Fred,

Excellent work Fred! I questioned the same remark but fell asleep before pursuing it.

I was at an IFT sponsored healthcare meeting Thursday with reps from TRS and Central Management Services. CMS stated that our total premium for TCHP Is about $1,000.00 per month. currently the state pays half and we pay half. This would make SB 2404 a cost of $12,000 a year to retirees and 6% over a lifetime. What a SCREW JOB! It actually makes the state money.

Diane

The IEA Board of Directors meets this weekend. The BOD includes Region Chairs from around the state.

Did THEY know?

I assure you that active teachers did not know.

Retirees did not know.

Read Glen Brown‘s post this morning. And mine from last night.

SB2404 is now clearly an unconstitutional bill, cleverly designed to look like a choice for consideration.

But there is no consideration.

The choice is to give up the compounded COLA that we already have and is protected by the pension protection clause of the Illinois Constitution in exchange for access to TRIP – but with members paying 100% of the premium and it is not protected.

I ask again.

Did We Are One know that they bargained this?

If they didn’t know, why didn’t they?

And why didn’t we?

Will somebody on the BOD being asking those questions today?

CHICAGO – National Board Certified Teacher Karen GJ Lewis has retained her position as president of the Chicago Teachers Union, according to unofficial, preliminary results from today’s election, receiving an overwhelming 80 percent of the votes.  In addition, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) has also retained the remaining officer positions including Jesse Sharkey as vice president, Michael Brunson as recording secretary and Kristine Mayle as financial secretary.  The slate also won all of its executive board and convention delegates.

Lewis’ new term begins July 1 and will last three years. The CORE team defeated the Coalition to Save Our Union in in all of its executive board and regional positions. Over 26,000 CTU members, including teachers, paraprofessionals, school clinicians were eligible to vote in today’s election.

The election was administrated by the American Arbitration Association (Triple A) and was monitored by the union’s Rules & Election Committee as well as observers representing both caucuses. The final, audited vote totals will be released later in the week.

No action until Monday.

But I noticed a third bullet point I hadn’t see before.

Retired Option 1:

• The TRS COLA would continue to be 3 percent compounded annually calculated from the member’s currentpension.

• A staggered automatic two year forfeiture of the member’s COLA after the effective date of the bill.

• Access to state health insurance with the possibility of paying 100% of the premium.

“100% of the premium?” I emailed Glen and asked. “Is this new to you?”

“Yes,” he emailed back.

What the hell?

So we looked into it. And sure enough.

Senator John Cullerton filed Senate Amendment 002 to Senate Bill 2404 on May 8, 2013.

“…Eligible Tier I employees and eligible Tier I retirees may be required to make contributions toward the cost of coverage under a program of health benefits.The vested and enforceable contractual right to a program of health benefits is NOT offered as, and shall NOT be considered, a pension or retirement benefit under Article XIII, Section 5 of the Illinois Constitution, the Illinois Pension Code, or any subsequent or successor enactment providing pension benefits…” 

[The health care option would have to be written into the Illinois Pension Code (40 ILCS 5/) to be considered a “benefit” protected by the Illinois Constitution. In this way, consideration would create a contractual cause of action for the full enforcement of that expectation – an irrevocable binding contract between the state (legislators) and public employees].

“The Department shall coordinate with each retirement system administering an election in accordance with this amendatory Act of the 98^th General Assembly to provide information concerning the impact of the election of health benefits. Each System shall include information prepared by the Department in the required election packet…

Celia Oyler is a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University.  We both were graduate students together at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At one time we shared teacher assistant teaching duties of undergraduates. I will admit that I stole most of my class activities from her.

She is the most decent and humane a teacher any student or colleague could ask for.

When something pisses Celia Oyler off, it is earned.

So when her employer, Teachers College, decided to award their Medal of Honor to the wealthy Merryl Tisch her outrage was not without just cause.

Professor Celia Oyler wrote the following message to her graduate students:

An Open Letter to Graduating Master’s Students in the Elementary and Secondary Inclusive Education Programs

I will not be attending convocation this year as I am on parental leave. I know if I were attending I would not be able to remain silent while Merryl Tisch is given a TC Medal of Honor. Her actions while Chair of the New York State Board of Regents have wrought incredible damage upon our noble profession.

