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

Minnesota lawmakers felt their Race to the Top application was adversely affected by insufficient teacher union buy-in. So they heeded the union’s repeated calls for “a seat at the table” by giving Education Minnesota President Tom Dooher, well, a seat at the table. Unfortunately, it was a seat at the legislators’ table during a committee hearing and Dooher is not only the union president, but a registered lobbyist.

Republican state Rep. Mark Buesgens said it was “like having Vito Corleone watching over his foot soldiers.”

The Democrats said the meeting was a working group and not a full committee hearing, so Dooher’s presence at the legislators’ table was not a breach of protocol. However, the Minnesota House voted 128-2 yesterday to bar lobbyists and executive branch members from sitting at the committee table with lawmakers during official meetings.

I think the GOP played this wrong. I prefer clarity in these matters, and instead of complaining the Republicans should have given Dooher a gavel and gotten video of him schmoozing at the table with the Democrats. Hell, they should give Dooher an office in the Capitol and save him the two-block walk from Education Minnesota headquarters. Stop playing the public for fools and show them who’s really making education policy.

Teacher union spokespersons are usually true believers, but they are also professionals trying to do a difficult job, which is to paint their organizations in an appealing light. A good communications director, when confronted with the information that the sun will rise in the east, will earnestly explain to you that it simply depends on your point of view.

Unions also have to deliver two messages: internal and external. They are often at odds. The union needs to convey to the public that it is not hidebound and unyielding, while conveying to the membership that it will not yield. This can lead to some headshaking comments.

For example, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie urged voters to reject school budgets in districts where teachers have not accepted wage freezes (which were most of them). He was criticized for doing so. New Jersey Education Association President Barbara Keshishian called the move “irresponsible,” and claimed Christie “wants to make a bad situation even worse by starving schools of the resources they need at the local level as well.”

Well, the results are in. There was a large turnout, and voters appeared to have followed Christie’s advice. They rejected 58.7 percent of 537 school budgets. That was the worst showing for school budgets in 34 years.

You and I would be hard-pressed to spin this into a defeat for Gov. Christie, but that didn’t stop NJEA’s veteran spokesman, Steve Wollmer:

“It’s disappointing for sure, but also understandable. People are generally overwhelmed by property taxes in this state, and equally underwhelmed by what they’re getting out of Trenton. These votes were a referendum on his budget proposal. The election results are a real wakeup call to Gov. Christie and the legislature that we need some new solutions.”

If you say so.

Meanwhile, following a press release by the school system, the Washington Post published a story headlined, “Montgomery County to weigh student performance as a third of teachers’ reviews.” The school district seems to think this is a big deal, as part of Maryland’s renewed Race to the Top application. The Post evidently agreed by running the story. But then you get to the bit about the teachers’ union:

“However, Doug Prouty, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, said the agreement signed Tuesday would not effectively change the way teachers in the school system are evaluated.”

This leaves me wondering if: a) district officials are kidding themselves; b) they are trying to kid the Race to the Top judges and us; or c) the union is trying to kid its members. Whichever it is, you have to admire the story’s aim to get people excited about business as usual.

Click here to read:

1) Ohio Education Association to Pay $3.75 Million in Damages to Retired Staffers

2) The Burden of Proof

3) Recommended Reading: The Beholden State

4) Last Week’s Intercepts

5) Quote of the Week

First there was the death prayer memo.

Then there was the drug mule response.

Now we’ve reached the culmination of Godwin’s Law – or at least the Pol Pot corollary.

On a Facebook page titled, “New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze,” one commenter wrote: “Remember Pol Pot, dictator of Cambodia? He reigned in terror, his target was teachers and intellectuals. They were either killed or put into forced labor… King Kris Kristy is headed in this direction.”

The Associated Press interviewed Marlene Brubaker, a Camden County Technical School science teacher who wrote the post.

“I’m not saying this guy is killing us physically,” she said. “I would say he’s trying to kill us spiritually,” by disrespecting teachers and spreading the myth that they’re overpaid.

How about disrespecting the memory of all the people who were killed – physically – by Pol Pot?

The founder of the Facebook page says he will delete such comments, because Gov. Christie “is not a genocidal maniac. He is a crappy governor.”

This is kid stuff. The solution is not “why can’t we all get along” rhetoric. Both camps should just acknowledge they hate each other, and settle it in the public policy ring. Comparing people to drug dealers, dictators or dead celebrities will get you in the papers, but it won’t affect school budgets.

Despite the overall glut in K-12 teachers, there are still shortages in specific areas like math, science, special education and foreign languages. At last someone has given thought to cross-training some of those laid-off elementary education teachers into those fields. Check out this news from Oakland, California. Win-win.

I’ve spent a lot of time and space the last few weeks writing about the number of teachers vs. the number of students. Matthew Ladner goes a step further and notes the real boom in education hiring has been among non-teachers – not just administrators, but support staff, secretaries, custodians, specialists, counselors, aides, you name it.

Matthew’s blog post cites the National Center for Education Statistics finding that in 1950 American public schools employed one non-teacher for every 2.36 teachers. In 2007, there are almost as many non-teachers as teachers.

How this works out at the state level is best illustrated by the New York State Public School Report Card for 2008-09, which on page 4 disaggregates staffing numbers in a pair of tables (I combine the relevant numbers from two tables here):

This is hardly a new problem, just worse. If you need a blast from the past, check out this piece I wrote for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in November 1999 titled, Mission Creep: How Large School Districts Lose Sight of the Objective — Student Learning.

Increase the scope of the mission, and you increase the number of personnel tangentially connected to the primary mission. Soon those employees need support staff, and before you know it, you’ve transformed your school system into a jobs program – one which, I have to admit, is an unmitigated success.

It’s the end of an era in public education (and end to my hopes to profit from a new TV reality competition show).