LaborPains.org

At first blush, examination of a new survey by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington doesn’t bode well for the idea of paying teachers according to how their students perform: 60 percent of Washington State public school teachers “strongly oppose” merit pay, and another 22 percent “somewhat oppose it.”

Among the study’s findings, however, was this interesting result: “to the degree that teachers have confidence in their principal, they appear more willing to support merit pay.” It’s simple: Trustworthy principals can be relied upon to make fair assessments of who is and who isn’t stepping up to give kids the education they need.

And it’s lack of trust in school administrators that teachers unions cite when defending laws that keep principals’ hands tied on critical personnel issues like hiring, firing, and compensation.

Improve the quality of principals, then, and you’ll see more teachers open to merit pay (which will in turn improve teacher quality). The only sticking point is that the very same union-supported policies (tenure, seniority-based pay) that insulate teachers from bad administrators also protect those bad administrators from getting fired! Click here for an unfortunate story along these lines.

It’s true that there are many bad administrators in schools. The teachers unions will tell you that the solution is to strip them of managerial discretion in determining teachers’ salaries and to make it practically impossible to fire teachers, even the bad ones. That kind of stalemate is no solution at all.

We’ve yet to hear of a union leader proposing that it might be better to drop these ridiculous “protections” (which only advance the interests of bad teachers and bad administrators, never schoolkids) and let school districts start acting like every other workplace in the country.

Carrying virtual placards reading “workers of the world unite” and demanding more or larger bonuses, IBM employees in Italy have launched a “virtual strike” in the virtual world known as Second Life.

We decided to check out the “strike” at IBM’s Second Life headquarters and give the picketers a little dose of UnionFacts.com. So we sent in our own virtual counter-protester — complete with slogan and sign.

All in all, we must report being disappointed in the verve of the virtual strikers. Most just stood around shouting typing platitudes.

No word yet on what constitutes “strike benefits” in a world where virtual deviance is virtually everywhere.

UPDATE: It is just another day on the virtual picket line for CUF, but now we’ve got a big, honkin’ sign. That’ll show ‘em.

A recent re-read of “From Contracts to Classrooms: Covering Teachers Unions,” a primer for education journalists published by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, unearthed an eye-opening story. As an education reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, Dale Mezzacappa had a hard time keeping her cool with a union lawyer after a rally where the union celebrated the demise of teacher accountability measures:

Only once in my 35-year reporting career was I goaded into responding in kind to someone who yelled at me. The yeller was an attorney for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, reacting to my story about the contract settlement between the union and the school district after months of contentious talks…

Uncharacteristically, I yelled back. The night before, I had found it unsettling, to say the least, to watch as thousands of teachers cheered wildly at the news that they didn’t have to worry about whether their students learned anything. They’d still get automatic raises even if none of their kids met achievement goals; they’d still get their pick of jobs based on seniority; they’d still have the right to refuse extra training even if their teaching skills were woefully out of date.

“If teachers don’t improve kids’ learning, what are they there for?” I asked. “What should they be judged on? What are they getting paid to do?”

To which I got the remarkable rejoinder: “Teacher performance and student achievement have nothing to do with each other.” [emphasis added]

• BET founder: “We gave African-American executives and technical people a chance to work in fields where the unions wouldn’t even let them join the unions.” (Hat tip: Employer Report)
• MSNBC Contributor: UAW’s ‘victory’ may really be last gasp
• The insecure skyline: The San Francisco security guard strike expands to the TransAmerica building

The Change To Win coalition has set up an additional surcharge on their members’ dues — which could raise as much as $14 million over two years — to fund their political machine. And they aren’t shy about their focus on passing the anti-democratic “Employee Free Choice Act”:

The convention resolution approving the assessment, and laying out the federation’s overall plan for the next two years, says the money will be used “to build a state-of-the-art coordinated political program to ensure the election of a pro-labor president in 2008 and pro-labor majorities in the Senate and House in order to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.”

If a virtual strike happens and no one cares, did it really happen? It’s a worthwhile questions since we have the first known virtual strike of a major corporation. See other relevant questions about the anti-IBM campaign here.

The funny thing: no one seems to know this is going on, save a few geeks who are virtual-carping from their laptops. Guess a cyber-strike isn’t much more successful than an auto workers walkout.

The plan for Democrats and union officials to build a permanent, anti-worker agenda by ending secret ballot elections for working Americans is rolling along — and it will have major policy implications across the board. As we told The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore:

“This is a life and death issue for the unions,” Mr. Berman says. Labor Department records show that unions generally don’t even call for a workplace election unless about 70% of workers sign a card requesting one — yet unions still lose half the elections they hold at work sites, suggesting many workers feel pressured to sign the cards but vote against the union in a secret ballot when they feel safe from retribution. Mr. Berman’s group calculates that the AFL-CIO could double its membership with the new law, generating up to $5 billion in additional union dues, money that could be channeled into supporting Democrats.

If the unions prevail in their card-check powerplay, Mr. Berman predicts it would transform the Congressional dynamics and vote count on a whole litany of issues that labor cares about. “If the card check issue passes,” he argues, “it will be the death of tax cuts, school choice, budget reforms, and more.” For the left, that makes card-check sound like a political panacea. No wonder Democrats are trying to keep this all under wraps.

Over at the Shopfloor blog.