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

It’s probably futile to try to apply some precision to a number that was pulled out of a hat, but a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe has – well, let’s call it an “anomaly.”

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was giving a commencement address in Boston, and this was the Globe‘s lede:

US Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned yesterday that as many as 300,000 teachers nationwide, including 4,000 teachers in Massachusetts, could lose their jobs this year if Congress does not provide additional money to aid struggling states and municipalities.

Three paragraphs later, we get this:

He urged Congress to pass a pending $23 billion education and jobs bill that he said would save or create more than 256,000 teaching positions, including an estimated 4,300 in the Bay State.

Whoa, big fella! I thought the whole idea was to prevent layoffs. What’s this “create” stuff? And if the jobs bill only takes care of 256,000 out of the 300,000 lost jobs nationwide, why would Massachusetts end up with 300 more jobs than it stands to lose? (Massachusetts’ K-12 enrollment has been falling for years.) Wouldn’t it make more sense to “save” 300 jobs in other states than “create” 300 new ones in Massachusetts?

And how did it get to be 300,000 “teachers”? NEA says 300,000 “educators,” which in its formulation includes education support employees. Even that is suspect, since a mere three weeks ago, a union press release stated, “NEA is now projecting more than 150,000 educator layoffs in the next three months, which would affect millions of public school children.”

Maybe this funny math will all work out in the end, but unfortunately it will take two to three years to learn what the actual numbers are for the 2010-11 school year. If we make a mistake, by then it will be much too late to do anything about it.

“Report Envisions Shortage of Teachers as Retirements Escalate” (New York Times – April 7, 2009):

Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report.

The problem is aggravated by high attrition among rookie teachers, with one of every three new teachers leaving the profession within five years, a loss of talent that costs school districts millions in recruiting and training expenses, says the report, by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit research advocacy group.

“The traditional teaching career is collapsing at both ends,” the report says. “Beginners are being driven away” by low pay and frustrating working conditions, and “accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems” that encourage teachers to move from paycheck to pension when they are still in their mid-50s, the report says.

“Teachers Facing Weakest Market in Years“ (New York Times – May 20, 2010):

In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.

Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.

The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs….

At the University of Pennsylvania, most of the 90 aspiring teachers who graduated last weekend are jobless. Many had counted on offers from the Philadelphia public schools but had their interviews canceled this month after the district announced a hiring freeze….

Michigan State University has pushed its 500 teaching graduates to look out of state. As local jobs have dried up, it started an internship program in Chicago, a four-hour drive from campus. Professors now go with students to the annual campus job fair to make sure they do not hover around the Michigan tables, but walk over to, say, North Carolina, Texas or Virginia….

Along with five other former teachers, Jade Stier, 27, finally gave up and enrolled in a nursing program last fall, after three years of looking for an elementary school job. She sent out hundreds of résumés, only to land one interview a year. She settled for working as a substitute teacher, earning $85 a day with no benefits.

“Spending $50,000 for an education you can’t use is really frustrating,” Ms. Stier said. “I definitely miss teaching, but I felt like I had no other choice.”

If there is an upside to the shortage of teaching jobs, it is that schools now have their pick of candidates.

Comment by John from Maryland on today’s Times story:

This is actually nothing new. There has now been a glut of teachers for a few years, except that the education schools and administrations are either too stupid to understand what a shortage is or too dishonest to admit that there’s no shortage of teachers.

I entered the teaching job market after getting laid off in 2002. I initially entered an alternative cert program which proclaimed me legally entitled to teach in 2004 to address this vast teacher shortage. Not only was I unable to find a job, but I got almost no interviews.

Arizona voters yesterday approved Proposition 100 by a nearly 2-1 margin. The measure increases the state sales tax by one cent for the next three years and applies two-thirds of the projected $1 billion in additional revenue to funding public education.

The Yes on 100 campaign spent $2 million, more than $100,000 of which came from the Arizona Education Association and its local affiliates. NEA chipped in an additional $50,000 from the union’s national ballot initiative fund.

In a year when voters seem angry about the high levels of government spending, tax initiatives in Oregon and Arizona have bucked the trend.

Last year, Steven Brill caused a commotion with his exposé of New York City’s rubber rooms. Some have credited Brill with providing the impetus for getting them closed.

Now Brill is at it again, with a piece for the New York Times Magazine headlined, “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand.”

It’s a meaty article, but the part that is already receiving attention comes at the very beginning, when Brill is interviewing United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”

“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.”

Most of us will find Mulgrew’s answer inadequate. But even Brill doesn’t realize how inadequate it was.

Unless Riley is categorized as a confidential assistant to Mulgrew, he is part of UFT’s staff union. This means Mulgrew can’t summarily fire Riley, even if he feels Riley is lazy or incompetent. Mulgrew can probably reassign Riley, but an attempt to dismiss him would meet with resistance from Riley’s union.

If Riley isn’t part of the bargaining unit, Mulgrew can fire him at will. But we can’t expect Mulgrew to tell Brill, “Oh yeah. I can get rid of an incompetent employee, as long as he doesn’t belong to the union.”

Union officers are labor advocates when dealing with school districts, but they are management advocates when dealing with their own employees. It should come as no surprise that they have difficulty continually making that leap between the two roles.

UPDATE: I’m told UFT’s professional staffers have no staff union (the support employees do). I believe this makes UFT unique. Chicago’s staff union is affiliated with the Teamsters.

Better late than never. This is page 4 from this month’s issue of Emphasis, the South Carolina Education Association’s member publication.

Lots of little stories for this week’s communique’. Click here to read.

Technorati ranks more than 100,000 blogs with “authority” calculations “based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time.” I don’t know what all that means, but it allows for comparison of blogs across and within all categories. The site doesn’t have an “education” category, so it requires going through the comprehensive listing to pick them out one at a time.

The rankings are updated once a day, but here are the top 20 education blogs as of May 16, with their Technorati authority figures (1000 is the highest possible score):

1) Joanne Jacobs – 610

2) The Quick and the Ed – 601

3) Gotham Schools – 584

4) Education Experts (National Journal) – 576

5) Flypaper – 572

6) Curriculum Matters (Education Week) – 562

7) Eduwonk – 556

8) Cool Cat Teacher Blog – 553

9) Get Schooled (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) – 550

10) Jay P. Greene’s Blog – 527

(tie) Intercepts – 527

12) This Week in Education – 526

13) The School Law Blog (Education Week) – 518

(tie) Education Technology – ICT in Education – 518

15) Kitchen Table Math, The Sequel – 516

16) Why Homeschool – 515

17) Homeschool Creations – 513

18) Dangerously Irrelevant – 507

(tie) Educational Boarding School – 507

20) EdTechPost – 497

Jay Mathews wrote about the latest Brookings Institution report on education journalism. He’s optimistic, but he states something important for those who write about education.

“Mass audiences aren’t that interested in school news. They will always, in my view, prefer reporting on celebrities, business, sports and politics, unless of course the government makes them watch us.”

The Technorati stats bear out Mathews’ premise. The top education blogger, Joanne Jacobs, doesn’t rank in top 1000 of all blogs. Political blogs rule the blogosphere, suggesting that the penchant for focusing on education policy rather than pedagogy is a rational one.