Merryl Tisch has ushered through the Board of Regents many policies with which I vehemently disagree; these include: decoupling teacher certification and master’s degrees from university-based teacher education (approving Relay Graduate School of Education); allowing InBloom to collect and sell private data on each K-12 student in New York State schools; and requiring all school districts to tie teacher evaluation to Value Added Measures based on student test scores. There are numerous problems with using student test scores to evaluate teachers (Value Added Measures). See here, here and here to start.

Despite these well-documented concerns, Teachers College’s initial press release indicated that TC was awarding Merryl Tisch this honorary degree because of her efforts to establish this system of teacher evaluation. To be honest with you all, when I first read the press release, I sobbed. My chagrin is shared by many. For instance, read New York State Principal of the Year (2013) and TC grad Carol Burris’s comment about Merryl Tisch on Diane Ravitch’s blog posting about the Tisch award.

If I were at the graduation convocation, I would wear a sign on the back of my robe. It would probably say, “USING STUDENT TEST SCORES TO RATE TEACHERS DISHONORS US”. Some people are suggesting that students and faculty could turn their backs when Tisch is talking; other people have the idea to hold up signs. In any case, I know that I couldn’t be silent. I would feel complicit; my silence would be condoning the award. I would make sure to sit next to a colleague or two or three who would also agree to take an action with me.

I cannot sit silently while teachers across this country are being viciously attacked and demeaned by the junk science of VAM. For instance: A district in Florida fired A Teacher of the Year based on her VAM. In Los Angeles, a well-loved community-minded teacher committed suicide after his VAM scores were published in the newspaper and he was ranked as one of the lowest teachers in the district; he specialized in welcoming children who spoke little English.

When I was a child, I voraciously read all the books I could find about the Underground Railroad, the Abolitionist Movement, the anti-Nazi movement (including the White Rose Society), the Civil Rights Movement. As a teacher I often included a focus on the South African anti-apartheid movement. For as long as I can remember, I have asked myself, “Would I have stood up?” “Would I have had the courage to defend the side of freedom and justice?”

There are activists in the educational community and TC alumni who are debating whether to call for a protest of the Merryl Tisch award at your graduation. While there are different opinions on this topic, they are all asking if there will be a protest from the graduating students. They realize that you are entering teaching at a very difficult time and they admire your courage. They are hoping that as beginning teachers you can find small ways to protect both the children and our profession by protesting the horrible anti-child and anti-teacher policies pushed through with Race to the Top funding. They hope you are entering the field of education knowing we need to fight courageously for an education that is based on children’s individual needs and does not try to reduce them to test scores; that you want to teach subjects even if they are not on the tests, such as the arts, music, drama, science investigations, and social studies inquiries. I have assured them you are visionary and courageous and that you see urban communities of color as full of multicultural resources and assets to be cultivated rather than as sinkholes of deficits that need to be corrected into middle class mainstream discourses as measured by the tests.

My heart is beating as I type these words, as I know that public education is under an organized assault by corporate reformers who seek to script your curricula and make you teach to their tests. These corporate reformers—The New Schools Venture Fund, the Gates Foundation; the Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and so on—seem to have nearly unlimited funds.

What we have on our side is our vision for a different kind of education: one that supports children to dance and sing and debate and play and create and dream and make art and design projects that show their ideas about how to make the world a better place. What we have on our side is our belief in humanity, relationships, solidarity, diversity, democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. I know that none of you entered our teacher education program with the mere goal of helping children score well on a standardized test. You entered teaching to touch the hearts and minds of children, and to listen to and value their stories. And to tell them through your words and your actions, “I see you, I expect huge successes from you, and I love you.”

Please walk with dignity into St John the Divine, no matter what you choose to do or not do about Merryl Tisch. And always remember that no Value Added Score can EVER measure how much value you have added to a child’s life.

With love,
Celia Oyler

Get information here.

Thousands of Philadelphia public school students are marching down Broad Street as I am writing this.

“We are willing to break the stereotypes and expectations of urban youth, and are taking this opportunity to tell the world that urban school districts deserve funding, and it is your responsibility under the Commonwealth Charter to provide us with more than a ‘bare bones education.’”

Read the back story in The Nation.

