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

Last month, the Education Trust and the New Teacher Project wanted to see seniority reform in exchange for passage of the edujobs bill.

This month, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey wants to raid Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and part of the Department of Education discretionary budget related to charter schools in order to offset the costs of the edujobs bill.

Coincidence?

UPDATE: Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson, to his credit, adds this sentence to his story about the Obey amendment:

“Estimates have ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 education jobs in jeopardy, although those figures might be questionable.”

He also quotes Obey spokesman Ellis Brachman: “Mr. Obey has said, ‘When a ship is sinking, you don’t worry about redesigning a room, you worry about keeping it afloat.’”

Maybe the ship is sinking because it’s overloaded.

The Incredible Shrinking Teacher Layoff continues.

* Oceanside, California – “OUSD to rehire at least half of laid off teachers”

* Ann Arbor, Michigan – “The board recalled all 191 laid-off teachers…”

* Chicago, Illinois – “…only 1,200 teachers will be laid off, instead of the 2,700 originally projected…”

* North Carolina – “State budget saves 1,600 teacher jobs, cuts spending”

Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats are trying to revive a $10 billion edujobs bill – this time with offsets.

In this flurry of job-saving activity, the U.S. Census Bureau yesterday released its annual report on public education finances. The figures carry us through the 2007-08 school year, and the two-year-old statistics show in stark relief how we reached this point.

Enrollment dropped nationwide by more than 45,000 students, and there was virtually no inflation in 2008. Nevertheless, per-pupil spending rose 6.1 percent to $10,259.

That year, 21.3 million people worked in the public sector at all levels of government. Six million of them worked in the public school system.

We spend more than a half-trillion dollars annually on public education, and school districts hold an additional $377 billion in debt.

Contrary to the belief of some, that money doesn’t come from a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It amounts to $3,635 a year from the paychecks of each and every working American.

So while politicians and the education establishment negotiate for more money in the names of parents and students, it’s well past time they acknowledged the concerns of those who don’t qualify for the status of “education stakeholder.” They’re expected to meekly cover every raise and ask no questions.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave the commencement speech at Foothill College in northern California last Friday, and let slip the Obama Administration’s true education agenda.

The headline at Palo Alto Online read, “Arne Duncan tells Foothill grads ‘to be shape-shifters’.” Here’s the relevant segment of his speech:

The concept of the Protean Career is based on the myth of the Greek sea god, Proteus. Proteus had two distinct abilities. First, he could change shapes with relative ease, from a wild boar to a lion, or from fire to a flood. This ability to shape-shift is the source of the popular meaning of the word “protean”–it refers to the ability to adapt to change and meet new challenges.

But Proteus’s second, lesser-known ability was the gift of prophecy. He was able to foresee the future–and answer any questions put to him about what the future held. And here, too, I think your ability to anticipate change and foresee job opportunities will help determine your success in the job market.

This is a clear message to graduates to become shape-shifters and join the reptilian conspiracy that controls the federal government and the media. It has long been known that President Obama is a reptilian shapeshifter, and also former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Hillary, too).

Crazy? You be the judge.

The $23 billion edujobs bill was reduced to $10 billion, then died anyway, despite the exertions of the National Education Association.

NEA flew in pink-slipped teachers from across the country to lobby Congress in support of the bill, but it appears local efforts were staving off the need for a federal bailout even while they were testifying.

High school teacher Angie Hallock of Elgin, Illinois, was one of the NEA members brought in. “In District U-46, we have nearly 800 educators being laid off,” she said, adding, “Class size will rise dramatically. With the layoffs in my district, we expect class size to go up to 38 kids per class — and that’s before new students register for the fall.”

But last week, her district called back 401 of 757 pink-slipped teachers. ”Based on current enrollments for next school year, the district has hired back enough teachers to meet staffing standards,” the Courier-News reported.

Another participant was Lisa Koester, who NEA identified as a special education teacher from Evansville, Indiana. “One third of the special education teachers in my district were cut,” said Koester.

