PSEA Has Lost The Election Already

It's only May, and the Pennsylvania State Education Association is already in the weeds for this year's gubernatorial election.

Democrats in Pennsylvania have been pretty excited about the chance to run a candidate against Tom "Most Beatable Republican in the Country" Corbett. Several started throwing hats at the ring a while ago, and for reasons that are not entirely clear out here in the cheap seats, PSEA made their choice early on, offering a "recommendation," which is three scoshes short of an endorsement, but two smidgens greater than a "looks favorably upon."

That happened back in February, and the flop sweat started showing almost immediately. The leading Democrat has been Tom Wolf, a businessman from York, PA who has a pleasant smile and the ugliest website since myspace threw up all over a 90s boy band. However, when you google any candidate for governor, Wolf is the sponsored result at the top. This highlights one of Wolf's greatest qualifications for public office-- he is rich.

McCord has been state treasurer for some ungodly number of years. The other two candidates include Congresswoman Allyson Schwatrz, who reportedly tanked the PSEA interview and generally projects all the likeability of a cranky librarian, and Some Other Person who has failed to register on the radar.

Wolf's wealth has been a big help, allowing him to subject Pennsylvanians to a prodigious media blitz. McCord decided to counter that with a big dose of negative dumb. In the late stages of the campaign, McCord has tried to smear Wolf with his connection to a former York mayor who may at best have been rather a racist and at worst may have murdered a lady. This has been a spectacular display of tone deaf politics, as the charge has come out basically as, "He stuck by a friend when he should have had the political sense to drop the friendship like a hot rock."

But PA politics is often about rural vs city (and by city, we mean Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and the Kingdom of Philadelphia which some Pennsylvanians would like to cut loose and give to New Jersey). Wolf is a small town boy made good (or at least rich), and in rural areas, "He stuck by his friend and failed to act like a professional politician" is not exactly a searing indictment.

Why did PSEA throw lukewarm support behind a guy who was, at best, a long shot? Well, McCord has good answers when it comes to charters and some reformy stuff, so his nomination is at least a sign that PSEA might not be as lost in the weeds as NEA. Wolf's only government experience was with Smilin' Ed Rendell, a guy who had no more use for teachers than he had for smallpox. Part of Wolf's copy on education says

we must provide every child with a world-class education that equips them with the skills to succeed in the 21st century. To do this, the commonwealth needs a leader who will ensure that every school is held to the same high standards, is funded appropriately, and graduates students with the skills needed to go on to college or enter the workforce.

So, more reformy goodness there. Grrreat.

So in the fall we'll face a choice between a candidate the union previously spurned whose not very friendly to public education, and a candidate who has proven to be actively hostile to public ed. I am not excited.


PSEA has always shared the national union's unfortunate tendency to give up important positions for "a  place at the table" and justify our support of anti-teacher politicians with that old standard "it would have been worse with the other guy." I suppose we'll go make nice with Wolf once he handsd McCord his head, and all the Dems have promised that once the primary is over, they will make nice and try not to discuss all the work they've now done for the GOP. If I had my way (which I won't, but a boy can dream), PSEA would just sit this one out, arms folded, off in the corner declaring "We won't help any of you jerks until you actually support public education and teachers who provide it."

Mastriano Is Flailing On Education

Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has a plan for education. Or at least, he had one. But the campaign appears to be trying to some damage control on the fly.

It was not a good plan. It was not even a complete plan. What we know about the plan so far is this-- cut real estate taxes to zero, replace that revenue source with nothing, give everyone a voucher (for far less than their district currently spends on each student). 

PSEA took a look at his original proposal-- to cut per pupil spending from $19,000 to $9,000 or $10,000. They made the generous assumption that he would leave alone local non-real estate tax and federal revenue, and figured what that would mean in cuts. Roughly $12.5 billion, or about a third of what is currently spent on education in the state. PSEA has an interactive map on which you can look up how big a cut your local district would get. In the case of my old district, for example, it would be a cut of almost $12 million--about 35% of the local budget. And that's without any projections of students leaving for the many--well, actually, just two-- private (religious) schools in our area. 

Mastriano has been responding, sort of, to the PSEA report. 

First, he walked back the initial figure from a March interview (Mastriano, like the rest of the MAGA crowd, does not talk to traditional press). Now he has a video saying the new funding level will be an "average" of $15,000 per student. He still hasn't offered an explanation of where that money would come from since the state gives districts far less than 50% or 75%.

Then the Friends of Doug Mastriano, a PAC pushing his candidacy, and Mastriano himself started to push back directly against the PSEA report. Like this:

This is the epitome of the non-response response. PSEA is telling lies? What are they, exactly? If that $12.5 billion figure is not correct, then what is the actual correct one? 

The Mastriano campaign has several times pushed back by saying, "I just voted for a big increase in education funding" which is rather beside the point, like arguing, "How can you say I'm kicking this puppy?! Didn't I just buy it a chewy last week?" It's not exactly a secret that Mastriano thinks that too much money is being spent on education, so it's not clear why he would want to pretend it isn't true (unless maybe someone in the campaign remembers how Tom Corbett lost his shot at a second term over cutting education by a single billion dollars).

Supporters also point at this poster:

Several Mastriano memes feature this photo of him shaking the hand of this giant child, but it's the list of policy ideas that is supposed to be the sell here. It leads with "maintain current education funding levels" and "levels" is doing a lot of work here, because Mastriano has been abundantly clear that he does not want public schools to get the same amount of money they currently get. But perhaps he's decided that the whole chop funding plan isn't playing well, so maybe rewrite.

Mastriano's campaign does seem to be scrambling. When I wrote this piece three days ago, the campaign website promised a "Property Tax Elimination Task Force." The current version of his plan page (which has had its address tweaked, breaking all previous links to the page) has moved that portion of the plan from "education" over to "revive the economy." But it's still there.

Mastriano continues to tout responses to the full menu of far right grievances, victim complaints, and demands for a safe space. He'll ban CRT (though he has yet to provide a single example of CRT being taught in Pennsylvania). He'll keep schools open. He'll keep "biological males" out of female sports. He'll have a parental rights law.

But in place of the kind of plans he's been touting for months, Mastriano's website now promises

Shift funding to students instead of systems by establishing Education Opportunity Accounts for parents

"Shift" is the key word here, replacing his longtime insistence that he can just cut spending across the board with the standard voucher promise that we'll just turn school funding into education savings accounts, a kind of neo-voucher that hands some taxpayer money to parents and wishes them luck (and provides no accountability to the taxpayers who footed the bill. Mastriano also promises to pump up Pennsylvania's already-existing tax credit scholarship program (a program that lets corporations fund private schools rather than pay taxes). And yet he is still promising to cut real estate taxes to zero, thereby removing the primary source of school funding in Pennsylvania. 

The giant holes in his plan remain. Local real estate taxes account for more than 50% of local school funding (far far more in some cases), so even the reduced funding levels that Mastriano has talked about will require some other source of funding. 

Nor does he discuss the issue of different funding levels for students. Will students with special needs get bigger vouchers? How much bigger-- will they be funded according to the public school system, which recognizes different levels of need, or will they be funded according to the charter system, which funds all students with special needs at the highest level no matter what? Because if it's the latter, a bunch of families with simple reading or speech issues would get a huge windfall--and Mastriano's program would need even more funding from somewhere.

No local sources of funding means the end of local control. Education savings accounts without any transparency or accountability are an invitation to waste taxpayer dollars. Oh, and you may have noticed that he wants to create a "Heroes to Teachers Program," presumably mimicking his buddy Ron DeSantis's plan to put veterans and their wives in classrooms with or without any qualifications. 

