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

A one-sentence embedded link in Elizabeth Green’s Remainders column led me to a chain of thought that culminated in the above question.

Blogger Miss Eyre, writing at Life at the Morton School, posted an entry about conditions in her New York City school, and the problems faced by her United Federation of Teachers chapter leader. A chapter leader is a union site representative, or shop steward, if you’re more familiar with the private sector term.

Miss Eyre says her chapter needs help, and she mulls increasing her participation. This is the section that caught my eye:

I have no excuse for not being involved anymore; my instruction, grading, and classroom management are now slightly better than half-assed, and I’m not doing grad school anymore since I finished my M.S.Ed. and have no idea what I’d do another degree in. So SLTs and the like seem to be something I ought to get involved in.

I’m sure Miss Eyre is simply being self-deprecating when she describes her teaching as “half-assed,” but it does raise a serious question. When teachers finally establish that comfortable routine we all like to achieve in our work, what happens next?

Most will continue to find their challenges dealing with a couple dozen squirming third-graders each year, but others, like Miss Eyre, will consider new avenues. Are the folks who take on new duties a cross-section representative of their colleagues, or are they a specific type? The answer might help explain a lot about school-level relations between labor and administration.

Are the teachers who become heavily involved in union matters young and idealistic, or experienced cynics who know where the bodies are buried? Are the teachers who become principals tired of teaching? What separates them from those who choose to climb the union hierarchy?

I think these are intriguing questions because we forget all these folks come out of the same pool. The most recent Schools and Staffing Survey reveals the average public school principal taught for 13 years before becoming a principal, and that 28 percent of them still teach. Teachers who think their principals are the spawn of Satan don’t stop to consider that the eggs were laid in the teachers’ lounge. Principals who think union chapter leaders are rabid dogs were probably happy to sic them on administrators back when they were teachers.

We are so concerned with why people leave the profession we don’t spend a lot of time on why they stay. It’s human nature to join groups where you feel you’ll fit in. We may find that the people who fit in the public school system have a lot in common, regardless on which side of the labor-management divide they stand.

The California Teachers Association and NEA are going to have a difficult time persuading voters to support Proposition 1A in next week’s election when they have failed to persuade some of their largest locals.

The No on 1A side already had its share of teachers – the members of the California Federation of Teachers and the Oakland Education Association. Now from the Calitics blog comes the news of further CTA defections.

“In voicing their opposition to Prop. 1A, UTLA leaders voiced their concern over a spending cap that would permanently affect state social programs while providing no real solution to the State’s torturous budgetary process,” said Josh Pechthalt, American Federation of Teachers Vice President of UTLA. “We need to build lasting alliances between education and other social service communities rather than allow us to be pitted against each other, as Prop 1A would do, in the struggle for limited state resources.”

The report is confirmed by this low-key notice on the UTLA website, but Calitics also claims United Educators of San Francisco is opposing 1A. There is no mention of this on the UESF website, and a story last month suggested that although a UESF caucus wanted such an outcome, the leadership postponed the discussion. If the local has decided to oppose 1A, it hasn’t made the decision public yet.

In the money and media battle, the CTA defections will have little effect, since dues money from Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco members will still be spent to support 1A. However, it will throw a huge monkeywrench in CTA’s phone banking, canvassing, precinct walking and GOTV machines in those areas.

Click here to read:

Special “Quote of the Week” Issue

1) Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association
2) Megan McArdle, economics blogger for Atlantic Monthly
3) Katherine K. Merseth, senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
4) David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association
5) Candi Peterson, member of the Washington Teachers Union board of trustees
6) Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers
7) Elaine Chao, former U.S. Secretary of Labor
8) Pat Donohoe, state councilor of the New South Wales Teachers Federation in Australia
9) Contract Hits
10) Last Week’s Intercepts

Here’s a slideshow of California Teachers Association employees conducting an informational picket of the union on April 29. The staffers claim CTA wants to cap its contributions to their health benefits and seeks cost-cutting measures regarding their pensions.

In Michigan, some school districts used taxpayer funds to be included in a “best school districts” infomercial.

AFT President Randi Weingarten:

While there is much to applaud in the president’s budget, we are disappointed that it includes continued public funding for private school vouchers in Washington, D.C. The foundations that have championed vouchers all these years easily could have raised the funds to ensure the children already participating in this program would not have their education disrupted. What is equally disappointing is that they are using these children, who are blameless, as pawns in their ideological battle. (emphasis added)

Judging by my inbox, it appears many of you were unaware that teachers could be fired for not paying their union dues. In fact, this is a common provision in teacher contracts, usually categorized under “association security.” The prompt for all the e-mails was this article in the May issue of The Detroit Teacher. It was written by Detroit Federation of Teachers Executive Vice President Mark O’Keefe:

Seventy Teachers Face Termination

“I can’t remember every employee I hired, but I remember all the ones I fired,” a former boss once told me. Although the union fights to save jobs for teachers, we are in the unfortunate position of having to notify 70 teachers that they may be terminated for nonpayment of union dues.

Paying union dues, or alternatively agency shop fees, is a condition of your employment. Occasionally, the district makes a mistake and fails to withhold the correct amount of dues. When this happens, we send an invoice to the member for the amount of dues owed.

When members do not fulfill their responsibility to pay their dues, we are in an unfortunate position. We have to notify the district that employment will be terminated in 35 days if the delinquent dues are not paid.

As much as we may like to “let it slide,” the union is owed thousands and thousands of dollars, which we need to pay our bills.

We can’t allow some members to pay all their dues while others get a free ride.

So my challenge is this: Find me something else a teacher would have to do that would not only allow a school district to fire him or her in the short span of 35 days, but would require it.

Chronic absenteeism? Striking a child? Drug dealing? Sexual harassment of a fellow teacher? An arrest for first-degree murder?

Evidently due process rights protect a teacher against every accusation but one. The heinous act of failing to pay union dues.