Called on the Carpet

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

The Logic Behind the Teachers’ Union

Hitler Reacts to Wisconsin Recall

Walker’s Policies Are Working

From the Weekly Standard:

Emily Koczela had been anxiously waiting for months for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill to take effect. Koczela, the finance director for the Brown Deer school district, had been negotiating with the local union, trying to get it to accept concessions in order to make up for a $1 million budget shortfall. But the union wouldn’t budge.

“We laid off 27 [teachers] as a precautionary measure,” Koczela told me. “They were crying. Some of these people are my friends.”

On June 29 at 12:01 a.m., Koczela could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The budget repair bill​—​delayed for months by protests, runaway state senators, and a legal challenge that made its way to the state’s supreme court​—​was law. The 27 teachers on the chopping block were spared.

With “collective bargaining rights” limited to wages, Koczela was able to change the teachers’ benefits package to fill the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plan​—​such as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)​—​saved $200,000. Upping the workload from five classes, a study hall, and two prep periods to six classes and two prep periods saved another $200,000. The budget was balanced.

“Everything we changed didn’t touch the children,” Koczela said. Under a collective bargaining agreement, she continued, “We could never have negotiated that​—​never ever.” Koczela, a graduate of Smith College and Duke University Law School, is no Republican flack. She says she’s a “classic Wisconsin independent. I vote both parties. I voted for Senator [Russ] Feingold but I voted for [Republican state] Senator Alberta Darling too.”

In Brown Deer and school districts across the state, Walker’s budget repair bill, known as Act 10, is working just as he promised. To make up for a $2.8 billion deficit without raising taxes, state aid to school districts (the largest budget line) was reduced by $830 million. Act 10, Walker said, would give districts “the tools” needed to make up for the lost money as fairly as possible.

But union leaders argued that the fight over the budget repair bill had nothing to do with balancing budgets. It was all about stripping public employees of their “collective bargaining rights.”

“We have said all along that this isn’t about pay and benefits,” Mary Bell, president of the state’s teachers’ union, said in February. “We are prepared to implement the financial concessions proposed to help our state in these tough times. But .  .  . we will not be denied our right to collectively bargain.”

Acceding, at least rhetorically, to higher benefit contributions​—​5.8 percent of salary for pension (up from nothing) and 12.6 percent of health care premiums​—​looked like a smart tactic. It made teachers seem reasonable and focused the fight on collective bargaining “rights.”

What few people may have understood, though, is that these are “rights” that most people, including federal employees, don’t have. But Americans don’t like taking away anybody’s rights. The polls in Wisconsin showed voters overwhelmingly opposed to “weakening” or “stripping” or “eliminating” collective bargaining rights. President Obama called the bill an “assault on unions.” Democratic state senator Lena Taylor compared Scott Walker to Hitler.

But as the abstract debate over collective bargaining collides with reality, it is becoming clear just how big a lie the Big Labor line was. Now that the law is in effect, where are the horror stories of massive layoffs and schools shutting down? They don’t exist​—​except in a couple of districts where collective bargaining agreements, inked before the budget repair bill was introduced, remain in effect.

In Milwaukee, nine schools are shutting and 354 teachers have been fired due to a drop in state funding and the end of federal stimulus funding. But if teachers there agreed to the 5.8 percent pension contribution, the school district says it would rehire 200 of those teachers. (Other changes could offset the rest of the layoffs.)

Despite the promise from Mary Bell that all teachers would contribute something toward their pensions, Milwaukee teachers’ union president Bob Peterson won’t agree to the change. In doing so he’s made it clear that “collective bargaining rights” is code for “union veto power.”

“You have a choice: layoffs or pension contributions. Do you see that choice?” a local Fox News reporter asked Peterson. “Why did you make a choice of layoffs?”

“I didn’t lay off anybody,” Peterson replied. He thinks Milwaukee teachers have conceded enough and blames Walker’s budget cuts for the layoffs. But a year ago​—​before Walker was elected and when Democrats controlled all branches of government​—​there were also layoffs.

Given the choice between fewer benefits and layoffs, the Milwaukee teachers’ union chose the latter. In 2010, 482 teachers, including Megan Sampson, a young educator named an “outstanding first year teacher” by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English, got the axe. CNN reports that this year “Milwaukee teachers are offering meals and moral support to 354 fellow educators who will be laid off.” Meals and moral support? The union’s got your back. A job? Not so much.

The only other district seeing such massive layoffs is Kenosha, where 212 teachers will be fired this year. “Kenosha is in the same boat as [Milwaukee], with a collective bargaining agreement signed before Walker took office that lasts until June 30, 2013,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on July 16. “But most other Wisconsin districts have avoided layoffs and massive cuts to programs.”

