Sorry kissfan. Senate Bill 7 is still bad news.

There is a good report on the Edelman affair by Steve Singiser at Daily Kos.

In the comment section, an anonymous poster with the handle “kissfan” writes:

I urge you all to read the statement issued jointly by the IEA, IFT and the CTU (pdf). Don’t rely solely on the “Fred Klonsky Blog.” Fred is a disgruntled IEA member intent on tearing down the organization’s leadership criticizing them at every turn. Yet Mr. Klonsky doesn’t run for any IEA leadership positions as he’s more than content to remain behind his keyboard where he can pretend to be important. He immediately jumps on anything critical of the IEA and runs with it regardless of what the facts may say.

The anonymous kissfan folows this up with:

I’ve been to my fair share of representative’s assemblies, including this last one in Chicago and don’t recall Fred doing much other than tweeting and spending an inordinate amount of time out of his seat during RA business. Nor do I recall Fred spending much time at the microphone during the Illinois caucus to argue his side of the issues. I do, however, recall Fred being extremely confrontational with at least one other delegate over his votes.

I don’t doubt that Fred works hard at what he does. It’s not his work ethic I’m questioning. It’s the agenda behind his motives that bothers me. If he’s so much smarter than the IEA leadership who has “sold teachersmout (sic) time and time again,” why wasn’t he running for any of the open executive seats during this last election? If leadership is as corrupt as you and Fred want us all to believe, I would think that sitting around and not trying to unseat them would be unacceptable for someone who “puts his ass on the line for his teachers every day of the week.”

 It’s a silly post which sounds a lot like a member of the IEA Board of Directors who made the same argument to me at the RA.

I agree with her, by the way. Nobody should soley rely on my blog. I’m not sure I’m disgruntled. More on the gruntled side. I run for crap a lot. Too much, actually. I’m getting to old for this stuff, y’know. I’m at the microphone all the friggin’ time. Frequently and famously “unseen” by former President Swanson.

And watch this kissfan:

I’m about to jump on something critical of the IEA leadership again. With facts.

One of the selling points of Senate Bill 7, which forever took away seniority and tenure rights, the right to strike in Chicago and replaced seniority RIFs with principal discretion and student assessment results, was that principals, for the first time, would receive training on how to do teacher evaluations.

Swanson and IEA Executive Director Audrey Soglin made much of this.

Just as Soglin made excuses for selling our local bargaining rights away for the Race to the Top money the state never got.

But now the Chicago News Cooperative is reporting that in these tight budgetary times there is no money for principal evaluation training.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.

Mr. Quinn included the money in his budget, but the House erased it and the Senate agreed.

“It’s not that the House doesn’t care — they do care — but it was just a question of priorities and having to make cuts,” said Jessica Handy, spokeswoman for Stand for Children, an advocacy group that helped write the bill.

I have a couple of observations:

1. This was always bullshit.

2. $500,000? That’s what they were going to spend on training principals in the entire state?

3. It was never worth giving up our seniority for.