School Choice Matters: Teachers unions still trying to deny parental choice

September 8, 2018 By Larry Sand 3 Comments

shocked-kid-apIn March, six months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island’s lawmakers approved a bill that offered parents school choice options, including vouchers and charter schools. Hardly radical, the voucher program was capped at 3 percent of total student enrollment and charters could not exceed 10 percent of all public schools.

As day follows night, the teachers union in Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit arguing that it is unconstitutional to use public funds for private schools. And then in April, another bit of devastation hit the tiny island: Hurricane Randi blew in. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, still aglow after teacher strikes had crippled the educational process in West Virginia and Oklahoma, decided to direct Puerto Rican educators follow suit.

Weingarten was overheard on a train plotting a shutdown strategy, but the union boss wanted to make sure that it was not called a strike, claiming they never use the “S” word. Instead, she said the public should be told “We are a human shield for the kids … teachers are doing this in the stead of parents and kids.”

On August 10, Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit, allowing the two small choice programs to go on as planned. And as night follows day, the union called a strike to protest the choice law and a few other policy changes. The good news is that it was a one-day walkout which began and ended on August 15.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, it’s no secret that the teachers union is in conflict with the school district, and a strike in October could follow. One bone of contention is the staffing of magnet schools, which are public schools of choice with specialized themes – performing arts, science and math, those aimed at gifted students, et al. These schools can draw students from outside the normal zip-code mandated boundaries, are very successful, popular with parents in Los Angeles, and are rapidly expanding.

Since magnet schools offer a specialized curriculum, they need teachers who are well-versed in certain subject areas. So what’s the big deal? The United Teachers of Los Angeles is demanding that if a school or part of a school is to be converted from a traditional program to a magnet program, “certificated bargaining unit employees at the school shall have a right to assignment at the converted school and shall not be required to reapply for assignment to the school after conversion.” This is like saying that if you had heart palpitations, you would have to be treated by a dermatologist because the hospital couldn’t hire a cardiologist.

But of course the union is doing this for the kids!

And what would a month be without a new bogus study on school choice? The latest entry comes from the Network for Public Education, a union-friendly outfit that believes in zip code-mandated government schools über alles. The group solemnly reports that “fewer and fewer states are escaping school privatization’s reach.” I’ll save the details for another day, but for now, let’s just say the National Education Association’s reporton the study makes it sound as if privatization is the equivalent of a bubonic plague that is rapidly ravaging our educational landscape.

But a poll from earlier this year paints a very different picture. According to EdChoice, only 33 percent of parents prefer that their child go to a public school, yet nationwide 83 percent of kids actually do. While 42 percent of parents would prefer to send their child to a private school, only 10 percent do. Also, a recent American Federation for Children poll, conducted by a Democratic polling firm, showed that 63 percent of likely voters support school choice, and among those most in need, the numbers are higher, with 72 percent of Latinos and 66 percent of African Americans favoring it.

In addition to the above, the survey found that 54 percent of Democrats support school choice. In our ultra-politically polarized time, this is very important. School choice has become a truly bipartisan issue, with more and more liberals sticking up for kids and taking on the teachers unions. In an eloquent and powerful piece, Catherine Durkin Robinson, who self-identifies as a “militant advocate, organizer and member of the Democratic Party for 30 years,” has quit her party. She deplores the fact that the Dems toe the teachers union party line because the union provides hefty campaign contributions to them. “This movement has helped me look closer at my side of the aisle. I’m so very disappointed in a party that refuses to fight for the people who need it most – children struggling to break free from generational poverty. Education is the most reliable way to do that. Democrats are blocking the schoolhouse door.”

If Ms. Robinson is any indication, the unions’ loss in the Janus case may just be the beginning of a descent that not even Hurricane Randi will be able to manipulate.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center

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Unions defend recent strikes — but voters should make up their own minds

May 18, 2018 By Larry Sand Leave a Comment

Teachers unionIn a USA Today op-ed last month, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten defended the teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and Colorado, by sketching a familiar hero-villain scenario. “Teachers are standing up for their students and themselves against largely red states with weak labor laws and where governors and legislators have opted for tax cuts for the wealthy instead of investments for children,” she wrote. Pointing to the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case, which she portrayed as a right-wing ploy to “get public sector unions out of politics,” Weingarten proclaimed, “Teachers’ voices — and their votes — are powerful, and educators have parents and communities supporting them.”

