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

You don’t need me to tell you that the proposed regulations for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top funds were disclosed today. Never before have so many people rushed headlong to grab their copy of the Federal Register.

I’m with Russo on this one. We’re getting a lot of coverage of the goals and not much about how it’s going to happen. EVERYBODY has noticed that the teachers’ unions are going to find a lot of objectionable stuff in these regs. NOBODY is spending time to figure out what that will mean. Here’s a guess: The unions will first work to water down the regs, but Obama and Duncan will still get most of what they want. Then the districts and the unions will take the money, and four years from now, just like magic, everything will be exactly the same as it is now.

My favorite bit in all the coverage was this quote from President Obama’s interview with the Washington Post:

“There are going to be elements within the teachers union where they’re just resistant to change, because people inherently are resistant to change. Teachers aren’t any different from any politicians or corporate CEOs. There are going to be certain habits that have been built up that they don’t want to change.”

I don’t want to overanalyze the President’s vocabulary, but “elements within the teachers union”? Who are these elements? When it comes to getting what he wants, the only elements that matter are the ones he meets, Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten. Therefore the only resistance that matters is theirs.

I hope President Obama was just trying to make a point about general resistance to change. If he actually believes he only needs to overcome a faction of hard-liners, he’s in for a rude awakening.

As predicted (see “Farewell to OLMS“), the unions are lobbying the Obama administration to defang the Office of Labor Management Standards and eliminate many disclosure requirements.

“We strongly urge the department to go back to the old forms in place before the 2003 modifications,” said James Coppess, who represented the AFL-CIO. “They were slightly less confusing and they capture the expenditures that are appropriately reported.”

Well, maybe the forms confused the AFL-CIO, but they cleared up a lot of confusion for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, Mike Petrilli learns something about state legislators (D-NEA).

A report by the Bond Accountability Commission reveals the Cleveland school district “continues to plan for new elementary schools in blighted neighborhoods where enrollment has plunged.”

The district created its current construction master plan in 2002 and updated it only once since then. In that time, enrollment has dropped from more than 70,000 to about 50,000. But the Cleveland Plain Dealer buries the lede. The last paragraph of the story reads:

The program, nearly half-completed, is on pace to run out of money before it wraps up in 2015. The district, which persuaded voters to pass a $335 million bond issue in 2001, has estimated that it will need to ask for another $217 million.

One commenter didn’t miss that little tidbit, asking:

So let me see, if I read correctly, we are going to build schools we don’t need for students we don’t have AND the school district will ask for even more money to do it? Further, enrollment has dropped 40% and the district can’t buy out teachers. When will this madness end?

It’s great when some of the people who voted to remove you from elected office and take over your union local will now sit in judgment of whether the action was justified.

Click here to read:

1) Despite Relative Success, NEA Still Worried About Membership Numbers
2) Improvising Innovation
3) Contract Hits
4) Last Week’s Intercepts
5) Quote of the Week

Morgan Reynolds discusses organized labor’s past, while Jane Slaughter examines its present and future.

Joanne Jacobs knows the difference between one-quarter and three-eighths, which is more than can be said for the folks at the United Federation of Teachers.

UFT will shut down “much” of its main office on Fridays for the rest of the summer, ostensibly to save money during the recession. Except that the employees who will no longer show up for work on Fridays will still be paid, so it sounds more like eight additional paid holidays than a cost-cutting measure. Especially curious is this remark:

“A spokesman for the UFT, Peter Kadushin, said the days off, which amount to a total of eight, are one of several cost cutting plans, and would likely shave 40 percent off the UFT’s energy bill.”

I’m not privy to UFT’s energy consumption patterns, and I understand that air conditioning in the summer probably burns more energy than heat in the winter, but how does one day of partial closing a week for eight weeks equal 40 percent in energy savings?