Fred Klonsky’s PREA Prez Blog

The Cozy Dog.

• Home of the corn dog on a stick.

800 teachers, bus drivers and education support para-professionals are in Springfield today and tomorrow for the IEA Winter Advocacy Conference. Steve and I went to two workshops this afternoon.

One was on understanding the Consumer Price Index. Yes. I know. It was even more exciting than it sounds. And the other was about school budgets and finances. Yes. I know. It was even more exciting than it sounds.

We needed a break.

It so happens that Springfield is the home of the original corn dog on a stick. The corn dog itself was invented somewhere else by somebody else. But in 1942 the owner of the Cozy Dog on Route 66 in Springfield, Illinois saw the original corn dog being made, dipped in corn batter and fried in a pan, and figured it would go faster if you put a stick in the dog, dipped it in corn batter and deep fried it.

I happen to believe there are four things that count in what to consider as good food. One: Wrapped in dough. Two: On a stick. Three: deep fried. Four: Pig.

Which makes the corn dog go three for four. Unless it is a pork smoky link and then it is a four bagger.

So Steve and I went off to the south side of Springfield looking for the Cozy Dog. Found it. And two corn dogs and some onion rings later we were ready to return to school finances.

• More school blocking the internet stories.

Yesterday, a teacher I know was teaching some social studies. One of her students asked, “What were the first colonies to become states?”

“Well, that should be easy to find out. Let’s look it up on the internet,” she said.

Blocked. Arghhh!

David Warlick on his 2 cents blog says:

…the United States runs what is probably the most repressive education system on the planet, especially when compared with the access to information that learners have outside the classroom. “Students in China have e-mail,” he said. “Do your students?”

And Dangerously Irrelevant comments on the internet book burning of Wikipedia:

If the district is going to take a principled stand against Wikipedia because some information is biased or incorrect, is it also taking out all of the encyclopedias (which research has shown, on average, to be as inaccurate as Wikipedia)?

• Reg Weaver calls “pay for performance” “pay for test scores.”

“Merit pay,” “pay for performance,” “pay for test scores” – no matter what you call it, it has never proven to be an effective method of improving student achievement or the quality of teaching.

These schemes, as proposed by politicians at the national level, are simply ways to further control the teaching and learning process. Washington is a long way removed from the nation’s 14,000 school districts. Its involvement in how teachers are paid should be as well.

NEA’s position has been clear for decades. Teacher salaries and student learning conditions are best worked out between the educators in a local school district and the local school board.

What serves America best is to provide great public schools for every child, regardless of race or zip code. That requires increasing the size of the resource pie, rather than dividing up the same resources differently.

Pay for performance schemes reward only a few and, in many cases, exclude others from participation. In most cases, pay for performance plans are not based on an educator’s knowledge and practice but on the artificial system of student test scores. No matter what it’s called, performance pay plans have never worked, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

It looks like a marriage made in heaven hell: Ohio and Wal-Mart. The anti-union bottom-feeding mega-retailer, Wal-Mart, is offering a quarter of a million dollars in start up grants to charter schools in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Ohio is a cesspool of crappy charters, with a number under investigation by the state’s attorney general.

The Columbus Education Association reports:

Wal-Mart has recently announced its offer of a cool quarter million to anyone interested in starting a charter school in Columbus. No word on whether students and non-unionized teachers will have to wear blue vests and greet people at the door as they enter.

Rich guy, Patrick Byrne, thinks you’re stupid.

Patrick Byrne, owner of Overstock.com and major financial backer of the Utah voucher plan which was rejected overwhelmingly by the voters, thinks you’re stupid for being against vouchers.

Would I buy from a guy who thinks I’m stupid. Not me. I’m not THAT stupid.

Read about it here and here. And more about the Utah voucher millionaires here at my brother’s Small Talk blog.

Teachers in Elgin’s school district U-46 rejected a contract deal last October. Unwilling to cave in now, they’re heading for a mediator.

The Daily Herald reports:

After 15 hours at the bargaining table Tuesday, Elgin Area School District U-46 officials and union leaders failed to reach a tentative contract deal for teachers, union officials said today.

Both sides now are scheduled to meet with a federal mediator on Dec. 6 to try to resolve the issue.

The district’s 2,400 teachers have been working without a contract since the beginning of the school year.

Initially, the groups said they would bring in a mediator if they did not reach a deal last Monday.

