A group of laid off teachers brought a petition to the offices of the North Clackamas Education Association in Oregon protesting the union’s decision to accept job cuts over salary freezes – contrary, they claim, to the wishes of the members. 

“We took a poll in the spring and they got our opinion and the majority said wage freeze,” said Monica Whiteley, who was laid off. "If I was her I would. So I would like them to look at the poll or honor it and have us look at the memo of understanding that is out there.”

SORRY I HAVE TO STEP IN HERE: A POLL ABOUT A POSSIBLITY INVOVING THE MOST GENERAL OF CIRCUMSTANCES AND AT A TIME WELL BEFORE THE THE TRUTH HAD  LEAKED TO THE SURFACE? JUST BEFORE THE BOARD WAS SET TO VOTE ON IT? THIS STINKS OF CORUPTION AND IS HAPPENING AT LOCALS ALL OVER THE STATE. THIS IS CTA  LEADERSHIP AT IT'S FINEST. SCREW THE LOWER MEMBERS FOR THE GOOD OF THE DYING (SOON TO RETIRE) ELEPHANTS. THIS WAS ATTEMPED IN MY CTA LOCAL. IT IS NOT A VOTE ON AN ACTION ITEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They said they feel the union hasn’t been listening or communicating.  “I have felt like my voice has not been heard. I wasn’t asked was I OK with losing my job,” said Jenny Klassen, another laid off teacher.

Meanwhile, members of the Kent Education Association in Washington state voted overwhelmingly to go on strike. Only one problem with that: Washington courts and the Attorney General’s office have repeatedly ruled that teacher strikes, like any public-employee strike in Washington State, are illegal.The KEA disagrees, however... There lots of ways around that if true!!!!

This is Where Some of our Children Live Here - Maybe More Than We Think

.

The buildings had no running water, illegal wiring, boarded up windows and rodent infestations, officials said.any of these 74 children are presumably of school age, and will be starting one of Oakland's elementary schools next Monday. They are now homeless, living with relatives or in a shelter. When they arrive at school, they will not have a sign explaining their conditions. They will just be among the many thousands of Oakland students struggling to live way below the poverty line. Many of Oakland's schools are attended by students who live in poverty. Some schools are more than 90% economically disadvantaged.

We are often told not to make excuses for the poor performance of our schools, but I have seen firsthand the effect that poverty has on student performance. The children who lived in this apartment complex (until they were made completely homeless this week) are not that unusual. They have no place to study, so it is tough to do homework. There are drug users around the building, so it is noisy at night, making it hard to sleep. There are shootings in the neighborhood, so sometimes they have to dive to take cover from flying bullets. The nearest real grocery store is literally miles away, so food is often purchased at the neighborhood convenience store, and is highly processed and unhealthy. You can see them walking to school in the morning, eating their breakfast of corn chips and soda pop.

And just the stress of being poor takes its toll. If I am a bit short with my bills at the end of the month, I know how stressed that makes me. But those without regular work have a level of stress I have never even known. Unemployment in the Bay Area is over eleven percent, and is at least double that in many of these neighborhoods. That stress spills into family life, making people short-tempered and even violent. Children are often moved from one home to another, depending on who has space and food to take them in. Can you imagine how you would feel as a parent if you could not even afford to pay for a roof over your children's heads?

On Monday, teachers will welcome their students to class. The ones without homes, the ones who are hungry, the ones in foster care -- they will do their best to hide these conditions. Like wounded birds, they do not want to appear weak or flawed. Once they are grown and have achieved success, they may take some pride in their humble origins, but there is no pride in being homeless when it is your reality today.

Good teachers will find out soon who the hungry ones are, and work with the school and the child's parent or guardian to get them signed up for free lunches. They will make space for the children to stay after school and do homework. They will push all their students to do their best regardless of their circumstances. School can be a sanctuary for these students, a place where they are safe, and have a chance to be seen as human beings.

This fall there is less money than ever. Most of the Republicans in the state legislature have signed a pledge not to ever raise taxes, so when state revenues plummeted this year, school funding was cut by more than a thousand dollars per student. While the Bay Area remains an expensive place to live, Oakland's teachers are among the lowest paid in the region. Class sizes will expand, and there will be no money to repair the copy machine or replace broken furniture or lost books. Teachers will dip into their savings accounts to make up the difference for their children, because that is what we do.

