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

There may not be money for pencils and notebooks, but there’s always plenty for pollsters, campaign consultants and media buys:

Oklahoma - ”Millions pour into SQ 744 campaigns”

Massachusetts - ”Unions pour another $2M into Mass. sales tax fight”

Minnesota - ”Lobbyist reports show Chamber of Commerce, teachers union big spenders”

California - ”Unions Spend Big to Defeat Prop. B” and “Spending in Capo school board race hits $184,573”

It will be a great day when our teachers get to keep the money they make and the NEA has to hold a bake sale to buy $15 million worth of campaign ads.

For a labor union, the Ohio Education Association has had its share of labor unrest with its own employees. Last month’s staff strike is only the latest example. OEA also sued its staff unions in 2005 and settled a $3.75 million class action lawsuit brought by retirees.

Those were big battles, but OEA also knows how to build mountains out of molehills, as evidenced by the years-long lawsuit it brought against former assistant executive director and general counsel Christopher A. Lopez. Lopez resigned his position in 2005, and OEA subsequently sued him for breach of his severance agreement, which stipulated he would not “at any time disparage, defame, or otherwise derogate Employer’s Officers, Executive Committee Members, employees or agents.”

OEA alleged that soon after the execution of the severance agreement in February 2005, Lopez left a voice mail message for Mr. David Latanick, outside counsel for OEA. The message was as follows:

Davey, you never call me anymore. This is el jefe. Call me sometime. I’m all settled with the OEA so you don’t have to worry about this gag order and all this s___ that slimebag Reardon said to you. So call me [phone number redacted]. Bye.

“Reardon” refers to former OEA executive director Dennis Reardon.

OEA also accused Lopez of being responsible for two anonymous letters sent to Reardon, one of which insulted Reardon’s wife, also an OEA employee. It read, in part:

You have made life a lot more difficult for people who devoted their working lives to OEA. Meanwhile Mrs. Reardon is decked out in a full length fur coat. You know the old saying? “What do you call a pig in a dress? A PIG!” How can you look at yourself in the mirror? You will burn in hell, you bastard.

The case worked its way to the 10th District Ohio Court of Appeals of Ohio, which ruled against OEA. On the issue of Lopez calling Reardon a “slimebag,” the court found:

The voicemail was a statement of opinion that Lopez did not think well of Reardon. This kind of trifling figure of speech is of so little consequence it cannot be said to be material and should be disregarded.

There was no evidence of any harm or detrimental effect to Reardon’s reputation because of the message. Lopez’s opinion of Reardon was no secret at OEA, or among its employees and outside counsel. Nor was the message disseminated to others. Based on a review of the evidence, we find that competent credible evidence exists that Lopez left the voicemail message for Latanick, which under the strict letter of the agreement constitutes a breach. However, the slang expression is such a part of modern casual speech as to be almost meaningless. OEA could not demonstrate that the message caused any damage to OEA or Reardon.

Regarding the letters, the OEA hired a fingerprint expert to determine who had sent them. The court found:

The evidence showed that both letters were found to have Lopez’s fingerprint on them. OEA’s fingerprint expert found only one print of value on exhibit No. 13, and that was Lopez’s fingerprint on the lower left corner of the first page. Exhibit No. 4 however, contained not only Lopez’s print on page two, the chain email, but also unidentified fingerprints on pages one and three and on the envelope that did not match Lopez’s prints.

…There were approximately 34 unidentified prints of persons other than Lopez on the anonymous communications that were submitted into evidence. The fingerprint experts testified that it could not be determined when a fingerprint is placed on a document. Therefore, the magistrate and the trial court found that the presence of Lopez’s fingerprints could be consistent with him transmitting or participating in transmitting the documents, as OEA claimed. However, they could just as easily have been consistent with Lopez merely touching, at some point in time, a sheet of paper loaded into a printer, a copier, or a page of a document prepared and transmitted by others. Faced with two plausible explanations, the trial court concluded that OEA had failed to prove its case by a preponderance of the evidence.

Absent the lawsuit, it is highly unlikely Lopez’ disparaging remarks would have ever reached the public eye. But by its own actions, OEA has caused more harm to its image and reputation than Lopez could have managed on his own.

