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Heartless and Mindless
As the National Education Association embarks on a new PR campaign, some of its affiliates engage in lawsuits and strikes.
In July, the National Education Association unearthed its “Strategic Plan and Budget” for 2016-2018. The introduction to the 76-page document includes the notion that the union needs to “win the race to capture the hearts and minds of parents, communities, and educators.”
Hearts and minds?
Well, two months later, let’s just see how that’s working out for the country’s biggest union and some of its state affiliates. In northern California, the Yuba City Teachers Association is in its second week of a strike. The union was asking for a 13 percent raise for its teachers. When the district claimed that there was no way it could afford such a salary hike, the union came back with a counter offer: 15 percent. (No typo.) When asked about the strike, a picketing teacher asserted, “…we have to do this for our students.”
Hearts and minds?
Washington State’s charter schools are once again endangered. The Washington Education Association is continuing its battle to remove the Evergreen State’s 12 charter schools and kill any such future endeavors. The union paints charters as unaccountable to voters, proclaims that they are privately run and don’t have elected school boards. The fact that parents send their kids to these schools of choice because the traditional public schools aren’t doing a good job does not matter a whit to the union. Perhaps Heartland Institute’s Bruno Behrend said it best: “The Washington Teachers Unions specifically, and the government education complex in general, once again expose their moral illegitimacy by attempting to destroy education options for Washington’s students and families.”
Hearts and minds?
Launched in 2001, Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program allows low income families to send their kids to a private school with money that is funded directly through private donations from businesses, which can then earn dollar-for-dollar tax credits from the state for their contributions. The Florida Education Association, which has been fighting against this increasingly popular form of school choice for two years, is running low on options and is about to embark on its final effort: an appeal to the State Supreme Court. If the state court denies FEA’s appeal, the union will just have to live with the ruling. FEA president Joanne McCall is optimistic, however. “The highest level ruled in our favor in 2006. They seem to be the most sane court (sic) that we have.”
But Bishop Victory Curry, chairman of the Save Our Scholarships Coalition, has a problem with FEA. “We are very disappointed that the union will continue its effort to evict more than 90,000 poor, mostly minority children from schools that are working for them. … The union’s decision is wrong for the children, and wrong for our public schools.”
Hearts and Minds?
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is angry, claiming that 27 failing school districts across the state continue to under-perform despite receiving over $100 billion in funding since 1985. He blames various union work rules as a big part of the problem, declaring. “We can no longer tolerate a tenure law that places seniority above effectiveness, or tolerate limits on teaching time that restrict teachers to less than five hours of a seven-hour school day in districts where our students most need quality teachers and intensive instruction.”
The New Jersey Education Association responded by calling Christie’s plea, a “frivolous legal challenge” adding that it was an attempt by Christie to divert attention from the Bridgegate scandal.
Sure.
NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer further explained, “… He’s demonized the women and men who work in our public schools. And he’s proposed a funding scheme that would steal from poor children to reward rich adults.”
Mr. Steinhauer has it backwards. Stealing from kids and enriching adults is what his and other teachers unions do. Quite well, I might add.
Hearts and minds?
And finally we have Chicago, a city where one in three never graduates from high school. The NEA does not have a presence there; the Chicago Teachers Union is affiliated with Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Nevertheless, it seems that CTU is all in with NEA’s “hearts and minds” modus operandi.
First a few facts: The median salary for a teacher in the Windy City is $78,169. When you throw in another $27,564 for various benefits, the total becomes almost $106K per annum. In retirement, the average teacher receives a hefty $50,000 a year. Ah, but the teachers are not happy. Chicago teachers are supposed to contribute 9 percent of their salary to fund their own pension. But, as things stand now, the teachers only contribute 2 percent, with the school district (taxpayer) picking up the remaining seven. The city, which is in dire fiscal straits, is asking teachers to pay the full 9 percent.
The audacity of the city fathers! The union is fighting mad and in heavy strike-prep mode, holding workshops which center on “workplace tactics to stick it to the boss.” The teachers could strike as soon as mid-October.
Hearts and minds?
Nope. “Heartless and mindless” is much closer to the truth. Shameless and arrogant too.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
A Mostly Merry Month for Educational Choice
Those favoring educational freedom – and their enemies – have been busy in May.
Overall, May has been a good month for the school choice movement despite a few lawsuits involving the teachers unions (so what else is new?). The Washington Education Association announced it would file suit by the end of the month challenging a new law in the Evergreen State that corrects problems in the way that charter schools are funded. WEA spouts the usual blather about how charter schools are not accountable, but of course the parents who send their kids to these schools of choice have a very different opinion.
