[Vision2020] Demonizing Teachers and Their Elected Leaders

[Sue Hovey]

Great job, Nick.  I know that both the IEA and NEA have lost members over the past year, three reasons being given:  

1.  Teacher union members are leaving the profession and often teacher non-union members are hired to replace them.  Oftentimes newly graduated teachers don’t make the decision to join the union in right-to-work states (Idaho) until a year or two into their teaching, when they come to realize joining is a wise move.  Idaho teachers are making less now than they did two years ago, as salaries were frozen both vertically and horizontally on salary schedules throughout the state and the state monies sent to districts for salaries have diminished about 19%.  Some teachers have decided to save money by dropping their union membership.  While I think it’s a foolish move in light of the need for Idaho teachers to stand together, some just feel it’s their least harmful option. 

2.  Tom Luna has been pushing alternative teacher certification and districts are now using those teachers as replacements for teachers who are retiring or leaving the profession or the state. As a group, these teachers tend to be older, have money coming from another source such as retirement from another career, and don’t tend to be as collaborative as those who come through teacher education programs.  (There are studies to support this statement.)  Certainly many of them will become fine teachers, but instead of learning about how to teach in college classrooms, they learn to teach as they teach.  They are supposed to have mentor teachers working along-side them, but as burdened as teachers are today, that mentoring often gets short shrift. 

3.  And because it’s such a stressful profession more teachers are tending to leave the classroom for other careers (which may be as stressful, but have better pay.)  The paperwork when one has special education students, 504 students, the self-evaluation plans, documentation required for No Child Left Behind, are really important, but so very time-consuming.  

4.  There have been fair-share agreements in some Idaho school districts, where non-union members were required to pay fees to the union to cover bargaining costs,  but I’m not sure about their status at this time.  Certainly the loss of fair-share will increase the number of non-members.  Teachers who don’t understand the critical need for professional unions aren’t going to pay for services they can get for free.  

Sue 

From: Nicholas Gier 
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 1:11 PM
To: vision2020 
Subject: [Vision2020] Demonizing Teachers and Their Elected Leaders

Dear Visionaries, 

As promised my radio commentary/column is on the Luna bills and Vandersloot's vicious attack ads.  Next week's radio address will cover the Luna bills in detail, but everything is not included in the full version attached.

I conclude my column with the observation that the Idaho Federation of Teachers proposed a Master Teacher plan 30 years before Tom Luna did, but the SBOE did not even give us the courtesy of a response.

Sue: I asked Penni if the IEA was going to respond to the loss of membership in the NEA.  In my long version I speculated about one reason: restrictions in some GOP states on "fair-share" agreements.  I know that public employee unions have lost thousands of members in Wisconsin because non-union employees no longer had to pay for the costs of collective bargaining, usually about 90 percent of unions dues determined by a judge or labor board.  This is a widely accepted (at least in progressive states) option to the union shop in the private sector.

This column will be adapted as an add that will run in Idaho major newspapers after I get a legal opinion about using union dues in this fashion.  Seems to be a "Go" after Citizens United, right?

Yours for teacher solidarity.

Nick

DEMONIZING TEACHERS AND THEIR ELECTED LEADERS

By Nick Gier, President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFT/AFL-CIO

            A full page ad entitled “Unions Declare War on Idaho Kids!” has appeared in many Idaho newspapers.  It was paid for by right-wing agitator Frank L. Vandersloot, Dutch for “from the ditch,” which describes the nature of ad quite accurately. 




Vandersloot charges that teacher unions “fought Governor Scott Walker’s educational reforms in Wisconsin. The kids won. The unions lost.” This conclusion is a tad premature. 




On March 30 U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled against a provision of Walker’s bill that required, just as Idaho now does for teachers, that public employee unions hold bargaining elections every year.  This is a burden that no democratic system has ever imposed.




Then on September 14 Dean County Judge Juan Colas ruled that Walker’s bill deprives public employees of their “rights of free speech, association, and equal protection.” 




            Vandersloot wants us to believe that teachers have finally realized they have been duped by union “bosses” in Washington, D.C.  A survey K-12 teachers done by the think-tank Education Sector found that 81% believed that they “would be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power” without union contracts.

            

            In a recent appearance in New York City Mitt Romney brushed off a comment by a parent and school board member, who reported that parents supported the union by 3-1 over Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  In Chicago thousands of parents marched with 50,000 union members in support of the Chicago Federation of Teachers. 




A McKeon & Associates poll of registered Chicago voters showed that 47 percent supported the strike while 39 percent opposed. Only 19 percent said Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former Chief of Staff, said that he was doing an above average job addressing the teachers’ issues.  

Vandersloot and his ilk spit out “union bosses” as if they were dictators with devious control over millions of teachers and school boards. Labor unions, however, are some of the most democratic organizations in the nation. All unions gain their right to represent workers by a majority vote of the bargaining unit. 

Instead of dictates from D.C., union members also decide for themselves whether to withhold their services.  Over the years they have held fewer and fewer strikes.  The number of work stoppages in the nation’s 16,000 school districts fell from 271 in 1975 to 15 in 2004. 

The National Education Association (2.2 million members), the American Federation of Teachers (1.5 million members), and millions of parents are not happy with  Obama’s continuation of Bush Era policies, which place far too much emphasis on  test scores and pit states and schools districts against one another. 

The Washington (D.C.) Teachers’ Union (AFT) has now succeeded in reducing the percentage that test scores count in teacher evaluation from 50 to 35 percent. The NEA-AFT union in Los Angeles has convinced its board that test scores will no longer be used in teacher evaluation. In stark contrast Idaho law now requires that lump sum merit pay appropriations be sent to school districts solely on the basis of test score improvement.




In 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” As the new president of the Idaho Federation of Teachers, I went on a state-wide speaking tour and committed my union to education reform. 




The IFT offered a Master Teachers Plan in response to the report’s call for merit pay. Master Teachers would be responsible for curriculum development and mentoring new teachers and would receive substantial salary increments for that work.  The State Board of Education failed to respond to our plan, even though we introduced the concept of Master Teacher 30 years before Superintendant Tom Luna did.

I  urge voters to ignore these vicious attacks on teachers and repeal the Luna Laws by voting “No” on Propositions 1, 2, and 3.

Nick Gier is President of the Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFT/AFL-CIO.








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