Liv Finne: Knows All, Sees All

I really wanted to call this post "Liv Finne: Knows Fuck-All, Sees Fuck-All", but blogger doesn't like the strike tag in the header of a post. Which is kind of ironic, considering the topic.

The Tacoma Education Association ended their strike this week (yes, the one I was wrong about), and that gave Liv some brief cause for joy:

The final agreement represents an important victory for students. By gaining flexibility in work assignments district officials will be better able to place the best teachers in the classroom, not just the ones with the most seniority. But the entire conflict could have been avoided.

Note that this was posted on Thursday at about 5:30 in the morning, according to the tagging on Google Reader. Later that day The News Tribune offered that they didn't have any details to share yet, meaning that the paper of record for Tacoma was either scooped by Liv Finne or that Liv was talking out of her ass.

Later on Thursday the teachers of Tacoma voted to ratify the contract by a margin of 1,683 yes to 15 no, so either 99%+ of the members of the TEA voted for a contract that isn't in their best interests, or Liv was talking out of her ass.

King 5 TV provided the final piece of the puzzle Thursday evening:

The way the district reassigns teachers, which was the main point of contention for many teachers, will not change in the current school year. But starting this year a committee of teachers and school district officials will look at potential changes for next year. The union originally wanted to maintain the current system based on a teacher’s seniority. Under the contract, any changes in the policy would need a two-thirds majority.

So that flexibility, that important victory? It's in a committee that needs a super-super-majority to effect change. Liv's post makes no sense, unless you look at it through the lens of "Anything to make teachers look bad".

This isn't a first for Liv. It was about this time last year that we talked about her being lead around by the nose by the since-disgraced Maria Goodloe-Johnson during the negotiations between the Seattle Schools and their teachers. Liv loves her administrators; the teachers in the classrooms, not so much.

Read more here, if any.

There's Nothing Like a Good Union Fight...

...and this is nothing like a good union fight:

Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson is accusing labor organizers of "fear and smear" campaign tactics, calling them un-Christian. Labor leaders charge that Delta is trying to demonize unions, and one pro-union website has likened Mr. Anderson to Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, in France, shit's gettin' real:

Several football matches in the north over the weekend had to be postponed.

I also rather adore this website, and while it takes a while to load the pictures are phenomenal.

Read more here, if any.

My Worry About the Labor Situation in the Seattle Schools....

....is that Maria Goodloe-Johnson will ruin the NWEA MAP test for all us districts that use it well and informatively.

She's trying to force a strike. She's the superintendent. If the largest school district in Washington State is pushed over that ledge, the MAP test will be one of the big reasons why, and that's a damned shame.

Read more here, if any.

An Aside from the Kent Teacher's Strike

A couple of days ago on the Kent School Districts web page there was a brief update on negotiations, saying that the Kent EA had failed to show up to that day's mediation session. Pretty damning, if true.

What the KSD didn't point out, and which the Kent EA subsequently did, was that was the day that the two sides were in court making their arguments about the injunction the Kent SD had filed for to end the strike.

Making it sound like one side didn't show up on a lark, and publishing that information as truth on your publicly-funded website, sure doesn't feel like good faith negotiating.

Read more here, if any.

Tom Vander Ark, Keen Observer of Bizarro World

This is one of the most nonsensical things I've read in a while:

Who owns Washington? In Washington State the answer is clear--the Washington Education Association. They dragged their feet in hundreds of districts and called strikes in a couple districts last night just to screw up the first day of school.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. In an environment where the WEA is at open odds with Democratic legislators, where levy equalization and class size reduction money was cut out of the budget, and where HB2261 passed into law despite a full-court press from the WEA, you're going to try to sell the line that the WEA runs Washington?

Denying reality doesn't change reality, and anyone who is still trying to portray the WEA as an all-powerful, omnipotent entity is certainly out of touch with reality.

In Kent, a Seattle suburb, the WEA welcomed a great new superintendent, Dr. Vargas, to town with a strike. Kent is a well run district where the previous superintendent served with distinction for a decade. Unfortunately, Vargas is receiving familiar treatment; it happened on my first day as superintendent 15 years ago. My kids asked me why they weren't going to school and why there were people with signs in our driveway.

Why yes, Kent is so well run that they trail in almost every metric, and now the KSD's half-assed negotiations strategy has forced a strike.