One striking feature of Walker’s budget repair bill is the flexibility it has given school districts to balance their budgets. For example, things are looking up in the tiny town of Pittsville in the heart of the state, where the district balanced its budget mostly through increased pension contributions and not replacing four retiring teachers.

“We didn’t change anything in our health care at all,” Superintendent Terry Reynolds told me. “If Act 10 hadn’t passed,” he said, “I don’t think the teachers’ union would have wanted to approve the 5.8 percent contribution” to pensions. “That would have been a hard battle to fight. I’m not sure we would have saved dollars there.” Enough money was freed up that Pittsville property taxes will decrease by 9 percent next year.

While class sizes increased slightly in Pittsville, they’re going down in the Kaukauna school district, where the school board used the budget repair bill to turn a $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. In addition to the 5.8 percent pension contribution, the board pared back personal days from ten to five, increased the deductible for a family health insurance plan from $250 to $500, and required middle school and high school teachers to teach six classes instead of five. Any or all of these changes could have been vetoed by the union under a collective bargaining agreement.

The reforms will allow Kaukauna to spend $300,000 in merit pay for teachers next year and offer more Advanced Placement classes and languages like Chinese or Arabic in the future, according to board president Todd Arnoldussen. Bringing down class sizes “was a win for the kids and a win for everybody,” he told me.

But as Patrick Meyer, the head union negotiator in Kaukauna, says in a video, “morale has been terrible” in the district. Might teachers be spread too thin now? “Elementary teachers already teach seven hours a day,” says Arnoldussen. “That’s a horrible argument. I mean, come on. Six classes at 50 minutes.”

If morale is down, interest in teaching at Kaukauna isn’t. An opening for an elementary teacher attracted “over 500 applicants,” says Arnoldussen. “So you obviously have a huge amount of people that really want to work for Kaukauna .  .  . under our noncollective bargaining agreement.”

Just three weeks after Walker’s budget went into effect, its sweeping success is already apparent. But will it be enough to spare the six Republican state senators who face recall elections on August 9? Whether or not the Democrats gain the three seats they need to take over the senate, Walker’s collective bargaining success won’t be undone anytime soon. But a victory could embolden Democrats, who are gearing up for a recall election against Walker as early as the spring of 2012.

“I don’t think they think the sky’s going to fall,” says Emily Koczela of Brown Deer residents, who will vote in the recall election of Republican state senator Alberta Darling.

As for the teachers, “some of them will feel better in a year or two.” Koczela says the union told them that “this is all a sham. There isn’t really a budget shortfall. If we just all stop giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations you’ll all be fine.”

“They didn’t know who was lying to them.” But soon enough they will.

Fascism Comes to Wauwatosa

This from a Town Hall Meeting where Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner appeared with State Senator Leah Vukmir. The audience was irate about Scott Walker’s bill requiring larger teacher contributions to health care and pension plans, and limits on union collective bargaining prerogatives.

Weren’t the teachers such wonderful role models for students?

Fascism in Madison: GOP Senator Glenn Grothman Chased, Trapped by Hecklers

Kudos to Democratic Representative Brett Hulsey, who saved Grothman from a very threatening situation.

Madison Union Supporters Given Fake Doctor’s Notes

From Media Trackers, an account of how a reporter got a fake doctor’s note, given (apparently) so that a teacher who abandoned her class and called in sick would have an excuse.

At the Madison rally on 2/19/11, doctors were signing fake excuses for teachers. I am not a teacher, but I managed to get a note. They did not ask for any identification or where I might teach. They were literally handing these out to anyone and everyone.

The actual note is reproduced with the story.

The name on the note (Dr. Hannah Keevil) is that of a real Madison physician.

With only this evidence, it’s possible that somebody was impersonating Dr. Keevil.

However, a source (we will only call her “Susan”) at the Nurse Triage Center at the University of Wisconsin confirms that it was in fact Dr. Keevil.

This is a serious example of medical fraud.

Teachers’ Union Protects Senior Teachers, Harms Younger Teachers and Kids

From Murphy’s Law, an account of how the Milwaukee teachers’ union is acting like . . . a union.

In the last couple weeks, we’ve seen the dispiriting spectacle of layoff notices going to nearly 500 Milwaukee Public Schools teachers. This includes some excellent ones let go simply because they have less seniority. This will mean even bigger average class sizes – and further declines in quality – for a district already struggling badly. And a clear culprit is the teachers union.

The union has always been more concerned about its veteran teachers, more worried about pensions than starting salaries for new teachers. Union officials have argued that this “career ladder” will attract new teachers, but that’s nonsense: What twentysomething teacher is thinking about a retirement that is at least 30 years away? Milwaukee teachers were already part of the excellent state pension system, yet back in the late 1990s, the union successfully pushed for an unneeded, supplementary plan that used local tax dollars to sweeten the pension for a select group of long-term teachers.

