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

“I believe that as much as our governor has been extremely transparent and honest in doing what he told folks he’d do – which is let the people decide – it’s too late for that. Once you put it on the ballot after June, it’s no longer an extension, it becomes new taxes. And once they’re new taxes, the people won’t support that. I think the Legislature ought to do that themselves.”

- California Teachers Association President David Sanchez, in a phone interview with the Sacramento Bee, April 12, 2011.

It’s generally not a good thing for public schools when they appear on Dave Barry’s blog three times in a single day.

* Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home

* Chocolate milk stirs controversy in schools

* Seattle school renames Easter eggs ‘Spring Spheres’

Earlier today, I posted about the California Teachers Association’s plan to occupy the State Capitol on May 9-13 as part of the union’s protests to increase tax revenue for the state’s schools and teachers. I now have further information, including the news that CTA has budgeted $1 million for the protests.

The union has set up a web site of material for activists at CAstateofemergency.com. The documents include the handout I posted earlier, plus a 10-page list of “potential activities” the CTA State Council dreamed up. The State Council consists of more than 700 elected union representatives from all across the state. I’ve also posted this document on the EIA web site.

The “potential activities” include:

* Target the businesses of  legislators in their home districts.

* Circle the offices of “problem legislators.” Target them with various actions.

* Picket/rally in front of legislators’ offices/homes.

* Follow targeted legislators for the entire day.

* Have students and parents do informational picketing for one hour outside their school site.

* Have parents and students camp in front of schools all night.

* Have teachers being laid off contact parents and other CTA members.

* Make phone calls on Parents’ Day. Call parents to tell them how their child is doing and then talk about the budget cuts and invite them to attend the rallies.

* Refrain from Shopping Day. Show the value of educators and other public employees and the economic contribution they make to local communities by refraining from shopping one day.

* Throw monopoly money in the toilet to show that all our money is going down the drain

* Publish a list of companies that are not paying their fair share of taxes. Send letters to these companies and the media and picket their offices. Withdraw funds from banks that are not paying their fair share. (Editor’s note: CTA is a tax-exempt organization.)

* One-day boycott of Microsoft and other corporations that are pushing failed education reform efforts.

* Turn fire/earthquake drill into crisis response drill to the budget cuts (involve students and the community)

* Attempt to close a major artery into town/cities

* Have celebrities involved in the demonstrations

* Dye hair red or wear red wigs

* Homeless encampments of students and teachers as they can afford a place to live

* Have people participate in a run across the state with a torch (like the Olympics)

* Statewide “A Day with No Teachers”

* Pay for everything with $2 bills to show true impact of teachers

* “Lights Out Day” during the week where educators teach in the dark

* Protest at an MLB game. Everyone wears a matching shirt and sits in one section. Have scoreboard acknowledge their presence (i.e., “pink-slipped teachers seated in section ___”)

* Work with organization like Ben & Jerry to have them create a labor-union flavored ice cream that can be sold at the rallies and in stores

Click here to read:

1) California Teacher Pensions: Not Reality. Actuariality.

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week

The California Teachers Association is planning a week of rallies, protests and an occupation of the state Capitol by 300 volunteers, scheduled for May 9-13.

Approved unanimously by the union’s 800-member State Council, the plan is designed to “force legislature to pass tax extensions” and “educate and convince communities to change tax structure and achieve tax fairness in order to achieve adequate, stable and ongoing funding for public education and essential public services.”

The “State of Emergency” plan – posted for your examination on EIA’s web site – calls for various protest actions over the five-day period:

“The week begins and ends with a group of educators (with others invited to join) taking over the State Capitol.” (emphasis in original)

Each day will have a different focus – from lobbying legislators, to “letters home” to parents, to “Refrain from Shopping Day.” On Friday May 13, regional protests will also be organized throughout the state.

Now it’s the New York Times, with a story on loan from the Chicago News Cooperative.

I won’t repeat myself, but merely point you to a two-year-old post which also dealt with Chicago.

Today’s story coincides not only with a piece in the Chicago Tribune about traditional Illinois public schools without unions, but with “Teachers unions rally against charter schools” (Detroit) and “Tempers flare over hiking cap on charters” (North Carolina).

Unions will always be able to pick off the low-hanging fruit when it comes to charters, but wholesale unionization will never happen until the unions overcome what I’ve termed their “We Hate You, Come Join Us!” problem. Union presidents can’t say charters are “second-rate schools with second-rate teachers, which will equate to a second-rate education,” and then expect those second-rate teachers to pay first-rate dues.

The Times article does provide this factoid:

Nationally, 604 charter schools, roughly 12 percent, have collective-bargaining agreements. But 388 of those schools are in states where the law dictates that charters be included in existing collective-bargaining agreements with local districts, according to data collected by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

So the real concern for charters is not that unions will infiltrate schools one-by-one until they take over; it’s that they’ll alter the state law so that charters must be covered by collective bargaining agreements.

Ads have been springing up throughout Pennsylvania from a group called NoVoucherTax.org. It purports to be in favor of lower taxes and smaller government, but its lone target seems to be a voucher bill currently in the state senate.

Reporter Tom Murse of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal performed some sterling and dogged work trying to track down the mysterious people behind the group, who are unidentified on the web site. The state Democratic Party and the Pennsylvania State Education Association both claim to have no knowledge of the group or its activities.

“PSEA doesn’t know anything about it, and while we like the content, we’re not involved with it,” spokesman Wythe Keever said.

Murse learned that the website domain NoVoucherTax.org had been registered to “Baltimore-based Democratic media strategist Walter Ludwig and his firm TeamBlue Politics Inc., which does work in Washington.”

It would be strange to find a well-financed campaign against vouchers that the state NEA affiliate doesn’t know anything about, but it’s even stranger that PSEA knows nothing about this particular campaign.

Back in January PSEA was one of the sponsors of the PA Progressive Summit in Pittsburgh. One of the conference sessions (scroll down to the next-to-last one) was “Running Blue Campaigns in Red Country.” The description reads:

We’ll look at the strategies, tactics and tricks needed to run progressive campaigns in profoundly conservative areas. Topics to be covered will include The Centrist Trap, Letting the Bench Call the Game, The Cavalry’s Not Coming, and Issue Jiu-Jitsu. We’ll look at some recent case studies – both successful and painfully unsuccessful–from Congress and local races. Bring your questions and ideas: everything’s on the table.

The session featured two, and only two, panelists: “Walter Ludwig, Team Blue; Steve Dunkle, Assistant Director for Government Relations, PSEA.”