DENVER – Across the United States, taxpayer dollars are being used to subsidize the salaries and benefits of teachers and other municipal employees who work for their local labor unions.

This wasteful tradition costs taxpayers millions each year, and has gone largely unnoticed because the details of the arrangements are most often negotiated behind closed doors.

Luckily this practice, popularly known as “union release time,” may be coming to an end in many parts of the nation.

Severe budget problems in California, Colorado, Arizona and other states have increased scrutiny on labor spending, with critics highlighting union release time as a disgusting waste of taxpayer money at a time when most schools and municipalities can least afford it.

Education Action Group has documented different forms of union release time in our reviews of teacher contracts in numerous states, and the issue has been probed in depth by researchers like Ben DeGrow of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center.

Educators are often released from their regular duties with pay - either full-time, part-time or on a per-diem basis – to serve as union officials. They are free to use school time to handle grievances, attend collective bargaining sessions, lobby government officials, do political work, and perform other union-related activities.

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Here’s another example that shows just how ‘accepting’ liberals are of people from all walks of life.

High School teacher Al Levie refused to accept an MLK award from Rep. Paul Ryan because, well, Paul Ryan is a conservative no matter how Levie tries to frame it. Levie stated that “Paul Ryan has no business being at an MLK event.” That’s a pretty bigoted action.

Levie’s speech can be found here.

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Fresh from his overwhelming re-election victory, Gov. Bobby Jindal has unveiled an audacious education reform agenda that built around an expanded school voucher program, new charter schools, a rigorous teacher evaluation system and a revamped tenure system. With the Louisiana state legislature set to go back into session this coming March, the governor is expected to win broad support for many of the proposed changes.

If so, the voucher program, which is now limited to New Orleans, would go statewide. Low-income families with a child enrolled in a school that has received a C rating or lower could use public dollars to cover the cost of private school tuition.

Jindal also favors using the new “value-added” teacher assessment to deny automatic tenure for teachers that do not received high marks. Beginning in the 2012-2013 school year, 50 percent of evaluations for teachers in academic classes will be based on the LEAP and iLEAP test scores, while the other 50 percent will be based more on subjective criteria built around classroom observations to determine how effective instructors are in motivating students. A pilot program that involves nine school districts and one of the charter schools is already underway.

“This is historic change and an important step forward for our education system,” said  Brigitte Nieland, vice-president and communications director of the Education and Workforce Development Council for Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). “For the first time, teachers will be evaluated based on how their students perform. This is about transparency and accuracy.”

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CHICAGO – The new documentary film is called “A Tale of Two Missions,” and it’s focused on current conditions in Chicago Public Schools.

One “mission” is led by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is working hard to provide fresh opportunities for kids stuck in failing city schools.

The other is led by Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, who is determined to kill the expansion of school choice in the city, so her union can keep students (and the tax money attached to them) trapped in subpar neighborhood schools.

And now, just as the documentary is released to the public, Emanuel, Lewis and their respective teams have started negotiating a new labor contract that will go a long way toward determining the future of Chicago Public Schools.

The current teachers union contract expires June 30. Negotiations on a new pact are expected to take months, perhaps even beyond the expiration date of the current contract.

Lewis had made it clear that teachers want higher salaries and more expensive benefits, despite the district’s estimated $720 million budget deficit and the continued threat of layoffs for young teachers and cancellation of student programs.

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When Governor Rick Snyder (R) and Republicans in Michigan’s state legislature implemented reforms to the state’s broken public school system last year, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) cried foul. The tone of MEA “leaders” trying to bolster their Middle Class credentials should sound familiar to anyone from Wisconsin or Ohio:

[MEA President Iris] Salters joined about 1,000 union members protesting at the state Capitol on Tuesday, saying the bill is “again a way to say to labor, you don’t count. It’s a way to say to employees, get back. I believe it’s just like being in the slave days.”

Why such desperate race-baiting against reforms that would modestly limit public union power? MEA bosses, following the example of higher-ups at the National Education Association, extract a tidy living from their members’ pockets.

Michigan occupational averages are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. MEA staff and officer pay comes from the Department of Labor. While the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers estimate average annual wages in Michigan at $43,280, average pay for MEA staff and officers is $96,373.

Crazy, isn’t it, how angry public unions get about reforms that would threaten their monopoly? MEA bosses must truly care about their underpaid, unappreciated members!

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Florida’s Marion County school district drew national headlines last summer when it announced that it was switching to a four-day school week as a way to save money.