It's almost as if Mastriano really doesn't know what he's talking about.

That would fit. Mastriano is running a campaign built to appeal to a butthurt base. One website motto is "You've been shut down, locked out, and unheard," a message that is clearly aimed at only certain portions of the electorate (the ones who used to have "F@#! your feelings" signs in their yards, but whose own feelings are apparently much more tender). So it makes sense that his whole "cut regulations, stop crt, fix elections" shtick would include an emphasis on Rufo-style "You can't trust public schools, so we need to both clamp down on them and defund them. 

But somebody at the campaign must have remembered that everyone gets to vote in the general election, so Mastriano is now doing this strange dance where on one hand he continues to promise and end to taxes and funding for public education and on the other hand he insists that funding for education will be just fine and vouchers will be awesome. 

Doug Mastriano deserves to lose hard, but his Christian nationalism anti-abortion MAGA appeal is going to play well in some parts of the state. Even, sadly, among many of the teachers whose jobs will be lost under his education plan. This is going to be a scary couple of months. 

Corbett, Wolf, Money, and Schools in PA

My own governor, Tom Corbett of PA, is looking at an uphill battle in his effort to get re-elected for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is his education record.

Pennsylvania is a complicated state, and this is a complicated race for teachers. Corbett is opposed by Tom Wolf, a sort-of Democrat who comes from York (location of the latest rapacious charter incursion) and whose main qualification for the governor's office is that he's a rich businessman. His previous government experience was working for Governor "Smilin' Ed" Rendell, a Democrat who viewed teachers about as fondly as he viewed the gum stuck to the bottom of old gym shoes. The Pennsylvania State Education Association endorsed Wolf's opponent in the primary but is now solidly backing Wolf, because politics.

Wolf's York connection turns out to be doubly important, because many of his buddies (including his campaign treasurer, who also works for the family business) are directly involved in the report that recommended converting York schools to a 100% charter. Activist Colleen Kennedy put that together back in May. David Meckley, the Corbett-picked "recovery officer" heading up the push to replace an entire public school system with charters (yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's so hard to believe that I want you to be sure I didn't suffer a massive typo) is also part of a multigenerational successful York family, and a friend of Wolf's.

Now Wolf has finally come out to specifically reject that plan. Maybe it's just good politics, and maybe it's a quid pro quo for the PSEA endorsement, but you'll excuse me if I don't get out my checkbook and start putting "Wolf for Governor" signs in my yard. The PSEA liked Ed Rendell, too, but once in office he was a lousy governor for education. PSEA likes to play the "let's earn a seat at the table" game, a point I've bitched about to PSEA officials, and I generally get a response of "Well, it could have been so much worse." Which is true, I suppose. I mean, you can add "and then I was diagnosed with cancer and hit by a truck" to the end of any news and make it worse. Doesn't mean I want to be friends with someone just because he punches me in the face slightly less hard than my enemies.

All of which is a way of saying that I'm not pre-disposed to automatically accept anybody's rhetoric about education in this election.

The big talking point is the $1 billion that Corbett took out of education spending. You would think that sort of accusation would involve pretty cut and dried facts. You would be wrong.

If you want a long, thorough, fact-laden unraveling of the issue, with lots of interactive charts, I recommend this piece (oddly enough, from the York Daily Record). But we can get the rough cut from this article and its attendant chart at factcheck.org.

 

The yellow pieces of bar would be the part where Smilin' Ed decided to use stimulus money to finance cuts to the education budget. The light blue part would be the part where we try to rescue PA education pensions from the economically disastrously incompetent skullduggery of the banksters. The short explanation of the argument is that Corbett would like voters to notice the yellow parts; he would also like voters to count the pension spending as education spending. This is deliciously ironic, as it involves an elected official officially arguing that anything that is for the good of teachers is also for the good of schools and education. (Do not hold your breath waiting for this argument to be applied anywhere else.) 

Meanwhile, Wolf would rather that voters not notice the yellow parts, but would like them to NOT count pension costs as education costs. 

Each campaign is actually peddling its own slightly massaged version of the truth. Because, politics.

There are other financial issue adding to the murk. It used to be that after a student switched to charter schools, some of the money that followed him there was shuttled back to his real public school. Under Corbett, that shuttling stopped. Add the complete lack of cyber-charter oversight in PA, and you get a state where running a cyber-school is faster, easier, and safer than just printing money in your garage. Meanwhile, the funding formula is bleeding public schools dry.

Not that public schools can do much about it. Under Smilin' Ed (who was all about property tax relief), school districts lost the ability to raises taxes in any given year by more than a smidge without a referendum. (Among other unintended consequences, this means that I am filling out my budget for the 2015-2016 right now). And because of a decade of can-kicking (maybe if we just wait, the market will suck less again), all of these districts have staggering pension bills coming due soon.

Let me also throw this in-- we have one of the hugest ranges of district types in the country. We have super-urban Philly and Pittsburgh, but we also have West Forest County schools, where half the geographical area of the county is served by a single building that includes about 400 students, K-12. Our funding system sucks, but I guarantee you that whatever system you devise, it will be royally shafting some district somewhere in the state.

The past two administrations in PA-- one GOP and one Dem-- have been disastrous for education. As noted by Factchecker.org, PA ranks 13th in spending per pupil, but 21st in per pupil spending that comes from the state. Local distracts are hurting. 

I wish I could paint a clearer, more pleasant picture of good guys and bad guys, but Pennsylvania is another state facing some difficult choices. Make no mistake-- Corbett is dreadful in general and terrible for education in particular. But it would take a hell of a whiz to get us sorted out, and I'm disinclined to see Wolf as that whiz. We're in trouble, and we're going to have an election, and afterwards, we're still going to be in trouble. That's about all I'm sure of.

PA: Doug Mastriano Wants To Cut This Much From Your School's Budget

Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has some thoughts on many topics, but some of his most alarming thoughts are about education. 

Many have wrestled with the issue of funding public education through real estate taxes. Mastriano has a solution:

Cut all real estate taxes and replace them with--nothing.

There are some issues not making it into the fine print. Mastriano has said that he wants to cut per-pupil funding in half. Since real estate taxes represent more than half the funding for most PA districts, it's not clear how we would get there. Presumably increased state revenue from... somewhere. Mastriano would also like that funding to take the form of vouchers, rather than actual funding for districts, so it's hard to predict exactly how hard local districts would be hit. 

But PSEA has given it a shot. 

Follow this link for a map that will show exactly how much of a hit each local district would take under Mastriano's plan. For instance, my own district would lose about $11 million, roughly 35% of total funding. That puts us in the middle, somewhere between a low of 9% and a high of 67%.

PSEA, being PSEA, projects this into staffing cuts, but presumably districts could also display the "creativity" that Mastriano claims this gutting will unleash by slashing all athletic programs, closing buildings, or axing other facilities. Nor is it a stretch to suppose that some districts will either partially ("Sorry, after 6th grade you're on your own") or completely shut down. 

Mastriano's education plan all by itself should serve as a deal breaker. But I'm afraid that some folks will say, "He's my guy for banning abortion" and vote for a future in which children must be born into a state with no real education system to carry them forward. I'm also afraid that a non-zero number of teachers will vote for him for the same reason, later shaking their heads in astonishment when their jobs are cut. 

