Maybe I spoke too soon. Ken finds common ground with Stand for Children.

As the so-called education reform committees of the General Assembly gear up for post-holiday hearings in Aurora, so has the IEA.

But just when I thought that President Ken Swanson and Executive Director Audrey Soglin were about to spine up and fight for our members, they revert to their old form.

One of the prime movers and shakers in the current attack on teacher unions is Stand for Children, a reformy Superman outfit that dropped a cool 600 K backing a handful of legislators in the November election.

Some of those legislators were placed by Boss Madigan and Cullerton on House and Senate education reform committees.

What is the SFC agenda?

• Undermine local collective bargaining rights.
• Ban the right of teachers to strike.
• Binding arbitration.
• End seniority and tenure rights.

These so-called reforms might very well find their way into bills by the first week in January.

Ken and Audrey sent a letter to our Region containing a promise to fight. Yesterday.

But at the very same time Communications Director Charlie McBarron was sending the following message on behalf of Ken and Audrey to Region Chairs and Grass Roots Political Activists (GPAs):

It’s important to understand that, while portions of this legislation
are deeply offensive and are absolutely off the table as far as we are
concerned, we also have some common ground with Stand for Children, including a desire to streamline the process for getting bad or ineffective teachers out of classrooms. 

A blanket “No” response is not appropriate and would be
counter-productive to our mission and to our desire to continue to be seen as leaders in education improvement in Illinois.

Yep. Ken has found common ground with Stand for Children. On what issue? Funding? Class size? Training and support for teachers? Opposition to the glut of standardized testing that has overwhelmed us?

Nope. Ken has found common ground with Stand for Children on the issue of finding a way to speed up due process and fire teachers faster.

Ken has become a character in an old western movie. “Hey paw. I say we hang ’em now and sort ’em out later.”

Here’s Ken’s argument as he expressed it to our Region:

The question of whether there might be some additional factors in addition to seniority used in RIF/recall procedures was raised in response to a great deal of publicity this issue received last spring particularly in Chicago. I don’t believe anyone in IEA is going to say seniority should not matter. I certainly don’t believe it should not. The question is whether there are any other factors we could agree should be used as part of the decision making process. For example, if two RIf’d people are nearly equal in seniority for a recall and one has excellent evaluations and the other is in remediation, should the one in remediation be brought back ahead of the excellent teacher because the excellent teacher was hired ten days after the remediation teacher was hired?

And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

In order to find common ground with what is among the worst of the reformy groups, the president of our union has managed to come up with a straw man who would make Dorothy proud.

Let me be clear. In 26 years of teaching, years as a Grievance Chair, 15 years of dealing directly with RIFs and rehires and 10 years as a local president, I have never, once, ever expereienced this issue. Ever. It is totally bogus. A fiction.

But it sets the stage. What will Ken and his cohorts sell out for his precious but over-stated “public support.”

If Ken won’t defend fair and due process as negotiated locally by his own locals, what will he fight for?