They then scheduled the Tuesday meeting as a last-ditch effort to resolve the dispute without outside help.

Union officials declined to comment until meeting with leadership groups.

Mediation is different than binding arbitration. A mediator works to help find common ground but cannot impose a settlement. Binding arbitration could lead to a forced settlement. Generally, unions try to avoid third party enforced settlements.

Friday morning I will pick up Steve and we will head down to the Winter Advocacy Conference sponsored by the IEA in Springfield. Steve is on our Negotiating Team and we will meet other members of our team when we get down there.

Springfield is a three hour drive and a million miles away from the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. The IEA is a 128 thousand member union, but most of the members are south of I-80. Illinois, like most states, is rural. Most of our union locals are small, suburban or rural. Many of our members teach all day and work the farm when they get home.

Not me. I head home to the Northwest side of the city where the corn is in the frozen food section of Dominick’s and soy beans are called edamame and you get them warm and salty at Hachi’s sushi place around the corner.

The Conference is held every year at this time. It once was called a Bargaining Conference. Back then the focus was on bargaining training. That still happens, which is why we are going as a team. It has a broader focus now, including political action training.

Last year when we went, we got about ten miles past I-80 and a truck had jack-knifed on the icy road. I sat there for three hours, then called down to the Conference only to find out that the storm had knocked out power in all of Springfield and the Conference had been canceled. Our team all met up at a truck stop near the Aurora exit and had breakfast. Ah, team building over eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast and bad coffee with dairy creamer! I asked for milk for my coffee.

Our negotiating team is elected. This is rare for IEA locals where most teams are picked by the local president. I like our system better. It just seems to me that democracy works better. Got an issue? Run. Got a complaint about the way we negotiated? Run. Unhappy about what we did nor didn’t get? Run. It is ironic that most union staff people have told me that electing a negotiating team is a bad idea. I think it makes them nervous. Good.

Our Contract has a year and a half left. We start bargaining with our board a year from this Spring. We start visiting schools on our listening tour this coming Spring. Surveys go out in the Fall.

It’s a long process. But we want to represent our members well and that takes work. All the negotiators have unique issues that they are concerned with and that brought us to become negotiators. But all strive to act locally and think globally.

The Winter Conference this Friday starts the process.

A striking writer friend in California said they needed better chants for their picket lines and did I have any suggestions. After following the WGA strike, I’m convinced that Youtube is the picket line of the 21st Century:

Education pundits.

Bloggers and pundits keep lamenting the fact that education does not seem to be a big issue in the early stages of the ‘08 presidential elections.

I’m not surprised about it.

I heard the whole Democratic field at last summer’s NEA convention in Philadelphia. And I think I said then that you couldn’t see light between the whole bunch of them. Hillary seemed knowledgeable. Obama seemed open to merit pay. They all criticized high stakes testing and hinted at criticism of NCLB. Blah. Blah. Blah. I mean they were talking to 10,000 educators. What were they gonna say?

What I think the electorate is responding to is not what the candidates are for, but what the program of the critics is: Vouchers (voted down when it has been on the ballot. See Utah). More testing and accountability. National standards. The Democratic Centrists including Ed Sector, Billionaires Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge fund school hobbyists, all thought they could hitch their political wagons to these issues. But it just ain’t happening. It’s not that people aren’t interested in education reform and change. They just aren’t thrilled with the choices these so-called reformers are offering.

• Charter teachers aren’t are into unions.

I was talking this week with a big time charter guy. “Teachers in charters just aren’t interested in joining a union,” he assured me.

Don’t tell that to the teachers at Merrick Academy in Queens, NY. NY Teacher reports:

Teachers at the Merrick Academy — Queens Public Charter School have overwhelmingly demanded representation by the UFT and the union is moving swiftly to make that a reality.

• I need a Rotherham translation.

OK. Someone tell me what the hell this means. In Rotherham’s most recent post in Eduwonk, he says:

Sure seems like in the ‘08 presidential campaign “performance pay” is becoming the new “school vouchers.” Used to be that vouchers were the big issue that pundits would use to size up Democratic candidates on education and benchmark their reform creds. Didn’t make a lot of sense but it was the way it worked. Now, in several debates the questions have been about performance-based pay for teachers and aside from the No Child Left Behind rhetoric it’s the most discussed education issue in the race.

Too bad, because like school choice, regardless of where one comes down on it, performance-based pay is just one piece of the school improvement puzzle.

