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

The good people over at Bellwether Education Partners, hosts of Eduwonk, are inviting applications from edu-bloggers to participate in their free, one-day workshop devoted to “Better Blogging: Skills and Tools to Increase Impact.” It will be held February 3 at the Sofitel in Washington, DC. They explain:

The proliferation of blogging and social media provides exciting new venues for individuals, as well as for policy and advocacy organizations, to reach wider audiences and amplify their work and ideas. At the same time, not all blogs or online sites are equal. Some receive thousands of daily visitors while others see a few hundred or less.

The discrepancy is not just a function of quality. It arises because many blogs fail to take advantage of the full range of strategies and best practices the blogging platform offers. Meanwhile, other blogs have great ideas and fresh voices, but are not consistently presented in a readable, engaging, and accessible way.

Eduwonk emphasizes, “This is a workshop about how to write and market not about what to write or market.”

I recommend applying for a slot if you’ll be in the DC area – after all, they’re serving lunch. But everyone would be better served if you took a group of people who already know how to write and market, and advise them on new and interesting things to write about. If Shakespeare had a blog about ESEA reauthorization, he wouldn’t draw 12 page views a day.

Over at the lefty publication Mother Jones, Kevin Drum wonders if having unions that collectively bargain only for wages and benefits might revive the labor movement.

Whatever you think of them, unions in their existing form are dying, and there’s little reason to think that’s going to change…. a new union movement that trades a bit of power in one area (work rules) for more power in another (much greater density in the private sector). It’s something to think about.

Drum admits the idea is “obviously pie in the sky” – an understatement once you read some of the hostile reader comments accompanying the piece, such as:

* “Kevin is totally chump meat by accepting anti-union meme.”

* “There’s a reason all those union contracts have tons of complicated clauses; it’s because the bossman can’t be trusted.”

* Where there are elaborate union work rules, they are the direct result of a history of egregious abuses and utter lack of trust in management justified by bitter experience.”

* “This is such an unutterably bad idea it’s really difficult adequately characterize it.”

* “Whenever Drum writes about unions he shows that he has little or no real world experience with them.”

* “This post is complete bullshit. Shame on Kevin, and Mother Jones, for publishing such drivel.”

* “Dude…you may have meant well by this column but damn you come off as a chump.”

I have no idea where the future of unions lies, but I haven’t seen any evidence that there is a viable Grand New Direction or Third Way that circumvents the current status quo. It looks like a fight to the finish to me.

Two weeks ago, the Wisconsin Education Association Council issued a press release stating, in part:

The fact is, the governor’s numbers don’t add up. Consider:

FACT: 97 percent of school districts received less state aid this year than last, resulting in nearly 4,000 educator layoffs and larger class sizes.

PolitiFact Wisconsin decided to take a look at that claim, and discovered WEAC’s definition of “educator” includes everyone who works for a school district, and “layoffs” include retirements, contract non-renewals, people who left of their own volition, and extrapolations.

The source upon which the claim was based, a survey of school superintendents, yielded the following table:

That’s 1,428 total layoffs, of which 678 were teachers. Wisconsin has more than 58,000 K-12 teachers. You’ll also notice that among teachers there were significantly more new hires than retirements – enough that they covered all but 223 of the layoffs as well. The teachers who suffered the most were the non-tenured, non-renewed teachers, who, by definition, were hired in the last three years. During that period, statewide enrollment declined by about 2,400 students.

PolitiFact rated the union’s claim “False.”

I found this Wall Street Journal column from a couple of years ago and thought it detailed well an interesting historical episode:

In 1939, FDR decided to move Thanksgiving Day forward by a week. Rather than take place on its traditional date, the last Thursday of November, he decreed that the annual holiday would instead be celebrated a week earlier.

The reason was economic. There were five Thursdays in November that year, which meant that Thanksgiving would fall on the 30th. That left just 20 shopping days till Christmas. By moving the holiday up a week to Nov. 23, the president hoped to give the economy a lift by allowing shoppers more time to make their purchases and—so his theory went—spend more money.

…Roosevelt might as well have commanded that roast beef henceforth would replace turkey as the star of the holiday meal, or that cranberries would be banned from the Thanksgiving table. The president badly misread public opinion. His announcement was front-page news the next day, and the public outcry was swift and loud.

…It wasn’t long before people started referring to Nov. 30 as the “Republican Thanksgiving” and Nov. 23 as the “Democratic Thanksgiving” or “Franksgiving.”

Public sentiment ran heavily against Roosevelt’s plan. Ten days after the president’s announcement, Gallup published the results of a national poll finding that 62% of Americans surveyed disapproved of the date change. By the time November arrived, the 48 states were nearly evenly divided. Twenty-three decided to stick with the old Thanksgiving, and 22 decided to adopt FDR’s date—Texas, Mississippi and Colorado said they would celebrate on both days.

For the next two years, Roosevelt continued to move up the date of Thanksgiving, and more states resigned themselves to celebrating early. By 1941, however, the facts turned against Roosevelt.

By then, retailers had two years of experience with the early Thanksgiving, and data were available regarding the 1939 and 1940 Christmas shopping seasons. In mid-March 1941, The Wall Street Journal reported the results of a survey done in New York City. The Journal‘s headline put it succinctly: “Early Thanksgiving Not Worth Extra Turkey or Doll.” Only 37% of stores surveyed favored the early date. In Washington, the federal government reported that the early Thanksgiving resulted in no boost to retail sales.

And so, on May 20, 1941, FDR called a press conference at the White House and announced that he was changing Thanksgiving Day back to its traditional date. The early Thanksgiving had been an “experiment,” he said, and the experiment failed. It was too late to move the 1941 Thanksgiving back to the traditional date, but in 1942 Thanksgiving would revert to the last Thursday of the month. This was “the first time any New Deal experiment was voluntarily abandoned,” a Washington Post columnist wrote.

The California Teachers Association doesn’t like a proposal to raise $10 billion in new taxes. The union previously expressed doubts about the California Federation of Teachers millionaires’ tax. Of course, it’s not because CTA has suddenly become the defenders of the state’s taxpayers. It’s because the union is working on its own tax hike initiative.

California’s budget is in its usual multi-billion dollar deficit condition, so one could be forgiven for believing that the problem is too few taxes. Fortunately, Richard Rider spells out in depressing detail just how overburdened the California taxpayer is:

* California has the 3rd highest state income tax rate in the nation.

* California has the highest state sales tax rate in the nation.

* California has the 2nd highest corporate income tax rate west of the Mississippi and 8th highest overall.

* California has the 4th highest capital gains tax rate.

* California has the 2nd highest gas tax and the highest diesel tax.

* California property taxes per owner-occupied home are the 10th highest in the nation.

If the solution to the state’s problems were higher taxes, we’d be living in Shangri-La already. The only question is whether voters can be deceived into believing that someone else will pick up the tab for further spending.

Click here to read:

1) Holiday Appetizers

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Scheduling Note

4) Quote of the Week

Press release here.

Tarka’s bio here.

BTU’s recap of the situation and current status here, which, while wonderfully detailed, needed only the sentence in the 18th paragraph:

“The BTU’s expenses exceeded revenues.”