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

Inside knowledge about teachers’ unions might not seem to be the most crucial information these days, but it can still come in handy.

ABC News reports that some parents in the Clovis Unified School District in California are pulling their kids out of school in protest of the California Teachers Association $1 million contribution to the No on Prop 8 campaign.

There’s only one problem, but it’s a big one. The 1,800 teachers in the district do not now belong, nor have they ever belonged, to the California Teachers Association. In fact, Clovis is the only large school district in California that has never had a teachers’ union.

The teachers are represented by a faculty senate, whose president is naturally a little concerned about kids missing school.

A protest in Clovis against the teachers’ union makes about as much sense as a protest against urban sprawl in North Dakota.

New York State United Teachers President Richard Iannuzzi joins other union officers who seem overly concerned about racial bias in their ranks.

In his October 21 column for New York Teacher, Iannuzzi wrote about meeting with a group of local activists and reported:

“And, sadly, everyone was able to recount a story of a colleague or a friend who would not support Sen. Obama – because of his skin color.”

Iannuzzi was direct. “Confronting the issue means we must all confront it – regardless of our own race. It means we must all resist the temptation to ignore a candidate’s strengths or weaknesses in order to cast a predetermined vote based on race,” he wrote.

Since Iannuzzi and his colleagues have a great deal of direct contact with, and polling data of, their members, I’m reluctant to simply dismiss these anecdotes as apocryphal. However, I’m struck by the low opinion these folks seem to have of their own members’ racial enlightenment. If Iannuzzi feels it necessary to cite the Holocaust in a column for his members, he’s either extremely distressed about their bigotry, or he’s engaged in some demagoguery in order to shame them into voting correctly.

It isn’t often you get glowing write-ups like this one:

“Never was a special-interest group’s power, and the Legislature’s craven acquiescence to it, more nakedly displayed.”

Click here to read:

1) Ballot Initiative Spending Due to Internal Imperatives
2) School System No-Brainers
3) The End of the Puerto Rico Saga?
4) NEA-AFT Merger Not Yet Rolling, But It Has a Train
5) Stop the Presses!
6) Last Week’s Intercepts
7) Quote of the Week

The New York State United Teachers is “preparing to announce today endorsements of 30 state Senate Republican incumbents and five Senate Democrats for re-election,” according to the Albany Times-Union.

Why would NYSUT suddenly endorse so many GOP senators? It only required small compromises regarding the state’s $2 billion budget deficit.

“It puts Republicans in the position of being against tax increases, against state employee layoffs, in favor of property tax caps and opposed to midyear education cuts,” reports the paper.

“Something’s got to give,” said E.J. McMahon, executive director of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, in the understatement of the year.

For more than 100 years the Utah Education Association and what is now Education Minnesota have held annual events for the purpose of gathering teachers together for professional development workshops and seminars. Schools are closed during the conferences, but teacher attendance at the conferences is not mandatory.

The Utah convention draws only about 1 in 10 teachers, while the Minnesota conference claims to draw about 1 in 6.

Past practice is a powerful force in school systems, and it’s not surprising that these traditions have continued as long as they have. But times have changed. Without disparaging the worth of the conference seminars, it is clear that the vast majority of teachers prefer to take the days off. Additionally, the organizations involved were created as professional associations in the 19th century, mostly dominated by school administrators. They are now full-fledged labor unions for teachers. Is it possible there is something else afoot?

By the most amazing coincidence, there is political and labor activism going on at these events! NEA President Dennis Van Roekel addressed the Utah convention, after which teachers “were encouraged to pick up a pocket-size list of candidates who are friends to public education so they could take it into the voting booth.”

Education Minnesota held a political forum at its conference, during which (another amazing coincidence) no other seminars or workshops were scheduled.

It’s this kind of taxpayer-subsidized politicking that makes the New York City button controversy a laughable distraction. People are wetting themselves over the indirect influence a teacher’s political button might have on a student, while they’re paying cold cash to send the union’s most committed activists to gather and discuss political strategy.

Yesterday’s news that the California Teachers Association’s contributed $1 million to the No on Prop 8 campaign went out on the Associated Press wire and across the state in no time at all. The donation made CTA the largest contributor to the campaign to preserve gay marriage.

CTA spokeswoman Sandra Jackson said the issue concerns educators because “teachers teach the importance of equal rights for all.”

At the same time, the Bay Area Reporter reveals that the No on Prop 8 campaign is having trouble raising sufficient cash from the gay and lesbian community.