Some voters may be persuaded by the argument that teachers are picketing for more money “for children,” but they would be better off looking at some basic facts. While teachers in some cases are underpaid and certain school districts underfunded, teachers on the whole, according to researcher James Agresti, get paid much better than commonly acknowledged. For the 2016–2017 school year, the average salary of full-time public school teachers was $58,950. That figure excludes benefits such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, which, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, make up an average of 33 percent of total compensation for public school teachers. When benefits get added in, teachers’ average annual compensation jumps to $87,854. And even that amount doesn’t include unfunded pension liabilities and certain post-employment benefits like health insurance, not measured by the Labor Department. Private-industry employees work an average of 37 percent more hours per year than public school teachers, including the time that teachers spend for lesson preparation, grading, and other activities. “Unlike less rigorous studies, this data from the DOL is based on detailed records of work hours instead of subjective estimates about how long people think they work,” Agresti adds.

Teachers aren’t just well compensated; they’re also more numerous than ever before, especially in proportion to their students. Researcher and economics professor Benjamin Scafidi found that, between 1950 and 2015, the number of teachers increased about 2.5 times faster than the number of students, and hiring of other education employees—administrators, teacher aides, counselors, social workers—rose more than seven times faster than the increase in students. Despite the staffing surge, students’ academic achievement has stagnated or fallen during that time. Scafidi suggests that, had non-teaching personnel growth been in line with student population growth, and the teaching force risen “only” 1.5 times as fast as student growth, U.S. schools would have had an additional $37.2 billion to spend annually. With that windfall, he suggests, we could have raised every public school teacher’s salary by more than $11,700 per year, given poor families more than $2,600 in cash per child to attend private schools of their parents’ choice, and more than doubled taxpayer funding for early-childhood education.

It’s no secret that lavish teacher pensions are eating up money that should be spent on students. Robert Costrell, a finance expert at the University of Arkansas, found that 10.6 percent of all education spending goes toward teacher-retirement benefits—more than double the proportion spent on pensions in 2004. “As a percentage of their total compensation package, teacher retirement benefits eat up twice as much as other workers,” Bellwether Education Partners policy analyst Chad Alderman explains. Teachers—including bad teachers—have a powerful incentive to stay on in their jobs, since they automatically earn more just by showing up each fall, regardless of how effective they are. Pension benefits start accruing later in a teacher’s career, so younger teachers are helping to prop up pensions for lifers, with little to show for it; if a teacher leaves the field early, he gets no pension at all.

States typically administer teacher pensions, but health-care benefits frequently vary according to the local school district. While some districts cut teachers’ health benefits off when Medicare kicks in, others, such as the Los Angeles Unified School District, are much more generous. LAUSD provides the same expansive health coverage for retirees (and their spouses) as it does for current employees; neither group pays a premium for its insurance. The district recently announced that the unfunded liability for retiree health benefits has risen to $15.2 billion, up from a reported $13.5 billion in 2016, which translates to a cost of $525 per student.

Come November, the teachers’ unions and their unhappy members will be taking their case to the voters. Taxpayers need to look at the facts underneath the teachers-as-victims rhetoric and vote for fiscal sanity.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network and a contributor to City Journal’s book, The Beholden State: California’s Lost Promise and How to Recapture It.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online

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Teachers’ union leaders grandstand about evil corporations while drawing fat salaries

February 22, 2018 By Larry Sand 1 Comment

School union protestAmerican Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten recently pilloried President Trump’s health plan in the Huffington Post: “GOP Rewards The Rich, Rips Off The Rest Of Us,” she declared. Is Weingarten among “the rest of us?” The union leader hauled in $472,197 last year.

