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September 6, 2010
In yesterday’s Los Angeles Daily News, LA’s second biggest newspaper, there was an article about the president of the 43,000 member United Teachers of Los Angeles with an interesting title - UTLA Head A.J. Duffy Fights to Make Union Part of Reform.
In the body of the article, he huffs, “School reform is what puts a fire in my belly.” After reading through the article twice however, the only specific reform I was able to find is that he thinks we need to find a way to “counsel some teachers out of the profession if they do not improve their performance.” What? Counsel them out? Ask them pretty please if they wouldn’t mind leaving the profession? This is reform? Good grief!
He also mentions something about revamping the teacher evaluation system. But when the Los Angeles Times printed the names of 6,000 teachers according to a value added rank, Duffy threw a tantrum and in a robocall asked all UTLA members to boycott the newspaper and called for an after-school day picketing of the newspaper by teachers next Tuesday.
Some generally accepted education reform strategies include such things as:
• getting rid of permanence or tenure for teachers — or at least making that status much more difficult to attain.
• being able to fire incompetent teachers – not counsel them out of the profession.
• not making staffing decisions by seniority.
• paying good teachers more than mediocre teachers.
• letting more children escape their district hell holes and attending a school of their parents’ choice, whether it be a private school with the help of a voucher or a charter school.
Mr. Duffy, to the best of my knowledge, has fought all of them. I would love to know just what kind of meaningful education reform he is talking about or maybe the “fire in his belly” is nothing more than having indulged at the wrong taqueria. As with the entire union leadership, his talk and his actions are two very different things.
In Hypocrisy is Big Labor’s Problem, Deroy Murdock details how union bosses perpetually bloviate about workers’ rights, management greed, etc., but when it comes to the unions’ own employees, the story is very different. When a man tried to organize twelve writers working for the United Federation of Teachers in New York, he was summarily fired. The situation occasionally reaches comic proportions. According to Murdock, “Not even big labor’s most basic activity — picketing — escapes union hypocrisy. Mirroring an M.C. Escher engraving, some unions hire non-union members to protest employers for not hiring union members.” The bottom line is that when unions become management, they are as flinty and ruthless as they claim “big business” is and the unions don’t think twice about it. Unfortunately, stories about this kind union hypocrisy don’t always make into the mainstream media.
I will leave you with a song on this Labor Day. In 1973, Hudson-Ford of the British band, The Strawbs, penned a song about union power called Part of the Union. With lines like
So though I’m a working man
I can ruin the government’s plan
Though I’m not too hard
The sight of my card
Makes me some kind of superman.
It is apparent that the song is satire – a parody of the union class at that time. However, many union members in Britain, Australia and elsewhere missed that it was satirical and used and still use it as an inspirational anthem. I guess dreams of power and invulnerability trump any rational analysis.
In any event, on Labor Day let’s celebrate all the hard working men and women in the U.S. As for the unions, maybe we could have a little more forthrightness and honesty and lot less hypocrisy and bullying. However, considering their history, I’m not holding my breath.
September 3, 2010
It appears that the public’s growing frustration with teachers unions and their collective bargaining contracts is finally starting to boil over.
This week, “Boston United for Students,” a coalition of students, parents and education advocates, rallied outside of the Boston School Department’s headquarters to demand a more student-focused teachers contract, Boston.com reports.
According to the Web site, protesters waived signs and chanted messages like “Stop bumping the good teachers, reward talent not seniority,” and “What do we want? Better teachers. When do we want them? Now.”
One parent, Angela Tang, summed up the group’s feelings from the podium.
“As parents, we are very frustrated that ineffective teachers are still in the classroom and too many good teachers are laid off,” she was quoted as saying on the web site. “We hope our new contract won’t protect ineffective teachers.”
Wow. We can only imagine what union bosses were thinking as they watched 70 protestors trudge around in 90-degree weather making such a spectacle in downtown Boston.
The event was organized by a coalition of about 30 area organizations and coincided with the last day of the union’s current contract.
The group is the second in the Boston area to call for longer school days, greater flexibility for administrators when hiring and assigning staff, and stronger teacher evaluations, according to Boston.com. Another group, the “Put Students First Coalition for a 21st Century Contract,” came together last week.
As union leaders know quite well, nothing provokes attention like a good, old-fashioned protest, and we’re excited to see students and parents come together when it matters most – as a new teachers contract is crafted.
Too often, their voices aren’t heard until the contract is approved and the details are set in stone. Boston parents want to be part of the negotiating process, which should be their absolute right.
Good for them for hitting the streets and making some noise. We hope their demands are heard and heeded.
September 2, 2010
Civil rights groups loyal to unions, not black students
How can minority kids escape awful inner-city schools if minority leaders won’t help?
By Steve Gunn
EAG Communications
Civil rights organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition are traditional allies of the national teachers unions.
That’s understandable from a historic perspective, because many union teachers were on the front lines during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s.
Today the organizations remain closely tied as power brokers in the Democratic Party, with the same basic liberal policy goals in mind.
But now the civil rights groups, and the people that run them, are facing a serious dilemma that really shouldn’t be a dilemma at all.
