LaborPains.org

Andy Stern may no longer be the head of the Service Employees International Union, a post he left in April, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the news.  According to the AP, he’s being dragged into an FBI investigation.  Just read:

“The FBI and the U.S. Labor Department are investigating prominent labor leader Andy Stern in their probe of corruption at the Service Employees International Union, according to two people who have been interviewed by federal agents. The two organized labor officials met with federal agents this summer to answer questions about a six-figure book contract that Stern landed in 2006 and his role in approving money to pay the salary of an SEIU leader in California who allegedly performed no work. [...]

One person who spoke to federal agents twice, in May and June, said they asked about a 2006 contract in which Stern received a $175,000 advance from Simon & Schuster to write the book “A Country That Works.” The SEIU and its locals bought thousands of copies of the book after it was published. The union also paid thousands to fact-check and promote the book, but Stern pocketed the advance.

As the article notes, Andy Stern left the SEIU because he “wanted to focus more on his personal life.” In Washington, that could mean any number of things, but there is one thing it rarely means: the individual wants to focus more on their personal life.

Craig Becker has so far refused to recuse himself. Well, perhaps that not the best way to put it. He’s more thrown up his hands and explained that what we thought he would recuse himself from (i.e. things related to the SEIU) and what he meant when he promised to recuse himself are two very different things entirely. Turns out, our fear that his appointment would signal the implementation of card check by means other that legislation were not unfounded. According to the Wall Street Journal:

And as many Senators feared when he was nominated, Mr. Becker is using his position on the National Labor Relations Board to bypass the will of Congress.[...] As a top lawyer for the Service Employees International Union, Mr. Becker had suggested that the NLRB has the legal authority to impose card check—which eliminates secret ballots in union elections—without the approval of Congress. And lo, at the end of August the NLRB dropped the bombshell, when, in a 3-2 decision, it decided to revisit its important 2007 Dana Corp. ruling. [...]

This Dana reversal also raises more questions about Mr. Becker’s ethical standards. The labor lawyer has already refused to recuse himself from cases involving the SEIU, his former employer. Now it turns out he had filed a brief for the AFL-CIO in the original Dana case, arguing that there is no essential difference between card check and secret ballots and calling Dana-style protections “bad labor-relations policy.” Mr. Becker is clearly biased against Dana and by any reasonable standard should not be able to rule on it.

No one would accuse Courtland Milloy of being a staunch supporter of school reform in the District of Columbia. After Michelle Rhee moved to eliminate underperforming teachers from the classroom, Milloy described the move as “Rhee’s way of showing students how to throw a teacher under the bus,” “how adults play Halloween tricks on kids,” and “dumb as chalk.” Later, he rhetorically asked “Can you raise an academic bar if you don’t have an ethical leg to stand on?”

Milloy was at it again this week in a column given the misleading headline “Despite Rhee’s missteps, her egalitarian vision inspires.” Instead of embracing Rhee’s efforts to tighten DC schools by eliminating under-utilized buildings and getting rid of under-performing teachers, Milloy suggested that the real problem is – wait for it – underfunding of DC’s schools. “Elitism [is] the most stubborn obstacle to school reform,” he wrote. “Not teachers’ unions, dysfunctional families, lazy students or black prejudice against a Korean American schools chancellor, but reluctance by the city’s haves to share classrooms with the have-nots.”

He bases his belief on a quote from billionaire Warren Buffet who once told Rhee that if “it would be easy to solve today’s problems in urban education. ‘Make private schools illegal,’ he said, ‘and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.’” Let’s leave aside the totalitarian impulse to remove options from people looking to find better ways to educate their kids. Buffet and Milloy have this idea that if we could only force families to send their kids to public schools, a spigot of money would open up because the elites finally realized the necessity for public schools. This is, in a word, asinine. It is class-baiting nonsense of the first order.

As a reminder: Washington’s public schools are among the best-funded in the entire country. As of 2008, D.C. was spending almost $25,000 a year per student, good for the third-highest rate in the country. What have we received for all that money? A local school system that will see only 9 percent of its students graduate from college within five years of graduating high school. A local school system that only sees two out of every five tenth graders score as proficient or advanced in math and reading tests. A local school system that is, in a word, broken.

But it’s all the fault of the elites, right? Those evil elites who send their kids to private schools, away from the deprivations of those well-funded public schools – they’re the ones to blame. It’s odd, though, that those very same elites would support things like the federal voucher program that helped poor families afford private schooling for their children – a voucher program that I can find no record of Milloy ever supporting.

