The impulsive decision of an Indianapolis public schools spokeswoman to eject two filmmakers from a public school budget meeting last week, and an Indianapolis Star reporter’s role in this potentially illegal act, must be investigated.            

     Education Action Group Foundation Vice President Kyle Olson and a cameraman were forced to leave George Washington High School March 24 during a “public meeting” on the district’s budget problems.

     Olson and cameraman Don VanderKooi attended to film a segment for an upcoming EAGF documentary on public education in the Midwest. The men signed in, set up their camera equipment and quietly recorded for roughly 40 minutes when something funny happened.

     Indianapolis Star education reporter Andy Gammill briefly chatted with Olson before heading across the room to whisper into the ear of Mary Louise Bewley, the district’s school/ community relations director.

     We aren’t sure exactly what Gammill said, but judging by Bewley’s facial expressions on the video footage, it wasn’t good.  Within 30 seconds of Gammill’s whisperings, Bewley called our crew to the hallway and forced them to leave by police escort because she believed the video recording was for “disingenuous purposes.”

     EAGF has since filed a formal complaint with the Indiana Public Access Counselor for possible violations of the Indiana Open Door Law.

     Bewley’s questionable behavior should concern any resident that values transparency in government. When a school official picks and chooses who can attend public meetings, the public’s right to know begins to circle the drain.

     Some have already started to argue about how the technical aspects of the state’s Open Door Law apply to this situation. They wonder if enough school board members were in attendance to define the meeting as officially “public.”

     But we believe that a focus on these trivial details only distracts from the bigger, more important question. IPS called a “public meeting” to discuss school finances, and invited the public to attend. Even IPS Assistant Superintendent Dr. Willie Giles told EAGF the meeting was open, with no special requirements to attend.

     Perhaps just as troubling as the public access issue is Gammill’s self-appointed role as meeting monitor.

     It seems quite clear that Gammill had a hand in nudging Bewley along, or even persuading her to take action against an organization that has been critical of the state’s teachers unions. We hope that the Indianapolis Star’s readers take his future reports with a grain of salt. We certainly will.

As one who has butted heads with teachers’ unions for some time now, I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from a producer a few months ago, who asked me to come to New York on March 16th to participate in a debate. Intelligence Squared hosts monthly debates on a wide range of topics and this one was clumsily named, “Do Not Blame the Teachers Unions for Our Failing Schools.” In other words, if you think the unions are to blame, you would vote against the motion. (By the way, our team made it very clear that the teachers unions are not the only cause of failing schools.

Each of the 500 or so attendees at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University got to vote their pre-debate opinion electronically before the debate and then voted again after it was over. The winner was determined by the team that got the most people to change their vote. Here are the results:

Before the debate After the debate
For the motion - 24% For the motion – 25%
Undecided – 33% Undecided – 7%
Against the motion – 43% Against the motion – 68%

Assuming both the pro-union folks and anti-union folks stayed put, the numbers tell quite a story. Of the “undecideds” – a few stayed undecided, but just about 95% came over to the anti-union side.

To put it into simply, the pro-union side got clobbered. The teacher and the superintendent on the union team were nice enough folks who apparently have some good union folks they deal with. They told some nice stories. They seemed very earnest. They sounded silly a couple of times, but nothing too egregious. And then there was Randi.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a former teacher, filled out the pro-union team. It boggles the mind that the best this union leader could do was trot out shibboleths followed by half-truths which preceded rambling non sequitors.

Our team consisted of Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education, Terry Moe, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a member of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and me. All we had to do was remind the other team of the facts. We used logic, data, and dramatic real world examples, all the while focusing on the big picture. While I was anticipating some brilliant points or arcane facts that our team wouldn’t be able to handle, the debate never came close to that scenario.

I saw up close and personal what I have always felt — that the teachers’ unions are running on empty. The emperor is naked as a jaybird. Not only don’t they have anything to offer in the way of true education reform, they are the greatest impediment we have to ed reform. All the lofty words from teacher union presidents over the years about higher quality schools, teacher accountability, investing in education, etc. are nothing but empty rhetoric meant to lead the press and the public to believe that they really give a damn about children.

Well, folks, the jig is up. Mainstream media stalwarts as the NY Times, LA Times and the Washington Post have turned against the unions. And just a week before the debate, Evan Thomas wrote a scathing cover story in Newsweek about the inability to fire bad teachers, a problem he correctly lays at the feet of the teachers’ unions. And if the audience at NYU and several polls are indicative, the unions have lost the general public also.

Reducing the power of these very rich and powerful organizations will be a long political struggle, but I can’t help but believe that we have turned an important corner and that the teachers’ unions are now in defense mode. On March 16th, Randi Weingarten et al had a chance to make a statement. They failed miserably.

