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

You thought the Nevada high school newspaper/First Amendment thing was all over, right?

Wrong!

Kathy Archey, the teacher who was the subject of a mildly critical article in the Churchill County High School newspaper, filed suit against the district superintendent, the school principal, the school’s journalism adviser, and the editor of the local newspaper in which the story received general attention. Though published reports don’t mention it, the presence of the journalism adviser in the complaint probably precludes the involvement of the union in the lawsuit, since the union cannot take sides in a dispute involving bargaining unit members.

Archey wants $10,000 in damages, claiming the article adversely affected her plans to open a restaurant in Churchill County. (Huh?)

“Based on the conduct of these individuals, Kathleen’s reputation as a teacher has been damaged,” the suit says. “She has suffered ridicule and has been rebuked by people who have been influenced by these defamatory and malicious allegations concerning her integrity as a teacher.”

The Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial page had this obvious take:

But one could still make the argument that Ms. Archey’s reputation has been harmed more by her effort to kill the story and then extract revenge from those involved rather than by the content of the article itself.

Sure, you’re tired of reading all this education dreck, but the Education Writers Association compiled its award-winning stories from last year. Check them out.

My favorite: second-prize winner in the “Small Media-Opinion” category Julie Mack of the Kalamazoo Gazette‘s “MEA cooks health-coverage numbers to the boiling point.” An excerpt:

The MEA didn’t just cook the numbers in this report. They made the pot boil over.

Did they think nobody would notice? That nobody would actually look at the footnotes to see how they did their analysis? That nobody would call them out?

I noticed. I read the footnotes.

I’m calling them out.

Strange that the report to which Mack refers wasn’t debunked by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. I wonder why.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission released a report titled “Big Money Talks” that revealed the California Teachers Association was the largest political spender in the state over the last decade, dropping $211.8 million on ballot initiatives, candidates for state and local office, and lobbying.

The amount was almost twice as much as the second-ranked interest group, the California State Council of Service Employees, which is the political arm of the state SEIU chapters.

The commission is unusually blunt about the effect this money has on the political process in California:

California’s Top 15 special interest groups often win by spending money to defeat ballot measures — which has the effect of maintaining the status quo. Their willingness to spend vast sums of money gives them the ability not just to drown out others, but to exercise powerful political leverage. By spending huge amounts of money, they send an unmistakable message to political opponents and elected officials alike: “We’re ready, willing, and able to spend millions — you don’t want to fight us.” What is good for the people of California matters less than what hurts or helps the individual interests of these groups.

The FPPC is even less optimistic than I am about the situation. “This report leaves little doubt where the vortex of political power lies in this state. The numbers tell the story. And there is no end in sight to the spending binge by special interests,” the authors wrote.

That last statement is certainly true.

The term “also ran” originated when newspapers would publish horse racing results, highlighting those that finished in the money (first, second and third) and the rest of the field, who were listed under the heading “also ran.”

The political equivalent appears to be “also heard from.” The occasion was the Senate Education Committee’s hearing on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The New York Times story led with the testimony of Andreas Schleicher from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and included a quote from Charles Butt, the CEO of the H-E-B supermarket chain in Texas.

The Times reported that “the committee also heard from Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union…” but provided no details of his testimony, and no quotes.

Ouch.

You can head over to the NEA press release to discover what Van Roekel said, and Politics K-12 has his response to a question about the Teacher Incentive Fund.

Oregon didn’t make it as a finalist for Race to the Top funds, but it’s good to know that the more than 100 people who worked all fall on the state’s application will have something new to keep them busy.

Betsy Hammond of The Oregonian reports the state Department of Education wants to “change the wording used to describe when students pass and fail — or uber-pass or uber-fail — state reading, writing, math and science tests.”

That’s right. Apparently the terms ”exceeds,” “meets,” “nearly meets,” and “does not meet” the state standards don’t have the right poetry. Hammond is polling readers to see which phrases they prefer. So far, the leader is “Totally Bombed, Failed, Passed, Aced.”

For the Internet generation, it would be appropriate to have “Epic Fail.”

Click here to read:

1) Oregon: Shape of Labor Battles to Come?

2) The New York Times Finally Solves the Riddle of Teacher Union Coverage

3) Last Week’s Intercepts

4) Quote of the Week

The press release calls this “an historic agreement”, but it’s hard to tell if this is really nothing more than the Pennsylvania State Education Association saying it won’t stand in the way of its locals joining the AFL-CIO. They are already allowed to apply for membership according to the provisions of the national agreement, which states only:

The AFL-CIO and the NEA will consult with each other through the Implementation Committee concerning each request for membership, and each organization will consult with their affiliated organizations through their own internal processes…. The agreements reached on these and any other issues will be subject to approval by the DANL and the relevant NEA state affiliate, and will be reflected in the Certificate of Affiliation issued by the AFL-CIO to the DANL.

We’ll find out tomorrow morning if there’s any more to it than that.