Weingarten is hardly the only fat-cat teachers’ union leader. According to the Department of Labor, National Education Association executive director John Stocks bagged $355,721 last year, while NEA president Lily Eskelsen García scraped by on $317,826. At the 2017 California Democratic Party Convention, California Teachers Association president Eric Heins ranted about billionaires without acknowledging his own $317,000 total compensation package. CTA executive director Joe Nunez’s compensation is $460,000; associate ED Emma Leheny makes $480,000, and deputy ED Karen Kyhn gets by on $427,000 yearly. New York City’s United Federation of Teachers boss Michael Mulgrew is practically working class by comparison, making $288,000.

Teachers’ union bosses are obsessed with “corporate” bogeymen. The Janus v.AFSCME case, if decided in the plaintiffs’ favor, will free public employees in 22 states from having to pay any money to a union as a condition of employment. The NEA sees the case as a plot by corporate interests to weaken unions. Schools are “the centers of our communities, not corporate profit centers,” Heins says.

But no one is more willing to invoke the “c” word than United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl. The UTLA honcho is on a mission to kill Proposition 13 protections for corporations. In a state aptly called “Taxifornia,” Proposition 13 is a desperately needed lifeline, limiting property-tax increases for business and individuals. The UTLA has released a barrage of propaganda in an attempt to close the “corporate property-tax loophole” and “level the playing field.”

Funny how Caputo-Pearl and other union leaders neglect to point out that teachers’ unions are themselves de facto corporations, though with a difference: all their income — money they get from teachers, voluntarily or otherwise — is tax-free. No teachers’ union — or any union — pays a penny in taxes. The unions have oodles of spare cash on hand — and they park a good deal of it with corporations. As teachers’ union watchdog Mike Antonucci writes, the NEA sinks lots of money into mutual funds, which invest in big corporations, including “AT&T, Verizon, Target, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, IBM, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Comcast, Coca-Cola, Philip Morris, Microsoft, Boeing, JP Morgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, and Aramark.” The NEA “invests in 9 of the 10 richest corporations in the United States,” Antonucci says.

So union leaders howl about the rich and how corporations don’t pay their “fair share in taxes,” but they support the biggest corporations with their own untaxed income — income that puts many union leaders themselves into the 1 Percent Club.

Larry Sand, a retired teacher, is president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network and a contributor to City Journal’s book, The Beholden State: California’s Lost Promise and How to Recapture It.

This article was originally published by City Journal

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School Choice Week Aims to End ZIP Code Mandated Education

January 27, 2016 By Larry Sand 2 Comments

 shocked-kid-apYou: I’m going out to dinner tonight.

Me: You are going to the restaurant down the street from where you live, right?

You: No, it’s not very good. I am going to a restaurant across town; it has food more to my liking and superior service.

Me: Uh, uh, you can’t go to that restaurant; you must go to the one closest to your home. It’s the law.

You would proceed to tell me that I am crazy. And I did make a nutty statement, didn’t I? But sadly this is exactly how we deal with education in California and throughout much of the country.

Why do we have Z MESS (ZIP code Mandated Education System) in the 21st century? Because it serves the adults in the education blob, aka, the Big Government-Big Union Complex, that’s why. There is no other reason.

The teachers unions especially are sworn enemies of choice, particularly when it involves privatization. This is totally understandable because, except in rare cases, private schools are independent and not unionized. That’s a major reason why – given a choice – parents frequently opt for private schools. In fact, school choice is really about empowering parents to pick the best school for their kids. As the Friedman Foundation’s Greg Forster points out, “School choice would be a big step toward strengthening the family. It would reassert the primacy of parents over every stage of education until the point where children leave home and gain the rights of adulthood.”

How do the unions try to sell their argument against choice? Feebly.

