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

When you report on an arcane topic like teachers’ unions, you can wait a very, very long time for ultimate confirmation of stories. For example, NEA never publicly acknowledged that retired Rear Admiral John F. Sigler was a finalist for its executive director job back in 2000 (or that I was the one who told him he didn’t get it).

Yesterday, Campaign K-12 interviewed outgoing NEA President Reg Weaver, who said he was for Obama all along “in his heart,” but kept quiet about it because NEA was split between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Weaver’s support for Obama wasn’t much of a secret, and indeed there was evidence Weaver was instrumental in keeping the door open for Obama back when he was just one of the Democratic pack and Hillary seemed to be a shoo-in. Check out this lead story from October 29, 2007, which was just a few weeks after AFT had endorsed Hillary, and months before Obama’s Iowa caucus victory launched him on the path to the nomination.

Education is a serious issue. We’re justified in treating the various political battles and adminstration vs. union struggles as if they matter. But once in a while, we need to be reminded that these disagreements are relatively small compared to what they could be.

Case in point: In Gaza, the Fatah-controlled teachers’ union called a strike to protest teacher transfers. Hamas took the opportunity to replace an estimated 2,000 of the 9,000 teachers who walked out.

“Anybody who left their job will not be allowed to return,” said the Hamas education minister. “They have become irrelevant and cannot be trusted anymore as educators.”

This is bad news for the students, who don’t know whether to return to school or not, and bad news for the teachers, who are out of a job if they don’t return to work – and who are out of a job if they do return to work because the Palestinian Authority, headed by Fatah, “would fire teachers who accepted school promotions,” according to a teachers’ union leader.

As with most else in the area, it’s a colossal mess:

“This is a disaster,” said Aly, a 47-year-old math teacher who declined to give his full name for fear of offending Hamas or Fatah. “The big losers are me and my students.”

Wael, a 38-year-old physics teacher and Fatah loyalist, said he felt bullied into striking.

“My salary and future are tied to the side that pays me,” he said. “At the same time, I am afraid there’ll be (Hamas) procedures taken against me.” He declined to give his family name because he did not support the Fatah-led walkout and feared his pay would be cut.

People of all political stripes gripe about the way our education system operates. But, yes, it could be much, much worse.

Investigations by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards have resulted in 889 criminal convictions and $90 million in court-ordered restitution since 2001. Some union officials decry the increased scrutiny, but the OLMS performs an important watchdog service for union members. Most of those convictions involved the embezzlement of union funds.

Among the cases in July 2008:

* The former secretary-treasurer of a Graphic Communications Workers local in Ohio pleaded guilty to embezzling $145,675 in union funds and filing false disclosure reports.

* The former treasurer of the AFT-affiliated Woodhaven Federation of Human Services Professionals was charged with embezzling nearly $16,000 in union funds. This may not seem like a lot, but the local only has 48 members and takes in less than $19,000 in dues each year.

* A former bookkeeper for a Teamsters local in Texas was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to embezzling $140,000 in union funds.

The Washington Post followed around the guy who distributes the posters at the Democratic National Convention. He didn’t write them. He didn’t design them. He didn’t manufacture them. He hands them out. He is, unsurprisingly, an NEA staffer.

Key quote: “It’s not really that complex, actually,” said Hedgepeth, who grew up and lives in Silver Spring. “It’s a whole bunch of volunteers working to make sure signs get on the floor so that everybody gets to wave them and have some fun.”

I can tell you from experience that conventions do not teem with interesting news stories. Some of the couple of thousand reporters from the Democratic National Convention in Denver are having problems dealing with the ennui.

The first day of the convention included speeches by outgoing NEA President Reg Weaver and AFT President Randi Weingarten. This, according to Education Week reporter Mark Walsh, is because “Monday of convention week is the day the Democratic Party traditionally squeezes in representatives of some of its biggest constituencies, but ones that it doesn’t necessarily want to have a prime-time role.”

Weaver’s speech is reproduced here, and Weingarten’s here.

Education News Colorado noted that Weaver spoke when “the hall was at most half full and no one was paying attention to the speakers.”

The Williamette Week reported that when Weaver and Illinois State Senator Emil Jones Jr. spoke, “delegates chatted, wandered around and barely seemed to notice them or most of the other speakers who took the podium before Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy and, after him, Michelle Obama finally arrived.”

The Arizona Capital Times was simply “sitting here waiting for something to happen and looking for Arizona delegates. They are my story. They are more interesting than President of the National Education Association Reg Weaver and ‘restoring the country’s commitment to education.’”

Even amid the tedium, The Hill managed to drum up a very interesting story indeed. Apparently, a large number of rank-and-file union members are racists, according to their leaders.

Am I overstating it? Here’s Alexander Bolton’s lede:

Racial prejudice is being cited among senior union leaders to explain Sen. Barack Obama’s difficulty in winning over support from white rank-and-file members.

And it goes on:

“I think there’s more resistance than people want to admit,” said Edward Finkelstein, publisher of the Labor Tribune, a weekly publication distributed in about 80,000 union households in St. Louis and southern Illinois. “It’s ingrained that voting for a black is anathema to everything in their core.”

And unless you think this is limited to dockworkers, miners and Teamsters:

Peggy Cochran, a former executive director of the Missouri chapter of the National Education Association, a 3.2 million-member teachers’ union, also said racial bias has made some teachers slow to back Obama. 

Cochran, a Clinton delegate who is charged with whipping Clinton’s other delegates from Missouri, said that Obama has met resistance from her union members.

“We hope to move them [into Obama’s camp],” she said. “There are various and assorted reasons why they are slow to move.”

“I think there’s a bias, a racial bias,” she said. “For some, there’s a bias for [Obama’s] youth.”

Thankfully, your union overlords are free from such sentiments. Remember them fondly as you shell out your dues to them this year.

It’s absolutely guaranteed that over the next four years I will receive at least one call a month from someone wanting to know how many delegates to the Democratic National Convention belong to the teachers’ unions. And for once I won’t have to dig up the information. Michele McNeil over at Campaign K-12 provides it up front. So, write it down! I know I will.

I haven’t taken any time off yet this year, so I’ll be out of town and far away from the blog for the rest of the week. If it’s not already your habit, take this opportunity to click some of the links on the blogroll at left. See you on Monday.