An Open Letter to Jerry Oleksiak (PSEA President)

Dear Jerry:

It has been a disappointing couple of days, what with the announcement of the announcement that the terrible Arne Duncan will be replaced with the even-worse John King. On top of that, we get the NEA's announcement of the early endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Now, today, on Facebook, I find your rationalized spin for that endorsement. I am beyond disappointed, but rather than simply stomp off angrily without saying anything except, "Cancel my membership," I want to address your comments, despite the fact that this endorsement fiasco drives home the fact that nobody in the state or local union is paying the slightest damn attention to the members. I am in my thirty seventh year of teaching in a classroom. I'm a registered Democrat who votes in every single election, and I'm a past local president of my union. So understand that I am not just some random crank, but an experienced and long-involved crank.

After presenting the background of your involvement in NEA's decision, you ask this question.

As you make your own decisions about whom you will support, I would encourage you to ask yourself this question: "Does this candidate support public education, our schools, and our students?"

It is an excellent question to ask, and one that I have asked myself. In fact, it's in asking this question that I arrive at my personal decision not to support Clinton. But before I talk about my own data on the issue, I want to see how that question leads you and NEA to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. So let's look at what you've got.

I have spoken to many PSEA members over the past year, and one concern I hear again and again is that public education in the United States is at a crossroads. Our colleagues you elected to the NEA board have heard similar sentiments, as have their NEA Board colleagues in other states. That is why they felt it was so important to act early and decisively to recommend someone for president who is the right person to take our country in the right direction.

Do not talk to us as if we are children. First of all, the NEA higher-ups did not get together to endorse "somebody" as the right person. You got together to consider endorsing Hillary Clinton, and you did it in hopes that by stepping in to save her flagging candidacy at the point it's beginning to circle the drain, the NEA would earn some favors, or at least some standing with a possible Clinton administration. If Clinton were not starting to worry about Bernie Sanders, the NEA would never have been having this conversation.

Secretary Clinton is a longtime supporter of public education and a longtime friend of NEA. She has worked throughout her career to make sure every child has access to preschool, and every child has access to quality healthcare through the CHIP program. 

Those two examples mean nothing in terms of supporting public education. And if you want to convince me she's a friend of NEA, you'd better get specific, because while it's hard to prove a negative, I'm damned if I can think of a single time she's done something for the union.


She opposes over-testing of students, and has fought for greater resources for our schools. 

When? How? You follow with a quote in which she says something nice about public education, but general platitudes are not reassuring, particularly when we're talking about someone who praised Jeb Bush's work on education in Florida. 

Secretary Clinton will also be a voice for our professions. She supports higher salaries for educators and collective bargaining rights. Secretary Clinton has said, "It's time to stand up to efforts across our country to undermine worker bargaining power, which has been proven again and again to drive up wages."

Surely the NEA leadership is not that obtuse. Higher salaries for teachers is popular talking point among many education reformers, who see higher pay-- for some-- as a useful tool in de-professionalizing teaching. Some like the idea of higher pay--linked to test results. Others like the idea of well-paid super-sardinemasters, with teachers handling hundreds of students in a single class.

And if Senator Clinton feels strongly about bargaining rights, why has she not spoken out strongly about any of the direct attacks on those rights.

She will listen to our ideas, be sensitive to our policy recommendations, and appoint a secretary of education who will do what's right for our schools and students.

Who do you mean by "our" exactly? Because apparently I can't even get my own union to listen to my ideas, so I'm not thinking members concerns will get passed on. "Be sensitive to" is the weakest kind of weasel language, as is the line about the secretary of education.

I mean, part of my issue here is that this is a bunch of weak-sauced general pablum at a time in which we face very specific, very direct attacks on our profession. If the candidate can't talk about specifics, I'm going to assume that the candidate is either ignorant of them or chooses not to address them because the candidate thinks I wouldn't like what she/he has to say. If soldiers from East Bottlevania were landing on the beaches of New Jersey, slaughtering civilians and blowing up cities, I would not be looking for a President who says, "In general, we are sensitive to the idea that foreign nationals should not be entering our nation's mainland and doing things that make our citizens upset." 

There has been speculation out there that NEA has not followed its prescribed process in making this recommendation.

Again, you can't be this obtuse. The speculation has not been that NEA is not following its process-- the speculation is that NEA's process sucks. I can think you can find plenty of members who have always thought it sucked, but generally felt that A) they couldn't do anything about it and B) it didn't usually involve really damaging decisions. This time is different. This time teachers are feeling really, really pushed into a corner and attacked, and meanwhile, their state and national unions aren't hearing them or addressing the problem. The proscribed process is one more way in which rank and file members are left feeling unheard and ignored by their own leadership. I don't care if you followed the letter of the rules that you set up for yourselves. The rules stink.


Additionally, as I've written before, this was exact;y the wrong for this type of political maneuvering. Democratic processes are under attack in this country, and to take action that makes a blatant lie out of Eskelsen-Garcia's "This is what democracy looks like" statement is exactly the wrong action at the wrong time. I don't care if it follows the policy and procedures manual or not.

Over the recent summer and into the fall, we have watched the presidential campaign kick into high gear. We have witnessed several candidates stake out positions of support for:
- Cutting funding to public schools;
- Linking educator pay to student test scores;
- Expanding private school vouchers;
- Weakening collective bargaining rights; and
- Testing kids even more than we do now.
Some candidates even want to go so far as to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education!

The subtext here is supposed to be, "But the GOP is really, really worse," I suppose, and I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly deeply completely utterly sick I am of having my union leadership tell me, "Well, we have to support the guy who will cut off our legs, because the other guy will cut off our legs and arms both."  I have had this argument with your predecessors, because this is a stupid, self-defeating line of reasoning, and we have suffered decades of misery because of it. The appropriate response to two candidates who each want to hurt us severely is to support NONE of them.

But your list is particularly galling because some of the things listed here are much-beloved by Hillary Clinton. She is a long-time fan of vouchers and privatizing schools through charters. The Center for American Progress has close ties to the Clinton campaign (John Podesta, previous CAP head and current Clinton campaign chief is just one example), and CAP has pushed for charters, high stakes testing, Common Core, and teacher evaluations tied to testing.

Faced with these grim realities, the NEA board chose to support a candidate who can win this election and will be a champion for our schools, our students, and our professions.

Yes, ultimately, this is about NEA leadership's belief in Clinton's ability to win-- at least, if she's not too bloodied by Sanders. But for the love of God-- if there is a credible reason to believe that Clinton will be a champion for any of those things, you had better share it with us, because I'll be damned if I've seen it.

Look-- beyond individual candidates, PSEA and NEA need to take a good hard look at their relationship with the Democratic party. In Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell was a disaster for public education, and nationally, the Obama-Duncan administration has been the most destructive ever. Like good little soldiers, we teachers keep sending our support, and our elected Democratic politicians keep stabbing us in the back. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only teacher who's had enough, and now I see us pushing a Clinton Presidency, which for education looks like more Obama Presidency, which simply doubled down on the worst policy choices of the Bush Presidency.

Other states found the backbone to stand up to the national union on this. It would have been heartening to see Pennsylvania do the same. Instead, once again, here comes the union leadership with carefully crafted spin and PR designed to manage the members and get them to fall into line. Honestly, I suppose I'll stew over quitting the union for a while and ultimately not do it, for a variety of unrelated reasons. But it's a union affiliation that am now ashamed of. This was a bad choice, divisive and destructive of NEA bargaining strength and dismissive of members at a time when we really don't need to be ignored by one more national organization, as well as supportive of a politician who we have no reason to believe will have our backs, ever. All the more ironic when NEA leadership has admitted that another candidate is much more in tune with our concerns.