As a rejoinder to National School Choice Week, which began Sunday, National Education Association writer Tim Walker posted “‘School Choice’ Mantra Masks the Harm of Siphoning Funds from Public Education” on the union’s website. In a piece amazingly devoid of honesty, he rails against charter schools, claiming they are rife with “waste and fraud.” He slimes vouchers, which he refers as “an entitlement program.” (!) He dismisses education savings accounts, asserting that they come with “little or no oversight over student outcomes.” And to top it off, Mr. Walker never gets around to explaining why so many parents avail themselves of choice and eagerly flee the highly regulated, overly bureaucratized, child-unfriendly Big Government-Big Union complex whenever they get the opportunity.

Sillier still is a Huff Po entry by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. Writing “When Unions Are Strong, Families Are Strong,” she claims that unions like hers are “strengthening our families, schools and economy – at the bargaining table, ballot box and beyond.”

Union-run schools are getting stronger? Only in a perverse sense. That “strength,” as exhibited by restrictive contracts and tenure and seniority mandates, only serves to weaken education and hurt children.

And Weingarten and her cronies show no love for schools that aren’t organized. The wildly popular and successful Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which serves predominantly poor and minority kids, has battled the union since its inception. As Michael Tanner writes in NRO, “… to preserve the program for the 2016–17 school year, Congress will have to either push through a stand-alone funding bill in the face of ferocious opposition from Democratic lawmakers and the teachers’ unions, or hope to include the funding in some future budget deal.”

Clearly, Weingarten doesn’t give a rip about “strengthening” the families that want to enroll their kids in the DCOSP program. Just the backbones of their union-owned legislators.

Celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday last week, the unions were oozing with platitudes about the civil rights leader. NEA president Lily Eskelsen García penned a piece which refers to King’s “legacy in our classrooms.” While it’s true that there is no way to know how King would have responded to charter schools or voucher programs, his oldest son is convinced his father would approve. In fact, Martin Luther King III spoke at the “Rally in Tally” where over 10,000 people converged on Florida’s Capitol building in Tallahassee to urge the state’s largest teachers union to drop a lawsuit challenging a voucher-like education program that benefits low-income families. The state teachers union, the Florida Education Association, is claiming that “the tax-credit scholarships divert state money away from a quality public education system the state is required, under the Florida Constitution, to provide.”

MLK III said, “I just find it interesting that in our country we have the gall to debate about how our most precious resource – our children – are treated.” He cautioned that he couldn’t say with certainty how his father would feel today, but insisted that he “would always stand up for justice. This is about justice.”

The union, undeterred by the rally, plans to forge ahead with the lawsuit, claiming that the “voucher scheme is not legal.” Matthew Ladner, senior advisor at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, snapped, “If there is a moral difference between redneck governors standing at the school house doors to keep kids out of school with a baseball bat, and union bosses wanting to go into schools to kick kids out of schools with legal baseball bats, the distinction escapes me.”

It escapes me too. But what is inescapable is that we are in the middle of a war which pits parents and kids against teachers unions, at the heart of which is our failing, antiquated way of providing education. It is now time to ignore the teachers unions, straighten up Z MESS and give parents the right to choose the best education for their kids … traditional public, charter or private.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

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War on Charter Schools Ramps Up With Empty Accusations

October 29, 2015 By Larry Sand 1 Comment

school education studentsCharter schools are like pesky chewing gum that the teachers unions just can’t quite get off their shoes. They have been persistent in trying to just get rid of the alternative public schools – except for the few they have managed to organize. The problem they’re having is that charters are very popular with parents and kids, especially with those who reside in the inner cities which are home to the worst traditional public schools. The latest pathetic attempt by union command-central to destroy charters emanates from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which, as investigative reporter Eric Owens points out, is a reliably pro-union advocacy organization based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Perhaps “reliably pro-union” is an understatement. The American Federation of Teachers gave CMD $30,000 for “member related services” in fiscal year 2015. Also, one of the biggest funders of CMD is Democracy Alliance, which boasts AFT president Randi Weingarten as a member and National Education Association executive director John Stocks as its president. The dark money group also includes old leftwing billionaire George Soros and new leftwing billionaire Tom Steyer.