Other school officials took a more conventional route by laying off teachers and cutting student programs, all the while blaming Gov. Rick Scott for underfunding Florida’s public schools.

Now comes a report that finds 946 school employees in the Sunshine State earned at least $100,000 in 2010. That’s up 818 percent from 2005, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability.

The foundation also finds the percentage of non-school employees who earn at least six-figures has increased by only 7 percent during that same period.

“You don’t have to be great in math to figure out that something is wrong with these school salaries,” Tarren Bragdon, Foundation for Government Accountability CEO, told the Sunshine State News.

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“I think we ought to give our children the best we possibly can and I think we’re moving in that direction,” says renowned political operative James Carville. ”Yes, I’m very excited about it.”

Reason caught up with the Louisiana native at the New Orleans kickoff event for National School Choice Week (NSCW), which runs from January 22-28 and features hundreds of events around the country designed to increase support for allowing parents to pick what schools their children attend. The Big Easy was the ideal location for the event as all children attend schools of choice in New Orleans, a radical – and so far incredibly sucessful – response to decades of failed approaches and the devasation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

Carville emceed an event that also featured performers such as The Temptations, Trombone Shorty, and Ellis Marsalis along with speakers such as MSNBC’s Michelle Bernard, former Arizona education head Lisa Graham Keegan, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

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The National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliates push an agenda that benefits union bosses at taxpayer expense. In America’s 28 forced-unionism states, teachers in NEA-organized schools who opt not to join must still pay dues, creating a huge pot of money for NEA to spend portraying teachers as victims and union bosses as their only friends.

NEA calls its political action committee “The NEA Fund for Children & Public Education.” Subtle, right? But NEA doesn’t stop at spending tens of millions on Progressives who will shovel money at public education without demanding reform for broken tenure and compensation policies. The nonpartisan materials on NEA’s member-funded website include, to sample a few recent items:

• Why School Choice Fails
• The ‘Right to Work’ Assault on the Middle Class
• The Case Against Vouchers

Given the union’s claim to stand for Middle Class workers, a casual observer might expect the salaries of NEA officers and staff to resemble the average working stiff’s. That casual observer would be very, very wrong.

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“A Tale of Two Missions” – a film by Juan Williams and Kyle Olson (and directed by Chicago-based Andrew Marcus) – tells the story of competing cultures in American education through examples from Chicago.

See the internet-only abridged version here:

While the fight for school choice rages across the nation, perhaps no better example exists than that of the Windy City.  Traditional alliances are breaking down.  Both political parties are pushing for education reform and expanded school choice.  The status quo is under attack, because most reasonable people understand that thousands of Chicago students are trapped in failing schools.

But the education establishment, led by the radical Chicago Teachers Union, is not willing to give an inch to allow better choices for underserved students. And the union still has enough money, influence and legal standing to make reform efforts difficult to implement.

The film features the Noble Street College Prep charter school and the amazing results its teachers and leaders are delivering for students and parents of Chicago.  It also exposes the entrenched educational establishment bent on stifling school choice options and preserving its monopoly on state education dollars.

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These days a lot of school budgets are being held together by the accounting equivalents of bailing wire and duct tape. But one Pennsylvania school district is so broke that it needs the state to provide the wire and the tape.

The Chester Upland School District began this week with only $100,000 in its savings account, and had no way of meeting its $1 million payroll – that is, until a judge ordered the state to give the district a  $3.2 million advance in its allowance, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The money will allow the teachers to be paid and the lights to remain on, at least for a few more weeks. The district is on track to be $20 million in debt by the end of the school year.

“Anxious parents are looking at other options for their children, such as sending them to private schools or having them live with relatives and go to other public schools,” the Daily Journal reported two days before the bailout was announced.

What’s causing Chester Upland’s financial meltdown?

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Pennsylvania’s Neshaminy Federation of Teachers has agreed to end its nearly two-week strike, and members will return to the classroom Friday morning. But that doesn’t mean the nastiness is over.

The school board had refused to continue contract negotiations while the union was on strike, which means the disagreements about future pay raises, health insurance contributions and retroactive pay are still unresolved.

State law requires that a three-member arbitration panel be brought in to help assist negotiations, reports PhillyBurbs.com. The panel will make its non-binding recommendations by spring. If the district and the union still cannot agree, the NFT has the legal option of going on strike a second time this school year.

School board President Ritchie Webb said that a second strike would prompt the district to file an injunction with the state, asking that the teachers be ordered back to work.

