Not the Best Advertisement for Viagra

NJEA is touting its potent “member to member” campaign for Corzine (see yesterday’s post here and NJEA’s powerpoint here), and we’ve been poking at the data in Ginger Gold Schnitzer’s titillating presentation. (Sorry. Just trying to get into the spirit of the powerpoint, which labels NJEA members’ unenthusiastic view of Corzine as “electile dysfunction.”) Anyway, in August NJEA officials discovered that there was only a 5 point gap between members who planned on voting for Corzine (40%) and those who intended on voting for Christie (35%). So they launched a comprehensive “communications campaign to inoculate the public” that included: 104,619 telephone calls, a full-time (8 am to 8 pm) campaign office, specially-designed software, polling, data analysis, direct mail, broadcast T.V. and cable advertising, and paid Facebook, Hulu.com, and youtube spots. The result of all this effort was that NJEA’s management moved Corzine’s favorables up 18% (from 39% to 57%) and his unfavorables down 19% (from 56% to 37%). And he lost the election.

NJEA members pay over a $100 million in dues each year. Do they get to vote on how it gets spent? Maybe someone should do a poll.

Christie Names Members of Education Transition Team

Governor-Elect Christie has named the 21 members of his Education Subcommittee, chaired by Dr. Susan Cole of Montclair University. The list includes Former Jersey Mayor Bret Schundler, Peter Denton of E3, principals from public and charter schools, an NJEA member, the founder of the Newark Charter School Fund, deans of education from N.J. teaching colleges. Here’s the complete list from the Star-Ledger.

Quote of the Day

Already the administration is being pressured to dilute [Race To The Top's] requirement that states adopt performance pay for teachers and to weaken its support for charter schools. If the president does not remain firm on standards, the whole endeavor will be just another example of great rhetoric and poor reform.

Competition among the states is also vital to reform. The administration is resisting the temptation to award funds to as many states as possible. And that's good. To be effective, Race to the Top funds cannot become a democratic handout. Competition brings out the best performance. That's true in athletics and in business, and it's true in education.

Harold Ford, Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Louis Gerstner, former chairman of IBM and the Teaching Commission, and Eli Broad of the Broad Foundation in today's Wall Street Journal.

N.J.'s Score on Data Quality

The Data Quality Campaign has posted its Annual Progress Report on State Data Systems, which measures each state’s development of robust longitudinal data systems to accurately measure student progress. The Report calls national progress “remarkable;” more and more states are reaching the ten "elements" the Campaign deems necessary for valid and reliable decision-making in education. New Jersey is one of 31 states that have met at least 8 of 10 elements. (Eleven states have all 10.) We’re missing “Statewide Teacher Identifier with a Teacher-Student Match” and “Student-Level Course Completion Transcript Data.” Not too shabby, although the former is a Race To The Top criterion. Here's N.J.'s evaluation.

A Win for School Choice

Here’s a lame duck bill that’s not so lame: yesterday the Assembly Education Committee approved S2982, a bill sponsored by Senator Shirley Turner that revives the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program Act of 1999, a five-year pilot program that allowed children to cross district lines if a school was willing to take them. Its reincarnation is apparently due to Christie’s platform of school choice and Race To The Top’s emphasis on reform.

You can read annual reports of the School Choice Act from 2000-2004, after which the pilot program expired, although 850 kids still participate. Reviews have been mostly positive. Recommendations from the reviews of the pilot program mostly involve expanding the number of choice schools (the original legislation limited the number to one from each county and only 15 counties participated) and expanding the quota of kids allowed (up to 2% of each grade of the sending school’s population). Here’s an example of one of the recommendations:

Sending districts are not consistent when they calculate their enrollment restriction percentages pursuant to N.J.S.A. 18A:36B-8(b). In some sending districts, the grade levels are so small that any calculation does not yield a whole student. These districts do not want to allow any students to participate in the school choice program. In other sending districts, the calculation yields whole students and then percentages of a student, for example 4.2 students. In one sending district, the percentage calculation yielded 1.5 students and there were three students in the lottery with two of those students twins. The district made a determination that only one student was eligible and one of the twins won the lottery. Eventually the sending district allowed the other twin to go to the choice district. This provision needs to be clarified.

The new bill, by the way, raises the number of kids allowed to transfer to 10% of any grade or 15% of any district.

