Sylvia is a single mom with two daughters who attend Palm Lane elementary school in Anaheim. She one of the parents who signed the petition to convert Palm Lane into a charter school under California’s parent trigger law. She told the Anaheim City School Board that one of her daughters is in fourth grade but reads...
Teachers unions are losing members, but stubbornly stick with the same old product. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us that in 2014 – for the second year in a row – that there are fewer unionized than non-unionized teachers in the U.S. The reasons for this are many: more right-to-work states,...
Elected officials, the courts and John Q. Public are supporting worker freedom these days; teachers unions and other public employee unions are on the run. Last Monday, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner issued an executive order that, if it stands, will absolve state workers from paying forced dues to a union. As The Wall Street Journal...
Just after Groundhog Day last week, the Brookings Institution released its annual Education Choice and Competition Index report, grading 110 school districts on the degree to which they empower parents with easily accessible, broadly available, publicly funded school choices and the degree to which the choice system results in greater access to quality schools. The...
What would you say to someone who displayed extraordinary courage and initiative to stand up for a law you wrote? “You’re fired” is probably not the first thing that comes to mind, but that’s what happened to Arturo Garcia on January 29, after he stepped onto some very big toes. Garcia, a full time district...
The latest teachers union PR ploy is pure cowplop. “Persuading the People on Public Schools,” a National Education Association document posted by the The Daily Beast’s Conor Williams, details the union’s new communication strategy. Subtitled “Words to avoid … Words to Embrace,” the previously internal “research brief” gives us a look into the mindset of...
If you drive by Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim, California, nothing seems amiss. With modern buildings, partially surrounded by a park, the school seems like a tranquil refuge. Like so many settings in sunny Southern California, palm trees and sycamores compete for space on the spacious lawns, beckoning skyward, swaying in the warmth of...
Andrew Cuomo becomes the latest governor to take on the teachers unions. Expanding vouchers to unaccountable private schools. Stripping teachers of their right to due process. Converting neighborhood public schools into privately run charter schools unanswerable to local school boards and taxpayers. Proceeding with tax cuts for the wealthy while starving public schools. Holy horrors! The above,...
My encounters with tenure, aka permanence, aka undue process for teachers. In an article posted recently, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of Education Next Paul Peterson asks, “Do Teachers Support the Vergara Decision?” More specifically, he discusses tenure, which is on hold in California due to Judge Rolf Treu’s ruling. The tenure statute is the part...
Assuming Judge Treu’s rulings survive the appeals process, what will replace the offending statutes? In last year’s Vergara case, Judge Rolf Treu ruled that the state’s archaic seniority, tenure and dismissal statutes were unconstitutional, adding that the evidence submitted “shocks the conscience.” The judge’s ruling is now being appealed by the state of California, the...
On January 14th the Orange County Board of Education will meet to consider, among other things, approving a 2% increase for the Orange County superintendent’s salary. Using data provided by the Orange County Dept. of Education to Transparent California, it can be seen that in 2013 the superintendent, Al Mijares, earned a base salary of...
NEA president praises Finland, Singapore and Canada, conveniently omitting facts about school choice and competition. The “global education reform movement has failed” … or at least that’s what National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García told a group of businessmen in Detroit last month. Spouting the usual edubabble, the union president told the Detroit Economic...
With a big assist from the teachers unions, the small class size myth lives on. “The sky is falling” is well-known throughout the world as an admonition to be wary of hysterical claims. While we appreciate the silliness of the Chicken Little story, we fail to recognize its relevance in many of the myths perpetuated...
Chances are that you don’t think that New York City Patrolman’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch has much in common with Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers. In fact, after Lynch sparred earlier this year with Weingarten protégé Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union’s United Federation of Teachers local, over the unit’s collaboration...