Union misrepresentation

Having known she was part to initiating some disciplinary actions in 2004-2005 against an employee and then had the nerve to also act as a union representativefor that same person.

Once again there was little support from the Uniserv on this, as they advised not to circulate the petition while employees are on the clock.

"It is outside of my responsibilities and authority to become involved in local governance issues. Thus, I believe it would be inappropriate for me to advise you on issues regarding who should or should not be representing your local's interest."

This never did get circulated, but really should have.

To: The De Pere Educational Support Personnel Association Members

The undersigned association members feel our current president and grievance chair person, Janice C******* has failed in her duties to uphold the purposes of the union bylaws and her duty of fair representation.

Specifically we are no longer confident in her ability to aid and assist members and have been witness to conflicts of interest that have led to negligence of her duty of fair representation. We fell she puts our association in jeopardy through her repeated irresponsible behavior.

Furthermore;
-She was elected Sat June 7th, 2003. Bylaws dictate that officers serve for two years, and may be re-elected without an interviewing term. At our last general membership meeting at the end of the last school year we should have had an election of officers.
-During the process of developing the support staff evaluation from Janice claimed to have sought out and brought forward feedback from unit members to a committee consisting of administrators, supervisors, and herself. To the best of our knowledge this is a false claim.

The undersigned

Wages don't keep up with cost of energy

Real hourly pay for all workers down 0.6%
By Brian Tumulty Press-Gazette Washington bureau August 29, 2006

WASHINGTON — Inflation in general and higher energy costs in particular have wiped out wage gains among manufacturing workers since the end of the last recession in 2001, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

The association said Monday that inflation-adjusted wages of manufacturing workers fell 1.7 percent between 2001 and last month, while real hourly wages for all types of workers fell 0.6 percent.

The association's report — released a day before the more comprehensive annual Census Bureau report on income and poverty — framed the wage problem in terms of national energy policy.

At Hudapack Metal Treating Inc., which operates two factories in southern Wisconsin and another in a Chicago suburb, president Gary Huss said rising natural gas prices have all but eliminated his ability to pay bonuses to his 170 employees.

"I don't have the cash to do it regularly right now," Huss said, adding that he still tries to provide a modest annual wage increase.

The National Association of Manufacturers is calling on Congress and the Bush administration to enact a "Manhattan Project" to develop new energy technologies such as coal gasification.

"Over the past year, energy prices have risen 23 percent due to increased global demand, limited domestic supplies, natural disasters and global instability," John Engler, the association's president and chief executive, said at a news conference.

Manufacturing employment rose only 17,000 in the 12 months that ended last month. Employment on the factory floor among production workers increased by 170,000 jobs, however, and was boosted by gains in export-oriented sectors such as computers and electronic products and aerospace. Most gains were offset by losses among nonproduction manufacturing jobs, which David Huether, the association's chief economist, said could be due to consolidation efforts and outsourcing.

Liberal economists have pointed to rising corporate profits and the continued growth in income inequality as contributing factors to the decline in average wages when inflation is taken into account.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, agreed with the association's analysis. "Real wages would be rising modestly if not for rising energy prices," he said.

But Baker said "the other part of the story" is the widening of income inequality that dates back to the early 1980s and halted only during the late 1990s.

Even among manufacturing workers there is an income gap, with higher skilled workers getting wage increases that have outpaced inflation while low skilled workers have not, according to the manufacturers group.

For once, blame the student

By Patrick Welsh USA Today 3/7/2006

Failure in the classroom is often tied to lack of funding, poor teachers or other ills. Here's a thought: Maybe it's the failed work ethic of todays kids. That's what I'm seeing in my school. Until reformers see this reality, little will change.

Last month, as I averaged the second-quarter grades for my senior English classes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., the same familiar pattern leapt out at me.

Kids who had emigrated from foreign countries such as Shewit Giovanni from Ethiopia, Farah Ali from Guyana and Edgar Awumey from Ghana often aced every test, while many of their U.S.-born classmates from upper-class homes with highly educated parents had a string of C's and D's.

As one would expect, the middle-class American kids usually had higher SAT verbal scores than did their immigrant classmates, many of whom had only been speaking English for a few years.

What many of the American kids I taught did not have was the motivation, self-discipline or work ethic of the foreign-born kids.

Politicians and education bureaucrats can talk all they want about reform, but until the work ethic of U.S. students changes, until they are willing to put in the time and effort to master their subjects, little will change.