Koester is an educational diagnostician for the Metropolitan School District of North Posey County, which employs about 100 teachers. She has 31 years of experience and says herself, “I’m at the top of the salary scale.” How she was laid off is a mystery, especially in light of this story from the Evansville Courier & Press, which notes the new teacher contract provides raises and a stipend, and quotes the superintendent as saying that ”North Posey has managed to avoid teacher layoffs despite the state’s funding cut to K-12 education, thanks in part to several recent retirements.”

Finally, we have 4th-grade teacher Gina Frutig of Durham, North Carolina. “Budget cuts mean that my fourth-grade students will be in classes that are 50 percent larger when they return to school in the fall,” she said.

Frutig is one of 237 Durham teachers who received pink slips. Her concerns about class size were overstated. “There are classes that are currently 30 people,” said school board member Steve Martin. “They would go to 32 or 33.”

Even so, the week before Frutig met with members of Congress, the Durham school board announced 180 of those teachers would return to work. A local TV news reporter sought out Frutig, and she told him, “I’m really not nervous. I think we’re all going to get called back.”

By now I assume everyone has heard about the new policy in the upscale school district in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that would provide condoms to students of any age – from pre-school on up.

I’ll leave the debate over that to the vast number of social commentators across the country, and instead focus on the provision that “requires school officials to keep student requests secret, and ignore parents’ objections.”

Here’s what Michele Couture, chairwoman of the town’s Board of Selectmen, had to say about it:

“I don’t know, you don’t want to take away a parent’s right to decide what’s right for their child. But it’s unrealistic to think that a parent saying no to condoms means the child’s going to say no to sex. They’re still going to have sex; they’re just not going to have a condom.”

This doesn’t have to cause such a huge fight. If Ms. Couture is convinced of what the kids are going to do, and is so certain of it that she will overrule their parents’ decisions, then she and the district should be perfectly willing to take the next logical step.

Adopt the kids.

The stories just keep rolling in.

New Jersey:

Due to more retirements than normal, only 15 Egg Harbor Township school employees will be laid off, Superintendent Scott McCartney said Tuesday.

Of those 15 employees, four are teachers and five are unionized support staff, he said. Six other positions are nonunion.

…Initially, 61 positions were slated for elimination. And after the township committee set the tax levy such that there was no increase for the 2010-11 school budget, 30 additional positions could have been eliminated.

Massachusetts:

BROCKTON — School Department officials worked frantically  Thursday to hand-deliver recall notices to 340 of the 430 public school teachers who received layoff letters in May.

Illinois:

In March, the Belleville Township High School (District 201) gave pink slips to 26 teachers. The district now plans to rehire 19 of them for the 2010-2011 school year.

and from the West Aurora School District:

This money and money from other cuts have already been put to use, hiring back all but about 18 of the 127 employees laid off in March.

The  news is not all good. In Glendale, California, 66 teachers were laid off. However, School board President Greg Krikorian said the district “is prepared to make an offer in negotiations that would bring back all teachers and reduce class sizes.”

In New Jersey, the Hamilton Township Education Association rejected a one-year salary freeze that would have restored 75 teacher jobs.

Union president Fred Schwartz said the union assumes the laid-off teachers will return to work once all retirement notifications are in. “That was the balance the association was considering,” he said. “Most get rehired back anyway.”

Almost 6,500 New Jersey teachers will retire this summer – double last year’s number, and that has some people upset:

Sean Spiller, president of the Wayne Education Association, said his district had about 40 retirements at the end of this school year, up from 23 a year ago. He said several teachers expressed dismay at feeling “forced out.”

“It’s a big negative,” he said. “Anyone in this profession knows it takes time to become great at what you’re doing. … You’re excited when you’re younger and want to do well, but you become a master at the content, you hit your stride at year 10. To replace them with people learning the trade, for next year’s group of kids, it’s a disservice.”

I was about to write a post about how this is inconsistent with the complaint that layoffs terminate desperately needed new teachers. Each retirement means at least one, perhaps two, new teachers won’t be laid off. But as it turns out, someone else already wrote about it two months ago:

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) predicts massive retirements one day, and wholesale destruction of the labor market for new teachers three days later. Either the teachers’ union can’t add, or they think that they can have it both ways.

If the retirement of a veteran teacher is bad, and the layoff of a new teacher is bad, and trying to differentiate between an effective teacher and an ineffective teacher for dismissal is bad, then we’re paralyzed. And that’s worse.