Do they remain in political lockstep with the teachers unions, even though the unions are fighting to preserve policies that keep black kids consigned to miserable inner-city school districts?
When the unions fight the expansion of charter schools, they are fighting black children. When they oppose school vouchers, they are opposing black children. When they insist on trapping a guaranteed clientele of students into horrible inner-city districts, they are trapping black children.
Freeing those children and their families is the civil rights issue of our generation.
Yet almost unbelievably, many traditional civil rights organizations refuse to acknowledge the horrible injustice being done to the youngsters in their own communities. They continue to support the union effort to maintain the failed status quo in public education.
Doesn’t the acronym NAACP stand for “the national association for the advancement of colored people?” Perhaps that group, and others like it, have lost sight of their primary motivation.
Anthony Bradley, an associate professor of theology at King’s College in New York City, recently summed up this outrage in an editorial published in the Detroit News.
“Civil rights groups. . .recently released a joint statement objecting to the Obama administration’s education reform proposal, which includes the closing of failing schools, increasing use of charter schools, and other common-sense moves toward choice and accountability in education,” Bradley wrote.
“Even though there is overwhelming evidence supporting the success of charter schools for children from low income households, the civil rights groups resist the opportunity for parents to exercise freedom to choose those schools.”
Black students, particularly males, are suffering from the “betrayal of teachers unions and civil rights groups that refuse to acknowledge the dignity of low-income parents by blunting their right to choose what is best for their children,” Bradley wrote.
The bottom line, according to Bradley, is this: “As long as teachers unions have influence in the black community, and in institutions pledged to black empowerment, and black parents are not financially empowered to opt out of failing public schools, black males are doomed.”
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“The way urban city school districts fail black males is more disconcerting considering that black professionals are in charge,” Bradley wrote.
He calls for the expansion of charter schools, the closing of underperforming schools, more faith-based education options, mass firings of ineffective teaching staffs, and more home school options.
Bradley is particularly high on charter schools and the success some have had with young black men.
Yet the teachers unions, and their partners in the civil rights movement, continue to fight the momentum of the charter school movement, simply because it threatens the stranglehold that traditional schools, and teachers unions, have on the nation’s public education system.
According to Bradley, the NAACP, National Urban League and Rainbow Push Coalition recently issued a joint statement bashing the Obama administration’s “extensive reliance on charter schools” and the “overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities.”
Meanwhile, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, petitioned the U.S. Department of Education to prevent single-sex charter school options because “the creation of an artificial single-sex environment will ill prepare students for life in the real world.”
On the contrary, perhaps young men of any race are more able to concentrate on their studies without the distraction of young women in the hallways. In his column, Bradley offers several examples of success.
The Eagle Academy in New York City, an all-male charter school comprised primarily of black and Latino students, has a graduation rate of 82 percent, according to Bradley. The Urban Prep Charter Academy in Chicago, another all-male school with mostly black youngsters, had a graduation rate of 100 percent in the Class of 2010, and all 107 black male graduates are headed to college.
How can the unions and their civil rights allies ignore those results?
“Nothing prepares black males for life in the real world like graduation from high school and attending college,” Bradley wrote. “Sadly the NAACP and the NEA have long undermined the push for low-income black parents to exercise freedom to choose the best schools as a national norm.”
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CHARTER DEBATE IN TEXAS
Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA, argued last week that the state of Texas should not invest more education money into buildings for charter schools.
His reasoning? Some charter schools do not produce the desired results.
“If you look at the research for charters, the results are not there,” Van Roekel was quoted as saying in the Dallas Morning News. “We still have many advocates who say it is the silver bullet for what’s wrong in education. But the record shows many of those schools are not delivering for kids.”
Hmmm. Schools not delivering for kids. That’s a topic that Van Roekel ought to know something about. And he admitted that much when he said the following: “We also have public schools that are not delivering for kids, and that is where we need to focus our attention.”
Who says?
First of all, charter schools are public schools, supported with public money. In principle they have as much right to the public dime as traditional public schools.
And if everything is pretty much equal in the failure department, why should one type of public school get more financial assistance than the other?
The answer is parental choice. The people of Texas should be able to determine which schools survive or which fail, based on where they decide to send their children. If there is considerable interest in charter schools in Texas (and it seems obvious there is), then there’s nothing wrong with the state government providing money for those institutions to have better facilities.
Van Roekel seems to be arguing that traditional schools deserve more investment because they were around first. We would argue that charters may be a better investment, because they are relatively new and some are still working the bugs out.
Charters may actually hold more promise for students and taxpayers, because they are less expensive to operate and aren’t burdened by constrictive union work rules.
Traditional public schools have had decade after decade to get their act together, and many still struggle to adequately instruct their students. After so many years, perhaps we can conclude that some of them are a lost cause and deserve extinction.
Perhaps it would be wise for the unions to stop whining about charter schools and focus on making traditional schools more valuable to the public. Then maybe the public won’t be so eager to fund alternatives like charter schools.
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FREE TICKETS FOR THE COMPETENT
Remember the recent Los Angeles Times story that tracked elementary student test scores over a number of years, and rated their various teachers accordingly?