A study released in December by University of Pennsylvania researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman suggests that the reason so many U.S. students are "falling short of their intellectual potential" is not "inadequate teachers, boring textbooks and large class sizes" and the rest of the usual litany cited by the so-called reformers, but "their failure to exercise self-discipline."

The sad fact is that in the USA, hard work on the part of students is no longer seen as a key factor in academic success. The groundbreaking work of Harold Stevenson and a multinational team at the University of Michigan comparing attitudes of Asian and American students sounded the alarm more than a decade ago.

Asian vs. U.S. students

When asked to identify the most important factors in their performance in math, the percentage of Japanese and Taiwanese students who answered "studying hard" was twice that of American students.

American students named native intelligence, and some said the home environment. But a clear majority of U.S. students put the responsibility on their teachers. A good teacher, they said, was the determining factor in how well they did in math.

"Kids have convinced parents that it is the teacher or the system that is the problem, not their own lack of effort," says Dave Roscher, a chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams in this Washington suburb. "In my day, parents didn't listen when kids complained about teachers. We are supposed to miraculously make kids learn even though they are not working."

As my colleague Ed Cannon puts it: "Today, the teacher is supposed to be responsible for motivating the kid. If they don't learn it is supposed to be our problem, not theirs."

And, of course, busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids are big subscribers to this theory.

Maybe every generation of kids has wanted to take it easy, but until the past few decades students were not allowed to get away with it. "Nowadays, it's the kids who have the power. When they don't do the work and get lower grades, they scream and yell. Parents side with the kids who pressure teachers to lower standards," says Joel Kaplan, another chemistry teacher at T.C. Williams.

Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C's or D's to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children's futures.

It is not only parents, however, who are siding with students in their attempts to get out of hard work.

Blame schools, too

"Schools play into it," says psychiatrist Lawrence Brain, who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the Washington metropolitan area. "I've been amazed to see how easy it is for kids in public schools to manipulate guidance counselors to get them out of classes they don't like. They have been sent a message that they don't have to struggle to achieve if things are not perfect."

Neither the high-stakes state exams, such as Virginia's Standards of Learning, nor the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have succeeded in changing that message; both have turned into minimum-competency requirements aimed at the lowest in our school.

Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration.

As a teacher, I don't object to the heightened standards required of educators in the No Child Left Behind law. Who among us would say we couldn't do a little better? Nonetheless, teachers have no control over student motivation and ambition, which have to come from the home, and from within each student.

Perhaps the best lesson I can pass along to my upper- and middle-class students is to merely point them in the direction of their foreign-born classmates, who can remind us all that education in America is still more a privilege than a right.

Patrick Welsh is an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Largest teachers union, AFL-CIO step closer

Largest teachers union, AFL-CIO step closer
By Greg Toppo and Brian Tumulty, USA TODAY 2/24/06

The nation's largest teachers union is poised to give its local chapters permission to join the AFL-CIO, setting the stage for a possible merger that could create a mega-union representing 4 million teachers and other employees.

Leaders of the National Education Association and AFL-CIO plan to announce on Monday that they will let local NEA affiliates join the AFL-CIO's central labor councils, local groups that coordinate union activity. The move would reverse longstanding policies separating NEA's 2.7 million members from the AFL-CIO, which includes the NEA's rival, the American Federation of Teachers.

Teachers in several cities and in three states — Florida, Minnesota and Montana — are already members of merged NEA/AFT unions. Teachers in New York are expected to merge this fall. The proposed agreement could pave the way for many more such arrangements.

NEA and AFL-CIO national leaders did not immediately respond to requests for interviews, but several local union officials confirmed the proposal and said they expect it to be announced at the AFL-CIO's Winter Executive Council Meeting in San Diego on Monday.

Dan Kaufman, spokesman for the Maryland State Teachers Association, an NEA affiliate, said he has seen the agreement. Wisconsin AFL-CIO President David Newby said he hadn't seen the exact language, but understood that it would facilitate more mergers. He represents 13 Midwest states as a non-voting member of the AFL-CIO executive council.

While NEA is not proposing a national merger, the agreement could help the AFL-CIO gain millions of members, replacing some of the more than 4 million it lost when several member unions broke off last year. It could also give the AFT a larger presence outside big cities.

