SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Union dues are big business

Further to Doretta’s posting yesterday about the power of the teachers’ unions, I suggest you read this cri du coeur by Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s school system. Mr. Klein, who had previously taken on Microsoft and won (until the decision was overturned on appeal), met his match in the New York teachers’ unions. The article is long - because it documents how virtually every one of his initiatives was blocked by the teachers’ unions - but well worth reading. 

And lest you think there is no applicability to Ontario, get out your calculator and calculate how much OECTA’s $60 surcharge (mentioned in Doretta’s posting) adds up to. On second thought, I’ll save you the trouble. At 45,000 members, the surcharge alone amounts to $2,700,000. That’s a lot of extra pocket money for a union that extracts more than $1,000 from each of its members as a matter of course every year and has an annual income in the neighbourhood of $50,000,000. And OECTA is the baby sister when it comes to the other two major teachers’ unions in Ontario - the OSSTF with 60,000 members and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario with approximately 76,000 members. 

It would be hard to over-estimate the power of these organizations.

Now Where Have We Seen This Before?

Michael Zwaagstra. who gave a great talk at SQE’s last AGM, has written a thoughtful article about Teachers Unions Acting Unprofessionally in the Freedom Forum.   Michael, who is a Manitoba teacher and co-author of What’s Wrong With Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them, writes about the decision of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association to up their members’ union dues by $60 in order to fund an election war chest:

      “With this decision, the union tossed aside any vestige of professionalism and non-partisanship. Rather than focus on providing professional support and services to their members, this union decided to force all of their members to donate to a political cause-whether they support it or not.

       “One can only imagine the uproar if a big business owner chose to deduct $60 from his employees’ salaries and used that money to run attack ads against the Liberals or NDP. People would rightly be outraged at this type of coercion. The action of the Ontario teachers union is no less egregious.

       “What makes this coercion even more problematic is that Canadian teachers have little choice in regards to union membership. In most provinces, membership in the teachers union is a condition of employment in the public school system. So teachers who disagree with the political positions of their leadership have little recourse.”

Of course this is not the first time that teachers’ unions have reached into their members’ pockets to do this.  In the U.S. many unions have done the very same thing, which makes one wonder exactly what kind of “professional development” really goes on at these conventions.  This missive is from Intercepts blog:

       ”Themed protests, tent cities and capitol takeovers aren’t cheap these days, and so union dues will have to rise in many states. We already know the Ohio Education Association imposed a $54 additional assessment to fund a campaign against SB 5. The Nebraska State Education Association also proposed a $10 per member ballot initiative assessment in addition to a proposed $5 dues increase. In California, dues will rise $8 to $647.

      “Minnesota and Utah plan to hold the line, proposing no increase in dues for 2011-12, while Iowa and Arizona are asking for $2 more. Wyoming and Kansas proposed $4 hikes. The Dakotas will see some of the largest increases, with South Dakota boosting dues by $10 and North Dakota by $13. Missouri will also ask for a $10 increase.

      “As reported earlier, national NEA dues are likely to increase by $2, but convention delegates will also vote on an additional $10 assessment for the ballot measure/legislative crises fund.”

As blogger Mike Antonacci, points out, “You’ve got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.”  Class, start singing.

Reading - the future

Considering the revolutionary influence of digital technology on most human endeavours, it’s surprising that the delivery of education has changed so little. Kids still sit in classrooms, in classes of 25, with one teacher, and these classes are still in big box buildings. Computers and telecommunications are mostly add-ons, to the extent they’re used at all. 

So it’s interesting to note that McGraw-Hill has just launched its first all-digital textbook for the K-12 market. Of course, there remains the question of whether the content of this textbook will be better than the generally lousy textbooks inflicted on students in the past. However, the whole new world opened up by digital textbooks may mean that the big textbook publishers will lose their virtual monopoly - and that is always good news for consumers. We await developments with great interest.

For a very limited time only!

