I saw this headline from the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and did not immediately think “Big news!” but instead “Really?” It read: “Florida’s Largest Teachers Union Lost Tax-Exempt Status.”

The IRS had in fact pulled the tax-exempt status of the Florida Education Association in January for failing to file a Form 990 for three consecutive years. This isn’t all that unusual. Back in 2010 there were 475 teacher union locals that were in the same boat, and I listed them. But certainly FEA would have been the largest affiliate to have that problem.

There was one peculiarity: FEA’s 990s were filed and publicly available. I’ve been including information from them in NEA affiliate financial tables for the past few years.

The explanation apparently involves the merger in 2000 of the NEA and AFT state affiliates, but no matter. This one was clearly an IRS screw-up, and good thing, too. We wouldn’t want FEA to have to pay taxes on its $31.8 million of annual income, would we?

My apologies to those of you who have been trying to access the EIA mobile web site only to see the same old page day after day. The problem has been solved (fingers crossed), although if you use your smart phone you will now have to go to http://www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/, which will take you directly to http://mobile.dudamobile.com/site/Intercepts.

What you will see are the five most recent daily blog entries, and if you scroll down to the bottom, links to the five most recent weekly EIA Communiqués.

The navigation bar at the top of the page will also take you to the EIA main page and all the content therein, plus an e-mail link.

Sorry about the mess and hopefully this will make things a little easier for mobile readers.

Congratulations to the AFT, which succeeded in persuading the operators of the 13 United Neighborhood Organization’s charter schools to remain neutral during its unionization campaign. About 87 percent of the 415 employees voted to have the Chicago Alliance of Charter School Teachers and Staff represent them.

“This is a turning point,” said AFT president Randi Weingarten. “This has the potential to change the conversation between charter operators and teachers.”

Picking up 400 new members in a charter school network is a win for AFT and teachers’ unions in general, no doubt of it. But let’s keep our heads, shall we?

When last I checked, there were an additional 381 charter schools (net) in 2012-13, enrolling an additional 275,000 students. Charter school staffing ratios vary widely, but even if we assume an average of 20 employees per school, that’s more than 7,600 charter school staffers added in a single year – mostly non-union.

Just to illustrate how charter school growth is swamping any unionization efforts, NEA and AFT would have had to organize 47 of those 381 new charter schools just to maintain their small market share.

A few teachers’ union news items from across the nation:

* The Maine Education Association is pushing a bill that would allow the union to keep the medical loss information of its health benefits trust a secret, which would stymie school district efforts to shop for coverage elsewhere. MEA fought against the disclosures for two years in court, but a federal appeals court ruled the union held a “virtual monopoly” on the health insurance of school employees that was “perpetuated by the very policy of non-disclosure which it seeks to protect.”

* Washington Education Association delegates voted to “explore pursuing an initiative to the voters to lower class size and/or enhance educator compensation.” Because no one has ever tried that before. /sarcasm

* Indiana State Teachers Association delegates elected Teresa Meredith to be their new president. Meredith is the incumbent vice president.

* Vermont NEA is celebrating the state House’s passage of a bill that makes agency fees mandatory for government employees, despite the explicit exemption from those fees that exists in the collective bargaining agreement of some 500 state employees.

Wow, using state laws to override collective bargaining provisions. Has Michigan heard about this?

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs about the recent United Federation of Teachers election – for example, here, here and here – and some forms of the words “apathy” and “indifference” appear in each to explain the poor turnout. They’re right, of course, but they have different explanations for why the apathy exists and what can be done about it.

Unions are not unique in claiming to want more participation and involvement when in reality they want more support for their particular way of thinking. You’ll never hear a Republican say, “Turnout was so bad last election. I wish more Democrats would vote!” So it’s usually the defeated who are most worried about apathy. Victors might be embarrassed by low turnouts, but since they won, they get over it pretty quickly.

I feel confident saying that large numbers of teachers will never be interested in who runs their union and what its policies are. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey just discovered 42 percent of respondents didn’t know that ObamaCare is law. In such an environment, it is difficult to get people’s attention about anything, never mind a union election.

What is to be done? Most factions spend their time trying to get the apathetic to be active. This is frustrating and often fruitless. Much better to flip the already activated. Finding the disaffected, persuading them, and making promises to them isn’t easy, but it is probably a better use of time and energy than explaining the issues to the uninterested.

Out-of-power union activists want to follow the model of Karen Lewis and CORE in Chicago, but few remember today that CORE gathered only 31% in the first round of voting in 2010, behind the incumbent UPC. Only by gaining the support of the other opposition caucuses, including PACT, was CORE able to win the runoff.

Lewis and CORE are in a strong position internally after the strike, but they face an election next month, and UPC has joined forces with PACT to oppose them. They may not win, but I’m pretty sure they’ll do better than the opposition in New York City did.

Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about ideology, platforms, professional association vs. industrial union, Common Core, blah, blah, blah. It seems strange to me that people who are so politically involved seem pretty naive about political horse-trading within their own unions.

Click here to read.

Naturally, as soon as I put up a blog post about how teacher union elections routinely go, we had a few unusual results from a slew of state and local affiliate elections last week. Of course, the environment was different because these officers were elected by delegates and union reps, who are by definition the most involved. That way you deal with the problem of an uninvolved rank-and-file by institutionalizing it.

Here’s how it went across the nation:

* Education Minnesota president Tom Dooher was running for a third term, but he was unseated by incumbent secretary-treasurer Denise Specht. Specht says her election does not represent a major upheaval in the union. Perhaps, but incumbents rarely challenge other incumbents in NEA state affiliates. We’ll see what happens next in Minnesota.

* The Washington Education Association had three candidates running for the state presidency, including the incumbent vice president. But he was defeated by Kim Mead, president of the Everett Education Association.

* In Florida, members of the Hernando Classroom Teachers Association ousted president Joe Vitalo and elected Jo Ann Hartge, a former president, to a new term.

* Nevada State Education Association delegates elected Clark County Education Association president Ruben Murillo Jr. to the state presidency. I can’t find signs of any other candidate.

* Truer to form was the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which elected incumbent vice president Betsy Kippers to the presidency over two challengers. Similarly, Missouri NEA selected incumbent vice president Charles E. Smith as president.