The debate can be seen in its entirety at http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/dont-blame-teachers-unions-for-our-failing-schools/ A transcript of the debate can be accessed from the same page.

     Teachers in Dover, Pennsylvania could soon walk off the job because local union officials are not satisfied with the size of raise or length of contract offered by the Dover Area School District.

     Officials representing the National Education Association’s local affiliate want the Dover school district to commit to a five-year contract which includes a 5 percent annual raise for its educators, the York Dispatch reports.

     The district is offering a three-year contract with a 3 percent annual raise. The two sides also are at odds over work hours and medical co-pay costs.

     We believe the threat of a teachers strike further illustrates the NEA’s growing disconnect from the communities it serves, especially considering that Dover’s teachers average $10,000 more per year than the area’s average household income, according to 2000 census information.

     The Dover teachers union also fails to realize that most schools across the nation currently are offering a 1 percent raise, or none at all, due to difficult financial times. The union should consider itself lucky its district is even considering a 3 percent pay hike.

     The strike threat comes after a fact finding session that was essentially meaningless because the school district’s negotiation team refused to accept the mediator’s findings.

     We certainly understand why. More often than not, the structure of the mediation process is stacked against the school system, and the findings typically lean the union’s way.

     Union leadership nonetheless plowed forward and took a vote from its members on the worthless report. The result? Near unanimous approval. Go figure.

     The union then issued a statement about the possible strike in a passive-aggressive attempt to shift full responsibility for its child-like behavior onto the school board.

     “It is the belief … that this contract could have and still can be settled without any such job action taking place,” union officials said in the statement quoted by the Dispatch.

     We say nice try NEA, but no dice.

     It’s our hope that the Dover school board stands up for its students and refuses to allow its teachers union to control negotiations with its typical tactics. A strike would only further emphasize that the NEA’s prime objectives are focused much more on leaching money from the public coffers, then educating the future leaders of our country.

     We trust that district’s students and concerned parents will learn that lesson quickly if they see their teachers on the picket line.

     Recent testimony before the U.S. Senate education committee shows that American students continue to slip farther behind their peers in other developed countries, and suggests the path to reverse that trend lies in the charter school model.

     The news comes as the Senate committee is considering a rewrite of the federal policy governing public schools, known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. We believe the sobering statistics are further evidence that our nation’s teachers unions continue to stand in the way of educational progress. We hope the senators on the education committee understand that, as well.

     Of the world’s 30 richest countries, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey and Mexico graduate fewer students from high school and college than the United States, where roughly seven in 10 students receive a high school diploma, according to Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, one of the world’s foremost experts on comparing national school systems.

     Canadian 15-year-olds typically are more than a full school year ahead of their American counterparts,  the New York Times reports.

     “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” Schleicher said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.”

     We’re not exactly surprised by that assessment.

     For decades, the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have gone to great lengths to hamstring education officials with teacher tenure provisions, mandatory raises, archaic and ineffective teacher evaluations and countless other bureaucratic barriers to real education reform.

     Charter schools, meanwhile, are absorbing the mass exodus from the crumbling public education system, and producing well-educated, successful graduates. The key to their success, of course, is that charters demand much more accountability from their teachers, and are free to rid themselves of poor performers without the arduous “due process” imposed by the union.

     President Obama’s federal “Race to the Top” competition is one of the most ambitious plans in U.S. history to change sagging public school fortunes by essentially bribing states into adopting many of the reforms inherent in the charter school model. It also pushes states to turn around their lowest performing school districts, by imposing control over the failed schools.

     In ways, RTTT gives state education leaders the authority to buck the teachers unions and push forward with a more effective education model, with or without their cooperation. Unfortunately many states have included  the unions in their RTTT application process, which has watered down the reforms that were meant to improve schools.

     Let’s just hope the sobering international statistics are enough to persuade the Senate committee to impose education regulations that put students first and union concerns at the bottom of the list.

It is perhaps well known to some that the public employee unions donate aggressively to Political Action Committees – especially those PACs that will help keep the public employee gravy train in good working order. Ed Lasky at American Thinker has written an article - http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/public_sector_unions_and_their.html - that spells things out quite clearly. The numbers he uses come from the Center for Responsive Politics - http://www.opensecrets.org/ - a research group which tracks money that flows into in U.S. politics.

As a former teacher, I am always curious to see where the two national teachers unions, the National Educational Association and the American Federation of Teachers, fit into this picture. Well, if you combine the dollar amount of the two organizations’ donations, they become #1 in the country – teachers unions have spent over $56 million their members’ dues on PACs in the past 12 years.