“Teachers need to understand that you can strike until the cows come home, but it doesn’t create more money in the district,” Webb said. “We have limited resources.”

The community seems to have had enough of the NFT’s selfish behavior, too.

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New York City government schools have had some pretty outrageous policies.  Rubber rooms were a great example.  They were special places created for teachers accused of crimes, incompetence and the like. Due to state tenure laws, it actually cost less to house the failed teachers in a location where they couldn’t inflict more damage on students, than to go through the lengthy and expensive legal process necessary to fire them.

Thanks Big Labor!

Now New York administrators are trying to deep-six a program created a few years ago in the collective bargaining agreement with the United Federation of Teachers: the Absent Teacher Reserve.

What’s this?  A creation of bureaucrats, politicians and labor bosses, the ATR is comprised of teachers who literally have no classroom for one reason or another. Due to a labor contract stipulation, they can’t be fired or laid off, and continue to draw the same salaries as full-time teachers. They’re put into the ATR pool, where they may be assigned to work as substitutes, clerks, or perhaps to do nothing at all.

They’re clearly not needed, and collectively they make a great deal of money. How’s that for management of taxpayer dollars?

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ST. PAUL, Minn. – Does time stand still in the St. Paul school district?

If it does, that would explain why its teachers union, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, is using contract negotiations to insist on a hard cap on class sizes.

For nearly a decade, there has been a consensus among education experts that when it comes to student achievement, teacher quality is far more important than class size. The research has so consistently downplayed the value of smaller class sizes that most scholars consider it a settled matter.

Assuming that the St. Paul Federation of Teachers is not stuck in some bizarre time warp, why is the union ignoring the research and insisting that strict class size limits be written into its new teachers’ contract?

According to SPFT President Mary Cathryn Ricker, capping class sizes is a way to guarantee St. Paul families that their children will receive personalized attention from their teachers, which she says is a necessary ingredient for a student’s success.

“This proposal is about meeting the needs of our students so that we can … quickly close this achievement gap,” Ricker told TwinCities.com.

Eric Hanushek, a leading scholar in the field of class sizes and teacher quality, offers a different theory.

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GRANT, Mich.  – Ever wonder what it costs to quit a labor union?

For one Michigan educator, the annual costs of “non-membership” in the local, state and national teacher unions total $544.28.

But Andrew Buikema, 10-year teacher with Grant Public Schools, is willing to pay the price, just for the privilege of being seen as a true professional, instead of a union worker.

Michigan is not a “right to work” state, which means Buikema’s job is still affected by the district’s contract with the local teachers union, the Grant Education Association. The GEA is affiliated with the Michigan Education Association and the National Education Association.

Buikema has been trying to leave the union since last spring, when he realized that GEA leaders were uninterested in helping the district control costs, even in the face of a multi-million dollar deficit.

By refusing to make wage and benefit concessions, the union contributed to conditions that led to 27 teachers – including Buikema – receiving layoff notices. The district was also forced into making cuts to student academic and extracurricular programs.

Buikema’s job was saved at the last minute, but he was disgusted by the union’s selfishness.

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National School Choice Week, a grass roots effort, will be held this year from January 22-28. Activities and events sponsored throughout the nation will focus on effective education options for all children and support of school choice options in all states. This is an opportunity to educate local school boards and state legislatures about the need for education reforms that empower parents to choose the best educational environments for their children, whether those environments are public schools, public charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, private schools, homeschooling and more.

If you own a business, company, or farm, sign in to sponsor National School Choice Week. Ask your local educational parents’ organization to be a sponsor and, perhaps, to host an event or activity focusing on school choice. Share this video with your local school boards, private schools, and parent groups.

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Senator Tom Harkin, whose outspoken opposition to Wall Street generally and for-profit schools specifically has made him a leading voice in Congressional regulation of career and for-profit colleges. His office is set to release a report this month – the second in a series – detailing the horrific ramifications of applying free market principles to higher education, but it seems his office may have much to be concerned about given recent details that have emerged about the Senator’s direct involvement in not only the creation and distribution of faulty past reports, but in back-door dealings that should give any American pause.