PSEA has been trying to address the questions of 1) how to get more young teachers into the union and 2) how to get better PACE participation. Pretty sure this will not help. "Hey, young teacher, please join PSEA. We would love to have your dues, and we will be happy to tell you what you think." Not a winner. Also, "Give us money to support politicians who will only stomp on you a little," is not a great sales pitch.

This was a bad call, and your attempt to justify it only made it sting worse. Feel free to contact me with any information that would help me better understand. In the meantime, I'm just going to continue being pissed off.

Sincerely,

Peter Greene

PA: Anti-Union Halloween Trick

Well, they aren't subtle, anyway.

Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY

That's from the flyer that Freedom Foundation's Ohio office (yes, Ohio) sent out to teachers union members in PA for Halloween. 

Freedom Foundation is one of several active anti-union operations in the US. FF is all about fighting unions, specifically "government unions" who represent "a permanent lobby for bigger government." They've opposed pay raises for state workers, pensions, and health benefits. They want to liberate "public employees from political exploitation."

If you're getting a sense of what their actual mission is, a fundraising letter from August of 2015 makes it plain:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. You can get more of this message from the work of CEO Tom McCabe. The goal is to neutralize unions as a political force, specifically as a force to counter the "shrink government till it's small enough to drown in a bathtub crowd." The group's funders include the Bradley Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Searle Freedom Trust. They're connected to ALEC, the corporate legislation mill, and the State Policy Network, a network of conservative advocates and think tanks.

The newest flyer argues that teachers should leave the union because it didn't get them pay raises that match the current rate of inflation (a curious argument from folks who certainly don't want teachers to get that large a raise). There's a simple detachable postcard to send to their office (again, in Ohio, even though the organization has a Pennsylvania office). It's nominally addressed to the PSEA president and includes a reminder that by Pennsylvania law, you are absolutely entitled to all the benefits of union membership even if you don't belong to the union. 

This kind of thing started roughly five seconds after the Supreme Court ruled on Janus, the case that established that members of government worker unions should not have to pay even a fair share. Groups like Freedom Foundation have filed numerous suits to get the home and email addresses of government employees, including teachers, precisely for this purpose. Heck, in the summer of 2018, Freedom Foundation sent folks door to teacher door to try to talk teachers into quitting the union. 

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy (heavily supported by the DeVos family), For Kids and Country (launched by Rebecca Friedrichs who rode point for the failed pre-Janus lawsuit), and Speak Up For Teachers, launched by the Center for Union Facts a dark money group run by union-buster Richard Berman have all taken a shot at separating teachers from their union. 

Ironic that the pitch includes a reference to vampires, because the 2018 round of this anti-union push reminded me of just that.

There's a scene in many vampire movies. Someone (usually not the hero) is holding a vampire at bay with a cross. The vampire locks eyes with him. "You don't need to do that. You are perfectly safe from me, and I know that cross is just starting to feel heavy. Heavier and heavier. Why don't you just put it down." And the camera closes in on our intrepid human-- will he put the cross down?

Look, I'm the last person to argue in favor of unquestioning loyalty to PSEA, which occasionally pulls a bonehead move. But being your own union puts you on the same wisdom level as being your own lawyer. I'd love to live in a world in which management is so benevolent and altruistic that teachers don't need any representation; I would also love to live in a world in which I got back all my hair. But here we are in this world. And no--the assorted 'alternative" organizations do not provide anything like the coverage and protection of the actual unions. 

And while the decision to become a free rider of the union can be criticized on ethical grounds, I'd also point out the practical problem with depending on rainstorm protection from a big pavilion roof even as you are sawing away at the supports for that structure. Getting people to quit the union is, first last and always, about weakening the union. If you think that would be great, simply look at the states where unions have been neutered--less job protection, les pay, less voice in the profession. 

Meanwhile, in other states, Freedom Foundation is spreading lies about what teachers do in school. These are rough times to be without a union if you happen to be in a state with teacher gag laws that forbid you from mentioning sex, gender, race or "controversial topics"--and in a week or so, we'll learn which states are about to join that club. It would be a shame if a teacher had to face these kinds of attacks without any kind of organization to help support them. 

Groups like Freedom Foundation do not have teachers' interests at heart. They just want to use every tool at their disposal to make unions go away. 

PA: Meet Scott Wagner

If you don't know Scott Wagner yet, you soon will. Wagner has mounted a loud, burly campaign for governor in Pennsylvania. And it is not good news for either educators nor other working folks.

"PSEA-- I intend to kick your ass!"

Wagner's political career started recently and fairly spectacularly. After PA Senator Mike Waugh resigned, Wagner threw his hat in the ring and was boxed out by the GOP establishment in PA. So Wagner went up against the GOP nominee and the Democratic nominee in a special election to fill the seat. And he beat them both, as a write-in. Not just beat them, but clobbered them with very nearly more votes than the two other candidates combined (with only 17% of the electorate voting-- the first lesson of the current political silly season in America is that people really need to get off their asses and vote).

Wagner is 60-ish, a successful businessman who runs both a garbage and a trucking company. He did not get to be a millionaire by being shy or humble; he announces himself not by expressing hope or intention to become governor, but declaring he will be the next governor of Pennsylvania.

Wagner has opinions about many things. He believes, for instance, that one likely cause of global warming is that the earth is getting closer to the sun every year. He also allows for the possibility that all these human bodies on the planet are giving off enough heat to raise the global temperature.

Wagner believes that the government in Harrisburg is disconnected from the real world, and in fact Wagner's frequent invocation of the "real world" is one the recognizable traits of the businessman-turned-legislator. The only real world, of course, is the one he lives in, where strong, rich men should not have to deal with government regulations or workers unions. Here he is explaining why the minimum raise is just fine and what we need are lazy people to pull up their pants and take the jobs they're offered.




Wagner has some thoughts about how to fix schools in Pennsylvania, based on some fairly simple understandings of the situation. Short answer: it's all the union's fault.

Every time your property taxes go up it is not because the cost to educate a student has increased. It is because the cost of health benefits have gone up, pension costs have increased, or union-negotiated salary increases have gone into effect. None of these things benefit students.

It's this kind of pronouncement that suggests that Wagner is either a dope or a liar. Pennsylvania pension costs have in fact ballooned, primarily because our legislature made bad plans and bad investments that were upended by the crash of 2008. And if you don't see the connection between what you pay teachers and what teachers you have in a position to benefit students, well-- you have a problem.

Wagner does see some sort of connection. Sign him up for merit pay:

There are teachers that will exceed expectations while teaching a classroom of 100 of the toughest-to-teach students. There are also teachers that would struggle to teach just one student at a time. I want the first teacher to make a small fortune, and I want the second teacher to find a new career that is better suited for him or her.

Sign him up also for ending tenure and seniority, creating "contract transparency," as well as establishing an Achievement School District (even though the OG ASD had a head start on all the rest and is still failing).

The "Fix Pennsylvania's Education System" portion of his campaign page uses politely coded language.

He is all in for school choice so that parents can have "their hard-earned tax dollars follow their child," which convenient overlooks the fact that school choice also means that their neighbor's hard-earned tax dollars will also follow the child, but nobody gets an accounting of where the tax dollars go. Wagner does anticipate this by calling for an accountability system that will be applied to all schools receiving public tax dollars so that all can be compared, except that no such system exists. I'm also wondering-- if Education Tax Credits are in the mix, does their use of private tax-exempt contributions to third party players mean that all the laundering makes them not-public dollars, thereby exempting all those schools from Wagner's system?

We must ensure that are our teachers are given an environment in which they can thrive. This means ensuring that good teachers are rewarded and given opportunities to grow, and that teachers that fail to meet the high standard that the vocation requires are removed from the system.

