Dear Colleague,
We recently sent you a brief (about 3 minutes of your time)
Survey Monkey questionnaire which deals with the Common Core State Standards.
If you are currently a K-12 teacher and haven’t filled it out yet, please go to
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VVFRHQC and do so now. Thanks. We would like to have an
idea where our independent teachers come down on this very controversial issue.
To see a reasonably balanced view on CCSS, please watch “Building the Machine.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01jc)
The June 3rd primary is right around the corner,
and among other things you have choice as to who to vote for in the race for Superintendent
of Public Instruction. All three candidates’ statements can be found here - http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/candidates/superintendent.htm
For more information, you can visit their websites, which are linked in the
voter guide.
Happy with your salary? Do you think you are being paid
fairly for the work that you do? The National Council on Teacher Quality doesn’t
answer those questions, but in a recent report examines teachers’ salaries in
other parts of the country. Additionally, the study looks at more than just a
pure dollar amount.
Adding
a bit more context to this discussion, we looked at housing affordability for
teachers. After all, if a district is near the top of the list of highest
paying districts and their teachers cannot afford housing in the area, that's
indicative of unequal purchasing power between high and low cost-of-living
districts.
In
order to look at housing affordability, we created the "Teacher Housing
Affordability Index." We used the American Community Survey's 5-year
estimates for median housing values from 2008-2012 by school district
geographic area to estimate housing prices. Dividing a teacher's annual salary
by the median home value produced the affordability index. We've identified
housing as "affordable" when the annual teacher's salary is greater
than one-third of median home value.
To learn more, go to http://www.nctq.org/commentary/viewStory.do?id=33847
In the last month, there has been much news coming out of
Modesto, where the local teachers union voted whether or not to disaffiliate
from CTA/NEA and become a “local only” union. (http://www.modbee.com/2014/04/15/3294453/modesto-teachers-to-meet-as-vote.html)
The
MTA leadership proposed leaving its state affiliate after CTA found the local
was out of compliance in spending a $280,000 annual grant. The local has
received the grant through the CTA for decades to pay for office staff: a
full-time executive director and a secretary.
Here’s
the hitch: The MTA does not directly employ its executive director. Instead,
for 22 years, it has paid the Modesto district to keep a former teacher on its
payroll. The arrangement has allowed the individual to continue to accrue
retirement credit under the California State Teachers Retirement System, better
known as CalSTRS. For 22 years, the local has thereby violated the conditions
of the grant, according to the CTA.
Right
before the election, the CTA board of
directors decided that Modesto’s plan to abide by the will of the voting
majority, instead of two-thirds of the entire bargaining unit, made the
election “unlawful.” They voted to place the local under state trusteeship, and sent two trustees after business
hours to take control of its offices and bank accounts. (http://www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2014/05/05/breaking-california-teachers-association-seizes-modesto-local/) But
the MTA officers were prepared and the police were called. In any event, the
vote went forth and by a 58-40 margin, the MTA members decided to stay with
CTA/NEA. (http://www.modbee.com/2014/05/07/3328610/modesto-teachers-association-nullifies.html)
On a similar note, education writer
RiShawn Biddle claims that “Teachers unions are getting desperate.” (http://rare.us/story/teachers-unions-are-getting-desperate/ ) He
writes that teachers
…
are none too fond of the profligate spending by both unions on matters that
have nothing to do with contract bargaining and addressing workplace
grievances. Political spending and union overhead costs (including 369
employees earning six-figure sums) accounted for 64 percent of NEA’s $343
million in spending in 2013. Just 13 percent of the union’s spending went to
collective bargaining and other so-called representational activities.
Younger
teachers, who now make up the majority of rank-and-file members, are unhappy
that the NEA and AFT ignore their concerns, including its support of last
hired-first fired layoff rules that put them on unemployment lines while
keeping veteran teachers on payrolls. Their desire for professional
associations that focus more on helping them improve the profession puts them
in direct conflict with the industrial union model that the NEA and AFT have
long embraced.
Between
the defections and membership losses and decline in political clout, the
question for the NEA and AFT is not if they will go out of business, but when.
And speaking of unions, George Parker, former president of
the Washington (D.C.) Teachers Union has done a 180 and joined with Michelle
Rhee’s StudentsFirst. I urge you to watch this brief video in which he details
the reason for his rather dramatic “conversion.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUnjf0PikNs&feature=youtu.be)
University of Arkansas
researcher Patrick Wolf has come out with an in-depth study, the results of
which show that charters are funded at much lower levels than traditional
public schools across the country.
Since public
charter schools are becoming increasingly politically popular and therefore
common in the U.S., we might expect that they would be funded at levels
comparable to traditional public schools. After all, they are public schools,
too. We would be mistaken. The research team systematically collected and
reviewed audited financial statements from the 2010-11 school year for the 30
states and the District of Columbia with substantial charter school
populations. We carefully tracked all the revenues committed to public charter
and traditional public schools from every source, public and private. We
identified a funding gap of 28.4 percent, meaning that the average public
charter school student in the U.S. is receiving $3,814 less in funding than the
average traditional public school student. Since the average charter school
enrolls 400 students, the average public charter school in the U.S. received
$1,525,600 less in per-pupil funding in 2010-11 than it would have received if
it had been a traditional public school. The gap is actually higher in focus
areas within states where charter schools are more commonly found, such as
major cities.
To download the report, go to http://www.uaedreform.org/charter-funding-inequity-expands/ To see
the data for California, go here - http://www.uaedreform.org/wp-content/uploads/charter-funding-inequity-expands-ca.pdf
On the subject of
charters, CTA is up to its old tricks – trying to do them in. Their latest
gambit is AB 1351 (http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1531) which
would “require that the initial chartering authority appoint a majority of the
members of the board of directors” of a charter school. Lance Izumi, Director
of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, writes:
If charter-school
organizers know that local school boards have the power to pass final judgment
on who sits on their governing boards, they will be less likely to nominate
people who possess talent, vision and commitment, but who are not likely to be
confirmed by the local school board. Only people politically palatable to the
school board will likely be nominated. There will be a chilling effect on the
variety of people put forward to serve on charter-school governing boards, with
the result that governing boards would end up becoming extensions of the school
board.
In other words,
charter schools would not be charter schools as we have known them. To read the
rest of Izumi’s op-ed go to http://www.flashreport.org/blog/2014/05/01/cta-attacking-charter-schools-again/
As always, we
at CTEN want to thank you for your ongoing support. Please visit us regularly
at www.ctenhome.org We do our best to keep our website up-to-date,
but if you need any information that you can’t find there, please send an email
to cteninfo@ctenhome.org or call us at 888-290-8471 and we will
get back to you in short order.
Sincerely,
Larry Sand
CTEN President