If Milloy was really in favor of reforms that would help lift students out of poverty by providing them with a better education, he’d support efforts to get struggling teachers out of classrooms. Of course, this would hurt his standing with his pals at the Washington Teachers’ Union – and we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen a couple of stories pop up that suggest some teachers are simply tired of their union’s anti-reform stances. First came news that a backer of education reform was putting up some money to help fund a “cheaper, non-political alternative to teacher unions” in Florida. Reports the Florida Times-Union:

The Orange Park-based educators network has been around since 1995 but has only about 2,000 members statewide. …

But Tim Farmer, who spent the last two years as a teacher with Teach For America at Eugene Butler Middle School, is ramping up the network’s recruitment efforts here.

Farmer, a former member of the union, said Duval Teachers United is “completely out of touch” with what teachers want and the services it offers are “overpriced.” The network, Farmer said, isn’t political and membership costs $180 a year compared with $680 for the union.

“I felt like it was time that teachers were given a choice,” he said.

Today, the Wall Street Journal notes that more and more New York City teachers are joining a group called Educators 4 Excellence. Though they explicitly deny being any sort of competition to the local American Federation of Teachers affiliate, the new group is staking out positions that put them in diametric opposition to the union:

Ms. Morris stresses that her group is “not anti-union, nor are we an alternative” to the UFT. Instead, the group is made up of “educators committed to amplifying authentic teacher voices that are not yet being heard in order to improve the education system to benefit our students.”

Of particular concern is the practice of laying off teachers based on how many years they’ve worked in the schools. That “provides a safety net to be complacent,” said Margie Crousillat, a member of Ms. Morris’s group who is a kindergarten teacher in the Bronx in her seventh year of teaching. “Some veteran teachers have been teaching 25 years and they are incredible. But some aren’t. I don’t think age or experience should dictate whether you’re safe in your job.”

About the UFT, Ms. Crousillat added: “Their priorities are not my priorities.”

We at Labor Pains applaud these alternative efforts. It just goes to show something we’ve said for a long time: Teachers aren’t the problem – union bosses are. Hopefully these new groups can pressure the old guard into being more accepting of reform and less political in the future.

Randi Weingarten has been making the rounds over the last couple of weeks, traveling the country in search of editorial boards and townhalls to talk to. Being a charming individual, she invariably comes off as reasonable; the standard response usually sounds something like this one from William McKenzie at the Dallas Morning News:

Before we get into details here, let me say that I found Weingarten an open, smart and energetic leader. Readers of this blog would know that I probably wouldn’t qualify as a teacher’s union guy, so I say that as someone who’s usually opposed to her in some fundamental ways. But she lacked the in-your-face quality that too many folks have in big debates, whether in education, foreign policy or health care. She’s informed, passionate and engaging. But she’s not dismissive, condescending or arrogant. Or at least that’s my reading, and, to me, that style goes a long way in today’s super-charged world.

McKenzie’s response isn’t terribly surprising. In person, Weingarten can come across as likable and passionate about education. It’s simply too bad that her actions have failed to match her rhetoric. On the one hand she talks about the need for reform, as she does in her pan of Waiting for Superman; on the other, she lambastes the LA Times for daring to release information about teacher effectiveness. On the one hand she charms William McKenzie; on the other, she fails to do anything while an AFT-affiliated teachers union in New York City fights to keep unemployed teachers on the payroll at a cost of $100+ million dollars to the city’s taxpayers. On the one hand, she admits that there are bad teachers; on the other, efforts to hold them accountable, as Washington, D.C., recently did, are met with threats of lawsuits.

I’ve brought Weingarten’s actions up before, but they’re worth highlighting again. Teachers unions aren’t going to be reliable partners for reform until their leadership begins to couple their big talk with big actions. I wouldn’t hold my breath on this happening anytime soon: Teachers unions have no real incentive to clear poor teachers out of the classroom, since they pay the same dues as everyone else. Unions would rather have small class sizes with more teachers (and, hence, more dues revenue to spend on election campaigns) than larger class sizes with fewer, better, more highly paid teachers.

The Miami Herald reports that Florida’s statewide teachers union has filed a lawsuit to stop the state from counting votes on a constitutional amendment that would alter class sizes in the state.

A lawyer for Florida’s statewide teachers union asked a judge Wednesday to block the counting of votes cast on the Legislature’s proposed state constitutional amendment to loosen class size limits. …

Meyer argued Amendment 8′s ballot summary and title are unclear, ambiguous and misleading because they fail to say the proposal’s chief purpose is to change school funding. The Florida Constitution now requires the Legislature to “make adequate provision” for meeting the class size requirements.