And just who are the recipients of teachers unions’ largess? Between 1998 and 2010, the NEA gave only 6% of its $30+ million to Republicans. And they are downright fair-minded compared to their junior partner in crime - the AFT. The latter gave a whopping 0% to Republicans. (98% went to Dems; the missing 2% went to “other.”) For organizations that claim to represent all teachers, this is a bad joke. They have never represented Republicans, and thanks to the availability of these statistics, we can all see that. Teachers can actually do something about this reprehensible situation, but that is a discussion for another day.

     Los Angeles students in 30 failing public schools can expect much of the same, inadequate instruction they have for years thanks to its weak-kneed school board and political pressure from the local teachers union.

     The school board recently voted in the interest of the United Teachers Los Angeles union to turn 30 “chronically underperforming” schools over to a conglomeration of nonprofit education groups, most of which are formed by the very teachers and administrators who already work in the buildings.

     We are baffled by the decision, to say the least. How exactly can the same teachers and administrators who drove these schools into the ground be expected to turn them around?

     They’ve had their chance for years. They failed.

     The sad part is that the school board was heading in the right direction with a plan for nontraditional school operators to take over about a third of its 800 schools. About 160 of those schools have been transformed.

     So what gives?

     “I think it was completely political pressure,” said Lauren Carter, spokeswoman for ICEF Public Schools, one of the private management firms that were recommended by the LA superintendent to revive the schools.

     “They weren’t making decisions on behalf of the kids. These were adult-based decisions, not what was best of children,” Carter said.

     Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called the action a “terrible blow to reform” and accused the school board of “trying to protect a failed status quo.”

     We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. After all, that seems to be what the nation’s teachers unions do best.

     Hopefully the public backlash from the board’s decision, and the obvious self-serving agenda of the UTLA will gain enough media coverage to give other school leaders pause before deciding to sentence their kids the more of the same.

     The Grand Rapids, Mich. school board is set to discuss the state’s school funding crisis Thursday as radical socialists take to the streets across the country to demand higher taxes for the nation’s struggling education system.

     Both of the events push for more tax dollars to support a school system that has failed students for decades, and serve as a slap in the face to concerned citizens focused on fixing the problem.

     Tomorrow, the Grand Rapids school board will host a “Community Forum on School Funding, Taxes and the State’s Structural Deficit” featuring Charles Ballard, economics professor at Michigan State University, and noted union apologist.

     Ballard released a union-funded “scholarly report” last fall during the state budget debate in Lansing which defended the state unionized workers’ lofty salaries and benefit packages that have plagued Michigan’s budget for years.  He was paid to write the report by the Service Employees International Union and the United Auto Workers.

     We fully expect Ballard to stick to the union line, and attempt to convince the Grand Rapids community to pony up more tax dollars for automatic raises and overpriced insurance for the city’s unionized teachers.  Ballard’s shtick likely will not address burdensome labor costs or union rules that are bleeding Grand Rapids schools to death.

     Ballard’s tax more, spend more mentality will also be echoed by protesters in Lansing and other states tomorrow as part of a “National Day of Action to Support Public Education,” led by radical socialist groups like Michigan’s By Any Means Necessary and North Carolina-based Destroy Industry.

     Is it a coincidence? Perhaps, but we highly doubt it.

     There is one problem, though. Michigan taxpayers are growing tired of the union’s racket.

     House Speaker Andy Dillon, D-Redford Township, made it clear at the Michigan Negotiator’s Association spring conference last week that he simply doesn’t have the votes in his caucus to raise taxes.  So a focus on generating more tax revenue to fix Michigan’s education funding crisis is misguided at best.

     School officials across the country are quickly realizing the stress that outlandish labor costs are putting on local school budgets, and are seeking common-sense contract concessions and reforms from their teachers unions in record numbers.

     Voters in Benton Harbor, Mich. recently supported their school board members’ decision to privatize services, by quashing a union-led recall effort over the decision.

     Central Falls, RI school superintendent Frances Gallo is being praised by her community and national education officials for standing up to her local teachers union. She fired the entire high school teaching staff after the union refused to commit to long overdue reforms needed to turn the chronically failing school around.

     The tides are changing, so why does the Grand Rapids school board seem to be left on the beach?

     Perhaps that’s a question Mr. Ballard could answer, because we certainly can’t find a good reason.

     If the Grand Rapids school board is truly concerned with the financial condition of the school district, it wouldn’t invite a union droid to advocate for the same old, same old. The board would be much better served by a roundtable of local business leaders familiar with successfully weathering rough financial times.

     Until the board decides to get tough with its very militant local teachers union to implement serious cost cutting and spending reform solutions, it will continue to do the same thing while expecting different results.

     And many believe that’s the definition of insanity.