Breaking News: PA Professsors Announce Strike's End

Per the union  website. No comments from me yet, just news.

Oct. 21, 2016
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, contact:
Kathryn Morton, kmorton@apscuf.org or 717-236-7486

The strike is over.

Faculty negotiators have reached a tentative agreement with Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. The three-year deal, ending in June 30, 2018, concludes a strike that began 5 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19. Faculty members will leave the picket lines immediately.

To preserve quality education, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties accepted concessions to salary and benefits in exchange for eliminating most of the 249 changes the State System proposed in June. Also for the sake of students, APSCUF agreed to a salary package that was significantly lower than that of the other unions. APSCUF will release details about concessions and rescinded items in a future statement.

“Our primary goals were to preserve quality education for our students, protect our adjuncts from exploitation, and make sure the varieties of faculty work are respected," APSCUF President Dr. Kenneth M. Mash said. “We achieved every single one of those goals, and the faculty were willing to take less than every other bargaining unit in order to preserve those goals. We are relieved to have an agreement that preserves quality public higher education in Pennsylvania and allows our members to get back into the classroom where they belong.

“We are thankful to Gov. Tom Wolf for his commitment to reaching an agreement. We may never have received a deal if it were not for his committment to public higher education, our universities, and our students."

APSCUF Vice President Jamie Martin thanked others who were pivotal in the process.

“We are especially grateful to Majority Leader Dave Reed, Rep. Mike Hanna, Sen. Judy Schwank, Sen. Jay Costa, Sen. Vince Hughes, the leadership of all four caucuses, and other members of the legislature,” Martin said.

Mash continued: "We also were overwhelmed and grateful for the support of our brothers and sisters at other unions. Most of all, we thank our students. If any high school student is looking for a place to go to school, they should look at how much all our students supported their faculty. We have phenomenal students, and we are proud to be able to return to the classroom to supply the quality of public higher education they deserve.”

This was the first strike in APSCUF's history. The faculty contract expired June 30, 2015, and negotiations have been ongoing since late 2014.

APSCUF represents about 5,500 faculty and coaches at the State System universities: Bloomsburg, California, Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown, Lock Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock, and West Chester Universities of Pennsylvania.

PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

Like that bad enchilada that you just can't keep down, Pennsylvania's HB 530 just keeps coming back. In fact, it appears it will be back this Monday.

I wrote about this damn thing last summer, and it has ben kicking around since early 2015. The bill was floated by Mike Reese, who was actually trained to be a history teacher before landing in admissions offices on the college level. Nevertheless, his bill is a terrible bill for public education in Pennsylvania. He states that his bill has two goals:

1) Save taxpayers money by changing the cyber funding system

2) Improve school choice.

Those are unimpressive goals, both disconnected from an desire to maintain strong public schools, and certainly not addressing issues with "the worst charter law in the country."

It's worth noting that the bill is not fully beloved by players in the charter business. Back in 2015 the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools complained about three aspects of the bill. In PA, cyber schools receive 100% of the per capita costs for students in the sending school regardless of the cyber's actual costs, making the profitability of PA cyber schools somewhere up there with "selling crack" and "printing your own money." HB 530 says that sending schools can exempt the per capita costs of running a cafeteria (after all, cyber schools do not provide lunch), but the charter folks still find the deduction unfair. The bill also allows deductions for previous years cyber costs, and while this will only be a thing for two years, the charter folks are afraid it will cost them too much money. Also, charters want to throw in a request to be paid for their buildings and facilities and financing. That is of course in keeping with the general charter business philosophy of privatizing the profits while sticking the public with all the costs and risks.

But those are the things charteristas don't like about the bill. There's a much longer list of things they like very much, thank you.

* Representation. The bill gives charter r4eps two more seats on the charter appeals board. It also creates a funding commission to look at charters, and gives charter reps a quarter of the seats on that board-- the same number as reps of public schools. That seems totally proportional, right?

* Real estate. Charters get first dibs on any school property that is vacated. Even if the local taxpayers who actually own the buildings have other ideas. And just how good a negotiation for price do you have when one side gets to open with "You have to sell this to me."