In a nutshell, the report asserts that the American public “does not have ready access to key information about how their federal and state taxes are being spent to fuel the charter school industry. Peppered with terms like “lack of accountability” and “flavoring flexibility over rules,” the summary is an indicator of how off-target the sloppy and factually-challenged report really is. As reported by LaborPains.org, for example, it attacks charter-friendly Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, offering reporters a misleading story about secret meetings and plots.

Emails obtained by CMD from Gov. Ducey’s office reveal that he (and his predecessor) helped propel a secret ‘School Finance Reform Team’ … The stated goal was for everyone on the school reform team to use their ‘different contacts to help get …legislation,’ which would effectively divert more money from public schools to charter school coffers passed.

But the Arizona Republic then printed the rest of the story. After reviewing the “secret” emails themselves, they found “nothing of the kind.” CMD was forced to issue a correction admitting that their reported premise was wrong. In the Republic’s words, CMD “used a handful of innocent emails to spin a conspiracy that just wasn’t real.

Of course there is nothing new about the unions and affiliated groups savaging charters with lies, using “unaccountable” and “billionaires” as their essential buzzwords. In June, NEA’s Brian Washington wrote, “… pro-charter forces are putting more money behind efforts to elect and lobby politicians who will implement policies resulting in unaccountable charter schools that threaten the futures of our students.”

The billionaire bash-of-the-week (seasoned with a dab of “accountability”), comes from Capital and Main, a union-friendly progressive website. There, Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, writes “Billionaires Can’t Teach Our Kids” which slams Eli Broad and a few other philanthropists for initiating a plan that would double the number of charter schools in Los Angeles. He claims, “Broad and his billionaire friends have decided that instead of investing in our public schools, they’ll just create new ones with less accountability and fewer standards ….” But a little digging reveals that In the Public Interest, which partnered with the American Federation of Teachers last year to push for more charter accountability, is a project of The Partnership for Working Families. An ACORN-like group, PWF hates anything capitalist and is a card-carrying member of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, whose raison d’être is to vilify “one percenters.” Not surprisingly, several of PWF donors are rich philanthropists, including the aforementioned billionaire George Soros and other wealthy globalist/socialists.

Their billionaires don’t count, of course.

The very day CMD came out with its bogus report, reform-minded Ed Trust-West released “More Than Half of the Top California Schools for Low-Income Students Are Charter Schools.” This report highlights the top 10 highest performing schools for low-income 3rd, 8th and 11th grade students in California and finds in 3rd and 11th grade, “five of the top ten are charter schools. In 8th grade, seven of the top ten are charters.” (Education Trust-West analyzed data from schools where “at least 60 percent of the students qualify as low-income in order to determine the top 10 performers by subject matter and grade,” reported Kimberly Beltran.)

Additionally, a recent Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) report shows that across 41 regions, “urban charter schools on average achieve significantly greater student success in both math and reading, which amounts to 40 additional days of learning growth in math and 28 days of additional growth in reading.” The CREDO report is certainly in line with the results of the California Assessment of Student Progress and Performance (CAASPP) test in Los Angeles, where Mr. Broad and his “billionaire friends” are seeking to make improvements. The results, released in September, show that only one-third of LA students in traditional public schools performed up to their grade level in English and one-fourth did so in math but that the city’s charter school students did much better.

LAUSD - performance on SB test 2015

(Courtesy of California Charter School Association via LA School Report)

Are charter schools perfect? Hardly. Not even all are wonderful. But as Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, notes in a rejoinder to the CMD report, when charters don’t do the job, they can and should be shuttered. “The public charter school bargain (has) more flexibility to innovate in exchange for accountability for higher student achievement. When public charter schools fail to meet their goals – whether for academic, financial or operational reasons – they should be closed, even if we have invested federal dollars in them. If we don’t close them, we undermine the whole concept of public charter schooling.” While there are a few exceptions, that’s the way charters schools operate.

The teachers unions and their fellow travelers would be best served if they’d stop their billionaire bashing and their tiresome accountability accusations. In fact, if traditional public schools were held to the same level of accountability as charter schools, the world will be a much better place. Why am I not holding my breath?

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

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