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

Be honest. One year after the inauguration of President Obama, did you think you’d be reading about this kind of stuff - in blue states?

* California: “California teachers union in rare legislative loss,” reads the Sacramento Bee headline, describing the passage of reforms designed to improve the state’s Race to the Top chances.

The CTA’s fight over Race to the Top brings out traditional political tensions between unions and charter schools – but also introduces philanthropists as a new force of power in the politics of education, said University of California, Berkeley, education professor Bruce Fuller.

The bills were backed by philanthropy-funded organizations that support charter schools, which generally do not employ union teachers. A major supporter was EdVoice, an advocacy group founded by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Housing developer Eli Broad and Gap founder Donald Fisher have played big roles in EdVoice and other groups that promote educational reform.

“Once you’ve got wealthy donors who are willing to replace teacher donations, then politics do start to shift,” Fuller said.

“A lot of this is not so much a shift in ideas but a shift in raw politics. The Democrats no longer just complain about the sluggishness of the unions, they have a benefactor who supports these reforms that for a long time CTA would have been able to kill.”

* New Jersey: “N.J. Gov.-elect Christie targets teachers’ union with Schundler appointment,” reads the Newark Star-Ledger headine.

“Forget the 20th century, these folks are back in the 19th century in terms of their thinking,” said New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie, speaking about the New Jersey Education Association’s opposition to the state Race to the Top application. Christie also named long-time NJEA nemesis Bret Schundler to be his education commissioner. “They (voters) didn’t pick me because they were looking for a subtle approach,” he says. “So, here it comes.”

* Nevada: ”Recession-stung governments target public employee unions; Strapped by lost revenue, officials look to cut into generous labor deals,” reads the Las Vegas Sun headline.

When Gov. Jim Gibbons suggested eliminating collective bargaining rights as part of an ambitious education reform proposal last week, he launched the latest attack on a group that’s shaping up to be this year’s political target: public employee unions.

Days before, Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid, a Democrat running for governor, called the county’s union contracts unsustainable and said negotiators would seek to rein in generous pay and benefits this year.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who’s mused about running for governor as an independent, said the collective bargaining process had “created a monster” and called on city employees — union and nonunion alike — to take an 8 percent pay cut in each of the next two years.

How did this happen? I’m reminded of Dave Barry’s quote about the difference between Democrats and Republicans:

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They’re the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot Virginia.

Both The New Republic and Jay Mathews have NEA’s non-response response to the speech delivered by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten yesterday. The Quick and the Ed boils it down to this:

There you have it: the NEA won’t embrace experiments in proving something effective if that something hasn’t already been proven effective.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten delivered a speech before the National Press Club this morning titled, “A New Path Forward.”

By my count, this is about the 10th new path forward since I began covering the national teachers’ unions, and most of them get launched with a speech at the National Press Club. The speeches always generate stories in the Washington Post and USA Today, and if the Wall Street Journal doesn’t cover it, Bloomberg will. The Post and New York Times weigh in with editorials, generating blog posts and follow-on commentary, and then it all gradually fades away until the requisite number of moons have passed and the next new path forward is presented.

Since breaking the cycle is sure to open the Hellmouth, I’ll simply direct you to the blog post I wrote upon the occasion of Weingarten’s last National Press Club speech, delivered November 17, 2008. Alexander Russo compiled the press clippings for that one, and the text of the speech is still available on the United Federation of Teachers web site.

An Education Intelligence Agency analysis of NEA’s financial disclosure report for the 2008-09 fiscal year reveals the national union contributed almost $26 million to a wide variety of advocacy groups and charities. The total more than doubles the amount disbursed in the previous year.

The expenditures fall into broad categories of community outreach grants, charitable contributions, and payments for services rendered. In this list, EIA has deliberately omitted spending such as media buys, or payments to pollsters or consultants that have no obvious ideological component. The grants range from $3.6 million to Protect Colorado’s Future, a coalition created to defeat three ballot initiatives in 2008, down to smaller grants to organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund, FairTest, MediaMatters, and People for the American Way.

Click here for an alphabetic list of the 164 recipients of NEA’s contributions, with relevant web links. All of these donations were paid for with members’ dues money (the union’s federal PAC is a separate entity funded through voluntary means).

1) California Teachers Association President David Sanchez is urging CTA local affiliates not to sign Race to the Top memoranda of understanding. “It’s crazy for them to think that we were going to go out on a limb and sign something off without knowing what the final product is going to look like,” Sanchez said.

But the teachers’ union in New York, along with school administrators, make exactly the opposite argument when it comes to collective bargaining agreements. “If negotiations were public, what incentive would there be for either side to move even one inch for fear of being publicly criticized?” asked a New York State United Teachers spokesman, while the superintendent added, “It’s not easy to reach an agreement with both parties now, and if we got the public involved it would be that much more cumbersome.”

2) There is an effort in New Jersey to move school board elections from April and May to November. The New Jersey Education Association is opposed because it “would politicize what is currently a non-partisan election process.”

Who’s the largest campaign contributor to school board candidates? You only get one guess.

3) In a Los Angeles Times opinion column, United Teachers Los Angeles officers A.J. Duffy, Julie Washington and Gregg Solkovits tell us how to create “better teachers, the union way.” They trumpet the district’s peer review program:

The Los Angeles Unified School District program, a collaborative effort with the union, provides both new teachers and struggling veterans with ongoing peer coaching from trained consulting teachers. Teachers who receive a below-standard evaluation are automatically referred to the program. So far, nearly 850 teachers have been referred to the program, and more than two-thirds of them have successfully improved their practice or decided to leave the profession.

The program is 10 years old. LAUSD has more than 34,000 teachers. That’s an average of one-quarter of one percent of LA teachers in the program annually. Also, how do we interpret that last sentence? Did two-thirds improve their practice and one-third leave the profession, or does the two-thirds include both improvers and leavers, and there is another third unaccounted for?

The Lutherans will miss him the most.

California Federation of Teachers President Marty Hittelman has no intention of backing down from his comparison of public school parents to “lynch mobs,” telling the Sacramento Bee he used the term “advisedly.”

Hittelman said no racial offense was meant. The term was used to suggest that a parent trigger could be used by charter-school proponents, pushing a self-serving agenda, to create sort of a “mob atmosphere” in gathering parent signatures, he said.

California legislators could have made things much easier for Hittelman if they had simply renamed the “parent trigger” something he could more readily identify with… Card Check for Parents.