American Federation of Teachers officials were extremely upset with the report, but Bob Bowdon, director of “The Cartel,” thought it was a useful way to inform taxpayers about the effectiveness of their city’s teachers.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he’s offering free tickets to view his hit documentary to any LA teacher who had an “above average effectiveness” rating. The tickets can be redeemed at the film’s screening at the Burbank International Film Festival on Sept. 11.
“The Cartel,” which takes a close look at the ugly state of public education in New Jersey, has won seven awards at various film festivals.
“Now that this data has been made public, we hope businesses all over Southern California will follow suit and offer discounts to LA’s best educators,” Bowdon said.
“Since the Los Angeles teachers union won’t allow merit pay for their highest performing teachers, this is one way we can thank them for their hard work without the (United Teachers Of Los Angeles) permission. This should become a trend.”
It would be interesting to find out how many teachers take pride in their strong performance rating and claim their free tickets.
It’s important that these teachers understand how much they are appreciated by the school reform movement, and how much more society could offer them if their union stopped insisting on protecting the job security of their most ineffective colleagues.
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September 2, 2010
Rhode Island resident Rob Ziegler took time to write in to the Valley Breeze newspaper with his thoughts on the state’s Race to the Top application and rightly called state union leadership out for its resistance to change. Here’s what he had to say:
Union support needed to boost ‘Race to Top’
Congratulations to Commissioner Gist and her team for winning a $75 million grant in the federal Race to the Top competition. Congratulations are also in order for all those who supported the state’s application including: leadership of the General Assembly, 48 school districts and charter schools and most importantly the leadership of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and the Foster and Glocester National Education Association unions.
Union support of the Rhode Island application was a key to the state’s win. Unfortunately the leadership of the NEA and the overwhelming majority of its local unions did not support the state’s application. This failure is just the latest example of the NEA’s resistance to any changes in the way we evaluate and compensate our teachers, which were key elements of the states application.
I have a message for Mr. (Robert) Walsh: Bob, the education reform train has left the station and unless you and other NEA leaders get on board and support Commissioner Gist’s efforts to improve K-12 education, you and your union will become irrelevant.
Bob Ziegler
Bristol
A July 2010 Gallup Poll found that only 34 percent of Americans have trust in the nation’s public school system; that’s down four points from 2009.
Most Americans believe that the public schools are failing the nation’s children. But as a new column from Anthony B. Bradley makes clear, it is black male students who are being hurt the most by inferior public schools.
And sadly, many leaders in the black community are still siding with the national teachers unions and fighting efforts to help minority kids escape failing inner-city schools.
Bradley writes “that only 47 percent of black males graduate from high school on time, compared to 78 percent of white male students.” In urban school districts throughout the nation, the graduation rates for black males get even worse. In New York and Philadelphia, for example, only 28 percent of black male students graduate high school.
But the situation isn’t hopeless. Certain charter schools throughout the country have helped black male students to not only graduate, but to excel.
“This summer, Chicago’s Urban Prep Charter Academy, with a 100 percent graduation rate, graduated a class of 107 black male students, all of whom are attending college in the fall,” Bradley writes. Another all-male charter school in New York “boasts a graduation rate of 82 percent.” Charter school success stories such as these ought to be celebrated by all Americans—but they’re not.
Opponents of charter schools include the usual suspects: the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Oh, their websites say they support charter schools, but read further and it becomes clear they support charter schools only if they can organize their staffs and control them.
But here’s the bigger story: Civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition also oppose the efforts of charter schools. According to Bradley, “Even though there is overwhelming evidence supporting the success of charter schools for children from low-income households, the civil-rights groups resist the opportunity for parents to exercise freedom to choose schools.”
How can this possibly be? It’s just old-fashioned politics.
Civil rights leaders, like most politicians associated with the Democratic Party, know that if they want to get ahead in the party, they need to play nice with the NEA, which has a huge influence on the party and its policies. So-called leaders in the black community are more concerned about their own political power than they are about the future of young black students.
On its website, National Urban League officials write that they “wholeheartedly” support charter schools. Yet a few sentences later, they warn, “While some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs, and should not be considered as the sole useful reform.”
Let’s review, once again, graduation rates for black males in major urban school districts: 34 percent in Atlanta, 27 percent in Detroit, 38 percent in St. Louis, 35 percent in Baltimore, 28 percent in both Philadelphia and New York.
Those numbers reveal an educational catastrophe for black male students, and the National Urban League responds by preaching a “wait and see” approach to charter schools. The only explanation for this is the old saying used for worthless politicians: “They came to do good, and stayed to do well.”
It’s an outrage that there are powerful adults who are willing to sacrifice the well-being of children for their own selfish political interests.
Bradley writes, “As long as teachers unions have influence in the black community and in institutions pledged to black empowerment, and black parents are not financially empowered to opt out of failing public schools, black males are doomed.”
Still, there is one reason for optimism: more and more Americans are coming to the realization that parents everywhere should be allowed to choose where their children attend school. But Americans need to understand that it’s more than just a good idea. It’s the most important civil rights issue of our time.
