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

A German teacher at a Hungarian high school was supposed to be supervising a party. Instead, she got a little carried away by the music. (Ultimately, PG-13)

Who needs pollsters when you have a sacred llama fetus?

“Rising fuel costs are forcing school districts to take drastic measures, including trimming or eliminating bus service, cutting all field trips, and shortening the school week.”

- National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel,
in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, October 29.

“The price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline fell a further 25.8 cents over the last week to a national average of $2.656, marking the first time all year that the price dropped below 2007 levels, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of filling stations. A year ago, the national average was $2.872 a gallon….

“Since the record national average of $4.114 on July 7 and the California record of $4.588 reached June 16, prices have dropped by 35% and 32%, respectively.

“The declines, analysts said, aren’t over yet.”

- October 28 Los Angeles Times

Aspire Public Schools runs 21 charter schools for 6,000 students in California. They want to open the Aspire College Preparatory Academy in fall 2009, which would be the first charter school in Modesto.

From the Modesto Bee:

“Teachers union representative Barney Hale urged trustees to deny the charter petition, saying the district has its own small learning communities and is working on starting its own charter schools. Hale said he also didn’t want to see the district lose students to Aspire, and the resulting teachers who might be laid off.”

Won’t Aspire have to hire teachers? Oh, but those teachers probably won’t be helping to pay Mr. Hale’s salary, or supporting the political TV ad industry.

Click here to read:

1) NEA Chooses Clout Over Public Image
2) SEIU Denied in Puerto Rico
3) Union Suggests Intriguing Collective Bargaining Innovation
4) Cincinnati’s Rubber Room
5) Stop the Presses!
6) Last Week’s Intercepts
7) Quote of the Week

NEA is very active with ballot measures this November, so its efforts on a future initiative in Oklahoma have gone unnoticed outside the state. The union and its Oklahoma affiliate have gathered enough signatures to place a measure on the 2010 ballot that would require per-pupil spending in the state to be raised to the regional average.

Among those opposed to the idea is AFT Oklahoma, which represents teachers in Oklahoma City but also many other public employees, who would likely see their shares of the budget pie drop. NEA represents only school employees in the state.

You know, I’ve got enough people haranguing me about things I’ve written to have to deal with things I haven’t written, but the American Federation of Teachers suddenly wants to be sure that everyone knows that AFT President Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year.

The impetus for this disclosure comes from a blog item written by Mike Petrilli on Flypaper yesterday that listed Weingarten’s annual salary as $600,000. In the item he links to the EIA Communiqué of April 14, 2008. This prompted AFT to call for a correction from Petrilli, because Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year. Petrilli then updated the item with “If you follow the link, it goes to Mike Antonucci’s Education Intelligence Agency, where he reports that Randi planned to draw salaries from both the AFT and UFT.”

This prompted AFT to call for a correction from me, because Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year.

I’m happy to oblige, even though I’m not sure what exactly is inaccurate in this six-month-old item. Here it is in full:

Randi Weingarten Makes Her AFT Accession Official. Spilling what was arguably one of the worst-kept secrets in American labor history, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten officially announced her candidacy for the presidency of the American Federation of Teachers.

She also made official her intention to continue as UFT president while holding national office. When the New York Daily News remarked that holding both positions would nearly double her annual salary to reach almost $600,000, Weingarten referred to her previous career as a Wall Street attorney and replied, “I took a huge cut in any kind of pay that I was ever going to make in my life to do this job. And so money has never been an issue with me other than to try to champion those causes for my members.”

Weingarten spent three years as an associate for Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. While there is no way to know what career path she might have taken had she not been hired by UFT in 1986, it’s pretty clear how much she would have made had she stayed at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan as an associate. She even mentioned it in a 2004 speech:

“If I were starting out today as a young new attorney in my old firm – Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, I would be starting at $125,000. After eight years as a teacher here in New York, I’d be making $60,700. After eight years in my old law firm, I’d be making a base salary of $215,000.”

A more recent look at the firm’s salary schedule shows a $280,000 level after eight years. Certainly we can generate scenarios in which Weingarten would have made more than $600,000 as an attorney, but in reality she made more money in her first eight years as UFT president than she would have had she spent those eight years as a Wall Street attorney.

If you follow the link, you’ll see that Weingarten told the Daily News that she “hadn’t even thought about the money attached to her potential new role.”

AFT informs me that sometime after my item appeared Weingarten “then told her UFT Delegate Assembly and the AFT Executive Council that she would only draw one salary,” which is only $350,000 a year, split between the United Federation of Teachers and AFT.

I’m flattered to hear that AFT thinks I’m privy to all the details of meetings of the UFT Delegate Assembly and AFT Executive Council, but this is the first I’ve heard of the arrangement. So, for the record, Randi Weingarten does not make $600,000 a year, which is so outrageous a sum it would prompt all sorts of internal unrest. Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year.