That means getting rid of unions and job security and regular pay scales.

And Wagner knows the basic playbook-- cut money for school districts, and then call them bad names for suffering from low funding. Wagner called the Erie schools "disgusting," even though he had helped slash their funding in the first place.

Wagner is, in fact, promising to be a governor in the Scott Walker mold. Wagner actually got to introduce Walker two summers ago at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference.

"Nobody has been attacked more for defending our fiscal conservative principles than Governor Walker,” he continued. “Public-sector unions and liberal special interests have tried to derail his agenda time-and-time again, and each time Governor Walker has won and delivered for taxpayers.”

This being attacked business is part of the Wagner brand. Like Walker and Trump, Wagner sells himself by the people voters can piss off by voting for him. This creates a bit of a challenge for groups that want to oppose him, because his base is going to eat that stuff up. Democratic Governor Tom Wolf already has a PAC up and running, and it is already taking shots at Wagner. All that does is give Wagner another chance to use the phrase "the governor and his union allies." Wagner's temper tantrum/borderline assault on an opposition photographer earned him a viral video looking tough and some Fox news coverage talking smack at George Soros.

His message is, at this point, a familiar one-- elect me and you will really stick it to Those People. My fear is that we'll get a Walker and Trump rerun. Wagner will do something outrageous, his opponents will holler, "Look! See that! Surely that disqualifies him!" and his supporters will just cheer, both for whatever he did AND for his opposition's freak out.

Wagner is bad news for Pennsylvania and really bad news for public education. The road to the governor's election is still a long one, but defenders of public education in Pennsylvania cannot afford to fall asleep at the wheel.

The Politics of Teaching

We know that closing our doors, teaching in our rooms, and hoping for the best don't work. At least not in a larger global sense. We know that the events outside our doors have become so powerful that our doors are not big enough to keep us safely isolated. There is no seal hermetical enough to block out the odor of the stinky cheese of politics.

So what do we do?

Like many Americans, we have to look at the political parties and say, "None of the above."

The GOP could represent some of our interests-- after all, what is more conservative and retro than the American public school? But because teachers are so often associated in the public mind with unions, GOP-ers are unlikely to view us as allies. Because we are not rich, we're not viewed as members of the club by the business-conservative wing. Because we value education and inquiry, we're viewed with distrust by the tea party wing.

I come from a conservative background myself, and I despair of how the GOP often runs counter to its own values. The GOP ought to love gay marriage; it's a chance to let gays become just as much a conservative, family-oriented, self-sufficient part of society as straights. Nor does it make sense that the GOP is the party insisting that citizens who want to exercise their right to vote should have to get a government-issued id.

But the GOP is not our friends.

In many ways, I find that preferable to the Democrats, who pretend to be our friend and repeatedly stab us in the back. In Pennsylvania, PSEA helped elect Ed Rendell, who proceeded to undermine public schools and chip away at the profession. And many of the biggest name in reform attacks today-- Duncan, Rhee-- are card-carrying Dems. Local levels are often no better. Democrats are raiding pension funds, setting up charter sweetheart deals, promoting TFA.

It is no news that the policies of the Obama administration are simply a continuation of Bush-era NCLB. If Bush had somehow been elected to two more terms, we teachers would not be any worse off than we are now. And the Democrat leadership tendency to think that the fancy shmancy elite in DC know better than the rest of us is not serving the teaching profession well.

At the end of the day, both parties are swimming in a polluted sea of dirty money. Each party, in its own way, serves the interests of the rich and powerful.

The unions are supposed to give us some political clout. They are failing.

I know the arguments. I've heard them from my own past state union chief. They boil down into two basic ideas:

1) We need to earn a place at the table.

2) It could have been so much worse.

I'm no romantic about this stuff. I know political realities often require political sacrifice and bargain-making. But the union leadership has lost its way. They've become so enamored of sitting at that damn table that they are not noticing that nobody else at the damn table is listening to them. And I no longer care that it could be worse, because right now it's really, really bad, and we are not saying so.

I'm not sure I'll ever trust NEA leadership again. Their support of CCSS is an inexcusable betrayal of the members. It's a complete abdication of their role. I will never make a contribution to the political action wing of the union. I do not trust them to spend it on something that will actually benefit the profession.

This is not a hopeful piece. It's entirely possible that we are at a point where teachers have so little political clout and the forces of reform are so intent on climbing over our bodies to get at that big pile of money that we might as well be ants trying to stave off an elephant.

We can keep speaking and acting locally. We can keep joining up with like-minded people. We can hope that at some point we will reach critical mass. But do not say to me, "Politician ______ is our friend. He will help us and make things better." Do not say to me, "We must support this party because they are the teachers' friends."

In the political world, we have few friends, and we have to get smarter about recognizing them. We won't recognize them by political party or union certification. We certainly won't know them by what they say. We'll know them by what they do, by their policy choices, by their willingness to stand up in opposition to policies designed to destroy public education. We'll know them because they understand what our opponents are really saying. We'll know them because they actually support us.

If You Want To Help Chester Uplands...

If you have not been following the story, know that Chester Uplands School District in Pennsylvania is currently so broke that its teachers and staff are working without pay. You can read up on it here, here and here.

Thanks to a commenter on this blog, I can point you to three places where you can help.

PSEA operates a fund that is used to financially assist teachers in just this sort of situation. Right now only a snail mail address is available, but on-line contributing is supposed to be coming soon.

The school district itself is actually soliciting contributions on its own page. Help out. They only need $1.5 million.

A community member has started a GoFundMe for the teachers. Again, the amount needed is staggering, but it's a way to help.

In the meantime, if you're in PA you might contact your elected representatives and say:

1) Get the damn budget done and passed

2) Fix the incredibly stupid charter funding formula that is draining public schools dry.

Are Reformsters Under Attack?

I have generally avoided picking on quotes from That Woman that appear in her joint blogventure with Jack Schneider, mostly because I think it's a worthy experiment that deserves some place to breathe. But recently she dropped an extraordinary quote that I can't let pass. It happened in a discussion of unions, specifically discussing the need for bridge-building if any collaboration is going to occur.

You say that would require a cease-fire against the unions; but I'd say that the cease-fire needs to be mutual. Reformers are under attack every day from unions as well.

This is a false equivalency of the rankest kind. Let us look, for instance, at my state of Pennsylvania.

Currently I, as a teacher, am under attack by StudentsFirst. Their national Let's Trash Tenure & FILO tour has been here for a few months, complete with slick advertising, video clips, and well-heeled lobbying.

As a teacher with thirty-some years of experience, I am directly in the cross-hairs of this campaign. StudentsFirst asserts that I need to live with the constant threat of being fired or else I will just default to Lazy Slacker status. They would like career status to be based on PA's version of VAM which includes the results of a bad test and, among other things, points for the number of AP courses my school pays the College Board to teach.

I, on the other hand, have a blog. 

So let's look at the fire that needs to be mutually ceased.

Attacks against me from StudentsFirst:
 
          1) Undermine my professional reputation by suggesting I must be lazy, cause I'm old.
          2) Threaten me with ending my career at will.
          3) Using both 1 and 2 to undermine my co-workers and destabilize my workplace
          4) Thereby threatening the educational well-being of the students that I am pledged to serve

Attacks against StudentFirst (and That Woman) from me:

         1) Sophomoric mockery

Shall we count my union's actions? Let's stick to the state, because to say that the NEA has attacked reformsters is ludicrous; they have been cheerful collaborators. But PSEA? Perhaps a bit more feisty, but have they done anything that would threaten, say, the continued existence of StudentsFirst, or That Woman's ability to make a living in her chosen profession?