* Direct payment system, so that public systems don't get their hands on the money that will be sent to cyber charters-- and public schools get a narrower window in which to question the numbers behind the charter payments. This means that elected representatives of local taxpayers will never even see the money, and it makes roughly as much sense as paying your contractor in full before he even starts working on your house.

This direct payment idea may have something to do with the last budget fiasco, during which charters didn't get paid because public schools were barely getting a fraction of their state aid. If 530 were law, it would presumably rescue charters at the (further) expense of public schools the next time our legislators can't do their jobs.

* Faux accountability. The state will develop a one-size-fits-all evaluation rubric for charters. And charter reps will help develop it. And authorizers will not be able to deny charter renewal on the basis of anything except those rubrics. Does this sound like actual accountability?

* Nepotism and felonies. The law explicitly rules these out; you can't have a conflict of interest and run a charter, nor can you continue to run a charter if convicted of a felony. Because that's how bad things are in PA-- bad enough that we have to write these things into new laws.

* Mergers and expansions. The law makes it easy for existing charters to do both. As always, the taxpayers funding the business get zero say.

The point, once again, is to give charters a little more help in pushing aside the public system, the voters, the taxpayers, and other folks who aren't actually busy making money in the charter business. There's more -- much more -- verbage to plough through, but if you're in Pennsylvania, this is not a bill you want to see happen. It continues the draining of public resources for private businesses and disempowers the voters of the state, while continuing to free charter schools from the kind of accountability that public schools face. Word is that this bill is about to be considered again; it would be a good time to contact your rep and say no.

If you want a quick and easy way to do it, use this link from the Network for Public Education.

PA: Professor strike update

As is typical in the early stages of these things, the main news being reported from the third day of the Pennsylvania strike by college and university faculty is that this is the third day of the strike by college and university faculty. I have heard numerous reports of students joining faculty on the picket line and attempts by schools to keep students going to classes-- even if nobody is teaching them. Opponents of the faculty are trying to paint the strike as greedy teachers and evil unions, but the actual issue are far more fundamental than who gets paid what.

There is also the intriguing question of what, if anything, Governor Tom Wolf is up to. Prior to the strike he had some even-handed words of encouragement for both sides (Go fix this), but there's been nothing much form him since the strike broke.

However, regular reader Seth Kahn is a co-chair of the strike committee at West Chester University, and he had this to say in the comments section of my previous post about the strike:

As far as we're concerned, the most problematic proposals left on the table are these--

1. While they've withdrawn (under pressure from us, by the way) the crassest proposals about how to exploit adjunct faculty even worse, there's still one that would lower the pay scale for part-timers. The idea is to split even the ranks of the non-tenure-track faculty into full-time and part-time. No.

2. Their claims about the health care proposal (that we won't accept what everybody else has) is literal BS (not Big Standardized--the other kind). The state system *imposed the package* on their managers (who obviously don't collectively bargain because they're managers) and now are blaming us for not voluntarily accepting a package NOBODY HAS VOLUNTARILY ACCEPTED.

3. The salary proposal has been obvious since AFSCME settled a year or more ago (the system engages in pattern bargaining, so once AFSCME settles we always know what's coming). But now, the system is trying to pretend like what was always obvious is somehow super-ultra-generous, and that we're jerks for not giving them everything else they want in return.

There's no question whether Frank Brogan is trying to build a system or break a union. He doesn't give a flip about this system or the people in it. He wants a union-busting line on his resume.

There are numerous rumors out there that backchannel attempts to reach an agreement are going on, but on the record, few facts to report. Let's hope this gets settled soon.

My Visit To Preschool

I'm in Seattle for almost a week, visiting my daughter, her husband, their newborn son, and their almost two-year-old son. This provides all manner of entertainment (you'll notice blogging has run a little slow), but today it provided an opportunity for me to be a visiting grampa (actually, my grandparental name is "Gump") at my grandson's pre-school class.

Like many education observers, I have an increased interest in pre-K because policy-makers and the Big Money Crowd are interested in pre-K these days. And while there are many good things to be said about pre-school programs, they remind me of what my high school band director said about playing clarinet-- it's easy to do, but really hard to do well.