I just found out that Funnix Beginning Math was available for free download from June 1 to June 26. I know that this is June 27, but iit looks as if it’s possible you can still do it for the next few hours at least. Funnix is a 100-lesson computer program for children who have not learned beginning math operations. Designed by the folks at the Association for Direct Instruction, this is a fabulous program that would normally cost hundreds of dollars. I hope you can manage to download it before they pull the plug!

Sunday at the Movies (Oregon)

Oregon has recently made some moderate improvements to its education system (improvements to the charter school authorization law, an open enrollment law, and improvements to the online learning law) but, judging by this video, much more is coming. It’s badly needed, as Oregon students score below the national average despite their demographic advantages.

Compulsory education: how is it working for you?

Things have been a bit quiet around here lately, and so I thought I’d throw a provocative idea into the pot. This article takes educational freedom to the next level: giving parents not just the ability to spend their educational dollars freely, but also giving them the ability to decide whether or not to even send their kids to a school period.

We all take the necessity for and benefits of compulsory schooling laws for granted, without really thinking about it but, as the author points out, there are a number of downsides to compulsory schooling - not least of which is the reality of hundreds of thousands of kids who are inexorably forced to return, day after day, year after year, to continue the torture visited upon them by their failing schools. There are some other issues around compulsory schooling as well, and readers with an open mind are invited to read the whole article.

I am not necessarily convinced by these arguments, but they are ideas worth thinking about - not least the question of the extent to which the state should be allowed to dictate its citizens’ private actions.

Good teaching matters

As parents instinctively know - and the research strongly supports them - it’s hugely important that their kids get a good teacher. Of course, there are lots of good teachers out there but, for the most part, they have become good teachers by trial and error, feeling their way and talking to other teachers, that sort of thing - as opposed to learning the tricks of their trade at their faculty of education. The sad truth is: most faculties of education provide an abysmal (or even no) grounding in how to teach well, focusing more on political correctness and leaf collections. 

In recognition of this fact, the US Senate is proposing a bill that would punish bad education schools and encourage alternative routes such as Teach for America. This approach is badly needed in Ontario, as the province’s faculties of education enjoy a monopoly on teacher certification and their problems are deeply entrenched, as explained in this essay by the former dean of an Ontario faculty. 

Why the Ontario teachers’ unions are on the warpath

About three weeks ago, I blogged about the Ontario Conservatives’ apparent hope that their bland education policy would appease the province’s teachers’ unions and ward off their usual anti-Conservative political activities during the election campaign. In light of the fact that the election is the Conservatives’ to lose, I wondered whether the teachers’ unions would take the bait and start building bridges to the Conservative Party.

In this column in the Toronto Sun, former education minister John Snobelen reveals that the answer to this question is a resounding no - and the reason doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the education file, which may or may not have contained enough soothing promises to call off the attack dogs. However, the Conservative labour file - with its promises of secret ballots in certification votes and the prohbition of unions using their members’ dues to support unpalatable political causes - makes the Conservatives’ insipid education policies irrelevant. There is no way that any union in the province of Ontario is going to back off now.

Now, I just want to make a little disclaimer here about the rest of John Snobelen’s column. I’m a little sensitive by now about being called a teacher basher (even though I used to be one and some of my best friends are teachers). Read my lips: I’m not endorsing Mr. Snobelen’s sentiments - I’m just reporting the facts here.

Something tells me they’re into something good

I must be getting soft, but here’s another good news story, this time from a group of Toronto schools using an approach called “3 to 3” (meaning from the age of three to Grade 3) to good effect. 3 to 3 is a program that develops children’s language skills through storytelling. 

Here are a couple of articles from our archives (here and here) that discuss the importance of giving young children rich vocabularies (and how to go about it) and the importance of learning how to speak to heterogeneous audiences.

Khan Academy tutorials have teachers flipping out

 The free online tutorials posted by Khan Academy are impacting on teaching – and not always in ways that its founder Sal Khan anticipated.  In this presentation to TED, Khan notes that some teachers are “flipping” what’s going on in their classrooms.  Teachers are forgoing their in-class lectures and assigning the Khan videos as homework and then using their class time to work on assignments.  This is dramatically increasing the teachers’ one-on-one time with the students who need extra help.