But there is a way in which education rhetoric these days seems to deny that poverty has an impact on the ability of students to learn. Sometimes it feels as if the schools and teachers are actually being blamed for the conditions our students are forced to live in. These conditions should not be used to justify a poor quality education. But the schools and teachers that serve these students have special challenges, and need our support.

What is the impact of poverty on your students? How do you respond as an educator? How should we respond as a society?

Posted by Anthony Cody on August 26, 2009 7:49 AM

Yes, The NEA is bloated and useless but...

 The comments NEA submitted to the U.S. Department of Education regarding the Race to the Top fund eligibility criteria. NEA has finally noticed that the Obama administration's proposed education reforms are in direct conflict with the union's agenda.

At Flypaper, Jamie Davies O'Leary calls this the "least surprising news ever" (emphasis in original) and who can argue? But stating it so flatly underplays the unceasing cloud of swamp gas that emanated from NEA headquarters ever since candidate Obama first mentioned performance pay in front of union delegates in 2007.

Obama had more than two years of opportunities to pull a John Kerry and back off from his statements. I, for one, expected him to. But he hasn't, and he continues to repeat exactly what reforms he has in mind. NEA, for its part, emphasized how the union and Obama were essentially in agreement and how such differences were inevitable and unimportant.

The day before the 2008 election, I wrote: "As we have seen with Gray Davis and various other Democratic governors across the country, NEA and AFT may not react well when the time comes for Obama to say 'no,' when they see his primary job as saying 'yes.'"

I kept beating that drum this year.

March 11: "I think President Obama's notion of performance pay falls well short of replacing the traditional salary schedule. But after hearing him speak on the issue several times, I am persuaded he does actually mean performance pay, and he is in fact at odds with NEA on the matter. Despite the union's public statements that they're all on the same page ('He means national certification. No, really!'), either the President or the NEA will be forced to blink on this one."

March 16: "Now we have President Obama, and in his first major education policy speech last week, he once again mentioned performance pay, plus supported lifting charter school caps, decried America's 'educational decline,' demanded accountability, and called for getting 'bad teachers out of the classroom.' NEA issued talking points on the speech the same day, and they emphasize that 'President Obama's plan calls for proposals we've been advocating for quite some time.' This will come as news to former President Bush."

March 23: "Subject matter differential pay has the potential of causing more divisiveness between NEA and the Obama administration than does performance pay. A lot of school districts may talk about performance pay, but most will be happy to continue without the bother of creating a new system. Districts everywhere would like the freedom to pay more to hire teachers in shortage areas, which would require very little change."

July 2: "It's hard not to root for Obama and Duncan, who continue to pitch the 'let's collaborate and come up with something that works' message. The problem, it hardly needs repeating, is that we don't all agree about 'what works.' And some people don't care if it works or not, as long as the checks keep coming.... The real test will come when there aren't enough carrots and NEA files suit against the sticks. Being Democrats buys Obama and Duncan time and the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't buy them invulnerability."

That's an awful lot of restating the obvious, but NEA's only response was to claim the press was distorting the issue. At the very least, the union owes Education Week's Stephen Sawchuk an apology for hammering him after he wrote about NEA's spin...

On this, the NEA finds itself blowing hot air on the right side for its members (much to everyone's surprise) with regard to Obama's thinly veiled extension of the real purpose of NCLB through his project  RTTP. (Race To Topple Progress) for disadvantaged children.


Though the goals espoused by Obama and Duncan are noble and tantamount toward getting the best education possible for all our children per tax dollar spent. Here’s the problem that nullifies the intention. NOBODY has yet to offer a valid, reliable and empirically sound way to use these test scores to measure teacher performance. We are forever complaining about the system, some can even identify what needs to change BUT WHERE are the blue prints to the solution? Not in RTTP. Each year a teacher has an entirely different set of kids with different backgrounds, temperaments, abilities, and disabilities. This Proposal insists that all children are the same and learn the same. Unfortuneatly for Obama, the very nature of a child (for whom public education is supposed to exist) muddies the waters of what all American’s expect: a fast simple solution. 8/30/09 9:30pm   Praetorian

Six Years in the Making - An American Deflation

Saturday, August 29, 2009

An American Deflation

In economics, deflation is a decrease in the general price level of goods and services.^[1] Deflation occurs when the inflation rate falls below zero percent, resulting in an increase in the real value of money – a negative inflation rate. This should not be confused with disinflation, a slow-down in the inflation rate (i.e. when the inflation decreases, but still remains positive).^[2]Inflation reduces the real value of money over time, conversely, deflation increases the real value of money. Money refers to the functional currency (mostly unstable monetary unit of account) in a national or regional economy.

