Saturday coffee.
My Saturday schedule is all messed up. I had coffee on the run. At 8:15 I was driving up to Palatine in the northern burbs to a meeting at the IEA Palatine office of Association political activists. Some had titles like “Grass Roots Political Activists,” and “Go To Team” members, as well as staffers and local members like me.
The subject was the coming legislative session and the anticipated issues. Surprise! They are fundng and preserving our teacher retirement pension. Wait! Didn’t I see this show last year? Better get use to it. There will be more reruns of this in the coming years than episodes of I Love Lucy.
Meanwhile down in Ottawa eight was not enough. After eight hours of negotiations, there is still no settlement. But eight hours means that they were talking. OTHSEA local president Glenn Weatherford said after the meeting that they are getting close and some issues may go to binding arbitration.
A community meeting is scheduled for 6PM tomorrow. Teachers will be there to answer parent and community questions. The board is invited. More information is here.
Also. Send a letter of support to OTHSEA@gmail.com
It remains a mystery to me why the IEA will not make a public statement in support of our union brothers and sisters in Unite Here. As you know, I am very concerned that we will be faced with impossible choices if the IEA continues to schedule it’s state convention in March at the Hyatt Rosemont. At the latest Region 36 Council meeting it was decided to send a letter to IEA Prez Ken Swanson asking him what the deal is?
According to the Boston Herald:
Unite Here! Local 26 is planning a nationwide candlelight vigil to rally behind the 98 Boston and Cambridge hotel housekeepers who were fired by Hyatt in August and replaced by cheaper outsourced workers. A date for the vigil hasn’t been set. The union has sent more than 500 letters and made more than 1,000 phone calls urging Hyatt customers to boycott the chain, president Janice Loux said.
Didn’t Ken get one of those letters? Listen. My local gets five delegates to the state convention. I’m telling you now, if the situation remain as it is, none of us will be going.
One more word about Nicholas Kristof’s piece of crap column on education in the NY Times this past week. A number of people have pointed to his claim that “a study found that if black students had four straight years of teachers from the top 25 percent of most effective teachers, the black-white testing gap would vanish in four years.”
While the specific study Kristof was referring to was not cited, Eduwonkette blew that nonsense out of the water back in June of 2008.
It’s everyone’s favorite sound bite: good teachers alone can close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. But if the entire teacher effect doesn’t persist from year-to-year – that is, a student only retains some fraction of the learning advantage they get from having a highly effective teacher – these claims simply don’t hold up.
Like every other claim in the Kristof column, this claim was a lie.
