I See Myself in This

“I maintain a blog that would be of interest to only a few dozen people in the world, but none of them read it.”

--“daurousseau”, in the June 6th, 2008 Chronicle Review

Then again, I got a couple of mentions on the most recent Get Free! podcast from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, so maybe there is an audience.

That would be fun.

Read more here, if any.

Sonya, Sonya, Sonya....(A Review of the May 9th Get Free! EFF Podcast)

I'm listening to the EFF's Get Free podcast from May 9th, and their new director of Labor Policy Sonya Jones says that it's "very hard to get your hands on" teacher's contracts (it's at about the 6:20 mark).

#1- Many school districts post their contracts on-line.
#2- It's public record; you should be able to get a copy in three days or less by mail if you ask for it.
#3- If the Director of Labor Policy thinks getting copies of the contract is the difficult part, then actually effecting changes in those agreements would be nigh-on impossible.

I've disagreed with her before, but this just seems defeatist.

"The school board can not reduce the number of teaching positions they have without negotiating that with the union," says Sonya. That's false on the face of it. The school district doesn't have to hire for positions that aren't needed. which is why many districts will handle decreased enrollment via attrition. I'm not going to defend Kitsap (the same way I wouldn't defend Spokane last year when they were bleeding kids but refusing to cut staff), but I really can't see how this is a union problem.

I do like the Godfather comparison, as long as it doesn't include the woefully terrible Godfather III. As the lead negotiator for my district I'm considering getting a fedora and wearing a white-on-white shirt/tie combination in order to set the tone.

It's also flat-out wrong to say that the schools that won't be receiving the AP grant didn't have AP programs in place; University High School in Central Valley has AP and would have been a grant recipient.

It's also wrong to say that union dues in this state are $900 a year without pointing out how much that can vary from district to district; while the WEA and NEA dues are consistent, local dues are not.

And can you imagine the stress on administrators if the teachers were represented by four different bargaining units, or if one teacher joined more than one association? If you think it's hard to fire a teacher now, sheesh....

And Sonya obviously has some research to do on teacher strikes here in Washington. They happen, and simply saying "They're illegal!" is ignoring the problem.

This idea that contract language looks the same from the smallest districts all the way up to Seattle is ludicrous. There might be some commonality in the nuts and bolts, but compare a Seattle or Spokane to a small district like Cheney or Reardan and the differences are far greater than the similarities.

It's also interesting to me to see a group like the EFF that's put a lot of work into model legislation projects that can be used in any state criticizing the WEA for having boilerplate language available. Different sides of the same coin?

Anyhow, lots of education discussion in this episode. Well worth listening to for anyone here in Washington who cares about education, from either side of the political spectrum.

Read more here, if any.

The EFF Podcast on Posting Teacher Salary Data Online

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation is in a good groove with their Get Free podcasts. The hosts are entertaining, the topics are worthwhile, and the production value is praiseworthy. Even though I’m a liberal (who still finds their video podcast host very easy on the eyes) I can give credit where it's due.

In their most recent podcast there’s a discussion of the EFF’s habit of posting teacher salary data on-line. Sonya Jones, who really comes off as rather bitchy in her blog posts, had gotten a letter from a teacher who didn’t realize that this was the practice and that it was just one of those things that we teachers have to deal with by virtue of being state employees.

The piece from the podcast that’s interesting is the defense that the hosts put up, offering that it’s not about individual teachers, really, but more about giving the public information on the system as a whole.

I think this defense fails. I can see where they’re trying to go, but I don’t think they quite get there.

The biggest flaw is simply in how their spreadsheets on salary data are constructed. As a union guy I’ll freely admit that I’ve used them on more than a couple of occasions to help various causes, and from that perspective I can tell you that the problem with the spreadsheets is that there is no differentiation between various job classes. You can’t look at any one of them and tell what the average teacher makes in district X, because if you aggregate all of the names and data for any individual school district you’ll also pull in the paraprofessionals (artificially lowering the average) and the administration (raising it up, though not by nearly as much a percentage). Even if you have a rote understanding of what the range of a teacher’s salary is, I’m willing to bet that the consumer at large could look at the raw data and pull in custodians (since most of them work a 240 day year) and paraprofessional supervisory staff.

Last year I looked at the same topic and asked whether this data was usable data, and as constructed I don’t know that it is.

If you've accessed the spreadsheets and used them, what did you use them for?

Read more here, if any.