Currently, mainstream economists generally believe that deflation is a problem in a modern economy because of the danger of a deflationary spiral.^[3] Deflation is also linked withrecessions and with the Great Depression. Additionally, deflation also prevents monetary policy from stabilizing the economy because of a mechanism called the liquidity trap. However, historically not all episodes of deflation correspond with periods of poor economic growth,^[4] while there are many examples of how strong rise in CPI immediately precedes or accompanies an economic downturn, such as Great Depression, the 1970-80's, and the 2008 economic crash.

SERIAL CRIMINAL LIVING NEAR BOX SPRINGS ELEMENTARY?

The Most Honest Man in Moreno Valley

AND topix.com,
MvGordies blog

Isn't this the same school where the night security guard (a moon lighting US Marine) was shot and killed while patroling the school?


Could the robbery of the three earlier teachers be a convenient stop for some cash by a nearby murderer?

Three teachers robbed at gunpoint at a Moreno Valley elementary school

10:00 PM PDT on Wednesday, August 19, 2009

By JOHN ASBURY
The Press-Enterprise

Education officials plan to re-evaluate security procedures after a gunman stormed a teacher's lounge at a Moreno Valley elementary school early Wednesday morning and robbed three teachers.

Officials want to enhance security procedures, including adding security patrols and closing certain access points to schools, said Superintendent Rowena Lagrosa, of the Moreno Valley Unified School District.

Box Springs Elementary School Principal Sam Stager said the man entered the open-access campus at 6:50 a.m., before students arrived. The man got into the teacher's lounge from a side or rear entrance where he robbed the teachers at gunpoint, demanding their purses, Stager said.

The women gave him their purses and he ran off the campus carrying a small handgun.

No one was injured and no arrests had been made as of Wednesday evening.

Police are not sure if he ran through the neighborhood or to a waiting car on Athens Drive, which runs past the school and homes, Stager said.

Moreno Valley police officers arrived within minutes after a school custodian called them but the suspect had already fled.

The three teachers were sent home for the day; substitutes took their places. The school district's crisis management counseling team was also called to the campus, Lagrosa said.

Parents were notified of the incident through an automated call system, Lagrosa said. Students were not told of the robbery and continued their normal school day.

"It's terrifying. We're a very close-knit community and school," Lagrosa said. "We're just in disbelief that this could happen. We want this to be a safe haven for our students and staff."

The Moreno Valley Educators Association was unavailable for comment.

Moreno Valley's elementary schools have a private security firm that patrols the area after hours until 6:30 a.m. One school resource officer patrols each of the district's middle schools and each high school has a full-time Moreno Valley police officer on campus.

Reach John Asbury at 951-763-3451 or jasbury@PE.com

Following editorial content by I Praetorian


Ladies and Gentlemen. If you heard the crack of bone, numbness and the eventual smell of Gangrene fills the air, would you wait for more information (in a lesser format) to motivate you to seek out a doctor? Folks the stench has been progressing for years. How much more will it take? The tide has turned. Thousands of jobs lost every week. The millions of unemployed are a mask for the millions more that have fallen off the meager unemployment subsidies and thereby left out of the count and left out in the cold.


READ THIS - YOU ARE GOING TO LOOSE YOUR JOB. Our professional association... I mean union... No I was told we're not that... If not this year (2-3 more rounds of cuts this year.) Then within the next two years. By the time the California Deficit is fixed in reality not just on paper, the still out of control national economic recession, (how many times did Bush say "there is no recession"?) will have spiraled down down to depression. Or worse yet, fostered by years of artificially maintained ultra low interest rates, a cycle of prolonged deflation. Ask a real economist. One without a personal political bend or trying to sell a product and you will see that this is not just possible. Probable? More economic variables than I know or care to list have come together in existential harmony to make a shambles of the American Dream and Our middle class. Do you know that the American Middle Class has been steadily decreasing since the Johnson administration. With the exception of a couple of years during Clinton's? Do you know we are dependent on a bloody debauched dictatorship for our national economic future? The Saudi's. Saudi Arabia has by virtue of it's huge oil reserves (read power and dependence related access to our military) keeps OPEC from raising prices or switching payment for that oil from the US dollar to the Euro. Either would bring us to our knees. Either would greatly increase the wealth of the other OPEC nations. Most of which have a burning axe to grind for the U.S.