There is a name for this technique in contract negotiations-- it's called stripping, and it consists of answering a proposal with a full-out attack (that simply takes things away that were already there), and then pretending that moderating that attack is "meeting you half way."

Union: We'd like to see a $1/hour raise and the addition of some flex time.

Management: We are going to cut off all workers' arms and legs.

Union: What the hell?!

Management: All right. We'll just cut off the legs. Now we've given something; you have to give, too.

The teachers whose careers have been damaged, whose job protections have been stripped, whose employment and wages are being made contingent on damaging junk science, and the manner in which all teachers are working in an environment that is being made increasingly hostile to us-- that's all the work of reformsters and their huge bankrolls and their connections to power.

How have reformsters been hurt? Which thinky tank consultants have had their jobs put in jeopardy? Which astro-turf group operators have had to worry about feeding their children? Which reformers have been forced to listen to teachers telling them how to do their jobs?

Reformsters and teachers are not locked in some struggle between equally powerful opponents who chose to attack each other. This is a battle between rich and powerful people who are being surprised that the less powerful, less rich, less important people they attacked are trying to fight back. No teacher-- certainly no teachers' union-- started any part of this fight, any more than the defense team at the Vergara trial initiated that bogus case.

Yes, reformsters' characters are being impugned. They should stop making it so easy to do that. And they should stop being surprised that when you attack peoples' lives, professions, the very work by which they support and define themselves, those people will not just roll over and play dead. It's flattering that, for just a moment, a reformster would pretend that what we teachers are doing in our own defense is hurting her somehow. But for more than just that moment, I don't believe it. And if I struggle while your foot is on my neck, I'm not sure less struggling from me is the solution to our problem.

Teachers in the Statehouse

Something extraordinary has happened this month in Pennsylvania. Jerry Oleksiak, one of 2016's scariest people and friend of this blog, has stepped down from his position as head of PSEA, the state teachers union. And he did it for the most unusual of reasons-- Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf selected Oleksiak to serve as his secretary of labor and industry.

Oleksiak was a classroom teacher for 32 years, teaching special education in the Upper Merion school district of PA. He's been a union official for several years. And now he's the Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry.

We've certainly seen teachers move up into elected office. Oklahoma just elected a retired teacher to fill the scandal-stained spot of a GOP lawmaker, and many other OK teachers are running for office. Oh, no, wait-- that was the special election back in July. The special election that just happened is this one, in which a teacher won with 60% of the vote.

But even I was surprised to see a governor of a state reach down and select a teacher for appointment.

I mean, I shouldn't be. Lord knows we've seen an unending parade of people with no education background appointed to state level positions. But it's true-- even I reflexively assume that when folks want someone to come run  an arm of government, they don't call on teachers. "This part of our state government is a mess. We'd better get a teacher to come in here and fix it," said pretty much nobody ever.

Yet we think nothing of saying let's get an economist or a banker or (God help us) a business person.

The reaction to Oleksiak's appointment, even among teachers, is a measure of the profession's lowered esteem (and self-esteem). Why would teachers be represented in capitols so much less than, say, lawyers and doctors? Why is it that "appointing a teacher" usually means some kind of cute mascot job like the Teacher Ambassadors of the USED which are a nice idea and no, wait, they are not, because it's the education department and teachers should not be invited to come hang out as honorary advisers-- they should be tagged to come run the place. And not just that department, but lots of other departments across government.

Teachers have management training with the most challenging of co-workers. We handle money, work with budgets, find creative ways to fund things (sure, it's all with the decimal point a little further to the left than in government, but still). We collaborate and compromise, and most of all, we have a broad background of knowledge across many fields combined with an intimate knowledge of how policies play out for real people on the ground. There really is no reason for anyone, including teachers, to think of government work as somehow out of our league. Certainly teachers, like other folks, may look at government work and find that it's far less appealing than their regular day job. But that's no reason not to ask, to just automatically rule teachers out.

The teachers of Oklahoma have finally gotten so sick of their legislature that they are mounting a multipronged attempt to simply take it over. God bless them. And God bless Jerry Oleksiak, for reminding us that there's no reason a governor couldn't pick up the phone and say, "I want to come serve in my cabinet."

PA: Better Than a Graduation Test

Pennsylvania's end of the year test faces a new challenge from the legislature, and if you're in the Keystone State, you may want to give your favorite legislator a call.

In Pennsylvania, we actually have two flavors of the Big Standardized Test that everyone is mandated to inflict on students as a means of evaluation schools and teachers. For the elementary and eight grade students, we have the PSSA test. But our high school students take the Keystone exam.

There are many problems with the Keystone Exam. If I were still in the classroom, I would be forbidden by law and by the test-givers "code of ethics" to so much as look at the test, but now that I'm retired I can tell you that it has problems such as questions that are essentially vocabulary quizzes. I can also tell you that it's fond of questions where it gives the student a reasonably familiar word in an unusual context and asks the student to define the word based on context; this kind of "gotcha" question is a common feature. The Keystone, like many such BS Tests, likes the mind-reading in which students are supposed to discern the author's purpose. It also likes the "which sentence is best" question. All poorly written and designed not to see what the students know, but to trick the students into selecting the wrong answer.

Not that students feel the need to engage in this battle with the test writers, because the Keystones are zero-stakes tests for students.

Yes, in Pennsylvania, teachers and schools are evaluated based on a test that means nothing to the students taking it.

Now, that's not entirely by design. We were going to phase these in and after a couple of years, the tests would be a state graduation requirement for Pennsylvania students. But then that deadline approached, and legislators realized that a huge number of Pennsylvania students would be kept from getting a diploma for no reason other than this test that the state was making them take. And so legislators have flinched several times and pushed back the year in which students will have to pass the Keystone Exams. There are three-- reading, math and biology-- although there were going to be many more until it turned out that creating all those tests would be both hard and expensive. The whole history of testing in PA is the story of the ship of grand aspirations run aground on the hard shoals of reality.

Anyway, we're still in a holding pattern, waiting for the moment when the legislature thinks that more students will be above average. Okay, not exactly: The Keystone exams are theoretically standards-referenced, which should mean that everyone can pass. But it should also mean that we can get test results literally five minutes after the student finishes the test, but we're still waiting months. Why is that? Maybe because of something called scaling, which seems like a fancy way to explain different weights for different questions on different forms of the test. Or maybe it has to do with rangefinding, which seems an awful lot like norm-referencing-- collect answers and see what their distribution looks like. I get into all that more here.

Last year the legislature and governor (who are not always best buds) opened up an alternative route for career and technical students-- CTE students could prove their career readiness through tests actually related to their careers. For instance, welding students take a variety of tests to become certified as welders; Pennsylvania now says that's good enough to graduate, never mind the Keystones.

Now Senator Thomas McGarrigle is back with a bill that proposes other ways to take some of the bite out of the Keystone Exams, based on a fully sensible premise: recognizing that "success after graduation looks different for each student and that requiring a high-stakes, one-size-fits-all pathway to graduation does not provide an accurate representation of students’ abilities or likelihood for success in the future."

What are the specifics of the SB1095?

Composite Scoring

Rather than scoring "proficient" on all three tests, the bill would call for a satisfactory combined score from all three. Students could score "proficient" on just one test and "basic" on the other two. The secretary of education will set the satisfactory score and it will take an act of the General Assembly to change it.

Another Delay

Originally the Class of 2017 was going to have to pass the Keystones to graduate. Currently the Class of 2020 would be the first. This bill kicks the can down to 2021.

