The NEA on the Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind

Not glowing, here.

Read more here, if any.

The AFL-CIO-SEIU-NEA?

Could be something, could be nothing, but it's certainly worth watching. From a New York Time article on how the AFL-CIO is looking to heal from its recent schism and become one big labor union again:

One somewhat surprising attendee was Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, which, with 3.2 million members, is the nation’s largest labor union, but has traditionally remained outside any larger labor federations.

A couple of years ago the Seattle EA affiliated with the AFL-CIO, though I'm not sure that much ever came of that alliance. If any of the Seattle teachers out there have thoughts, I'd love to read them.

Oh, and Eduwonk beat me to this.

Read more here, if any.

What RTI Shouldn't Be

The next big thing on the horizon in my life (after my daughter's next round of medical tests, and the budget cuts, and lobbying in Olympia, and trying to get the WEAPAC numbers up, and getting my car fixed, and trying to save members' jobs, and....) is a presentation that I'm giving at the spring WERA conference on implementing RTI in my elementary school. I'm coming at it from a union president perspective--e.g., these are the roadblocks that teachers can see and put in front of you, this is how you get around those roadblocks--so this article from the December 10th Education Week on a symposium that the NEA held on RTI is the kind of article that I'm particularly interested in right now.

It's also the kind of article that drives me absolutely bat*hit crazy. Consider:

“We really do see [RTI] as a way of transforming the way we do business,” said Patti Ralabate, a special education policy expert for the NEA. “But too often, these kinds of initiatives are done as a top-down approach.”

The symposium is one of the first steps the NEA plans to take to help increase the capacity of teachers to engage in RTI programs as they spread through school districts, Ms. Ralabate said.

See, this is when I think the union gets in trouble--when they try to be something that they're not. The NEA's involvement with RTI should be in writing contract language, advocating for the needs of sped teachers, and maybe even program evaluation. What the NEA should not be doing is trying to increase the capacity of teachers, because any kind of professional development that the NEA could do towards RTI is guaranteed to be laughably deficient.

A far more likely model is that the NEA will train some people, who will train some Uniserv staff, who will have knowledge that they take with them out into the field. Maybe it gets used, maybe it doesn't. A far more likely scenario is that RTI gets interpreted by the school districts in a number of different ways and that an area wide/state wide consensus develops on what RTI is and that then becomes the model.

Point is, the NEA should be an informational piece. I don't think they can guide this idea with any real ability.

Later on:

The challenge with RTI, however, is in making sure general education teachers understand how it works, and how to properly administer the interventions, supporters say. Teachers must also juggle the small-group work of RTI along with their other classroom responsibilities.

RTI shifts the focus to student progress, not student labels, David Prasse, the dean of the education school at Loyola University of Chicago, told the group gathered in Washington for the NEA-sponsored symposium, held Nov. 24.

But to be carried out successfully for classroom teachers, RTI “cannot be an add-on,” he said. Instead, it must be seen as a natural part of good classroom instruction.

This is when the defensive barriers start going up big time, because many teachers pick up on the if/then pretty quickly:

If this is a part of regular classroom instruction, then I'm not going to get any more help for the additional things they'll ask me to do.
If they're not going to give me the resources to make this work the way they want, then I'm not going to do it.

If this is a part of regular classroom instruction, then I'm already doing it.
If it really mattered, I'd be doing it already.
If it really mattered, then they'd be doing it for me.

The fundamental, then, is to not present RTI as a matter of, "This is what good teachers do," because the false premises inherent in a loaded statement like that will kill the idea before it even has a chance to get to fruition.

Oh, but there's more:

Abraham H. Jones, a special education resource teacher for the Christina district in Wilmington, Del., also stressed the importance of RTI as work that is done in the regular classroom.

“It’s a general education initiative, and it needs to remain in the general education classroom,” Mr. Jones said. Educators should work on promoting RTI through pamphlets and brochures as well as professional development, so that it can become better known to more teachers, he said.

Are you f'ing kidding me? A pamphlet?

And this, too, is what drives the regular education classroom teachers mad--it's very, very easy to dismiss RTI as nothing but a sham to keep kids from getting referred to special education, and when you go to your regular ed teachers and ask them to make efforts that have historically been the province of special education ( like measuring data, planning interventions, small group instruction) you're doing nothing but feed into that perception.