What’s interesting here is that the state of Florida has actually written into its constitution the number of students who should be in classrooms. The union fought hard to pass an initiative that capped class sizes at 18 for first through third grades, 22 in fourth through eighth, and 25 in ninth through twelfth. This is literally in Florida’s state constitution. This kind of micromanagement is kind of mind-blowing, but given the power of the state’s teachers unions, it’s not terribly surprising. Allow me to explain.

The union claims that they just want to see kids get the best education possible, and small class sizes are the key to accomplishing that. Experts might disagree – most point to teacher quality as the single most important key to student success outside of said student’s home life – but let’s leave that aside for the moment. What teachers unions are really interested in is collecting more dues. How do they collect more dues? By having more teachers on the payroll. How does one get more teachers on the payroll? Why, mandate incredibly small class sizes, of course!

It’s an interesting shell game, one that we’ve seen play out recently in the “teacher bailout” pushed for by President Obama; the Wall Street Journal reported that the $10 billion subsidy to states to keep them from laying off teachers led to at least $100 million in additional dues for the National Education Association.

There was a minor dustup over at the Huffington Post when Davis Guggenheim (the director of the pro-education reform documentary Waiting for “Superman”) was criticized by Dan Brown (not the author of The Da Vinci Code, but a schoolteacher) for offering gauzy platitudes instead of actual suggestions for reform.

Wrote Brown:

Guggenheim presents his teacher bona fides by mentioning his first documentary, The First Year, which followed rookie teachers. He opens and closes with a personal, emotionally-charged narrative that informs his above-reproach talking point (Teachers are very, very important). The essay, though, is light on the actual steps we need to take to recruit, develop, and retain a new generation of great teachers. …

His recommendations are so vague that many would-be reformers can and are using the same language to promote untested, potentially dangerous initiatives.

That’s fair, to a point. The problem is, every time someone suggests actual, concrete reforms, teachers unions tend to lose their minds. Consider what happened when the District of Columbia tried to utilize the IMPACT evaluation system to judge which teachers were “effective” and which teachers were “ineffective”: union head George Parker promptly threatened to file a class action lawsuit.

Or consider what happened when the Los Angeles Times performed a value-added analysis of teachers in the LA Unified School District and then made those results available to the public: The head of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, lambasted the paper for letting people know the quality of the their childrens’ teachers and the United Teachers of Los Angeles reacted by boycotting the newspaper and forming a picket line outside of its offices.

My point is a simple one: Why ask for concrete proposals if you’re going to fight every single one that’s offered? That’s what teachers unions and their leaders like Weingarten do; they make hazy proclamations about being in favor of reform and helping schools improve, yet when a school system or a reformer actually offers concrete reforms, they squeal like stuck pigs.

It was announced earlier this summer that 241 teachers were fired as a result of the DC Public School’s new IMPACT evaluation system. There was some confusion over how many of those teachers let go were actually deemed “ineffective”; the Washington Post’s Bill Turque has the breakdown:

In addition to the 75 teachers with “ineffective” scores, there are an additional 51.5 (there’s a part timer, I assume) “minimally effective” educators who were excessed — forced out by enrollment or program changes at their schools — and could not find other spots by Aug. 13.

So, at the end of the day, IMPACT led to 126.5 teacher firings.

So that’s a little more than half the number first thrown out by DC’s chancellor, Michelle Rhee. Of course, the Washington Teachers’ Union isn’t going to take this lying down – how dare someone suggest that teachers be held accountable for their performance! Hence the threatened lawsuits and appeals to the grievance process by WTU head George Parker.

Elsewhere in the Post, AEI’s Rick Hess was quoted as saying “Michelle could have been less divisive, but that would have required dialing back her efforts and her timetable.” According to Hess, “Too many superintendents move so slowly that, at the end of a six- or eight-year tenure, they accomplished only a fraction of what Michelle has thus far done.”

And there’s some question as to what will happen if Rhee leaves Washington in the event of an Adrian Fenty loss in next week’s mayoral election:

One vision of life after Rhee in D.C. schools holds that a switch in leadership would imperil progress. Gray has said he wants a chancellor who will continue to improve schools while closing rifts between the District and its teachers. But Rhee supporters question how much tension or pushback he would tolerate to continue the reform movement.

These supporters also say her departure would undermine a nascent but discernible growth in parent confidence in the school system, especially among young families. Enrollment has stabilized after decades of decline. Any new chancellor would need at least two full school years to assemble a team and produce real evidence of effectiveness. That would bring the city to the cusp of another mayoral election cycle.

Regardless of who the chancellor is this time next year, let’s hope that their focus remains squarely on improving the District’s public schools and pursuing reform.