MPS officials argue that none of the recent layoffs would have been necessary if the union would agree to switch from its Aetna insurance plan to a lower-cost plan offered through United Healthcare. This could save the district some $48 million, enough to prevent any job layoffs for teachers, school board president Michael Bonds claims. “I’m not aware of any place in the nation that pays 100 percent of teachers’ health care benefits and doesn’t require a contribution from those who choose to take a more expensive plan,” Bonds told the press.

The teachers’ union is always demanding more funding for education, but embarrassingly, private schools hire good teachers that provide effective edutation and spend about half as much to educate a student for a year as the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Unionized teachers are a classic example of what economists call “rent seekers,” using politics to get for themselves money and perquisites that their productivity could never get them in a competitive market.

Think Detroit.

Think Greece.

And of course, think Milwaukee Public Schools.

Bilingual Education: A Liberal Social Experiment That Hurt Hispanic Kids

From Heather McDonald, writing in the City Journal, a deconstruction of the corrupt push for bilingual education, which was often imposed on Hispanic kids whose parents didn’t want it.

On the face of it, it’s pretty obvious that if you want a kid to learn a language, you immerse them in it.

That, after all, is what affluent white parents do when they want their kids to learn a language. They send them to foreign countries. They put them in an environment where they have to speak a foreign language to get along.

But if affluent white parents, including liberal yuppies, know what works best, that doesn’t help working class and poor Hispanic parents, who have to endure what the interests of educrats, the political agenda of activists, and the interests of the teachers’ union impose on them.

Luckily, the public can overturn entrenched interests in California, because they have referenda there.

New Education Research: Unions Hurt Children

In the current issue of the prestigious American Journal of Political Science, an article from Terry Moe, who is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Translation: heavyweight research from a heavyweight scholar. Peer reviewed. The abstract explains the results:

Students of American politics rarely study public sector unions and their impacts on government. The literature sees bureaucratic power as rooted in expertise, but largely ignores the fact that bureaucrats often join unions to promote their own interests, and that the power of their unions may affect government and its performance. This article focuses on the public schools, which are among the most numerous government agencies in the country, and investigates whether collective bargaining by teachers—the key bureaucrats—affects the schools’ capacity to educate children. Using California data, analysis shows that, in large school districts, restrictive labor contracts have a very negative impact on academic achievement, particularly for minority students. The evidence suggests, then, that public sector unions do indeed have important consequences for American public education.

Good scholars don’t just dump data into top journals without an explanation of the theory that led them to expect the results they got (or in rare cases, another result), and Moe lays out his expectations early in the article:

The unions use their power—their basic work-denial power, enhanced by their political power—to get restrictive rules written into collective bargaining contracts. And these restrictions ensure that the public schools are literally not organized to promote academic achievement. When contract rules make it difficult or impossible to weed out mediocre teachers, for example, they undermine the most important determinant of student learning: teacher quality (Sanders and Rivers 1996). And when contract rules guarantee teachers seniority-based transfer rights, they ensure that teachers cannot be allocated to their most productive uses (Levin, Mulhern, and Schunck 2005). Much the same can be said about a long list of standard contract provisions. This is to be expected. Except at the margins, contract rules are simply not intended to make the schools effective.

Moe’s “dependent variable” (what he is explaining) is something called the API, which is derived from student test scores. The higher the API, the higher the test scores.

There are always methodological issues with an analysis of this sort. We might wonder, for example, whether heavily black districts with a lot of Democratic voters elect liberal school boards that readily cave in to the teachers’ union. But those districts might have kids that perform poorly for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of schooling. Moe deals with these issues decisively -- controlling for minority population in each district, as well as a host of other variables.

Bottom line: both at the elementary and the secondary levels, restrictive union contracts harm student achievement.

When Moe breaks down his results, some complication enters. Restrictive union rules seem to hurt more in large school districts, and in districts with a large minority population.

But of course, these are the districts most at risk. Unionization, in other words, hurts most in the places where conditions are already worst.

This study, in a way, is a follow-up to a 1990 study (Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools) in which John Chubb and Moe showed that private schools are better organized to educate kids than public schools. In that study they stressed the role of unions doing the same things they have done to kill the auto industry — introducing rigidity in how things are organized and promoting a “then versus us” mentality among the workers.

Quite simply: your pro-union liberal friends ought to be ashamed of themselves. Don’t look for them to repent anytime soon, however. Unions — and particularly the teachers’ union — are their political allies.