August 31, 2010
The can of worms opened a couple of weeks ago by the Los Angeles Times will be with us for some time. On August 14th, the Los Angeles Times ran a story called Who is Teaching Our Kids? What they did was this–
* The Times obtained math and English scores for the California Standards Test for the years 2003-2009 under the California Public Records Act.
* They hired Richard Buddin, a senior economist and education researcher at the Rand Corporation, to conduct an analysis of the data.
* The scores were then converted into percentile ratings, dividing them into five equal categories from least effective to most effective.
* The first report, including 6,000 third, fourth and fifth grade teachers, was posted Sunday by the Times on its website.
* The Times has given teachers an opportunity to comment on their ratings.
It is important to note that teacher performance is being measured using the value added technique, which rates teachers “based on their students’ progress on standardized tests year after year. The difference between a student’s expected growth and actual performance is the ‘value’ a teacher adds or subtracts during the year.”
Since publishing the first of many articles, there has been a massive amount of confusion, obfuscation, arguing, complaining, and threatening, with no signs of abating. I will attempt here to clarify the picture.
There are three different questions that need to be addressed.
First is “value added” (VA) a reliable measure? In other words, does it measure what it purports to measure – teacher effectiveness, based on student standardized test scores? There has been much input from statisticians and it would seem that over a period of years that yes, VA is a reliable measure.
Second, if VA is reliable, is it fair to judge teacher effectiveness on the basis of a single standardized test? Most experts say yes, but not as the only measure – other assessments such as principal evaluation during unannounced classroom visits, for example, should be given some weight.
Third, should the LA Times be publishing VA scores so that parents and the general public can see them?
While teachers seem to have mixed feelings about all this, the teachers’ unions do not. The more militant and intransigent National Education Association has been very unyielding and said “no” to all of the above.
The American Federation of Teachers led by Randi Weingarten has been more conciliatory. High visibility Washington D.C., with its tough-as-nails Chancellor Michelle Rhee, has a new contract with AFT local –the Washington Teachers Union, whereby VA counts for part of a teacher’s evaluation. In fact, Ms. Weingarten claims that she has “negotiated 54 contracts in districts where it counted for 10% to 30% of a teacher’s overall review.” However, the AFT President stops short of giving her blessings to the LA Times for publishing teachers’ names. She feels it is cruel, but does agree that parents have a right to see the scores.
A.J. Duffy, president of the local LA teachers union, UTLA, has said very contradictory things about VA. According to the Times, “… Duffy criticized value-added analysis because it depends on standardized test scores that he considers flawed. He said that he wasn’t opposed to principals using it confidentially to give teachers feedback, but that it had no place in a formal evaluation.”
First he says that the scores flawed, but then says principals should use them as feedback for teachers. One has to wonder, if the scores are flawed, why should they be used it at all? He then went to call on teachers to boycott the Times for publishing the names. And according to their website, UTLA is planning a protest at the LA Times building on September 14th after the school day ends.
The bottom line is this. If VA is a reliable measure and that a student score on standardized tests is a fair way to at least partially assess a teacher’s value, why not publish the scores with a caveat that the VA score should be but one part of a teacher’s evaluation? Why shouldn’t parents, whose children’s education is at stake, know something about the effectiveness of someone as important as a teacher? And why shouldn’t taxpayers who pay teachers’ salaries be aware of what bang they are getting for their buck.
At this time, anyone can go online and find out what credentials a teacher in California holds. As such, it seems to make sense that the next step that parents and taxpayers should have access to information that shows how well these credentialed teachers are doing their job.
(I have created a Facebook page that deals with this issue. If you have a Facebook account and would like to get involved, please go here.
August 30, 2010
According to the president of the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, the state of Texas should not spend any more money on charter schools because “the results are not there.”
“You cannot make a case that we ought to invest more money in charter schools based on the research,” Van Roekel told The Dallas Morning News. “We also have public schools that are not delivering for kids, and that is where we need to focus our attention,” he added.
Van Roekel’s reasoning is nearly as flawed as his grasp of the facts . First, charter schools are public schools. Van Roekel knows this; he’s simply trying to scare the public about the nature of charter schools.
Van Roekel claims that since some charter schools aren’t cutting it, the state of Texas should pull the plug on all charter schools—even though Van Roekel acknowledges that some Texas charter schools have been quite successful. Does his suggestion make sense to any reasonable person?
Undoubtedly, there are some bad charter schools, but there is a built-in safety feature for parents and students: a charter school that is failing its students will not have its charter renewed by the state. When was the last time that happened to a bad traditional public school?
So what’s really behind Van Roekel’s attacks on charter schools? It’s simple: most charter schools are not unionized. The NEA is the largest labor union in the country, and its leaders know that their power and influence (and their union dues, of course) will decrease as parents and students continue to flock to charter schools.
If Texas parents are not happy with the results of their local charter school, they can place their children into a better school. But that’s for the parents to decide. Letting Dennis Van Roekel make that decision for them is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
August 27, 2010
August 26, 2010
One union pension bailout could lead to another . . .