At any rate, it’s a good sign that we’re reviving this program, one of the very few ways public school kids in New Jersey have of exercising school choice and escaping the gallows of their zip code. (Are we hyperbolic? Newsflash: Camden just won the award of most dangerous city in the country.) Nonetheless, there are naysayers. From the Star-Ledger:

"The concern we have is ... if enough kids were to move out of a district in one grade or school ... it could lead to a cut in services or programs for kids left behind," said NJEA spokesman Steven Baker. "It was never intended to harm the students who were not taking advantage of the program."

And from the Press of Atlantic City:

Ginger Gold Schnitzer of the NJEA said the organization supports choice, but is worried that the higher percentage could hurt the schools in other small districts if they lose a lot of students.

Schnitzer unsuccessfully lobbied Senator Turner to hold off a vote on the bill or to lower the quota of kids allowed to participate. Let’s hope the Legislature has the cojones to resist inevitable pressure to do the same. It's the right bill at the right time.

NJEA: Our Teachers Are Sheep

Mike Antonucci of Education Intelligence Agency, a website that seeks to reveal the inner workings of teachers’ unions, posted yesterday about NJEA’s covert campaign to overcome members’ antipathy and/or apathy toward Corzine. His reporting is largely based on a power point presentation made by NJEA’s Director of Governmental Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, called “Campaign 2009: An Organizational Victory." Confused? Call it an internal victory because NJEA claims to have radically changed its members' views on the gubernatorial candidates after the leadership learned over this past summer that its members preferred Corzine over Christie by only 5 points. NJEA leaders decided that lobbying its own members was “an organizational imperative” in order to maintain control of NJEA politics. Writes Antonucci,

This wouldn't be the first time an NEA state affiliate used member dues and resources to persuade members their opinions were faulty, but the extent of NJEA's effort was extraordinary. The union live-phoned nearly 105,000 members, established campaign teams in every county, and organized school building visits to lobby members to vote for Corzine. This was nothing compared to what was going on at NJEA headquarters.

According to Schnitzer's presentation, NJEA "opened a full time campaign office in a conference room," which was "open from 8 am-8 pm for staff to phone bank, enter data, get training, and learn of other volunteer opportunities." The NJEA staff also assisted local operations from state headquarters.

The results were dramatic, at least as far as NJEA members were concerned. Corzine's favorability rating went up 18 points before election day, while Christie's unfavorable ratings ballooned 21 points. Corzine's five-point lead among members grew to an astonishing 35 points.

Christie won the state by a comfortable margin, as NJEA's influence over the general public was not as dramatic, and would not have been decisive in any case. The public's agenda is much broader than that of the teachers' union, and so the union's influence is diffused. But its influence over its own members cannot be overstated, regardless of the members' preferences.

How do independent-minded NJEA members feel about a substantial percentage of their dues going to their political makeovers by leaders in NJEA who gloat about their ability to puppeteer votes? We’d love to know.

An Argument for a 3% School Budget Cap

Hold the rotten tomatoes, please.

At the risk of inciting the ire of every school board member and school employee in the Garden State, here's why Christie ought to push a hard 3% cap through the Legislature.

• Who cares whether free public preschool is a the cure for educational equity or a needless babysitting service? The voters want lower property taxes. (Corzine forgot that it's the economy, stupid.)
  

• Between 75% and 80% of a local district's school budget is payroll and benefits.

• Current collective bargaining agreements hover at about the 4.5% mark. This is a direct result of a loose 4% cap on school budgets. As long as a district has a little cash bundled away in surplus (and sometimes when it doesn't), it will lose the case when a contract dispute is put before a state-appointed mediator because 4.5 is awfully close to 4.

• If there is a hard cap of 3%, then maintaining salary increases in the mid-fours will have an immediate and deleterious effect on instruction in the form of lay-offs, larger class sizes, freezes on curricular material. Local bargaining units will be hard-pressed to rationalize salary proposals so out of sync with budget restrictions when students will bear the brunt of it.
  

• Despite local districts' best efforts, salary increases remain stuck in an endless loop because mediators make decisions based on regional settlements. The only way to lower budgets is for the Legislature to step in with a game-changer.
• Yes, yes, NJEA eats its young, often protecting tenured and long-term members at the expense of the new talent. Lowering the cap doesn't guarantee that settlements will come down. But they likely will, and it's a baby step toward gaining control of the unsustainable costs of a New Jersey public education.