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

With the release of the National Center on Teacher Quality report grading states on how well they retain effective teachers and dismiss ineffective teachers comes a timely case study in the St. Petersburg Times.

According to Pinellas County school officials, middle school math teacher Curtis Brown “didn’t prepare adequate lesson plans. Didn’t teach the assigned subject matter. Didn’t use the required teaching software. And didn’t improve despite repeated attempts by administrators to help him.” After jumping through various regulatory hurdles, and with the concurrence of an administrative law judge, the district was able to fire Brown.

As the story shows, getting rid of a teacher on grounds of incompetence is almost unheard of in Florida, but that isn’t the most interesting aspect of the story.

Brown’s union, the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, hired an attorney, Mark Herdman, to represent him. Herdman’s defense strategy was, well, fascinating:

“Herdman, Brown’s attorney, argued in court filings that the district could not prove the teacher was incompetent because its evaluation of him was not based primarily on scores from the FCAT or similar tests, which he said state law requires. Other courts have ruled against districts on those grounds, but state lawmakers made statutory changes a few years ago. Pinellas officials said those changes broadened the types of evidence that could be used to prove incompetence.”

You read that correctly. The union-assigned attorney argued that Brown was not incompetent because the district hadn’t evaluated him based “primarily” on student test scores.

It took about five minutes to find this quote from a policy brief by Arizona State University’s Gene V. Glass for the Education Policy Studies Laboratory:

“Florida teachers have generally reacted negatively to the plan to evaluate them based in large part on their students’ test performance: Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, remarked, ‘It’s a bad pay system based on a bad set of criteria.’”

But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe bad really means “bad.”

Tom Leedham has twice challenged Junior Hoffa for the presidency of the Teamsters. In an editorial for Labor Notes, he displays skepticism about a possible reconciliation between the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, and offers an unusual criticism of card check legislation:

“The Employee Free Choice Act, if passed in its current form, will lead to more union members, but it will also motivate employers to shop for compliant unions.

“At the first sign of legitimate organizing, they’ll rush to sign up their employees with corrupt or company-oriented unions rather than having to deal with honest, more militant labor organizations. A new federation must establish a strong and fair judicial process to minimize employers’ ability to union-shop.

“Reunification seems to be on the table primarily because President Obama has expressed a preference for dealing with just one federation. We should insist that the president listen to diverse voices of labor, not just one top leader.

“Mending the split will, however, give cover to leaders deserving of criticism. It’s rare indeed for a federation president to openly criticize a member organization or its leadership.

“Clearly at this time of challenge, labor needs more inclusion, more debate, and more accountability. Without these basic democratic concepts we risk finding ourselves in the same position three years from now.”

First, of course, is Sam Dillon’s examination of the education component of the so-called stimulus plan in the New York Times.

Second is an in-depth analysis of the clout of public sector unions in New Jersey by Bob Ivry of NorthJersey.com.

Third is the latest in the civil war between SEIU and the United Healthcare Workers-West by Jessie Muldoon on SocialistWorker.org.

Fourth is the not-entirely-unexpected hypothesis that the California Teachers Association’s proposed sales tax initiative might – yet again (see item #2 here) - not really be headed for the ballot, by John Wildermuth of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Officials of the Los Angeles Unified School District have decided not to lay off any teachers, even though the district has a $250 million budget deficit and doesn’t have the money to pay them.

“It’s a risk — it could exacerbate our spending problems in the summer — but it’s a risk worth taking,” said school board member Richard Vladovic.

There are no good choices in the current climate, but I hope LAUSD administrators know they are not the first to go down this particular road. The Detroit Public Schools also thought it was a good idea to hang on to teachers well after the money to pay them had dried up.

Armed with this knowledge, Los Angeles can get ahead of the game and start searching now for an emergency financial manager.

Click here to read:

1) EIA Exclusive: NEA Officers and Staff Salaries and Benefits
2) Last Week’s Intercepts
3) Quote of the Week

Headline from Associated Press story:

“Stimulus school money could be hard to cut later“

Education support workers in the St. Joseph School District in Missouri voted by a more than 2-to-1 margin not to unionize with Missouri NEA. Ninety-three percent of the 146 workers cast secret ballots.

“I felt there wasn’t anything that needed to be fixed. It’s a good place to work and a family atmosphere,” said district electrician Jaysen Horn. “A lot of things could be up for negotiation that might be lost. It’s working, why fix it? That’s what the majority of the people thought.”

We patiently await the tidal wave of news stories, commentary and national trend analysis concerning this momentous event.