Will taxpayers pick up the tab for $1 trillion in teacher pension liabilities?
By Ben Velderman
EAG Communications
WASHINGTON, D. C. - Will the madness ever end?
Just over two weeks ago, Congress passed a $10 billion “Education Jobs Fund” that gave money to cash-strapped states to keep teachers and other school employees on the job.
It was spun as a victory for the kids, but the real winners were the teacher unions, whose members were spared from making salary and benefit concessions to avoid layoffs.
While the teacher unions won a temporary victory, we have to believe that they are paying careful attention to another, bigger prize that’s lurking in the shadows – an expensive federal bailout for private companies with union-negotiated pension plans.
If this latest bailout becomes law, it will mark the first time in American history that tax dollars are used to fund the pension plans of private industries.
In late July, Sen. Dick Durbin (D – IL), the second most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate, announced that he is supporting the “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010.” This proposed bill that would make select labor union pension plans the “obligations of the United States.”
Here’s how it would work: Congress would specifically bail out troubled Multiemployer Pension Plans (MEPPs). These pension plans are used in the transportation, construction, and entertainment industries (among others) in which workers regularly change employers but stay working in the same field.
Instead of having each employer set up a unique pension plan, MEPPs establish a general pension fund that employers fund at a rate determined during collective bargaining sessions with the union. Unlike traditional pension plans that are controlled entirely by the company, the unions help manage the MEPPs.
But they haven’t been managed very well, and the taxpayers could be stuck with the cost of making them whole.
Why would this be of interest to the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers?
A recent study from the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice finds that “teacher pension liabilities for all 50 states now total almost $1 trillion….almost triple the cost of what state officials have on their balance sheets.” The study concludes that these unfunded public burdens “could bankrupt state budgets, including education programs.”
The teachers unions know that their lavish pension plans will result in a financial tsunami for the states. Should this new bailout go through, it will pave the way for a massive bailout for the teacher pensions, the likes of which has never been seen. This is a very big deal.
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Death By A Thousand Cuts
Back to the MEPP bailout.
The MEPP system may work okay when the economy is humming along, but its structural flaws quickly become evident during a recession.
Since the beginning of this current economic downturn, a large number of companies have gone out of business. As a result, fewer employers are paying into the MEPPs, and those employers are having to pay more and more into these pension funds just to keep them afloat. Employers are in danger of death by a thousand cuts.
If the unions were responsible, they would head back to the negotiating table and rework their pension agreements to make them sustainable. But why do that when there’s bailout money to be had? That’s where Congress enters the picture.
The bill supported by Sen. Durbin would take the pension benefits of workers whose companies have gone bankrupt and put them into a separate account. This new account would be administered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a government run insurance fund for pension plans. Currently, when a pension plan goes bust, the PBGC takes it over and uses the insurance premiums paid by its members to cover the costs. But since the PBGC itself is more than $20 billion in debt, that is not a viable solution.
Under this proposed bailout, these new, separate pension accounts (called the “partitioned plan”) would become the “obligations of the United States.” In other words, the multiemployer pension plans would be given a clean bill of health after the taxpayers make them whole. As Yogi Berra might say, “It’s deja vu all over again!”
In testimony before the U.S. Senate, Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi put it this way: “The proposal ultimately makes the taxpayers liable for paying the benefits of the partitioned plan. Currently, no other benefit obligations assumed by the PBGC are subject to the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”
Read that last sentence again and let it sink in. Should this bill pass, unions will realize that no matter how reckless and irresponsible their demands are during a collective bargaining showdown, the U.S. taxpayer will be forced to come to the rescue should their employer go bankrupt.
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“We want ours!”
This proposed bailout needs to clear a few major hurdles before it can become law.
The first hurdle: the American people are sick of bailouts. That’s why supporters are selling this as a jobs bill. They argue that if the taxpayers take responsibility for these pension plans, employers will have money freed up to spend on job creation.
This is the “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” approach to economics: it’s nice and simple, but it has no basis in reality. Adding more debt (which will need to be paid back in the form of higher taxes) is no way to grow the economy. Not even the bill’s supporters believe this. But by labeling something as a “jobs bill” instead of a “bailout,” they hope enough people will be bamboozled into supporting it. Hey, it worked for the teacher unions.
The cost is another major sticking point. Supporters of the bailout argue that it would “only” cost around $10 billion. Here’s how a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters put it: “We’re not asking for trillions of dollars like the banks get. We’re just looking for temporary relief for pensions that lost money in the stock market crash.” Translation: “We want ours!”
The $10 billion price tag for the bailout is laughable. A 2009 analysis by Moody’s Investor Services looked at some of the largest MEPPs in the nation and concluded “that these plans are collectively underfunded by upwards of $165 billion.” Do they not want us to know about the $155 billion? Does anyone really think this bailout would stop at $10 billion? Anyone?
The Senate bill and its counterpart in the U.S. House of Representatives are currently hung up in committee. It looked like the union pension bailout was going nowhere until Sen. Durbin threw his weight behind it. This has fueled speculation that the Senate may try to push this bailout through later this year, after the November elections. Even though there is no appetite among the public for another bailout, organized labor might demand that Congress jam it through.