The October issue of MEA Voice, the newsletter of the Michigan Education Association, contains a series of sidebars called “Fast Facts.” Here they are:

29

Percentage of teachers who do not consider themselves affiliated with any political party*

39

Percentage of teachers in large school systems who identified themselves as Democrats in 2006, down from 53 percent in 2001*

45

Percentage of teachers under 30 who classified themselves as conservative, the least likely age group to do so*

63

Percentage of teachers aged 40 to 49 who classified themselves as conservative, the most likely age group to do so*

*Source: “Status of the American Public School Teacher 2005-06,” National Education Association

The Mackinac Center notes that in the same issue, the MEA recommended 111 Democrats in 114 Michigan House races.

I was more taken by the term “Fast Facts.” Why did it take the union more than four years to release these figures? But if you want an explanation for why teachers can be conservative while their union endorses liberals, you need only click here. Those facts are from 2005 and were released - fast - in 2005.

Click here to read:

1) How Much Does NEA Spend on Politics?

2) Duncan Announces Summit to Restore Unions’ Public Image

3) Last Week’s Intercepts

4) Quote of the Week

Here’s a provision of the proposed Baltimore Teachers Union contract that escaped my notice but caught the eye of the editors of the Washington Post. The tentative agreement – voted down by the BTU rank-and-file – proposes a system by which teachers would be paid not strictly according to years and college credits, but by “achievement units” accumulated.

A teacher would receive 12 AUs for the highest grade on an evaluation and 1 AU for each college credit. But work your way to page 9 of the tentative agreement and you find a teacher is to be awarded 3 AUs annually for being a union building representative.

District and union officials have made it plain that despite the defeat, they have no plans to substantially change the agreement. They will “concentrate instead on clearly explaining the terms of the innovative contract.” In layman’s terms, that means twisting enough arms to put the contract over the top.

I’ll be standing by to hear them explain the pedagogical benefits of being a shop steward.

Last Tuesday, I noted there was some opposition brewing to the new Baltimore teachers’ contract, but I wrote:

“Since the much more controversial DC teachers contract passed, it’s hard to imagine this one being defeated.”

Oops.

City teachers voted it down – 1,540 to 1,107. Union president Marietta English blamed the defeat on the rumor that “some charter school operators have encouraged their teachers not to vote for this agreement.”

So it’s back to the drawing board for the negotiators. I’ll avoid predicting the outcome of ratification votes in the future, and I hope Harold Meyerson will think twice before he writes another column like this one.

Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for Superman, was interviewed by A.V. Club (h/t: Russo) and was asked, “How does it feel to have teachers’ unions attack the film?” He replied:

“It sucks. I mean, when you make An Inconvenient Truth, it’s not difficult to have your enemy be Exxon Mobil or the dirty coal company. In this case, I’m a Democrat, and I believe, I really believe in unions, I’m a member of a good union. So that was an uncomfortable truth for me to have to talk about, but I’ve tried to make a reasonable film. I don’t know where it’s written, but somehow it’s written that you can’t criticize the unions. Otherwise, you hate teachers.”

And we’re hearing the same lament from noted lefty actor Alec Baldwin in his Huffington Post column headlined “Raising Awareness of Flaws in Education Is Not Union Bashing“:

If ever you wanted proof that there may be an education crisis in this country, just look to the reading comprehension level evident in some of the comments posted on this site.

In my last post, I recommended people see Davis Guggenheim’s film, Waiting for Superman. I did not bash unions in this country. I did not state nor did I imply that charter schools are preferable to typical institutions of public education. I never represented myself as an authority on the subject of education.

What I wrote was:

“This is a monumentally important film. My father was a public school teacher for 28 years and I can think of few other areas in our society that deserve this type of urgent scrutiny right now. See Guggenheim’s film, which opens in theaters this weekend.

“Whether or not teachers’ unions are partly to blame is open to discussion, but Guggenheim’s film casts a light on that perspective. And once you get a peek at New York City’s ‘Rubber Room’ for outcast teachers, you may never view the NEA and the AFT the same way again.”

If you read union bashing into that, then you have a problem. An education problem.

I feel bad for Guggenheim and Baldwin, but being called a union-basher or a teacher-hater only hurts if you give a crap. The arithmetic is simple: “If you say x, I will call you y. So don’t say x.” Each person makes his own judgment whether that’s a fair exchange. The only permissible alternative is to become Diane Ravitch, earning accolades for telling them exactly what they want to hear.