This guy

I have read a little bit about Seattle's co-operative pre-schools before (check out Teacher Tom's blog over in the bloglist to the right). There's a big, semi-painful network of co-ops, coordinated by levels of boards, run out of colleges and other civic groups. Co-ops are big in Seattle. It's a complex system that is still evolving (still reportedly working on consistency in teacher pay). But I'm still curious-- how exactly do you run a pre-school for children under two? And what would Department of Education officials require to prove that the program was high quality?

My grandson's pre-school is on the campus of North Seattle Community College, in a large rambling building that looks like it would have made a good set for a bad seventies sf movie, but is still clean and pretty and, on this particular morning, glistening with steadily falling Seattle dew. It's a co-op , and this particular class includes children between one and two years old.

The two-hour session starts with a half hour of open play in the outside playground area (this is Seattle so the play area is under an overhang so that it's still usable even if the dew is falling heavily).  Then there is circle time, in which the children and their parents (every child comes equipped with a parental unit) sit on the carpet in a circle-like format and Teacher Kari (who plays a mean autoharp) leads some songs. There's snack time, then play station time (not PlayStation time), then cleaning up time, then circle again, and then goodbyes.

You could call it loosely structured. The parents sang the songs and modeled the actions and at any given moment, some of the children were following along and some... not so much. But the whole atmosphere was relaxed and nobody pushed the children to stay "on task." The play stations were completely self-chosen, and parents monitored, but did not direct the activity. During the stations, parents also rotate in and out of parent education sessions.

Teacher Kari delivered pretty much everything in song. There was a greeting song and a picking up song and a goodbye song. The circle songs used lots of props, like blackbirds on a stick and scarves and a parachute.

Was there academic content? Well, some of the songs used some numbers and body parts (make the blackbirds dance on your shoulders). But any attempt to measure the "outcomes" would be a fool's errand; today one boy is having trouble separating from his mom and another just wants someone to read him a book. How do you propose to measure that?

Was there non-cognitive skill content? Did I mention the age? They show some social behaviors, but mostly managing to play in the same space as another tiny human is a win. They interact well with the other parents (my son-in-law is the most popular kid in class).

So was this more than just a loosely organized play date? Absolutely. Could any reasonable human actually assess any of this? And the very idea that you would try to would be a clear signal that your pre-school does not have its heart in the right place. And before you tell me that nobody in their right mind would try to do assessment of two-year-olds, I'll remind you that only a few years ago nobody would have seriously suggested testing five-year-olds.

So it's nice to know that somewhere in the world-- especially in the part of the world where my grandson lives-- people still know how to do pre-K right. I can only hope that as the US Department of Education inserts itself into the world of pre-K, they manage to visit that world.

John King's Civics Lesson

The e-mail from the charter-shilling group Center for Education Reform announced breathlessly that John King "joined the chorus of education leaders, elected officials and respected members of the African-American community in criticizing by the NAACP‘s decision to demand moratoriums on charter schools."

He didn't. He spoke in front of the National Press Club at a luncheon this week, said many things about civic education, and answered some questions, one of which may be my absolute favorite question asked of a federal official ever-- but we'll get to that along with some other things he did. But King did not go after the NAACP.

The full text is twenty pages long, and I've read it, but nobody really needs to. But I am going to compress severely.

Jeff Ballou gives King an introduction that mentions his " emphasis on making sure all students are receiving the same level of education, regardless of race or zip code," and notes that he is today returning to "his roots as a social studies teacher" and I am reminded that as abused as the mantle of "Teacher" has become, lots of people sure do want to claim it based on the thinnest of experience (like say, teaching for just a year or two in a selective private charter school.

As always, King opens by invoking tales of Mr. Osterweiler, the gifted teacher who changed King's life and who would never be allowed to do half of what King credits him with doing in  today's climate. It remains the central irony of King's career that it rests on such a powerful story of powerful teaching, and yet King cannot or will not see how the policies he pursues guarantee that the Osterweilers of the world will be stifled, straightjacketed, and pushed out of teaching.

But on to his point.

Civic education is a big deal. King leads with some history of civic issues like voting and an appeal to the importance of knowing that history, but says there are more important things like "being willing to think beyond our own needs and wants and to embrace our obligations to the greater good." Yeah, don't wait for me to say something snarky about that, because he's correct.