If that occurs, the two major teacher unions, plagued with their own self-inflicted pension nightmares, won’t be far behind, demanding their piece of the pie.
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MORE INDIANA UNION INSURANCE TROUBLES
Perhaps the Indiana State Teachers Association should get out of the insurance business.
The first clue came last year, when ISTA Trust, the insurance wing of the teachers union, enrolled roughly 30 local school districts into an insurance plan that would allow the districts to recover unused long-term disability premiums.
But the ISTA Trust folks apparently comingled the schools’ dollars with other funds and made bad investments, resulting in the loss of at least $20 million that should be reimbursed to local schools.
Now there’s another ugly tale coming out of Indiana, which makes the ISTA look even worse.
The Metropolitan School District of Pike Township (Indiana) filed a lawsuit last week, accusing the union of fraud, conspiracy and racketeering activities.
The union intentionally fleeced school funds through a prolonged insurance scam, according to claims in the lawsuit that was filed in U.S. District Court. Union officials overrode required prescription drug co-payments for its members and sent inflated, fraudulent invoices to the school district, the lawsuit says.
The ISTA also billed Pike schools to cover benefits for individuals that were not employed by the district and were not eligible for coverage, the lawsuit says.
The union’s conduct, if true, serves as yet another fist in the eye of taxpayers who fund ISTA’s unscrupulous activities, as well as the school districts that rely on the union to administer health benefits.
We at EAG issued a press release earlier today, regarding this troublesome situation.
“The leaders of the Pike Township school corporation have taken a bold stand for taxpayers and should be lauded for it,” EAG Vice President Kyle Olson was quoted as saying. “They appear to have provided the necessary documentation to back up their accusations. EAG encourages other school leaders to look at the lawsuit and the evidence to determine if ISTA has been pulling a fast one on them, as well.
“If so, other school corporations should join Pike Township in its demand for legal action. School corporations must not allow the ISTA to treat them as a money-making machine, and they ought to redouble their efforts to ensure every dollar is being used appropriately.”
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Instead of trying to figure out how to get more money for education, schools across the state are figuring out how to get more education for our money. We should all follow their examples. And while we are at it, we must channel the resources we do have directly to student learning.”
– Tony Bennett, Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, during his innaugural “State of Education” speech Monday.
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August 26, 2010
Will the madness ever stop? Just over two weeks ago, Congress passed a $10 billion “Education Jobs Fund” that gave money to cash-strapped states to keep teachers and other school employees on the job. It was spun as a victory for the kids, but the real winners were the teacher unions who were spared from making any concessions on pay and benefits that are necessary to balancing school budgets.
Once that $10 billion is spent, the structural problems of school spending will still remain. A recent study from the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice finds that “teacher pension liabilities for all 50 states now total almost $1 trillion….almost triple the cost of what state officials have on their balance sheets.” The study concludes that these unfunded public burdens “could bankrupt state budgets including education programs.”
While the teacher unions won a temporary victory, we have to believe that they are paying careful attention to another, bigger bailout that is lurking in the shadows. And this time, there is more at stake than just a few billion dollars. If this latest bailout becomes law, it will mark the first time in American history that tax dollars are used to fund the pension plans of private—unionized—industry.
The teachers unions know that their lavish pension plans will result in a financial tsunami for the states. Should this new bailout go through, it will pave the way for a massive bailout for the teacher unions, the likes of which have never seen. This is a very big deal.
In late July, Sen. Dick Durbin (D – IL), the second most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate, announced that he is supporting the “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010.” This proposed bill that would make certain labor union pension plans the “obligations of the United States.” Put another way, the American taxpayer will be on the hook for financially disastrous pension plans.
Here’s how it would work. Congress would specifically bail out troubled Multiemployer Pension Plans (MEPPs). These pension plans are used in the transportation, construction, and entertainment industries (among others) in which workers regularly change employers but stay working in the same field. Instead of having each employer set up a unique pension plan, MEPPs establish a general pension fund that employers pay in to at a rate determined during collective bargaining sessions with the union. Unlike traditional pension plans that are controlled entirely by the company, the unions help manage the MEPPs.
Death By A Thousand Cuts
The MEPP system may work okay when the economy is humming along, but its structural flaws quickly become evident during a recession. Since the beginning of this current economic downturn, a large number of companies have gone out of business. As a result, fewer employers are paying into the MEPPs, and those employers are having to pay more and more into these pension funds just to keep them afloat. Employers are in danger of death by a thousand cuts.
If the unions were responsible, they would head back to the negotiating table and rework their pension agreements to make them sustainable. But why do that when there’s bailout money to be had?
Here’s where Congress enters the picture. The bill supported by Sen. Durbin would take the pension benefits of workers whose companies have gone bankrupt and put them into a separate account. This new account would be administered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a government run insurance fund for pension plans. Currently, when a pension plan goes bust, the PBGC takes it over and uses the insurance premiums paid by its members to cover the costs. But since the PBGC itself is more than $20 billion in debt, that is not a viable solution.
