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

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean appeared on MSNBC and dropped this bombshell:

“There was a battle between charter schools and teachers unions for years and years. That battle is coming to an end,” he said.

I’m pretty sure the Planet Mongo – where Alfie Kohn has lived for years and Diane Ravitch is reportedly househunting – has Internet access, so it’s strange that Dean hadn’t seen this story:

In a 4-to-3 decision, the Georgia [supreme] court struck down a law empowering a special statewide commission to approve and finance charter schools even over the objections of local school boards.

In a Freudian slip of a headline, the NEA-affiliated Georgia Association of Educators (GAE) issued a press release:

GAE lauds GAE Supreme Court’s decision on charter schools

The Court’s decision reaffirms GAE’s belief that public charter schools should remain under the management and control of their local school boards. We believe the Georgia Supreme Court’s Majority opinion echoes the constitutional and statutory analysis focused on in GAE’s Amicus Brief to the Court regarding the historical, constitutional, and statutory meaning of “special schools.”

Apparently on Mongo the Emperor Ming the Merciless has decreed teachers’ unions will no longer expend time and money to eliminate, cap and regulate charter schools. Here on Earth, however, the Hundred Years’ War continues.

Blogging may be intermittent for the next week or so. Normal schedule will resume after Memorial Day.

Click here to read:

1) NEA Gives Friend of Education Award to 14 Fugitive Wisconsin Democrats

2) CTA’s State of Emergency: The Lamest Show on Earth

3) The History of Public Education Hiring: Ancient and Recent

4) Illinois: National Model?

5) Washington Education Association Approves “Day of Action”

6) NEA Archives Open to Public – Don’t Get Trampled

7) Upon Deeper Reflection, Go Pound Sand

8) Last Week’s Intercepts

9) Scheduling Note

10) Quotes of the Week

“…it soon became apparent that CTA leadership wanted to keep the lid on anything they weren’t controlling, confine actions to mainly lobbying, and stick to a narrow message of ‘tax extensions now’.”

The NEA-affiliated North Dakota Education Association and the AFT-affiliated North Dakota Public Employees Association have taken the first big step in merging the two organizations. The representative bodies of both unions agreed to draft a constitution for a merged union, which would then have to be approved by a two-thirds vote of those bodies. Any merger would also have to be approved by the national parent unions, though this is not expected to be an obstacle.

If the process is completed successfully, North Dakota would become the fifth merged NEA-AFT state affiliate, joining Florida, Minnesota, Montana and New York.

Yesterday the California Teachers Association set up 400 empty chairs outside the Capitol. “Each of these 400 chairs behind us represents 100 educators that did not return to the classroom driving class sizes beyond capacity,” said incoming CTA vice president Eric Heins.

The union’s state of emergency site claims the chairs ”represent the 40,000 educators (30,000 teachers and 10,000 support professionals) who have been laid off over the past 3 years due to the state budget crisis.” There is the additional claim that “More than 40,000 educators and support staff have been laid off in the past three years. This year, another 20,000 teachers could be lost.”

I’m not even going to try to determine where CTA got its numbers. Its rhetoric clearly states that these are education employees who were laid off and did not return.

Here are the actual numbers from the California Department of Education’s DataQuest:

2005-06
Number of teachers – 307,864
Number of classified staff – 285,501
Total – 593,365

2006-07
Number of teachers – 308,790
Number of classified staff – 287,613
Total – 596,403 (up 3,038)

2007-08
Number of teachers – 310,361
Number of classified staff – 294,202
Total – 604,563 (up 8,160)

2008-09
Number of teachers – 306,887
Number of classified staff – 303,607
Total – 610,494 (up 5,931)

2009-10
Number of teachers – 299,666
Number of classified staff – 300,734
Total – 600,400 (down 10,094)

There are no teacher numbers available for 2010-11 but the number of classified staff was reduced an additional 9,140.

You can worm your way to 40,000 if you assume 21,000 teachers were laid off in 2010-11. That would mean virtually every teacher who received a pink slip last year was laid off, something we know isn’t true.

Regardless, there is no denying there are sizable layoffs of education staff going on in California. They seem a little less devastating and apocalyptic when you see they were preceded by adding more than 17,000 jobs over three years.

You had your choice of rallies in Sacramento yesterday. You could march around the Capitol with David Sanchez and the California Teachers Association, or you could head a few blocks down the road and join the crowd celebrating the unlikely return of professional basketball to Sacramento.

It was no contest.

Meanwhile, Amanda Morello of the Examiner provides some first-hand details on the arrests of protestors on Monday. She is a GOP activist, but reports the sit-in was mostly a Code Pink affair, with minimum CTA involvement. She also posted an extensive Photobucket slideshow of the protest.

Here are my favorite signs from the sit-in:

The Smart Meter people showed up!

It may be hard to see the sign in the back, but it reads, “Zen Capitalism Is Still Capitalism” – a vague reference to our governor, I suppose.