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

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1) Teacher Union Election Post-Mortems

2) Last Week’s Intercepts

3) Quotes of the Week

The National Education Association has named liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as its 2012 Friend of Education. Previous winners include the 14 fugitive Wisconsin Democrats, Diane Ravitch, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy.

I hope they checked with Krugman’s mom first.

Too often we equate strong or weak unions with strong or weak collective bargaining laws, but the Alabama Education Association continues to successfully resist one major education reform effort that has worked its way past 40 other teacher union state affiliates – charter schools.

A major effort to pass a charter school law had the backing of the governor and the state senate, but died in the House education committee.

“This is a victory for the schoolchildren of Alabama and the underserved public schools all over the state,” said Dr. Henry Mabry, executive secretary of the Alabama Education Association. “We don’t need to dilute even further the precious little funding for our elementary and secondary students to gamble on the unproven model of charter schools.”

Never underestimate the power of more than 18,000 phony Twitter followers.

The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation released a report finding that taxpayers are spending millions of dollars in salary and benefits for people who aren’t doing any public work. In fact, they’re performing union work – a large portion of which involves extracting more money from said taxpayers.

The report revealed some union officers received attendance bonuses and overtime, a non-teacher received a teacher’s salary, and doctorate scale was paid to someone without a doctorate. In some instances where unions were supposed to make some reimbursement, those payments were not made.

None of this should come as a surprise to readers of this blog. Union release time on this scale is common practice throughout the U.S. But the union defense of these perks is wearing thin.

“The purpose of such agreements is to promote labor harmony within districts by making it possible for problems to be addressed and resolved cooperatively rather than through adversarial processes,” said New Jersey Education Association president Barbara Keshishian, apparently with a straight face.

Al Ashley, president of the Camden firefighters’ union, has his own complaints. “I work very hard,” he said. ”The stress levels have been bananas ever since the talk of layoffs started, through the layoffs, and now after the layoffs.”

All the more reason for Ashley to do someting much less stressful – like running into burning buildings.

Camden police union president John Williamson said, “My phone starts ringing at 5 a.m., and sometimes it doesn’t stop ringing  until 2 a.m.”

Ah, the Reg Weaver Defense!

The notion that union officers are providing a service to their employers is beyond ludicrous – it’s insulting. I’ll subscribe to it the first time a superintendent is able to fire a union president for failing to properly represent his or her members.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) and its union allies spent more than $4 million in an attempt to make Kathleen Falk the Democratic recall nominee against Gov. Scott Walker. They ended up paying about $17.47 per vote for a 24 percentage point defeat in a primary where Falk lost her home county by a two-to-one margin.

We’ll now have four weeks in which we’re supposed to forget all that has gone before, in favor of the new narrative as Walker faces off against Democratic nominee Tom Barrett.

In a post-election press release, WEAC declared: “Wisconsin voters have spoken, selecting Tom Barrett to run against Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election. The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) will immediately unify its membership to support Tom Barrett as we stand together to reclaim Wisconsin.”

And that’s all they had to say about Tom Barrett. But what can they say? On April 20, WEAC told its members:

Did you know that in 2006, Kathleen Falk earned 50,000 more votes than Tom Barrett did when he ran at the top of the ticket in 2010? Falk is a proven vote getter, statewide, and is the strongest candidate to defeat Governor Walker in the upcoming recall elections…. Kathleen Falk, is the only candidate having the support of an independent and effective “get out the vote” grassroots organization. Wisconsin for Falk has offices across the state and is reaching thousands of voters each day through phone calls and door canvases.

In a series of frequently asked questions, here was the union’s answer to the question “Can Kathleen Falk win?”:

Yes. This election and the circumstances surrounding it are unique and represent an entirely different playing field from previous elections. It will be a close election, and Kathleen Falk has previously garnered a good percentage of the vote across the state. She’s a strong and viable candidate who provides a stark contrast to Scott Walker because she values our members and working families. She has a strong campaign team and her intensity and passion match that of our members over the past year. When meeting with educators, her commitment to the issues we care about resonates and she receives standing ovations. Kathleen Falk has the ability to bring a winning message to voters.

And in a campaign flyer, here’s WEAC’s rundown of Tom Barrett’s positions:

School Funding – Hasn’t offered a school funding plan. In the past, supported a gradual increase in state funding (returning to two-thirds state funding of public education) as the budget climate improved.

School Privatization – Favors expanding voucher programs and increased taxpayer support for private schools.

Act 10 to Eliminate Collective Bargaining – Used Walker’s Act 10 “tools” to impose a new health care plan and raise premiums on most city workers, failing to extend any of the city’s collective bargaining agreements. Called for the inclusion of police and fire units under Act 10.

For his part, Barrett has his own selective amnesia. Milwaukee Public Radio‘s coverage of Barrett’s acceptance speech quotes political analyst Amber Wichowsky as saying: “You did not hear much in that speech about restoring the collective bargaining rights.”

So despite being the driving force behind the recalls, WEAC and friends are already in the position of making the best of a bad situation. Their best-case scenario is exchanging a Republican governor whom they hate for a Democratic governor who will ignore them on crucial issues. Call it the Obama Quandary.

Details here on a compromise in the ongoing education reform battles in Connecticut. AFT Connecticut calls it “fairly reasonable.” Connecticut Education Association is “cautiously optimistic.” CEA spent $400,000 crushing the original bill.

Yesterday’s communiqué had these two sentences in the fourth paragraph of the story about CalSTRS:

“In 2001, CalSTRS paid teachers under $4 million in benefits. Ten years later, that figure is more than $10.2 million.”

Those dollar figures should be billions, of course, not millions.

The versions posted the web site are now correct. My apologies for the error.