Under this proposed bailout, these new, separate pension accounts (called the “partitioned plan”) would become the “obligations of the United States.” In other words, the multiemployer pension plans would be given a clean bill of health after the taxpayers make them whole. As Yogi Berra might say, “It’s deja vu all over again!”
In testimony before the U.S. Senate, Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi put it this way: “The proposal ultimately makes the taxpayers liable for paying the benefits of the partitioned plan. Currently, no other benefit obligations assumed by the PBGC are subject to the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”
Read that last sentence again and let it sink in. What’s being proposed by the happy-sounding “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010” is unadulterated socialism. Should this bill pass, unions will know that no matter how reckless and irresponsible their demands are during a collective bargaining showdown, the U.S. taxpayer will be forced to come to the rescue should their employer go bankrupt.
“We want ours!”
This proposed bailout needs to clear a few major hurdles before it can become law. The first hurdle: the American people are sick of bailouts. That’s why supporters are selling this as a jobs bill. They argue that if the taxpayers take responsibility for these pension plans, employers will have money freed up to spend on job creation. This is the “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” approach to economics: it’s nice and simple, but it has no basis in reality. Adding more debt (which will need to be paid back in the form of higher taxes) is no way to grow the economy. Not even the bill’s supporters believe this. But by labeling something as a “jobs bill” instead of a “bailout,” they hope enough people will be bamboozled into supporting it. Hey, it worked for the teacher unions.
The cost is another major sticking point. Supporters of the bailout argue that it would “only” cost around $10 billion. Here’s how a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters put it: “We’re not asking for trillions of dollars like the banks get. We’re just looking for temporary relief for pensions that lost money in the stock market crash.” Translation: “We want ours!”
The $10 billion price tag for the bailout is laughable. A 2009 analysis by Moody’s Investor Services looked at some of the largest MEPPs in the nation and concluded “that these plans are collectively underfunded by upwards of $165 billion.” What’s going to happen to the other $155 billion? Does anyone really think this bailout would stop at $10 billion? Anyone?
The Senate bill and its counterpart in the House of Representatives are currently hung up in committee. It looked like the union pension bailout was going nowhere until Sen. Durbin threw his weight behind it. This has fueled speculation that the Senate may try to push this bailout through later this year, after the November elections. Even though there is no appetite among the public for another bailout, organized labor might demand that Congress jam it through. Big Labor is already upset that their friends in Congress have not passed “Card Check” legislation which would do away with secret ballots when employees are deciding whether or not to join a union.
If this bailout fails to get through this year, rest assured the idea isn’t going away. The unions can’t afford to let this issue go away – there’s too much money and power at stake. It’s true they could get by with less, but that’s simply not the union way.
There’s a scene in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in which the duo is being relentlessly pursued by a posse. Exhausted and exasperated, Cassidy wonders aloud, “Who are those guys?”
That’s how the American taxpayer must feel about those continually seeking bailouts. In this case, the pursuers are from Big Labor. And you can bet they will soon be joined by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
August 19, 2010
Teachers union fights transparency and accountability in LA
Unions should realize that their tantrums are a turn-off for the public
By Steve Gunn
EAG Communications
LOS ANGELES - Accountability is a dirty word for teachers unions.
They believe it’s unfair to hold their members responsible for the outcome of their work, which is student progress.
And they get really angry when taxpayers - the people who are paying the teachers - are allowed to find out how well the teachers are teaching.
After all, citizens simply pay for public schools. How dare they expect to see the results of their investment!
The Los Angeles Times caused a major stir last week when it published a story based on a detailed study of teacher performance in that city’s school district.
The newspaper published the names of more than 6,000 elementary teachers and the standardized test scores of students in their classes over the course of seven years.
The study was conducted as a simple measure of teacher effectiveness, something parents and taxpayers - and the unions themselves - should clearly be concerned about.
It found large disparities in test scores for students of various teachers, indicating that some teachers are far more effective than others.
The release of the study prompted a major hissy fit from union officials at the local and national level.
United Teachers Los Angeles responded to the article by announcing plans to organize a mass boycott of the newspaper, with teachers and others in the labor movement encouraged to cancel subscriptions.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, got into the fray by suggesting that teacher perfomance is a private matter and doesn’t belong in the newspaper. She argued that standardized test scores should only be available to teachers, administrators and individual parents, and not the community at large.
Weingarten even asked the editors of the Times to keep the story out of the newspaper.
”Teachers look at this as a hammer, a sledgehammer, and they’re scared about it,” Weingarten was quoted as saying in the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader. “They’re school teachers. They’re private individuals. They’re not public figures. And they just woke up one day and 6,000 names were going to be in the newspaper.”
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They work for the public, Randi
We’ve got some news for Ms. Weingarten.
Public school teachers are public employees, living off the public dime, so therefore they are indeed public figures. Their performance determines how well the children of a community are educated.
Yet Weingarten somehow believes that this is not the public’s business?
Get real.
In case Weingarten has not noticed, the public has become increasingly concerned with the state of education in this country. Our students are falling far behind their peers in other nations, a fact that’s making people wonder if union domination of the public education system is really working.