"It's potentially very significant because it's no secret that there's a split in organized labor," says Andrew Rotherham, co-editor of the new book Collective Bargaining in Education. "The NEA, which has potentially millions of members, is essentially choosing a side."

The move could also benefit the NEA, which has suffered politically since 2002, when it began forcefully opposing President Bush's No Child Left Behind education reform law. AFT has been more amenable to some of the proposed reforms. "To the extent that there's less daylight between them, it's good for the NEA." Spokesman Dennis Tompkins of the New York State United Teachers, the AFT's largest affiliate with 525,000 members, said he was expecting Monday's announcement to confirm that dual affiliation is allowed.

"We've made the union stronger by bringing people with the same job titles and job descriptions under the same umbrella," he said.

Denis Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO, estimated that 85% of the state's public employees, from teachers to public hospital employees, local highway departments and first responders, are unionized.

"This is a big move," said Mike Antonucci, a Sacramento-based teacher union watchdog who writes a widely read blog on unions.

A 1998 effort to merge the NEA and AFT failed after NEA members rejected it, but Antonucci calls the new agreement "a creeping merger" of the two unions, moving them closer to joining together. Together the two unions would represent about 4 million teachers and other workers, greatly impacting their bargaining authority.

But Antonucci said the proposal could create problems for the NEA, which generally puts every policy change — from major budget proposals to whether or not to authorize articles in its magazine on the dangers of perfume in school — to a vote at the union's convention, or representive assembly, each July.

"If they don't put it in front of the convention for some sort of vote, I'm pretty confident that someone's going to raise the issue," he said.

Brian Tumulty writes for Gannett News Service.

Reclassification for the president

During the DePere Educational Support Personnel Association 2005-07 Contract Negotiation a few positions were clarified with the help of an arbitrator. The High School Principal Secretary position held by Mary Lemke was clarified to be a union position, the District Account Payable Angie P*******, as well as the District Payroll Specialist held by Bruce M*******.

Interestingly enough at the General Membership meeting what was also failed to be mentioned was that High School Student Accounting Clerk position held Janice C********, who happens to be the Chief Negotiator and Union President went from a Job Class 6, to a Job Class 8, resulting in a $1.57 pay bump.

Stupid in America

Stupid in America - How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education By John Stossel ABC News - Jan. 13, 2006

"Stupid in America" is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America's public schools and it's about time we face up to it.

Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, "You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It's a normal thing here."

We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools to see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but officials wouldn't allow it.

Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best classrooms in their district.

We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down in state after state.

Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C., allowed "20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked at two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says it's one of the best schools in America. Yet what the students taped didn't inspire confidence.

One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another "20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with his shirt off, in front of his teacher.

If you're like most American parents, you might think "These things don't happen at my kid's school." A Gallup Poll survey showed 76 percent of Americans were completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school.

Education reformers like Kevin Chavous have a message for these parents: If you only knew.

Even though people in the suburbs might think their schools are great, Chavous says, "They're not. That's the thing and the test scores show that."

Chavous and many other education professionals say Americans don't know that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because without competition, parents don't know what their kids might have had.

And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.

Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved ... We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."

He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.

Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.

"That is the biggest lie in America. They waste money," he said.

To save money, Chavis asks the students to do things like keep the grounds picked up and set up for their own lunch. For gym class, his students often just run laps around the block. All of this means there's more money left over for teaching.

Even though he spends less money per student than the public schools do, Chavis pays his teachers more than what public school teachers earn. His school also thrives because the principal gets involved. Chavis shows up at every classroom and uses gimmicks like small cash payments for perfect attendance.

Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city.

"It's not about the money," he said.

He's confident that even kids who come from broken families and poor families will do well in his school.

"Give me the poor kids, and I will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do it," he said.

Monopoly Kills Innovation and Cheats Kids

Chavis's charter school is an example of how a little innovation can create a school that can change kids' lives. You don't get innovation without competition.

To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.

Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them "stupid."

We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."

The Belgian students didn't perform better because they're smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

American schools don't teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don't have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids -- it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.

Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.

She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Last week Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.

This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers.

Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers some relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average or way below average."

Here's just one example from New York City: It took years to fire a teacher who sent sexually oriented e-mails to "Cutie 101," a 16-year-old student. Klein said, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."

Only after six years of litigation were they able to fire him. In the meantime, they paid the teacher more than $300,000. Klein said he employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what are called rubber rooms. This year he will spend $20 million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence. Klein's office says the new contract will make it easier to get rid of sex offenders, but it will still be difficult to fire incompetent teachers.