Last fall, Harkin released a report that his office claimed detailed a host of transgressions on the part of for-profit or “career” colleges from misuse of student loan money to misleading counseling services and high default rates among graduates. The report was criticized by Senate Republicans as “unfair,” and Republicans boycotted subsequent hearings. It was later revealed that the report, compiled – with Harkin’s help – by the GAO, was faulty and many of its findings either fabricated or unusable and the GAO issued fix:

In November 2010, the GAO was forced to release a significantly changed report. The correction affected 16 of the 28 findings in the original report. The bias of the original report was also reflected in the fact that all 16 revisions were all of the same type: changing flawed statements that cast the for-profits in the worst possible light. Error after error took statements out of context or did not accurately portray what was said.

The report, however, had Harkin’s desired effect. Just days after the report was presented at a Senate hearing, the value of for-profit schools’ stock dropped 14% and companies that ran free-market educational facilities lost over $4 billion dollars.

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INDIANAPOLIS – Would you like a vivid example of how dysfunctional leadership and top-heavy bureaucracy can cripple an inner-city school system?
Just take a good look at Indianapolis Public Schools. The horrifying results speak for themselves.

Less than 60 percent of IPS students graduate high school on time, third- and eighth-graders score more than 20 percentage points below the state average on math and English tests, and six out of seven of Indiana’s worst schools are within the district.

Those sobering statistics are the impetus behind an encouraging new proposal to remake the district, drafted by education reformers at The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis nonprofit charter school advocacy group.

In the report – “Creating Opportunity Schools, A Bold Plan to Transform Indianapolis Public Schools” – The Mind Trust outlines how excessive and illogical labor spending in the district could be redirected into classrooms, where it belongs.

The report calls for drastic restructuring of the district, including decentralizing of the administration, expanding school choice, and giving high performing schools greater control over their budgets and staffs.

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PITTSBURGH – Conventional wisdom says that allowing charter schools to compete with traditional schools for students and resources will result in the destruction of public education.

Those assumptions are being proven wrong by the renaissance underway in Pittsburgh Public Schools, caused – in part – by the district’s 31 area charter school competitors. Instead of being the bane of PPS’s existence, the charter schools are spurring the district into becoming leaner, more efficient and, ultimately, more effective for students.

Pittsburgh school officials understand that the “landscape has changed and that we need to be more competitive in the new world,” Lisa Fischetti, chief of staff and external affairs for Pittsburgh Public Schools, wrote in an email to EAG.

“ … [T]he increasing array of other educational options (e.g. charter schools, cyber charter schools, and potentially vouchers) did help to move the needle in terms of our culture shift.”

Part of PPS’ “culture shift” involves cutting over $40 million from its annual budget, a process that started last summer when the district cut 217 office positions and furloughed 54 teachers and paraprofessionals. In March, the district expects to announce that 398 teachers will not be returning for the 2012-13 school year.

Normally, when a school district announces mass layoffs, it is followed by charges that lawmakers are not “investing” enough in public education and that the apocalypse is at hand.

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In Wisconsin, Governor Walker’s public union reforms are pummeling the Big Labor narrative by saving taxpayer dollars and teachers’ jobs. Meanwhile, the professional class-warriors who get rich pushing “solidarity” force districts into layoffs by refusing to revisit unaffordable contracts.

After similar reforms failed in Ohio thanks to a smear campaign exceeding $30 million, Ohio’s public workers are enjoying the sort of union victory that’s often accompanied by a pink slip.

A month ago I shared stories from around the state of firings caused by the same union bosses who screeched against Governor Kasich’s “attack on workers.” To the surprise of neither of my website’s readers, this avoidable trend continues.

Voters who opposed reform have caused the very problems Big Labor insisted reform would create:

Marion Police say they are committed to answering the city’s 9-1-1 calls but come the [sic] January 1st, callers could see delays in response times.

That’s because the [sic] 15 officers are being cut from the department.  Another position is expected to be eliminated in 2012.

Emphasis mine. Delayed response times were one of the many unexplained evils that would have allegedly resulted from making public employees a little more accountable to the public.

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NEW YORK -  The new year has only just begun, but the United Federation of Teachers, the union that represents teachers in New York City, seems determined to make it a banner year for union selfishness.

The New York Post reports that UFT President Michael Mulgrew recently pitched a fit over the state’s plans to expand its standardized testing sessions for math and reading to three hours.

“It’s pretty clear right now the last thing we need is more testing,” Mulgrew said, according to the Post. “Test prep is one of the biggest dangers that our kids face in schools right now. Preparing kids to take standardized tests does not lead to real learning.”

What nonsense.

How many class sessions do teachers need to show students how to fill in bubbles on a test sheet?

How many class hours are required to help kids understand the strategies behind answering multiple choice questions?

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