If teachers don’t want to be held up to public scrutiny, they should go work in the private sector. As long as we’re paying them, we have an absolute right to know how well they are performing.
Public knowledge of teacher performance is particularly important in cities like Los Angeles, which is home to one of the nation’s worst public school systems. If the public is not allowed to know what’s wrong in the district, how are the problems ever going to be fixed?
Besides, it’s not as though the school district can do much about underperforming teachers. That’s because tenure “due process” rules force districts to spend a fortune to try to fire them.
According to L.A. Weekly, the district spent $3.5 million over the past 10 years trying to fire a mere seven teachers for poor performance. Only four were fired, two were paid large settlements and one was reinstated.
On top of all of this, we believe it would be wise for Weingarten and the United Teachers Los Angeles to consider the repercussions of their public tantrums, particularly when they defend bad teachers.
Imagine being a parent in Los Angeles and reading about the large disparities in test scores for students of different teachers. That parent might expect the union to react with concern, and a pledge to help address this obvious problem.
Instead the parent learns that the union wants to boycott the newspaper, because the newspaper is keeping citizens informed.
That parent is likely to start viewing the union as an enemy in the battle to educate their children, rather than an ally. Is that really the impression that Weingarten and UTLA wants to leave with the people who generate their salaries?
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SHIRT THROWERS IN ESCONDIDO
Public relations are clearly a challenge for teachers unions, probably because they’ve been shielded from the cleansing light of public scrutiny for so long.
It’s just like spoiling a child for the first 10 years of life, then suddenly expecting that child to behave responsibly. The predictable result is a loud temper tantrum, which is exactly what we’re getting from the teachers unions.
Sometimes the tantrums are downright hilarious.
A few months ago, union teachers in Escondido, California reacted to a proposal to trim their salaries for two years by taking off their shirts and laying them at the feet of stunned school board members at a public meeting.
Luckily, it appears that the shirt-shedding teachers were wearing other garments to cover their skin. Otherwise a silly protest might have turned rather unsightly. Photos of the protest clearly indicate that the participants are not undernourished.
”It seems to reason that the next item you want is the shirt off our backs,” union president Romero Maratea told the board before taking off his shirt.
Other teachers took their shirts off before the meeting, put them in a box and placed them before the board, according to the North County Times - Californian. Some audience members threw shirts at the board, the newspaper said.
What an impressive display of concern for the district’s financial plight. We’re certain that the residents of the district noticed that the teachers were acting more juvenile than the children they instruct.
Union temper tantrums come in other forms, as well.
The Indiana Department of Education has issued a list of underperforming schools that could eventually be taken over by the state. The South Bend district has three of those schools.
To prevent a takover, state officials want school districts to sign a “memorandum of agreeement,” which outlines steps the districts can take to improve academics and avoid a takeover.
One step is making teacher assignments without regard to seniority. That obviously upset the South Bend teachers union, which threatened to file a lawsuit against the school board if it signed the memorandum.
Fearing litigation would zap district savings and create hostility with the union, the superintendent recommended against signing.
“There’s no guarantee that the state won’t take over (the three schools) if we don’t sign the MOA,” Superintendent James Kapsa told a local television station. “There’s no guarantee that the state won’t come in if we do sign the MOA. But there is a guarantee for litigation and we don’t want that. We want to use our money - what little we have - for kids and programs and education, rather than in the courts.”
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PUTTING VIAGRA FIRST
The “Boneheaded PR Move of the Year” award has to go to the Milwaukee teachers union.
The Milwaukee school board is battling a huge budget deficit, while still trying to offer students some sort of quality education.
But the union has been putting up as much resistance as possible.
A few months ago the union rejected a school board proposal to change health insurance carriers, a move that would have saved millions and kept many younger teachers on the job.
Then last week we heard that the union is suing the district so Viagra, the male sexual stimulus drug, will be covered by employee insurance. The annual cost to the district would be approximately $786,000, according to published reports.
Luckily several major media outlets picked up this story and let everyone know how incredibly self-serving this local union is being.
How do union officials expect the public to be on their side when they literally want to steal money from school kids to pay for their sexual kicks?
It’s gotten to the point where those of us in the school reform movement don’t have to publicize the selfish behavior of the unions, because they do that themselves.
But we still couldn’t resist the temptation to issue a press release regarding this bizarre tale.
“Milwaukee union leaders think teachers should be held harmless when it comes to concessions, and they would very much like us to pay for their recreational sex drugs, as well,” EAG Vice President Kyle Olson was quoted as saying. “If this pathetic situation doesn’t tell us something about the twisted priorities of teachers unions, nothing will.”
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OLSON SHARES VIEWS ON TV
Olson was a guest on two national television news programs last week, addressing education issues.
On Aug. 9 he appeared on the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” discussing the pending passage of the teachers union bailout bill in Congress.
On Aug. 13 he appeared on the popular “Fox and Friends” morning program on the same network. He discussed the fact that four states are scheduled to receive money from the teachers union bailout legislation, even though they had few, if any, teacher layoffs.
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