Then there is the Sunshine State, where the Florida Education Association is suing over the state’s Tax Credit Scholarship program. Launched in 2001, it allows low income families to send their kids to a private school with money that is funded directly through private donations from businesses, which can then earn dollar-for-dollar tax credits from the state for their contributions. The union has a couple of legal problems, however. Thus far it hasn’t demonstrated to the court that it has standing – sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party’s participation in the case. Additionally, the union has yet to articulate a specific harm that the program inflicts on public schools.
Now for the good news. In August 2015, the ACLU sued Nevada over its Education Savings Account law. Passed a couple of months earlier, the law covers tuition at approved private schools, as well as textbooks, tutoring services, tuition for distance learning programs, fees for special instruction if the child has a disability, et al. There are two tiers to the program: less affluent families get the statewide average basic support per-pupil, or around $5,700, while wealthier families receive $5,100. In support of the litigation, the Nevada State Education Association came up with “Ten Reasons Why Nevada’s Education Savings Accounts Are Bad News for Public Schools and Students” a document which includes the same old tired complaints we always hear from unions – public schools are underfunded, private schools have no accountability, choice leads to segregation, etc. But the lawsuit which claimed that public monies should not go to a religious institution, was denied by the judge who said, “parents – not state actors – decide whether they will use an education savings account, or ESA, to pay for tuition at private and religiously affiliated schools.” The ESAs are not home free yet, however, as there is a second lawsuit pending before the Nevada Supreme Court where the justices are expected to hear arguments in early June.
When it comes to public funds going to private schools, there has always been an arbitrary line drawn between k-12 and college. Pell Grants, which traditionally have been awarded to college students in need to use at the college of their choice – public, private, secular or religious – have been championed by the teachers unions. Yet the same unions rail against any similar vouchers on the elementary-high school level. But, in a very interesting move, Pell Grants can now be used by high schoolers as part of a dual enrollment program. Under the new plan announced just last week, thousands of low-income high-school students in nearly two dozen states, will, starting this summer, be able to get federal grants to take college courses for credit. And some of the 44 participating colleges are private. So with Pell Grants now stretching into high schools, it will be interesting to see if the teachers unions weigh in. Nothing from them yet. In any event, the slippery slope may have become just a bit slicker.
Two studies have come out this month which show the benefits of school choice while dispelling most of the banalities that the teachers unions and other anti-choicers regularly use. In “A Win-Win Solution – The Empirical Evidence on School Choice,” a meta-analysis (study of studies), Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice senior fellow Greg Forster found that choice improves academic outcomes not only for participants but also public school students. Summing up the study, Jay Greene writes that choice “saves taxpayer money, moves students into more integrated classrooms, and strengthens the shared civic values and practices essential to American democracy. A few outlier cases that do not fit this pattern may get a disproportionate amount of attention, but the research consensus in favor of school choice as a general policy is clear and consistent.”
A second meta-analysis led by University of Arkansas researcher Patrick Wolf, using 19 gold standard studies of private school choice programs globally, found that private school choice increases the reading and math scores of choice users. Interestingly, achievement benefits of private school choice appear to be somewhat larger for programs in developing countries than for those in the U.S. Wolf explains, “Our meta-analysis avoided all three factors that have muddied the waters on the test-score effects of private school choice. It is a non-ideological scientific enterprise, as we followed strict meta-analytic principles such as including every experimental evaluation of choice produced to date, anywhere in the world.”
Facts, data and meta-studies are what honest researchers use. The unions, not using any objective methodology, rely purely on vapid talking points which they cannot back up. (Actually there was one recent study commissioned by the United Teachers of Los Angeles in which the union tries to prove that charter schools have cost the LA School district a half billion dollars. But the report, loaded with inaccuracies and distortions, ultimately proved that a study commissioned by a teachers union is about as valid as preposterous claims made by a 3am TV pitchman hawking wrinkle cream. More on the faux UTLA study soon.) Some National Education Association baseless assertions:
Fact: There’s no link between vouchers and gains in student achievement.
Fact: Vouchers do not give parents real educational choice.
Fact: Vouchers do not reduce public education costs.
Lie. Lie. Lie.
