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

Three charter school stories of note in three different states:

* Joe Nathan’s Center for School Change discovers Minnesota has nearly tripled its charter school enrollment since 2001-02. A record 28,206 students now attend charters in the state.

* We may see a similar boom in Rhode Island, where the 2004 union-sponsored charter school moratorium will finally lapse on June 30. About 3,100 Rhode Island students attend charters, and another 2,500 remain on waiting lists.

* State Sen. Charles L. Copeland released to the public a leaked Delaware State Education Association report outlining union strategy for limiting charter schools in the state. DSEA hired a Washington DC consulting firm to advise them on “convincing the public to think twice about allowing the continued expansion of charter schools.”

This is just a hunch right now, but DSEA is a small affiliate that probably doesn’t have thousands of dollars lying around to throw at pricey DC consulting firms. I’ll bet there was an NEA grant behind this.

My NY Daily News editorial yesterday created some buzz at least (#2 most read and #4 most e-mailed in the opinion section, with a bullet), but the real question is whether New York City is immune from the forces already affecting large urban school districts across the country.

The numbers have been crunched, but the hard political work is still underway. In Miami, more than 500 positions are facing the knife, and that’s an improvement from last week’s predictions. Miami’s enrollment and hiring numbers are very similar to New York’s.

Detroit is floating a 1,400-teacher layoff to reduce a projected $408 million budget deficit for fiscal year 2009. The city has seen a 41% drop in enrollment in the last 10 years. The union is planning a rally against the cuts.

The 38% dues hike (see item #2 here) proposed and authorized by the leadership and representative bodies of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) was defeated by a 2 to 1 margin in a rank-and-file vote.

The proposal did not garner 40% support in any area of the district, receiving just 5,713 votes overall. There were 11,413 “no” votes, which means that about 60% of UTLA members could not bother themselves to vote in an election to determine whether an additional $264 would be taken from their paychecks.

Click here to read:

1) How’s That Charter School Union Campaign Coming Along?
2) That’s the Chicago Way
3) Poor Communities, Affluent Schools
4) Detroit Breakdown, Motor City Shakedown
5) Last Week’s Intercepts
6) Quotes of the Week

You’ll never guess who the California Teachers Association endorsed for President last week.

OK, maybe you will.