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

Today’s lesson comes courtesy of Bernadette Marso, president of the Leominster Education Association in Massachusetts. Her members just voted down, by a 305-47 margin, a five-year, $856,000 grant from the Advanced Placement Training and Award Program. The program, among other things, pays teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money “if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.”

Some district officials and parents complained about the union decision because the bonuses were just one part of the program, which includes professional development and a subsidy to offset the AP exam fee for the students. But the union stood firmly opposed.

“We understand that some people will not understand the vote, but we confronted this from a union perspective,” Marso said. “We have a fair and equitable contract with the district, and to have a third party come in and start paying certain teachers more money than other hard-working teachers goes against what a union is all about.”

When last we left the Indiana State Teachers Association, its officers called a special representative assembly, sent layoff notices to one-quarter of the staff, and settled down to figure out how to eliminate not only the deficit of its depleted insurance trust, but that of the union itself.

EIA can now report that ISTA’s layoffs will go forward, a number of regional offices will be closed or consolidated, and members will be subjected to a $40 annual dues increase, bringing the state affiliate portion of dues to $489 for the 2009-10 school year (NEA national dues will be an additional $162).

The dues increase could remain in effect until 2012.

NEA has promised additional support, though the details have yet to be worked out. At the very least, NEA will provide assistance for ISTA’s summer and fall membership drive, which should be a public relations challenge. (“We’re broke and we just increased dues by an unprecedented amount. Join us!”)

ISTA representatives will meet with the NEA board of directors at the national representative assembly next week, but it is unclear how much of this situation will be presented to the rank-and-file delegates. Nor is it known whether assistance to ISTA will come through normal channels, or if adjustments in NEA’s budget allocations will be made.

National Journal is a prestigious publication, and I hope its reputation isn’t tarnished by its questionable decision to name me as a contributor to its brand-new Education Expert Blog. I’m listed alongside such luminaries as NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Checker Finn, Linda Darling-Hammond, and a host of others who together constitute the in crowd of public education policy.

It’s possible Russo and I fill out the Italian-American quota.

Anyway, the inaugural question is “What’s the Best Use of Stimulus Money?” I chose to answer the question seriously, rather than just type “Weekend in Vegas.”

Eventually the format will lead to some back-and-forth among the contributors, so bookmark the site and check every Monday for a new question.

UPDATE: Eighteen responses so far and mine is the only one that doesn’t require you to click “Read More.” I am so proud.

The new management of the Detroit Public Schools has finally figured out that 14,000 employees for 84,000 students is not financially viable, so there will be layoffs.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers reacted predictably, but the union has its own budgetary problems to deal with, along with the possible embezzlement of tens of thousands of dollars of union funds.

Go to the American Federation of Teachers web site and you’ll find the following claim:

The AFT has more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide, 43 state affiliates, and more than 1.4 million members.

Getting to 1.4 million members requires some creative math, but we’ll put that aside for now. More to the point is that the union’s Labor Department disclosure report claims fewer than 725,000 full-time members.

Some of these folks aren’t teachers; they are nurses, health care professionals, state employees, education support workers, guidance counselors, etc. Some of them are teachers, but aren’t currently working as teachers, including those who have office jobs or are union officers on release time.

And now media outlets have begun to notice that some of them are teachers, but they aren’t teaching, including those in rubber rooms, teacher jails, and graveyards.

It would be an informative exercise to take those 1.4 million members and see how many are in the nation’s classrooms each and every day, teaching children full-time. Since the current AFT president reportedly had only one semester of full-time teaching experience, it may be time for the American Federation of Teachers to consider a new name.

Andrew J. Coulson is pessimistic about the future of charter schools, and I can’t blame him, because I used to feel the same way.

No one has ever accused me of being Pollyanna when it comes to public education, but after 18 years I believe charter schools have established themselves. There is now, in my view, a charter school status quo, which puts the teachers’ unions in the unenviable position of attempting to alter that status quo. History and common sense suggest they are unsuited to the task of inducing systems to change direction.

What is also obvious is that organizing individual charter schools, or even cherry-picking a few schools under one charter operator, as was done in Chicago with Civitas, will never be cost-effective for the teachers’ unions. Of course there are dangers. The growth of charter school franchises make them more like school districts when it comes to labor relations, and therefore more inviting targets for unionization. Also, unions have proven themselves adept at getting through state law what they couldn’t get through grassroots organizing.

But such an outlook fails to account for the championing of charter schools by mainstream Democrats, including our President and Secretary of Education. This isn’t a new phenomenon, either. Back in 1999, “Gov. Moonbeam” himself, Jerry Brown, helped turn back a bill that would have placed California’s charter schools under the strictures of their local teacher union contract (see third bullet here).

As long as charters stay true to their roots, treat their employees well and weed out failing schools, they’ll be able to resist union and bureaucratic pressures. And that comes from the original Gloomy Gus.

In an Associated Press story about union interest in charter schools, there is this from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten:

Weingarten said the charter school movement would expand more rapidly if supporters were more open to collective bargaining.

“The promise of charter schools is that they are small incubators of experimentation, both in terms of instruction and labor relations,” she said. “They shouldn’t be separate systems.”

And fortunately, thanks to the Niagara Gazette, we know exactly what she means.