Supplemental Instruction

The school can offer extra instruction to students who don't make it (but the school may not require it). That extra schooling is not allowed to interfere with their regular schooling; in other words, the infamous practice of pulling a student out of regular courses for a bunch of test prep remediation is banned. Telling a vocational student that he can't attend his vocational classes until he's finished remediating is banned. The school can give the student a chance to supplement his instruction, but they may not hold his real education hostage to do so. This is a Good Thing.

This, Because...?

"No public school entity may be required to offer, nor may any student be required to participate in or complete, a project-based assessment as provided for in 22 Pa. Code 4.51c."

The Special Ed Loophole

A student with special needs who completes the requirements of his IEP but doesn't "otherwise meet the requirements of this section" must be given a regular high school diploma. Of course, any school can screw with this by writing Keystone Exam proficiency into the IEP. Smart parents will refuse, and smart schools will go along and wink wink nudge nudge some opting out, since that lets them drop some of the lowest test-takers' scores from the school evaluation.

A Whole Pack Of Alternative Assessments

A student "will be deemed proficient" if she does both of the following:

1)  Gets good grades in the "associated academic content areas of the Keystone Exams." These "grade-based requirements" are locally set.

and

2) Any of the following:

Gets a recommended-by-the-secretary score on the appropriate AP or IB exams

Gets an ASVAB score sufficient to qualify for military enlistment

Shows official notification that they will enter a registered apprenticeship program after high school

Gets a secretary-approved score on the SAT or ACT

Shows they've been accepted by "an accredited nonprofit institution of higher learning

Some other piece of compelling evidence that shows the student is ready for college, career, or the military

Reportage

The Secretary of Education is directed to report on how all this is working out.

One Weird Piece of Leverage

All of these alternatives are listed as existing in any year that the Keystone Exams are required for graduation. Which means, I presume, that if the Keystones are never required for graduation, all the rest of this stuff evaporates.

Who Likes This

The Pennsylvania School Board Association likes this. PSEA likes this. The PA Senate has already unanimously liked it, and now we're just waiting on the House.

And really, everyone should like this, because it takes the radical step of trying to judge college and career readiness by means other than a Big Standardized Test that's not even a very good test. If you're looking at all the alternative paths and thinking that under this bill pretty much nobody would need to take the BS Test, well, yes, I think you're correct-- and that's a good thing. Or to put it another way, why would we want to tell a student who has passed all their required classes, been accepted to college, or already started on a work or military plan that all that is going to be thrown out because of the results of a single standardized test.

No, this isn't perfect. And yes, there are a million conversations we need to have about the whole "college and career ready" issue. And yes, the SAT and ACT are probably not a great measure of anything, either. But it is still a huge improvement.

If you are in PA, this page has a simple link for sending your representative a note to support this bill. And here's another one. The bill is currently trapped in committee and needs to be sent out for a vote soon. This is soon. Send your note now.

Note. Some local school district administrations will grumble because in anticipation of the state's eventual action, many local districts have made the Keystones a local graduation requirement, even though the state never said they had to. Some may grump that this will require them to retool their system. Tough. If their system counts the Keystones as a graduation requirement, their system is seriously flawed and they should be delighted to have the chance to fix it.

PA: Court Decides in Favor of Privacy

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week issued a long-overdue ruling with far-reaching consequences for school privacy issues.

The case dates back to 2009, when some folks asserted that Right-To-Know laws meant they could demand home addresses and phone numbers for teachers. The state teachers union fought the issue, but the lower court ruled that teachers should have the right to argue why specific their own personal info should be denied. But that was it, and it wasn't much. PSEA appealed.

Now in a unanimous ruling, the state supremes have ruled that a school district is not a directory service. And they've said in language that has some other clear implications. Here's how Emily Leader described the ruling in an e-mail to Pennsylvania School Board Association members:

The Court held individuals have a constitutional right to privacy in their home addresses under Article 1, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.  In general, individuals have a right to “informational privacy” which may not be violated unless this right is outweighed by a public interest favoring disclosure.”   The Court found that in this case there is no public interest in disclosing the school employees’ home addresses in response to this request which outweighs their interest in privacy in their home addresses.  It noted, “To the contrary, nothing in the RTKL suggests that it was ever intended to be used as a tool to procure personal information about private citizens or, in the worst sense, to be a generator of mailing lists. Public agencies are not clearinghouses of “bulk” personal information otherwise protected by constitutional privacy rights.

Does that seem a little broader than just employee's home addresses? It looks that way to PSBA, too. Here's their advice for how school districts should deal with the ruling:

If someone asks for individuals’ private information which is in the school district’s possession, you should deny the request unless the requester provides sufficient information to establish the public interest outweighs the privacy interest. Remember that things like salaries and other compensation are public.  However, home addresses are not.  We do not have an exhaustive list of what is covered and what is not covered by the right to informational privacy. For those non-lawyers receiving this, you will certainly need to get legal advice when you want to assess whether informational privacy rights are implicated by a request under the Right-to-Know Law.

Emphasis mine.

In the opinion, the court looks back at the history of privacy cases in PA and the history of ruling the right to privacy part of the basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The court also throws in a mild scolding for the Office of Open Records.

We must remind the OOR, however, that the unique procedural posture of this case, including its status as a party-defendant, is the result of its repeated failure to promulgate adequate regulations to address the almost complete lack of procedural due process for individuals whose personal information is subject to disclosure under the RTKL.

This is followed by some choice excerpts from the Judge's Spanking the OOR Greatest Hits, which translate roughly as, "If the OOR wasn't such a half-assed lazy crew that counted on everyone else to do the hard part of enforcing the law well, we wouldn't be here."

It should also be noted that the Right To Know Law in Pennsylvania is always being bullied and whittled away by the public entities (including school districts) that would rather the press and the public didn't know certain things, so any ruling that puts another leash on the law is not an unmitigated win. This ruling will provide the basis for a lot of necessary privacy protection, but sooner or later some dipstick is going to try hide some sort of misbehavior behind it as well.

As a postscript, we should also note that the ruling re-asserts the principle in PA that breaches of privacy are supposed to weigh public benefits against private costs, and that principle certainly takes a beating any time someone wants to argue that all sorts of student personal data and testing data and God-knows-what-else data should be hovered up and handed over to testing companies and whatever other entities they choose to share/sell it to.

PA: Another Attack on Unions

It's an idea that crops up from time to time, unique in that there isn't really any camouflage for it-- it just baldly attempts to make life more difficult for unions.

This time it's coming up in Pennsylvania under one of its common names-- "Paycheck Protection."

This bill pops up in Pennsylvania roughly as often as Punxsutawney Phil, and the rationale is as simple as it is transparent. Here's the bills favorite boosters, the free market think tank Commonwealth Foundation, being excited that the bill is up and rooting around again:

Since 2007, government union leaders in Pennsylvania have spent more than $95 million on politics—both from members’ mandatory union dues and voluntary campaign contributions—and taxpayers have been forced to help them do it.

That is mostly lies.

Union leaders have spent a bunch of money in Harrisburg, but it's illegal for them to spend member dues money on political stuff. That's why PSEA, for example, has a whole separate category for member giving for political action (PACE), and a teacher's money doesn't go to PACE unless they sign up to do so. The argument that unions spend dues money on political activity, from Friedrichs to this new bill, is that everything a union does is political. If they spend dues money on negotiating a contract-- well, negotiating the contract is political. Putting an ad in the school's yearbook is political. Virtually everything a union does outside of retirement teas and new teacher welcomes is branded political by folks who believe that teachers should most properly shut up and do as they're told and never, ever get involved in life outside their classrooms.

