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

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Click here to read:

1) Fifteen NEA State Affiliates Are “Financially Distressed”

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quote of the Week

Inside Higher Ed reports that the union representing faculty in the State University of New York (SUNY) system has narrowly voted to disaffiliate from the American Association of University Professors. Affiliation with NEA and AFT will be retained.

The SUNY union has long had a series of complaints about AAUP, one of the most prominent being a failure to provide any “return” on the $190,000 sent to the national affiliate each year.

My apologies for being so California-centric the past couple of weeks, but the melodrama involved in government employees attempting to work their way out of the consequences of their own policies is worth considerable coverage.

California Common Cause recently released its 2011 Campaign Finance & Lobbying Industry Report and the numbers are truly ghastly. Special interest groups have spent almost $2.7 billion in lobbying alone since 2000. Here’s the graph for the 2011 calendar year:

“You’re seeing more people with lobbying as part of their business plan because it is a better return on their investment,” said Phillip Ung, a policy advocate for California Common Cause.  (Emphasis added.)

The Newark Star-Ledger discusses the issue of school district consolidation, which, if you’ve ever read this blog before, you know is the bad idea that will never die.

The Star-Ledger editorial board has this to say about the concept:

The hoped-for result — doing the same job with less administrative overhead — will save money and lower taxes.

But it never happens. And it’s not just because people have a romantic attachment to home rule. The real reason is there are practical roadblocks. And it doesn’t help that advocates tend to wildly overstate expected savings.

…For one, teachers make up the bulk of every district’s budget, and a merged district will require just as many teachers, unless the schools stuff more kids into each classroom.

What’s more, when school districts merge, state rules require that they all match the most generous teacher contracts. Merge 30 districts, and that means teachers in 29 of them will get raises — enough to wipe out any savings from cutting administrators or sharing services.

Even if Hunterdon County could overcome the teacher contract hurdle, it runs into this structural problem: The districts with relatively low taxes wouldn’t want to merge with the districts that have high taxes. Supporters concede the countywide district would have to cut at least $90 million to guarantee every town a property tax decrease. That’s unlikely.

The op-ed then reaches the triumphant conclusion – “None of this means we should abandon this effort.”

Whaaaa-?

Yep, the headline for the editorial is ”N.J. should support school district mergers.”

You would think editors would be able to go back over their own text and re-read the part where the hoped-for result “never happens.”

In one paragraph, the Sacramento Bee‘s Kevin Yamamura tells us all we’ll ever need to know about California government money management:

The latest cash problem comes after the state has received $2.6 billion less than what Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers assumed in their optimistic budget last year. Meanwhile, Chiang said the state is spending $2.6 billion more than state leaders planned.

You may recall that the National Education Association and some of its affiliates ran into legal trouble concerning their endorsement of certain 403(b) retirement annuities. Though NEA’s case was ultimately dismissed, the union was vulnerable to similar claims of failure to disclose endorsement arrangements and payments to the union by vendors.

To its credit, NEA joined forces with the National Tax Sheltered Accounts Association and the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries to create a disclosure form to allow school employees investing in 403(b) plans to make “an apples-to-apples comparison of their investment options and the fees that brokers and providers receive.”

The form has sections describing “who is receiving compensation from service providers with respect to their plan” and “payments promised to an employer and/or its employees, unions, investment providers, service providers, and/or employees of unions. Include all endorsements, marketing fees, retention payments, bonuses, etc.”