Even though strikes by public employees are illegal, the WEA picks a few districts in key media markets and runs strikes every year just to remind local and state officials who's really in charge. The Kent strike is supposedly because teachers don't want to meet with their principal more than once a week; they're trying to spin this as 'more time with the children'--please. They also mention class size, but that's a red herring in a state with equalized funding and big budget deficits. This isn't about issues; it's about power.

The WEA can't make a district go out on strike.

The WEA can't make a district go out on strike.

The WEA can't make a district go out on strike.

I made similar comments last year during the Bellevue teacher strike--anyone who thinks that it's an easy thing to get 85% of the membership to say that they're going to stop doing their jobs and walk a picket line is so blindingly ignorant about how unions work that their opinions are irrelevant, even if couched in the language of the "education expert".

Read more here, if any.

It's Conclusive: Strikes are Good for Students

So Liv Finne, who is to education policy what Michelle Bachmann is to rationality, has a poorly-formatted post up about how Kent shouldn't strike because of their poor WASL scores. The Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) has piled on, too, in an editorial that I'll spend more time with in a different post.

The obvious argument for a union hack like myself, then, is that those scores would be better if the teachers weren't going to useless meetings, or if the class size was what it should be, or if teachers didn't flee the district to brighter horizons.

I think it's Al Shanker who's attributed with the idea that if it's good for the teachers then it's good for the students. With that in mind, I used the School Report Card that the EFF released last spring, along with their list of districts that have been out on strike recently. On the EFF report card a rating of "6" is considered average, and the cut-off score for a 6 is to be ranked 570 or higher.

In Bellevue, which went out on strike in 2008, the elementary schools are ranked #1, 615, 104, 104, 44, 431, 650, 30, 855, 16, 49, 259, 227, 227, 295, 461, 57, and 401. That's an average ranking of 268, well above average. Only three schools in Bellevue are ranked "Below Average" on the EFF metric. If you take them out, the average ranking rises to 180.

Collective bargaining and a strike don't seem to be slowing Bellevue down any.

Let's try Shoreline, who went out in 2007. Their schools are ranked 95, 104, 136, 295, 295, 372, and 372. That's an average of 208, even better than Bellevue. Every school in Shoreline, which also had labor troubles this year, is above average in the EFF rankings.

How about Lake Stevens, which had a strike in 2003 and is looking likely to have another one? Their 6 elementary schools are ranked 259, 401, 208, 136, 227, and 549. An average ranking of 297, and again no school is below average on the EFF scale.

If strikes hurt, then every post-strike district should look like Marysville (2003, an average ranking of 687, 6 of 10 schools below average). These school rankings, though, show that there isn't much of a trend to be found.

So if a strike is the ultimate manifestation of out of control teachers, and if out of control teachers are the antithesis of student achievement, then why do the kids in districts that have gone on strike seem to be doing pretty well?

Read more here, if any.

A Swing and a Miss, EFF Edition

So it's August, and you know what that means--more rightous indignation about the potential for teachers to go out on strike. This post from the EFF's blog is on point, and it lays out the anti-strike position well, even though I'd respectfully disagree with where they're going with it.

At the bottom, though, they really go off the rails when they talk about the Kent School District and their ongoing negotiations with the Kent EA:

If the Kent teachers' union truly cares about the education of the children in that district, it should not strike. Instead, continue to work out problems at the bargaining table. Don't take them out on the students.

Here's the trick--the KEA would like to work those problems out at the table, but it's the District that cut off negotiations and declared an impasse, refusing to interact with the EA any longer.

If Kent gets pushed to the brink, it's going to be the KSD that put the kids in a bad way. They pretty much admit as much in their open letter to the community.

It's going to be an interesting couple of weeks.

Read more here, if any.

On the Teacher Strike in Bethel

Well, the worst case scenario happened: teachers in the Bethel School District over by Tacoma went on strike this week, cancelling the first two days of school. A mediation session is scheduled for this weekend; hopefully the issue can get resolved quickly and fairly.

There's plenty of reaction on the internet. The first Tacoma News-Tribune story above has better than 100 comments; the WEA position is here and the Bethel EA also has their own web page; SVC Alumnus has the contrary viewpoint; and there's also thoughts from the Evergreen Freedom Foundation here. The News Tribune also referenced chatter on MySpace, but I couldn't find any when I took a quick look.

Striking is the nuclear option that can haunt a district for decades afterwards. It's also the ultimate in risk-reward metrics; you're putting it all on the line, but will it be worth it?

Read more here, if any.