“Tweeting is an art.” Randi is to Twitter as George W is to painting. 

The trouble all began when American Federation of Teachers President issued a statement in support of the We Are One/Cullerton bill. The bill, SB2404 is Senate President Cullerton’s attempt to circumvent the pension protection provision of the Illinois Constitution.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel also issued a statement in support of it.

All this is not surprising. Both the Illinois affiliates of the NEA and the AFT are part of the We Are One coalition.

Van Roekel’s statement was boiler plate. All about collaboration and working together to solve problems.

Weingarten was no better.

But she didn’t stop there.

She started tweeting about it. And making stuff up.

About how retirees weren’t covered by the bill.

About how it represented shared sacrifice.

How it was fair.

Brother Mike called her on it.

And we pointed out the falsehoods.

She backed down and admitted she was wrong.

Then Rich Miller of CapitolFax talked with one of her people and questioned how the AFT President could be so wrong.

Things kind of went viral.

“Twitter is an art, not a science,” her people explained to Miller.

But the non-artist is back at the easel.

Back on Twitter this morning.

Tweeting about SB2404. Again.

She is claiming it is “fair” and provides for the long-term security of the pension system.

She is as wrong as ever.

Maybe she should turn off Twitter.

Or one of her people should take control of her smart phone.

Fred:

I was at a recent gathering of a number of retired teaching colleagues who have been retired for a few years under the state’s Early Retirement Option (ERO). They haven’t yet received their retroactive COLA because they aren’t the magic age of 61. We were wondering what impact either proposed bills (SB1 or SB2404) will have on their earned COLA?

What is very troubling for these people is that  if their COLAs are staggered should SB2404 becomes law, what does staggers mean for those receiving their long-awaited COLA?  Several have sought out via email the opinions of people they thought might know the answer.

One is a former IEA president. The other being the current one.

However, the explanations are vastly different.

Below you’ll find the answers quoted in their entirety from the emails I’ve received.

One opinion from a former IEA president was that with SB2404, “YOU will not lose your compounded cola. That is why I’m supporting this. We will keep our cola and the guarantee of health care for two years of froze Cola – no raise. staggered means they will allow a teacher to collect a year of cola between Freezes to soften the impact. There will be a formula developed that deals with you people I think it will be your raise at 61 would have been 15% it might be 9% but then your freezes are done with.”

The current IEA president responded, “We believe that you will get the retroactive cola as per the current arrangement.  Then the next year a freeze, followed by a 3% compounded, followed by a freeze and then 3% compounded every year thereafter.”

How can it be that two people supposedly “in the know” can have such disparate answers?  The former IEA president’s answer suggests the freeze is not staggered and it would immediately lower the first raise on the retroactive COLAs. The current IEA President says she “believes,” rather than stating with definitiveness, that people will receive their retroactive COLAs.

As retired teachers who were never consulted in negotiating the proposed bills, where do we go to find the real answers? Not just about this issue. We have other questions as well. How can make an informed choice between a COLA, healthcare, or a combination of both should we have to make a choice?  It seems to me that a lot of people aren’t shooting straight with retirees about issues concerning us.

I sure hope it won’t be like Pelosi said about passing the healthcare bill, “we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”  Because should that happen, it will be too late and the damage will have been done.

Janis Arciniegas

“Hey. Getting my facts right is an art, not a science.”

CapitolFax picked up on the Twitter and blog exchange  brother Mike and I had with AFT President Randi Weingarten.

They questioned her staffer about why she didn’t know about the Illinois pension bill she endorsed.

AFT: Rich- I wanted to make sure you saw that Randi sent Fred Klonsky a longer comment off twitter to clarify why she and IFT support the pension proposal. He made it a separate post.

http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/randi-weingarten-responds-to-my-blog-post-on-pensions/

Miller: Yes, I saw that. She doesn’t address the issue about how she got her facts wrong. Can you?

AFT: She quickly corrected her tweet. Then she sent Fred that longer message since she didn’t feel like twitter’s 140 characters was sufficient to detail her thoughts on the bill

Miller: But why was she wrong in the first place?

AFT: 140 characters is an art, not a science and didn’t effectively capture her thoughts—hence the longer blog comment.

See the entire CapitolFax post here.