Next some scare stats about Kids These Days and how they don't know their Constitution or Joe Biden and Schoolhouse Rock explanations of how a bill becomes a law (and that's before we even get to stuff like "How a federal agency uses its enforcement powers to rewrite or circumvent laws it disagrees with."

So King wants teachers to cover civic duty-- and he wants teachers to do it in a non-partisan manner. And it tells us something about King that he says the civic engagement is not a GOP or Democratic Party issue, as if the two parties do not cover (and also fail to cover) a wide range of philosophies and ideologies that create a fairly wide and complex tapestry on which American citizenship plays out. It's the view of someone who is looking at the political gamesmanship of DC and not the actual ideas and understanding that drives the worldviews behind policy positions.

But Kin knows these conversations could be "uncomfortable," so he calls for "support and training" for teachers because heaven forbid we teachers try to talk about Hard Things.

Then we're on to specific examples, including some student service groups and the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, because there's nothing political about that. And he talks about the new Museum of African American History and Culture. And he works his way around to an absolutely strong and even moving argument in favor of civic knowledge and civic skill, that wraps up here:

 Whether it’s K-12 education or higher education, we have to see it as preparing students, yes for college and careers, and yes for civic participation, for citizenship, for caring about the common good and contributing to the common good. 

It's a nice speech, almost nice enough to sail past the fact that it is Duncan and King's Department of Education that has pushed college and career readiness (defined as "good score on a math and reading test) to the point of pushing out exactly the kind of civics education that he I arguing for. One of the amazing features of the USED is that they seem to be completely oblivious to the effect ts of their own policy decisions.

But now, for the Q & A session.

The event took questions from twitter. It's in the Q & A session that King generated some of the press that has come out of this event. Let's take a quick look. I'll paraphrase:

Ballou: You just said a lot of really pretty words. How do you actually do any of that stuff?

King: Short answer-- no idea. Long answer-- Some grant money that could be used for civics. Schools should decide to just do it, despite the fact that all of my department's policies are dedicated to pushing them in other directions. Third, "lift up" teachers by "empowering" them to lead. Somehow.

Ballou: Do you think Trump has made bullying worse among kids?

King: "I can't comment specifically on the 2016 election" because reasons? Because I want to be the only person in the country who hasn't? Because I want to keep employment options open? Seriously, I can't think of a single reason he couldn't. But he goes on to say that bullying is bad, and bullying of immigrant children is really bad. And as this point is developed he ties in the issue of police brutality and relations between citizens and law enforcement.

Ballou: Are we getting higher graduation rates by producing less capable graduates?

King: "Yeah, we worry a lot about that." Yup. When you use some simple data point as a measure of complex stuff, you get baloney data. People keep trying to tell me that, but I don't listen. Let me toss in the old argument about college remedial classes, because that's another simple measure of complicated stuff that could be affected by all sorts of other factors. Don't care. I'm going keep acting as if this is a simple issue and that everything bad is the local district's fault.

Ballou: You need money for a lot of this stuff, but at the same time, you keep pissing Congress off. Could that be a problem?

King: Let me rattle off the history of education law, pointing out that it has always been about civil rights. Therefor, I feel comfortable interpreting ESSA in terms of what history intended, and not what the Congress that passed it actually wrote.

Ballou: Should somebody do something about poverty?

King: School. Education. Pre-K. I will continue to ignore research that says family SES trumps education most days.

Ballou: Speaking of which, can you get Pre-K support from that Congress that you annoy.

King: I will crush them with the wait of my academic, theoretical economics argument. I learned in New York that you don't have to actually work with people to achieve policy goals. At least, I think that was the lesson.

Ballou: Prion education?

King: We're putting back education funding for incarcerated learners.

Ballou: What about Common Core, called a "punishment-driven shotgun approach" by some critics?

King: The usual baloney about standards adopted by states, gosh, feds got nuthin' to do with it; state developed, state chosen. Does anyone anywhere actually still believe this?

Ballou: The charter question. It's pretty meaty. How do you fix authorization so that you don't have suckfests like Michigan. How do you reconcile your own public school salvation story with the charter tendency to drain resources from public schools. Do you agree with the NAACP's criticism of charters, and if so, will you stop throwing federal money at new charters?

