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

Instead of their usual haunted house event for Halloween, this year the Dennis Township school district and teachers’ union engineered a zombie apocalypse for middle school students. They’ve posted this video on the district web site.

It isn’t the first time labor-management relations in New Jersey involved people being eaten and kids peeing their pants, but it turned out well this time.

It’s the nature of victors in an election to view the results as a signal for the other side to fold up its tents and go home. This didn’t happen in Ohio in 2010 and the public employee unions were able to easily turn back an effort to severely restrict collective bargaining. After you sift through all the analysis, you should come back to this simple sentence: “Labor fought harder, observers said, because its stakes were higher.”

The union coalition spent $30 million – a third of it from NEA and its Ohio affiliate – or about $15 per “no” vote. Somehow the One Percent control all of the nation’s wealth, but never seem to be able to come close to outspending the teachers’ union. Maybe that’s how they stay so rich.

Naturally, the public employee unions view the results as… a signal for the other side to fold up its tents and go home. This isn’t going to happen either, but we will be treated to more pairings of “union” and “resurgence” to go with the previous 17,453 union resurgences.

In an election about union power, union power prevailed. At least it was a battle over the real issue, and not a proxy fight over vouchers, TABOR or school board candidates.

I apologize for not following the ongoing melodrama surrounding the front-page publication of “NYSUT’s leaders get double-digit raises” in the October 28 Albany Times-Union. Sure, I raised some questions about the story the same day, but I wasn’t aware that NYSUT was demanding a correction, and got it on November 4.

The paper now admits that its interpretation of the IRS data was flawed, but its correction falls a bit short as well:

The numbers cited by the Times Union were for salaries set by the union’s Board of Directors in June 2008, which NYSUT notes came after an increase in state school aid, rather than last year, as teachers layoffs and other education cutbacks were occurring.

According to NYSUT, President Richard Iannuzzi received an 11.2 percent increase at that time, applying to the 2008-2009 school year. In the succeeding years, he and other officers received raises of 2.75 and 2.85 percent. For the current 2011-2012 school year, the board at Iannuzzi’s request froze his salary and that of other officers.

Now that NYSUT has set the record straight, we now know exactly how much Iannuzzi and the other officers make, right? Wrong. Froze his salary at what? As New York Daily News columnist Bill Hammond learned, the union refused to say.

I don’t ascribe nefarious motives to this. I honestly believe the union can’t say how much money Iannuzzi makes without first examining, then trying to explain, the gory detail of base salaries, taxable cash allowances, deferred income, taxable benefits, non-taxable benefits, and reimbursement of expenses (including $8-12K per year from AFT for his duties as vice president that doesn’t show up on NYSUT’s books). Why go through all that trouble when the end result will be “We make a very good living off teachers’ dues”?

Unfortunately, “How much do union officers make?” and “How much do unions spend on politics?” and “How many teachers belong to a union?” are three questions that can’t have both simple and accurate answers. Best not to venture into those minefields unless you’re prepared to make some boring exposition.

Click here to read:

1) The Education Labor Time Machine

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week

Congratulations to New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who decided in honor of his 60th birthday to run the New York City Marathon yesterday.

Walcott finished in 4:23:51.

Kind of a strange edu-politics story out of Maine has Gov. Paul LePage offering to spend more money on teacher training if the Maine Education Association will do the same.

“For every dollar the MEA puts up for professional development for their teachers, we’ll match it,” he said, drawing applause from those gathered at the Maine Tax Forum held at the Augusta Civic Center. “I believe they collect dues, and right now those dues go to Washington at the end of the year for political campaigns. I think the dues should be invested back in to the educators in the state of Maine.”

Even I think this is a political stunt, so I won’t spend time on the idea. I was more interested in the reaction of MEA President Chris Galgay to the reporter’s questions:

As for the governor’s challenge to match funds, Galgay wouldn’t say how much money the union collects in dues, how much is spent on training and how much goes to the national union….

“The NEA president has little control of what the states are doing,” he said. “The national association is more about me reaching out to them for support or them saying what can we do for your members in Maine.” He said most of the dues that Maine teachers pay to the national union come back to the state, but he declined to be specific about how that worked.

That’s quite a combination of poor public relations by Galgay and poor reporting. So let’s be specific.

In the 2009-10 school year, the Maine Education Association collected almost $6 million in dues for itself, and with 14,466 full-time certified members and another 4,940 full-time education support employee members, will collect roughly another $3.1 million this year to send to NEA.

Of that $3.1 million, a little more than $1 million will make its way back to Maine in the form of UniServ grants and other national assistance (well short of “most” of what is sent to the national union). If this were not done, there is no way MEA could pay the the $5.85 million to cover the salaries and benefits of its staff of about 50 and continue to operate.

As to how much MEA spends on teacher training, that is much harder to quantify. The union spent a total of $42,050 on “conferences, conventions and meetings,” some of which had to do with teacher training. and another $68,563 on local affiliate grants, some of which may have had a teacher training component. Since virtually all of MEA’s money goes to its employees and officers, we would need to know how many hours each spends on teacher training activities and then apply that percentage to the payroll costs.

This all may be academic, but there still exists some ignorance (perhaps feigned in this case) about what the primary mission of a teacher union is. Hint: It’s not teacher training.

After the resounding defeat of a tax hike measure for public education spending in Colorado this week, we are informed that “The last successful statewide voter initiative to increase taxes was in 2006 in South Dakota.”

This should come as no surprise to readers of this blog, as Intercepts has previously noted South Dakota’s defeat of the Open and Clean Government Act in 2008, and declared the state “a hotbed of labor unrest” in 2006.

And South Dakota is not willing to sit on its progressive laurels:

Supporters of a proposal to increase South Dakota’s sales tax by one percentage point to boost education and Medicaid funding said they submitted enough petition signatures Tuesday to get the proposal on the ballot next year.