The Real Reason for the Milwaukee Public Schools Financial Troubles

From School Choice Wisconsin, an analysis of how fringe benefits are eating up the budget of the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Let’s be honest about this: not only are public school teachers overpaid (private schools hire teachers for much less and get equal or better results), their fringe benefits are absurdly generous.

So whenever one hears whining and complaining about “underfunded” public schools, remember that the teachers’ union is at fault for creating a monster that gobbles up cash and fails children.

Voucher Foes Hurt Poor Kids

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago is gearing up for another round of tumult from the closing of possibly more than a half dozen failing schools. Whatever the Chicago Public Schools administration does to solve this problem, the parents of students have no choice but to cope.

Middle-class families exercise school choice by loading up a moving van and relocating to a suburb with good schools. The rich can afford private schools. Only the poor -- often minorities in inner cities with under-performing schools -- are stuck with little or no choice.

President Bush tossed out an idea Monday to open up choice for poor kids but, as usual, it was rejected out of hand by Democrats and teacher unions. The $300 million Pell Grants for Kids proposed by the president in his State of the Union message is modeled on the popular Pell Grant program that helps poor kids go to college. Basically, the Bush plan would turn over tax dollars to parents to send their children to private schools.

In other words, vouchers.

Bush’s proposal was shouted down by Democratic lawmakers and unions with the usual complaint that vouchers pull resources away from urban schools.

This argument has been rebutted by studies, many of them compiled online by the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. No school district that has adopted choice has had its budget reduced, the foundation says. For example, it reports that in Milwaukee, per-pupil spending jumped from $6,316 in 1990-91, when its program began, to $10,375 by the 2003-04 school year. Other studies show vouchers improve student performance. Milwaukee recorded better graduation rates, and Harvard studies of privately funded voucher programs in New York and Dayton, Ohio, revealed better math and reading scores for African-American students. What’s more, research shows competition from vouchers improves public schools.

Vouchers remain an appealing idea with the public. A just-released poll done for the Friedman Foundation, the Illinois Policy Institute and seven other groups finds 51 percent of people in Illinois favor vouchers and the number was 73 percent when the aid is limited to low-income families or kids in failing schools.

So why doesn’t the voucher movement find traction?

For one thing, there’s opposition from unions supported by their allies in the Democratic Party and civil rights movement. Conservatives believe in the sovereignty of the individual and trust in his or her ability to make the right decisions. Liberals believe individuals need help from government in confronting big challenges or, especially, big interests like business. There’s some truth in that. But in this case, liberals are aligned with the big interests -- teacher unions and the education monopoly. Yes, teachers and school administrators are committed to educating children. Still, their position is complicated by self interest, i.e. unions putting job security first.

The author goes on to explain that most middle class parents, happy with their own kids’ education, view real choice for poor kids as a source of possible trouble. Thus voucher initiatives (at least broad based ones) fail.

And poor kids are denied choice.

A Tolerant Atheist

Via Heart, Mind & Strength, an account of an atheist who gave a major contribution to Catholic education.

According to the New York Daily News:

The wealthy philanthropist who gave $22.5 million to help Catholic schools doesn’t think much of theology - in fact, he’s an atheist.

But even though Robert Wilson doesn’t believe in God, he does believe in giving poor kids a chance at a quality education.

“I am an atheist, [but] it’s far more than about religion,” said Robert Wilson, who was raised as an Episcopalian. “It’s about getting an education. The donation has nothing to do with religion.”

The statement didn’t exactly sit well with Edward Cardinal Egan, who joked that Wilson might need a bit of an education himself about what goes on in Catholic schools.

“Mr. Wilson and I are going to [be] spending a lot of time together,” Egan quipped.

The donation - the biggest in Archdiocese of New York history - will help 3,000 kids from poor families pay for Catholic schools in New York City during the next five years.

Wilson, 80, suggested he would have considered supporting public education, but wanted to sink his money into what he considers a higher-quality school system.

The former Wall Street investor, who is listed among BusinessWeek’s “50 Most Generous Philanthropists,” blamed the teachers union for crippling public schools with what he termed selfish and greedy demands.

“They oppose any effort to help private schools,” said Wilson, who usually shuns the limelight. “They’ve opposed any kind of help to the Roman Catholic system.”

According to Bloomberg, Wilson said:

“Let’s face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization,” Wilson said. “Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent.”

As the culture war has heated up, expressions of venomous hostility toward Christianity on the part of atheists have been front and center in the media, and even in the local leftist blogosphere.

But people who simply don’t believe in God are not necessarily bigots, nor necessarily enemies of Christians.

As for people like Wilson: Christians are going to pray that they will find Jesus. But regardless of that, he’s a good guy, and deserving of love as a generous and compassionate fellow.