schools,” she said. “Sometimes, teachers will be assigned as team teachers and won’t be in the classroom at all. Some teachers have additional planning granted to them, and then they become quasi-administrators.”

Aronowitz added, ”We have found, especially in elementary schools, that you may have three or four assistant principals. “That just doesn’t make sense.”

I think the fact that this problem is widespread is a sad commentary on a badly bureaucratized public school system. But I’m not going to get all polemical about it. If you want a polemic, here’s a polemic.

Here’s the Associated Press headline:

“Nevada teachers union reach deal with casinos to raise room tax“

Let’s review our lesson plan from Civics 101 (updated): There’s the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, the casinos and the teachers’ union. The legislative branch is in charge of appropriating money from the taxpayers to fund the workings of government, subject to the veto powers of the executive branch. If the amount of money does not satisfy the teachers’ union, it will seek to extract funds from the casinos, subject to the veto powers of the casinos.

In case of a stalemate, the teachers’ union and the casinos will meet secretly in an appropriate venue to hash out the details. At the moment of decision, white smoke will emanate from Harrah’s, after which the paeans will receive word of their fate and await their assigned tasks.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Richard Dreyfuss lecture about this.

Click here to read:

1) NEA and AFT: Different in Difference
2) UTLA Wants to Raise Dues by 38%
3) District Spending Data Updated for Seven More States
4) Education May Be the Last Friend He Has
5) If Three’s a Trend, Is Four a Movement?
6) Scheduling Note
7) Last Week’s Intercepts
8) Quote of the Week

I’ll have more on this in the communiqué later today, but I thought I’d give you a head start by linking to this biting report on internal matters from a Chicago Teacher Union delegate.

Middle and high school students in Rialto, California, were treated to the fifth annual edition of the Collective Bargaining Institute, a program put together by union reps, including some of the same folks who brought you the fictional Yummy Pizza Company (for some background, see fourth bullet here).

The purpose of the program seems to be to prepare kids for the 7% of American private sector jobs that are unionized. I wonder if anyone teaches them that mastering math and science could lead to billions of dollars and the creation of 10,000 jobs.