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

I’ve known USA Today education reporter Greg Toppo ever since he was on the beat for the Santa Fe New Mexican and believe me, he’s about the least likely reporter to be carrying water for the teachers’ unions. So that accusation, made by Andrew Rotherham at Eduwonk, caught my attention.

I’ve never met Andrew, but we’ve been cyber-acquainted for almost as long, and he’s not the type to hammer a reporter just for writing something with which he disagrees.

I’m also acquainted with Alexander Russo and John Merrow, and they hammer Andrew for hammering Greg.

The cause of all this heartburn is Greg’s article on Teach for America, and the prominence it gives to union claims that districts are laying off experienced teachers and replacing them with, ostensibly, lower-cost TFAers.

I don’t find the story as egregious as Andrew does, and a simple e-mail to Greg might have been a more appropriate response, but I am sympathetic to his argument that Greg’s story repeats the same angle on TFA that was ginned up by NEA after the Charlotte-Mecklenburg incident. (N.B. NEA Executive Director John Wilson, featured in the USA Today story, was for a long-time the executive director of NEA’s North Carolina affiliate and remains involved in the state’s politics.)

For what it’s worth, I think Greg’s story was not up to his usual standards, and Andrew caught him on it, but overreacted.

NEA has a large, well-financed communications department. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the union occasionally gets its PR message and talking points in print. Thankfully, from my point of view, the press shows WAY more skepticism of teacher union claims than it used to, and, by extension, so does the public.

Four Indiana teachers covered by the Indiana State Teachers Association insurance trust filed a class action lawsuit in state court for breach of fiduciary duties. The immediate purpose of the suit is to get eight additional trustees appointed to oversee the trust’s finances.

A previous suit had been filed in federal court, but ISTA is disputing whether the feds have proper jurisdiction in the case, so the plaintiffs are covering all bases. The 22-page complaint is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few choice excerpts:

* “As part of the NEA’s exertion of control over ISTA and the plan, all nine of the Plan’s Trustees resigned or were terminated, and the NEA appointed Edward Sullivan to act as ‘Sole Trustee’ of the Plan. However, the Trust Agreement requires that the Plan be operated by nine Trustees and contains no provision for the appointment of a sole trustee. Edward Sullivan’s complete control over the administration of the Plan is thus in violation of the terms of the Trust Agreement.”

* “Days after notifying schools that [long-term disability] payments would be cut off entirely, the NEA and ISTA announced that they had formed a ‘partnership’ to marshal sufficient funds to ensure that LTD benefits would be paid in full. However, the NEA and ISTA admitted that the details of this partnership had not yet been finalized or reduced to writing, including the source of money to fund tens of millions of dollars in LTD benefits. The NEA and ISTA further stated that the details of their partnership might remain completely confidential. Without any details of where the money is going to come from, or even an assurance that the details would be explained once they were worked out, the promise by the NEA and ISTA that LTD benefits will continue provides cold comfort to disabled teachers who rely on these benefits to pay their monthly living expenses. Plaintiffs’ counsel have repeatedly asked counsel for the NEA, ISTA, and other Defendants to provide details and documentation of their Trust, including requests during a telephonic conference with the court in the Federal Action, but the Defendants have refused to provide any details or documentation.”

* “One detail of the ‘partnership’ between NEA and ISTA that became clear only after persistent questioning by the press was that the NEA’s portion of funding for LTD benefits would not be a gift, but instead would be nothing more than a long-term loan to ISTA. In order to pay back this loan, [ISTA President Nate] Schnellenberger admitted that ISTA would raise dues on Indiana teacher members of ISTA and would have to consider selling its assets and laying off staff. In other words, under the NEA and ISTA ‘partnership,’ Indiana teachers will end up paying millions of dollars for the mismanagement and irresponsible investment of ISTA Insurance Trust funds for many years to come.”

* “The Plaintiffs and their counsel are understandably skeptical that the NEA and ISTA will follow through on their public commitment to pay all LTD benefits over the next 15-20 years. As described above, just over a month ago ISTA principals publicly stated that its LTD policy was among the best administered in the country, that the financial problems it was experiencing were not severe, and that benefits would not go unpaid. Days later, ISTA issued a memo to school (sic) saying LTD benefits would be completely cut off after July 31, 2009.”

Stephen Sawchuk at Teacher Beat gives the short version of Race to the Top eligibility arguments, while Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed reveals the intimate details of think tanks’ ”nefarious media-manipulation plans.”

Charles Barone over at Swift & Change Able examines the logical fallacies behind AFT President Randi Weingarten’s argument that New York is eligible for Race to the Top funds even when it’s clear that state law and the U.S. Department of Education guidelines are contradictory.

NEA has to come up with even a bigger workaround. As Barone notes, the Race to the Top guidelines state:

“to be eligible under this program, a State must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”

NEA, of course, has gently mentioned its objection to teachers being evaluated with student test scores, but just as with its policies on performance pay, the union’s beliefs about teacher evaluation are much more circumscribed than its public statements might lead you to believe.

The relevant paragraph from NEA Resolution D-20 reads:

“The Association also believes that the use of student achievement measures such as standardized test scores or grades to determine the competency, quality, or effectiveness of any professional educator is inappropriate and is not a valid measure.”

We can argue till we’re blue in the face about whether and how teachers should be evaluated based on student achievement, but the immediate issue is the Obama administration insists on such a linkage for Race to the Top funding eligibility and NEA’s official policy is to oppose such a linkage. Sherman Dorn thinks NEA may take the opportunity to  ”increase the leverage of state affiliates, not to eliminate the requirement on linkability of teachers to student data.”

That would be sensible, and preferable to a dogfight with Obama and Duncan, but NEA dislikes taking the federalist approach, and allowing state affiliates to work out their own arrangements could lead to internal friction (ref. Denver and performance pay, Wisconsin and charter schools, Minnesota and merger, et al.).

I don’t have a crystal ball, but experience tells me NEA will devote itself to finding language vague and amorphous enough to allow its affiliates to get the funds without any explicit backtracking on its opposition to evaluating teachers with student achievement measures. The union can be very creative with semantics and I’m guessing they will succeed.

The U.S. Census Bureau finally released its annual report on education spending, titled Public Education Finances: 2007. For you this means a few days of newspaper headlines ranging somewhere between this one and this one.

For me it means several weeks of steady work updating EIA’s Public School District Enrollment and Spending tables for some 14,000 districts. So while I hammer away on that project, talk among yourselves about the takeaway statistic from the report: Public school spending rose 5.8% in 2007.

Click here to read:

1) Indiana AFT Affiliate to End No-Raid Agreement with ISTA
2) NEA and Private School Educators
3) Contract Hits
4) Last Week’s Intercepts
5) Quote of the Week

If you would like a long, detailed analysis of Big Labor’s problems as viewed from the left, take a look at Lee Sustar’s piece for Counterpunch titled “U.S. Labor in Crisis.”