Does that mean it doesn’t matter what you think about performance-based pay? Why doesn’t it? Explain this to me. I mean, lots of things are “just one piece of the school improvement puzzle,” but they still matter.

• Joe Williams at Billionaires Democrats for Education Reform goes bonkers over candlelight vigil.

The UFT in NY is organizing a candlelight vigil to protest “gotcha” tactics used by NY school boss Klein against teachers by administration. Williams is offended that a teachers’ union would fight for teachers’ rights to due process and fairness. I’m not shocked at Williams’ shockedness.

We’re back in Chicago after having Thanksgiving in Brooklyn. We gave up coffee at Peet’s at home for Connecticut Muffin and Bagel Delight on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. Edge to Peet’s on the coffee. No contest on the bagels. Brooklyn by a mile.

It was almost 70 degrees in NY on Thanksgiving day. The Japanese Maple next door had the most beautiful red leaves. Every time we walked out, someone was taking a picture of it.

Thanksgiving with our kids, grandchild and friends was terrific. Menu: Carolyn made a perfectly cooked turkey, two kinds of stuffing (Chris’ traditional family white bread, and Leigh’s corn bread with added sausage and cherries), garlic mashed potatoes and my sliced sweet potatoes in cream with a pecan streussel topping, brussel sprouts with bacon, Anne’s corn pudding from Fannie Farmer and cranberry relish. Lots of wine and Jesse’s Pumpkin cheese cake for dessert.

Travel tip: If you fly out of La Guardia at 9PM on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the plane will be two thirds empty and will leave twenty-five minutes early. At least ours did. Basically the only people on the plane were Anne and me and (surprisingly) our old friends, Mike James, Paige and family. Mike has co-owned the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park in Chicago for a billion years.

Judge rules that the public has a right to know about the Jena Six.

The Chicago Trib reports:

A judge ruled Wednesday that the public and the news media should have full access to all legal proceedings involving Mychal Bell, one of the teenage defendants in the racially-charged Jena 6 case in Louisiana, whose prosecution had been shrouded in secrecy on orders of the trial judge.

Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Chicago Tribune and joined by a coalition of major U.S. media companies, Rapides Parish District Judge Thomas Yeager ordered that Bell’s upcoming criminal trial, as well as any pretrial hearings, must be open to the press and the public. Yeager also ordered that the court record and transcripts of any closed proceedings held so far be made available to the news media, and that attorneys for Bell be released from the trial judge’s gag order.

“The right to an open trial is one that’s very important,” Yeager said in making his ruling, “so that the public has confidence in what we do.”Yeager’s ruling was a rebuke to LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray, who had ordered that the proceedings should be closed.

New layout design for Democrats for Education Reform?

At first I thought it was a new format for DFER. But, no. It’s a new blog: Billionaires for Education Reform.

A recent posting:

Smelly and I bumped into Mike and Joel at the Century Club; we told them what a fabulous job they’re doing with the public schools. Not that we actually know anyone who sends their kids to one – but we simply love those ads on TV showing all the improvements they’ve made!We also love what they’re doing with trying to get rid of incompetent teachers – why anyone should want to stick around as a teacher beyond one or two years anyway is beyond me.In fact, wanting to stay as a teacher probably disqualifies one automatically, since anyone with brains or talent would naturally want to move on in a couple of years to law school or Wall St. In fact, our nephew, Spence, is graduating from Yale this spring and planning to go into TFA and teach in the Bronx; luckily he got a slot at Morgan Chase reserved for when he’s had enough giving back to society and is ready to move on.Muffy Hindenburg

UPDATE: Be sure to check out another DFER copy-cat site.

Is Hillary for the future or for the children?

When you attend as many state and national union conventions as I have and listened to as many politicians speak at them as I have, you…I don’t know… grow a little cynical about them. The differences between them always break down between one who is “for the future” and the other who is “for the children.”And so it was as I was reading the recent news report on Hillary’s latest education pronouncements. You pick. Is she a candidate who is for the future or does she stand for the children?

• She came out against merit pay. Future? Children?
• She came out against violence. Future? Children?
• She came out for uniforms, especially for girls (?) Future? Children?
• And she wants “to be president to help every boy and girl have a better future, have the health care they need and get a good education and live your dreams.” Future? Children? That last one made it a little tough, I know.

Thanks to NYC Educator for including my post, It’s the war, stupid. in the current installment of The Carnival of Education.