But no matter. The unions will not give up their ongoing efforts to deny parental choice. To paraphrase an old maxim, since they can’t bang on the facts, they try to bang on the law. And when that doesn’t work, the only thing they have left to bang on is the table.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
Reactionary Teachers Union Parties like It’s 1909
Self-serving Washington Education Association dusts off a 100 year old law to shut down charter schools.
As I have frequently written, the teachers unions have a schizoid relationship with charter schools. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays they want to kill them off; on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays they want to unionize them. Earlier this month, with the help of a compliant court, the National Education Association affiliate in Washington managed to trash the state’s fledgling charter school movement – a tiny movement, barely sticking its toes in the water with all of one school having opened in Seattle last year, with eight more opening this fall.
But citing an arcane law passed in 1909, the Washington Supreme Court deemed the charter schools unconstitutional. As reported in The Seattle Times, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen ruled that “charter schools aren’t ‘common schools’ because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards. Therefore, money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools.” Justice Mary E. Fairhurst agreed with the majority that charter schools aren’t common schools, but argued in a partial dissenting opinion that the state “can constitutionally support charter schools through the general fund.”
The Washington Education Association, which was joined by the League of Women Voters of Washington and others in bringing the suit, was gleeful. “The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along — charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding,” said Kim Mead, WEA president.
This is maddening.
The thrust behind the decision is that charter schools are not accountable to local voters the way traditional public schools are. Ironically the statement is true, but for the reverse reason. Charters are in fact far more accountable than traditional public schools. As the Wall Street Journal points out,
Charters must submit detailed applications to a state commission explaining, among other things, their curriculum, standards and plans for special-needs students. They must also submit to a public forum—i.e., a union beating. They provide annual performance reports, and the State Board of Education can sanction charters that fail to achieve their objectives and close those in the bottom quartile of public schools. Only the lowest 5% of traditional schools must propose corrective plans.
American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess wrote a scathing denouncement of the decision in National Review, claiming among other things that, “…the notion that Washington State’s school districts are sacrosanct because they allow the public to carefully select teachers and discharge incompetent ones reads like a twisted joke. Ultimately, the court’s rationale serves as an open-ended, extra-constitutional rejection of all challenges to the education monopoly.” Using words like “gutless” and “lunacy” to describe the decision, Hess ended his broadside with, “We’ll see if Washington State’s myopic mandarins really have the nerve to ask law enforcement to shut down these ‘speakeasy’ schools in order to stop the state’s charter-school students from illegally pursuing a public education.”
An interesting facet to the mess is that the teachers unions gave the maximum allowed by law ($1,800 in 2012 and $1,900 in 2014) in campaign contributions to seven of the nine judges on the Washington Supreme Court in their most recent election to the Court. Call me crazy, but this reeks of a conflict of interest. While a quid pro quo can’t be established, it’s hard not to be a bit cynical. Danny Westneat writes in The Seattle Times about a simple cure for this. “The state of Utah has a much stricter rule — that justices have to sit out a case if someone involved in it gave their campaign $50 or more. If we had that rule, the Temple of Justice would have been almost emptied for the charter-schools case.”
What’s next for the Washington charters? As Robin Lake writes in an aptly named piece, “A court decision only the Kremlin could love,”
As many have forcefully opined, this decision should be reconsidered by the court (a motion to reconsider is likely). Barring that, the legislature could pass a new charter that doesn’t use the term “common schools,” or pass a constitutional amendment. If lawmakers have any decency, this will happen quickly. That’s the only way to make sure that students and their families don’t have to endure any more needless chaos.
Coincidentally, while the state teachers union is busy shutting down charters, its Seattle local started off the new school year by calling a strike, thus closing the city’s public schools. The big disagreement in this case is money. While the district is offering a 10 percent raise over two years, the union is demanding a 16.8 percent increase over the same time period.
As The Daily Caller’s Eric Owens reports, Seattle teachers currently have a median annual salary of $60,412. And of course that amount is for only 180 days of work and doesn’t include a panoply of perks including medical, dental, vision and life insurance, not to mention generous pension benefits. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the annual per-capita income in Seattle is $43,237 – for 48-50 weeks of work per year, and those workers typically have a much less robust benefits package.
Weighing in on the Seattle strike, National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García gushed that she is proud that the NEA local’s teachers walked out, explaining “…educators are standing up for the schools students deserve.”
How a teacher union boss could make such a loopy statement with a straight face is beyond comprehension. Union leaders are busy closing charter schools in Washington by dredging up a vague, poorly written 100 year-old law and shutting down every public school in Seattle by striking, but they are of course doing it for the children. Gag.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
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