But even GOP pushers of these don't always have the cojones to just come out and say, "Lot's of teachers give money to the Democrats and we want to stop that. We want to starve the Democratic Party as just one more way to take total control of state government."

So we have to throw in that second point-- that taxpayers are somehow being charged tons of money for automatic deductions from paychecks. The clearest sign that this is simply baloney is that this complaint never comes up in regard to taxes or social security or the United Way or all the other things that are automatically deducted from paychecks.

But automatic deductions make paying your union dues easy, and opponents want to make paying dues hard (just like they try to make voting Democrat hard) so that some smaller number of people will do it.

One bill (SB 166) was sponsored by State Senator John Eichelberger, the same guy who also recently sponsored the bill to make it easier to strip teachers of sick days.

But also emerging from the Senate Government Committee this week was a bill from Senator Scott Wagner (SB 167) that simply seeks to make automatically deducting union dues illegal for public employees.

Wagner is not particularly shy about his hatred for unions of any sort-- this will be good to remember as he launches his bid for governor on a platform of "liberals suck and government should be shrunk to the size of a pea." Here's what he had to say about his bill

“Paycheck protection has been a top priority for me since coming to the Senate in 2014,” said Wagner. “Taxpayer money is being used to collect dues and PAC contributions for public sector unions. The unions then use that money to lobby against major issues like pension reform and the elimination of property taxes, both of which are taking a toll on the Commonwealth and its taxpayers.”

“Opponents argue the cost to taxpayers is minimal,” continued Wagner. “But cost has never been my focus. These unions are getting away with an activity that would send anyone else to jail – using taxpayer resources for political purposes.”

Got that? He doesn't care about the cost, except that it gives him an angle by which to attack the unions. By this argument, of course, teachers should only be able to get involved in political activities if they work for free and are never paid with tax dollars.

SB 167 is extra special because it actually proposes a constitutional amendment, so that we can really establish Pennsylvania as a union-hostile state.That also means that it would have to be approved in two consecutive sessions.

So if you're a teacher in Pennsylvania who has been getting lots of exercise trying to contact Pat Toomey about Betsy DeVos, you'll  want to keep those dialing and writing muscles warmed up, because our elected officials are going to need to hear from us again.

PA: Free To Teach? Who Are These Guys?

Once again, it's time for teachers in Pennsylvania to get a nice mass mailed postcard from our friends at Free To Teach, a group dedicated to reminding teachers that they don't have to belong to that stinky union. 

I took a look at these guys back in 2015, but as I look at the two postcards they sent to my home, I think it's time to revisit them. If you're a PA teacher wondering who these guys are, I can answer at least part of that question.

Free To Teach's front man used to be Matt Eason, a phys ed teacher down in the Philly area at Avon Grove schools (he also runs a first aid and CPR training company). His pitch was to call for "paycheck protection" and the death of fair share because he objected to being forced to join a union. He also pushed the usual misleading talking point that dues go to political purposes that he didn't support, an argument that depends on two notions; one, that dues pay for things like political support of candidates (they don't-- that's already illegal) and two, that everything a union does is political. 

I'm just going to liberate a couple of these guys before lunch

This time, the name on the postcard is Keith Williams. Like Eason, Williams was a real life teacher (English, Conewango Valley School District) for twenty-one years before he left in 2018 to become the director of Free To Teach. He's a graduate of Geneva College, and he also ran his own business consulting firm. And like Eason, he was upset that the union wanted them to give them his hard earned money. He even made the trip to Harrisburg in 2014 to argue against fair share and for paycheck protection . The argument here is that it costs the taxpayers big bucks to process deductions of union dues from teacher paychecks. This is a silly argument. Williams' involvement with Free To Teach pre-dates his new job; in 2016 he collaborated with Eason and Jodie Kratz on an op-ed cheering on the Friedrich's union-busting case. 

Free To Teach used to be a project of the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives, a far-right advocacy group in Pennsylvania that is part of the State Policy Network and is also tied to ALEC and Koch Brothers money. 

But things have changed since 2015. Specifically, the Janus decision changed things (a case bankrolled largely by members of the State Policy Network), and in 2018, after that decision came down, Williams left teaching for his new job, and Free To Teach became the project of an organization called Americans for Fair Treatment. In 2018, Williams tried to portray the group as a grass roots movement with Williams himself as the only paid staffer (Williams is listed as staff for both AFFT and Free To Teach), setting out to just let teachers know their rights. Yes, they have the same initials as the American Federation of Teachers-- what a remarkable coincidence.

AFFT is out to convince all public workers to exit their respective unions. They've been at it since 2014, when they were a national group based in Oklahoma. In 2016, they filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia school district and teachers union over the practice of release time for union leaders to do union work. That suit was handled by the Fairness Center, a Harrisburg law group that will take the case of anybody "hurt by public sector union officials"-- so, literally a union busting law firm and another SPN member.  The suit was thrown out because the court found that AFFT, as an Oklahoma group, had no standing. That may well have helped give them the push to create or change into what is now technically AFFT-Pennsylvania and the PA-based Free To Teach. In 2018 they were successful in a similar suit against the Reading Education Association.

AFFT is now up to two staffers, including Williams and Rebecca Whalen (logistics and membership coordinator), a 2018 graduate of Lebanon Valley College whose only previous job is for the Commonwealth Foundation. 

In fact, AFFT is a pretty transparent shell for the Commonwealth Foundation. The AFFT board consists of:

Michael J. Reitz: Vice-President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, one of the biggest right-wing thinky tank advocacy groups in the country, pushing right to work and funded generously by the Kochs, the Bradley Foundation, and, yes, the DeVos family.

Charles Mitchell: currently CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, previously an associate at the Charles Koch Institute

Tim Hoefer: Executive director of Empire Center for Public Policy, a project of the Manhattan Institute, member of SPN and ALEC, and funded by the Bradley Foundation among others

George Coates: Chairman of the Board at the Commonwealth Foundation. 

Your Free To Teach postcard is, in short, the product of the same old network of anti-union far-right folks who have been constantly looking for ways to slap teachers down and put them in their place. A full frontal attack on unions has not been as successful in Pennsylvania as it has been in states like Wisconsin. 

The website is loaded with plenty of reasons you just don't need the union. Liability insurance is "redundant" because the employer's coverage should take care of it (because when it's time for lawyers, you can count on the district to look out for teacher interests). Besides, you'll only need liability insurance if you commit a crime. And the union has to give you a lawyer for free anyway. If these folks can convince enough Pennsylvania teachers to be free riders, unions will weaken, losing both ability to negotiate for better local contracts and less ability to advocate for teachers and public education in Harrisburg (not to mention being hampered in providing that "free" legal representation free riders depend on). That's the goal here.

The good news, so far, is that the post-Janus apocalypse that many unions braced for has not actually happened, and actions by teachers in states like West Virginia have shown that even if you could disempower the union, teachers will find a way to push back if you push them too far. 

When you get the card, you'll see that Williams has provided a handy email address. Feel free to ask him about the time that he angrily gave back the raise that the union negotiated form him, or if, now that he's retired, he's planning on doing without that pension that the union won him (actually, he may be well enough paid that he doesn't need it). But at a minimum, you can safely throw your invitation to union in the trash. 

Because, look-- you will never find me serving as an unconditional cheerleader for PSEA, and local leadership can be a crapshoot. But if a teacher's plan is to depend on their own negotiating prowess to get a personal awesome contract, or they're just going to trust folks like the Kochs and the DeVos family to look out for their best interests--well, that's a bad plan.