King: Charters are magical education factories and we should let them grow without limit. Bad authorizers are a problem, but they are the states' problems, not ours. We shouldn't have arbitrary caps because "we shouldn't limit kids' access to great opportunities." Which is pretty talk, but if a charter only gives access to 1% of the students in a city, while reducing the opportunities available to the 0ther 99% by reducing the resources available to them, charters aren't really helping, are they?

So King in spirit disagrees with the NAACP-- but he didn't come right out and say so, and never actually referred to their resolution in his answer.

Next up:Okay, this is an absolutely awesome question that came in via internet, as many teachers were apparently chiming in. Here's the actual transcript:

 One teacher says, “I worked 12 hours yesterday, I didn't have time for lunch. Did you have time for lunch? I make $47,000 a year. How much do you make,” which of course is public record. “I can't go to the bathroom when I need to. Can you go to the bathroom when you need to? And please don't talk about how great teachers are. We don't need empty rhetoric. We need resources, we need policies that actually help us teach, not help profiteers.”

King: Let me offer some empty rhetoric.

Ballou: Your IT got in big trouble. Have you sorted all that out?

King: Totally. Our IT is now awesome. It is the best IT in the world. Our IT is nothing but winners. We IT so well that everyone else is just losers.

Then King answers some questions about himself, gets a ceremonial mug and heads on his way.

PA: About the Professor Strike

As just about everyone has heard today, the professors at fourteen of Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities are on strike (due to a quirk in our system, Pitt, Penn State and Temple are in a different state university system). This is the first such strike in ever.

It is hard to know exactly what's going on in the first days of a strike. I was president of my own local union over a decade ago when we went on strike, and I still remember well how information management is a huge issue all by itself, struggling both with the issue of hundreds of people shooting off their mouths regardless of knowledge, and both sides trying hard to control the narrative.

Bottom line-- be a cautious information consumer these days.

But as some with friends, family and former students all over this dispute, I can note a couple of things.

The state's point man is Chancellor Frank Brogan. Brogan started out as an elementary classroom teacher in Florida and got out pretty quickly to enter administration. He eventually became Florida's youngest-ever Education Commissioner. He was going to run for that job again when he was tagged to be Jeb! Bush's Lt. Governor. He was Jeb's point man on education and was elected to second Lt. Gov. term, but left in 2003 to become president of Florida Atlantic University. Upon being appointed to second term at that job, he left that job to become chancellor of Florida's university system in 2009. In 2013, Pennsylvania hired him away, while PA was being run by a governor who wanted to roll the university system back. And he carried all that baggage into contract negotiations that have been dragging on since 2015.

The contract struggle has been a fine example of all the bad things happening in higher education. The state has proposed to hire more adjuncts, force them to teach more classes for the same money (or, more likely, take a pay cut for the same work), push more cyber classes, and just generally water down the whole product. The state has run some of that back at the last minute, which if nothing else has the PR effect of generating a lot of smoke about what is actually on the table.

But what I want to be sure to note is this-- the faculty members could have easily thrown the adjuncts and part-timers under the bus on this one. They could have said "I've got mine, Jack" and let the adjuncts and part-timers take it in the gut. They didn't do that.

Students, at least in my region, are doing some freaking out. The teacher pipeline is already in serious trouble and this strike, which makes the prospects for student teaching and other pre-service placements just kind of mysterious and uncertain.

Nobody ever wants to strike. But strikes are invariably the result of reaching that moment where you realize that you can either damage the institution some right now, or you can sit back, cover your own butt, and let the whole thing be slowly and more thoroughly wrecked over time. In our strike, I used to say that it was not a contest to be won by one side or the other, but a problem to be solved by both sides together. Hard to do if management doesn't want to fix anything. The most striking detail I've read today is the news that the state's team just quit last night around 8:00. When you reach this kind of impasse, you can either try to build something or break something. The next few days will tell whether Brogan and his team are trying to build a system or break a union.

Here's some additional reading if you want it, likely to change regularly over these days (though the state has been running behind)-

The union FAQ sheet

The state's FAQ sheet

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.