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

New York State United Teachers posted letters to President Obama it solicited from members and their students. Appropriately enough, they read very much like letters to Santa Claus.

In the meantime, NYC Educator writes a letter to AFT/UFT President Randi Weingarten, in response to a “Dear Colleagues” letter Weingarten recently sent to UFT members.

We’re on a roll. Only six weeks after Vermont discovered that hiring more teachers while shedding students does, remarkably, lead to school budget deficits, comes the news that Maine has learned school district consolidation does not lead to budget savings.

Perhaps we could excuse Maine officials for not studying the research, but they didn’t have to. Their own newspapers reported this would happen back in October 2007.

Click here to read:

1) EIA Exclusive: NEA Shares the Wealth to the Tune of $11.7 Million
2) Last Week’s Intercepts
3) Quote of the Week

I actually have readers expressing doubt about the veracity of Tom Toch’s tale of homeless people holding places in line for NEA lobbyists for the Arne Duncan confirmation hearings.

So here’s a link to the service – linestanding.com – which is a division of Quick Messenger Service. They’ve been doing it for a long time – as evidenced by this story about Al Gore’s Congressional testimony. And they’re not above a little lobbying themselves.

In 2007, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) introduced S. 2177, which would have prohibited “the payment of individuals to reserve a place in line for a lobbyist for a seat at a congressional committee hearing or business meeting.” Mark Gross, owner of linestanding.com penned a paean to the free-market economy in response. The bill died in the Governmental Affairs committee.

Members of NEA and other unions will be on and around their very own float during Tuesday’s inauguration parade.

I had about a dozen one-liners prepared for this news, but it’s Friday so I thought I’d open it up to the hoi polloi. Have a great weekend!

From Tom Toch over at The Quick and the Ed:

At first, I didn’t think my Education Sector colleagues and I were going to get into Arne Duncan’s Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. Arriving at 8:00 for the 10:00 event, we were surprised to find a line of 50 people already camped out in the hallway. They were a pretty disheveled crew, and they weren’t exactly jazzed about the Duncan event. A couple were dozing off. But as 10:00 approached and the line grew to several hundred people, these early birds at the front began to disappear, replaced by well-heeled lobbyists for major education organizations, including a half dozen from the National Education Association. It turns out that the organizations hired a company to have homeless people arrive at 4 am to hold places in line for them (a thriving business on Capitol Hill, I discovered). At a rate of what one of the company’s representatives said was $30 an hour, the NEA spent over $1,000 to get its team in the room. The homeless seat-savers, of course, only saw a fraction of the fees. Perhaps they should unionize.

I awake this morning to mass hysteria about the news that 15 of the 22 teachers at a KIPP school in Brooklyn want to join the United Federation of Teachers.

The New York Daily News, EdWize, Sherman Dorn, Mike Klonsky, Alexander Russo, Education Week, Elizabeth Green, Eduwonk, Flypaper and Ezra Klein have all the news and analysis you could possibly want about this earthshaking event. But it’s only important if you make one assumption that both sides seem to be making – that it will lead to many other KIPP schools unionizing.

This is certainly possible, since the unions would much rather try to organize the large “chain” charters like KIPP and Green Dot because it is most cost-effective. But all this hoohah is silly. How many stories have you read about the 355 new charter schools that opened this year? How many of them are unionized? Unions and charters are like King Canute and the sea.

Still, if the KIPP teachers want UFT, they are entitled to it. And as we all know, a unionized charter school means an end to all labor difficulties.