My personal belief here is that you've got to have two dual structures in place: PLCs, or some sort of team level meeting where data sharing becomes the norm, and a useful pre-referral team that can analyze that data for the teachers--and maybe even collect it for them--with the understanding that it might be useful for a special education referral at some point. If your pre-referral team is just a rubber stamp of bad ideas off of the web (i.e., "Have you tried having Little Johnny sit somewhere else in the room?"), then you need to reform your crap structure before you try to superimpose something like RTI on top of them. Similarly, if you're not making a connection between the resources and knowledge of your special ed teachers and the new work that you're asking the regular ed teachers to do, then you're really neglecting what could be your most awesome resource.

Recommended Reading: the blog at the RTI Action Network, where some of the important questions are discussed. They don't seem to get a lot of traffic, yet, but I think they're off to a capable start.

Read more here, if any.

You Go To College To Be a Teacher, and What Do You Get?

According to the NEA, a boatload of debt.

The front page story in the January 2008 issue of NEA Today is on the amount of student loan debt many future teachers are graduating with, and how this potentially could drive excellent teaching candidates into careers that have a higher pay grade. The numbers are startling: $28,000 in debt, $58,000 in debt, $15,000, $25,000, $30,000, $90,000.

That’s a tough anchor to have to haul around right after college. Do you know anyone who said no to teaching because of debt, or the low starting salary?

Also worth noting is this report out of England that says women on average take 16 years to pay back their student loans, while men take 11. The article attributes the difference to the "gender gap" in salaries, and a side effect of women taking time off to have children.

Read more here, if any.

Asked, Then Answered

This came from Mark, in the comments section to my post on the WEA Union Dues Lawsuit. I was going respond in the comments section, but it got long so I thought I’d make it its own post.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that there is now an alternative to unions in the State of Washington, in the form of the Northwest Professional Educators. I have no affiliation with them. You say they are "arch conservative," but I know of quite a few teachers who are members who are huge supporters of public education but who do not support the unions.

What is your beef with the Northwest Professional Educators, if any?

To be fair, I said that Human Events Online was arch-conservative, not the NWPE.

As to whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that NWPE exists, overwhelmingly and decisively I'll tell you it's a good thing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having options available, and for those who feel that the WEA isn’t for them I wish them well.

That said, here are some of the problems that I have with the NWPE:

• Who are they? If you look around their website you can’t find a single name. Who is their president? Who works with the schools? If I needed legal services, whom would I talk to? I know what the counter-argument here is, “We need to maintain our privacy to keep from being bullied by rabid unionists!”, and that’s fine. But if you have the courage of your beliefs, why not stand up for them?
  
  
• I think that some of the viewpoints the NEA takes are asinine, too, but painting the locals and the WEA with the same brush because you don’t like what goes on at the NEA Rep Assembly is troubling. As evidence, I give you statements like this:
  
  While many employees support their local union, they may desire to opt out of the WEA and NEA because of the unions’ support of political and social issues that the educator opposes. See Grading the NEA: The Troubling Values of a Union Giant.
  
  If you question the values of the WEA, then point that out. Using the parent organization to slam the state isn't intellectually honest.
  
  
• It gets worse when you follow the link from the NWPE over to I Choose Charity, which explains to dissenters how to opt out of the union. Here the big issues are abortion (which isn't a WEA issue), gay rights (which is an issue for everyone), and school choice. One wonders: if you want to be an agency fee payer because of the WEA's stance on vouchers, what in the world are you doing teaching in a public school?
  
  
• They're not a bargaining agent, and anyone who thinks that schools would be a utopia if it wasn't for the damned contract getting in the way is fooling themself. Statements like "We focus on what is best for our students and for their education" (see here) are platitudes, just like "What's good for the teacher is what's good for the student."
  
  
• Then there's things like their commentary on teacher compensation (here, see page 4) which calls for "new fresh ideas" to raise teacher compensation. The two ideas they name? Local only bargaining units and faculty senates, different iterations on the theme "Get rid of the union."

The main issue as I see it with the NWPE is that they don't seem to stand for anything besides, "We're not the WEA and NEA!", and I don't think it's enough to say that you're not them. That was basically what John Kerry ran on in 2004, and it didn't work. There has to be content to have any validity, and as I see it right now the NWPE doesn't have the content yet.

Read more here, if any.