When I confronted Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, she said, "They [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just have just given up, or gotten bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons."

Zoned Out of a Good Education

I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12 years, he still couldn't read.

So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to. Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up two grade levels -- after just 72 hours of instruction.

His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian's progress but disappointed with his public schools. "With Sylvan, it's a huge improvement. And they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're on point. But I can't say the same for the public schools," she said.

Lying to Beat the System

Gena Cain, like most parents, doesn't have a choice which public school her kids attend. She followed the rules, and her son paid the price.

In San Jose, Calif., some parents break the rules to get their kids into Fremont Union schools. They're so much better than neighboring schools that parents sometimes cheat to get their kids in by pretending to live in the school district.

"We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here illegally, under false pretenses," said District Superintendent Steve Rowley.

Inspector John Lozano works for the district going door-to-door to check if kids really live where they say they live. And even seeing that a child is present at a particular address isn't enough. Lozano says he needs to look inside the house to make sure the student really lives there.

Think about what he's doing. The school district police send him into your daughter's bedroom. He even goes through drawers and closets if he has to. At one house he found a computer and some teen magazines and pictures of a student with her friends. He decided that student passed the residency test.

But a grandmother who listed an address in his district is caught. The people who answered the door when Lozano visited told him she didn't live there.

Two days later, I talked with the grandmother who tried to get her grandson into the Fremont schools.

"I was actually crying. I was crying in front of this 14-year-old. Why can't they just let parents to get in the school of their choice?" she asked.

Why can't she make a choice? It's sad that school officials force her to go to the black market to get her grandson a better education. After we started calling the school, the school did decide to let him stay in the district.

School-Choice Proponents Meet Resistance

When the Sanford family moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C., the family had a big concern: Where would the kids go to school? In most places, you must attend the public school in the zone where you live, but the middle school near the Sanford's new home was rated below average.

It turned out, however, that this didn't pose a problem for this family, because the reason the Sanfords moved to Columbia was that Mark Sanford had been elected governor. He and his wife were invited to send their kids to schools in better districts.

Sanford realized how unfair the system was. "If you can buy a $250,000 or $300,000 house, you're gonna get some great public education," Gov. Sanford said. Or if you have political connections.

The Sanfords decided it was unfair to take advantage of their position as "first family" and ended up sending their kids to private school. "It's too important to me to sacrifice their education. I get one shot at it. If I don't pay very close attention to how my boys get educated then I've lost an opportunity to make them the best they can be in this world," Jenny Sanford said.

The governor then proposed giving every parent in South Carolina that kind of choice, regardless of where they lived or whether they made a lot of money. He said state tax credits should help parents pay for private schools. Then they would have a choice.

"The public has to know that there's an alternative there. It's just like, do you get a Sprint phone or an AT&T phone," Chavous said.

He's right. When monopolies rule, there is little choice, and little gets done. In America the phone company was once a government-supported monopoly. All the phones were black, and all the calls expensive. With competition, things have changed -- for the better. We pay less for phone calls. If we're unhappy with our phone service, we switch companies.

Why can't kids benefit from similar competition in education?

"People expect and demand choice in every other area of their life," Sanford said.

The governor announced his plan last year and many parents cheered the idea, but school boards, teachers unions and politicians objected. PTAs even sent kids home with a letter saying, "Contact your legislator.

How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been proven?"

A lot of people say education tax credits and vouchers are a terrible idea, that they'll drain money from public schools and give it to private ones.

Last week's Florida court ruling against vouchers came after teacher Ruth Holmes Cameron and advocacy groups brought a suit to block the program.

"To say that competition is going to improve education? It's just not gonna work. You know competition is not for children. It's not for human beings. It's not for public education. It never has been, it never will be," Holmes said.

Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that served you a bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the government assigned you to "your" grocery store. The store wouldn't have to compete for your business, and it would soon sell spoiled milk or stock only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell houses advertising "neighborhood with a good grocery store." That's insane, and yet that's what America does with public schools.

Chavous, who has worked to get more school choice in Washington, D.C., said, "Choice to me is the only way. I believe that we can force the system from an external vantage point to change itself. It will never change itself from within. ... Unless there is some competition infused in the equation, unless that occurs, then they know they have a captive monopoly that they can continue to dominate."

Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do. If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, science schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what else. If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.