As for the Saudi's every spare bit of capitol not spent on devaluing US assets to try and maintain some value of their previous investments, is spent paying for US military protection and keeping their own people from over throwing the Saudi family. And for some vary good reasons. According to the organization "Human Rights Watch," the Saudi family which is estimated at over a hundred individuals, still require women to obtain permission from male guardians (usually husband or father) to conduct their most basic affairs, like traveling or receiving medical care, even speaking in the presense of another man. A Juvenile death penalty. Currently, judges evaluate a suspect's signs of puberty... to determine whether to try him or her as an adult. No examination of a child's mental capacity takes place. There is NO minimum age. They import 1.5 million Asian workers each with promises of decent wages to take back home but most are treated and live worse than they did in their native countries. The wages turn out to be grossly substandard and each takes away job that Saudi workers desperately need. Poverty is rampant in SA. Because of the ultra secretive and inaccessible inner circle of the government let alone the Saudi family, it can not be confirmed but some human rights investigators believe that within the Saudi inner circles, men still buy female slaves kidnapped from brothels and off the streets of foreign countries.


NOW, WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH THE CTA/NEA? Please read the story linked to the title at the top. I am not a Democrat or Republican but I find myself wading through the propaganda of both to assemble bits and pieces of the truth.

Teach for America: Elite corps or costing older teachers jobs?

USA TODAY
By Greg Toppo,

BALTIMORE — In 2007, fresh out of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Chris Turk snagged a coveted spot with the elite Teach For America program, landing here at Cherry Hill Elementary/Middle School in a blue-collar neighborhood at the city's southern tip. For the past two years, he has taught middle-school social studies.

One recent afternoon, during a five-week "life skills" summer-school course, Turk tells his five students that their final project, a movie about what they've learned, has a blockbuster budget: $70.

"We can go big here," he says. "We can go grand."

He might as well be talking about the high-profile program that brought him here. Despite a lingering recession, state budget crises and widespread teacher hiring slowdowns, Teach For America (TFA) has grown steadily, delighting supporters and giving critics a bad case of heartburn as it expands to new cities and builds a formidable alumni base of young people willing to teach for two years in some of the USA's toughest public schools.

Baltimore Superintendent Andres Alonso — who says he has seen "fewer retirements, fewer resignations and just greater stability in terms of our teaching ranks," much of it because of a reluctance to leave a secure job in a recession — has doubled the number of TFA teachers, known as "corps members," in city schools over the past two years.

Next week, more than 160 new TFAers arrive in Baltimore, up from 80 in 2007. They'll make up about one in four new hires.

Nationwide, about 7,300 young people are expected to teach under TFA's banner, up from 6,200 last year. TFA is expanding from 29 regions to 35, including Dallas, Boston and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

But critics say the growth in many cities is coming at the expense of experienced teachers who are losing their jobs — in some cases, they say, to make room for TFA, which brings in teachers at beginners' salary levels and underwrites training.

FULL COVERAGE: Latest news, in-depth reports at schools.usatoday.com

TWITTER: Follow reporter Greg Toppo @gtoppo

In Boston, TFA corps members replaced 20 pink-slipped teachers, says Boston Teachers Union President Richard Stutman. "These are people who have been trained, who are experienced and who have good evaluations, and are being replaced by brand-new employees."

This month, he met with about 18 other local union presidents, all of whom said they'd seen teachers laid off to make room for TFA members.

"I don't think you'll find a city that isn't laying off people to accommodate Teach For America," he says...

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Massachusetts | Baltimore | Princeton University | National Education Association | Amherst | University of California, Los Angeles | Cherry Hill | Teach for America | John Wilson | Michelle Rhee | Wendy Kopp | KIPP: the Knowledge Is Power Program

"Coming to your town soon thanks to the all consuming impotence of the NEA"