In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: There are efforts to have the Kansas Legislature expand the open records law to include the spending records of several taxpayer-funded agencies, but the City of Wichita wants to keep the records secret. Then, did you know the Kansas teachers union has a media response team? Finally, Arthur Brooks makes the moral case for free enterprise. Episode 32, broadcast February 23, 2014. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.
Tag: KNEA
Our Kansas grassroots teachers union
Letters to the editor in your hometown newspaper may have the air of being written by a concerned parent of Kansas schoolchildren, but they might not be what they seem. It’s fashionable for school advocacy groups to bash their critics as mere lackeys of a top-down driven power structure. It is the advocates for school spending — teachers, parents, children, school principals — that are the true grassroots, they say.
So it might be surprising to learn that Kansas’ largest teachers union has a plan and mechanism for distributing its message. It’s called the KNEA Media Response Team, and it says it is “responsible for promoting KNEA and public education in the print and electronic media.”
The team’s web page holds language like: “The KNEA Media Response Team builds on existing KNEA media outreach efforts and is a sanctioned KNEA Board Task Force.”Task Force. Sounds like a military organization, not a grassroots advocacy group. Sanctioned. Sounds like someone had to obtain official permission. Obtaining permission from a central authority isn’t characteristic of grassroots activism.
The page also says: “Because we’re seeking fresh voices, board members, council presidents and local presidents are not encouraged to apply.”
It’s a detailed plan: “During the first year, there will be only one per media market. To participate, members must attend the initial MRT training or have taken Cyndi’s message framing session within the last two years.”
There are pre-determined talking points on a secret web page: “Refer to KNEA member only Web page for basic messages on key education issues (https://ks.nea.org/membersonly/talkingpoints.html), or contact KNEA Communications for help with other issues. Use these to write your response.”
It’s encouraged, although not mandatory, to get pre-approval for the communiques team members have developed: “Submit your letter to the editor or guest column to the newspaper via e-mail. Send a copy to Cyndi. Initially, members may send their letter to Cyndi first before submitting it to a news organization.”
If the union leaders have a message they want to promulgate, you may be asked to help: “At certain times, you may be asked to write letters promoting KNEA’s positive goals for public education, instead of responding to what others write.”
There’s a contract team members must agree to: “I agree to become a KNEA Media Response Team writer for 2009-2010. I understand and support the goals and guidelines of the KNEA Media Response Team. I will work with KNEA Communications to write letters to the editor and engage in other media activity that helps promote public education.”
All this would be less objectionable if KNEA was truly working for the good of Kansas schoolchildren. But notice that KNEA is concerned with public education only, not education in general. That’s because teachers in private schools, religious schools, and homeschooling parents aren’t union members. Then, when you learn that KNEA opposes nearly all forms of education reform — especially measures that would bring greater accountability to teachers and schools — the target of the union’s concern is obvious: Not the children. See Kansas reasonable: The education candidates.
KNEA: supporting institutions at children’s expense
From Kansas Policy Institute.KNEA: supporting institutions at children’s expense
By Dave Trabert
The Kansas National Education Association’s slogan is “Making public schools great for every child.” It may be a coincidence that their slogan seems to emphasize institutions over students, but many of their actions quite deliberately put institutional interests first. My belief has nothing to do with individual teachers. Kansas is blessed with thousands of dedicated teachers who get up every morning thinking of ways to help students and they deserve citizens’ gratitude and support for everything they do. My comments are not directed at teachers, but at the institution of the KNEA.The most recent example of this teacher union (the organization) putting institutional interests ahead of student needs was in an email blast they sent last week about hearings held by the Special Committee on Education. It began with their usual vitriolic put-downs of people with whom they disagree and concluded by saying, “…that everything we know from student assessment – … Kansas continues to improve and that Kansas continues to perform in the top tier of states….”
KNEA knows that that is a deliberately misleading statement. In fact, they wrote it following a detailed presentation for the Committee showing that, while many Kansas students do quite well and likely are very competitive internationally, roughly half of Kansas students (those who qualify for Free & Reduced Lunch) are two to three years’ worth of learning behind. Even more disheartening is the fact that those achievement gaps are getting wider.
The National Center for Education Statistics says that 10 points on NAEP is the equivalent of a year’s worth of learning. The gap was 24 points (roughly 2.4 years) in 1998 when Kansas first participated in NAEP. It was 22 points in 2005 before funding was dramatically increased. But now, after nearly $3 billion in targeted At Risk spending, the gap is wider than ever at 28 points. The gap for 8thgrade students in Reading is 24 points…three points wider than it was in 2005. The gaps for 4th grade and 8th grade Math are 18 points and 24 points, respectively. FYI, the Kansas Department of Education (KSDE) is on record saying that NAEP is the “gold standard.”
Similar patterns exist on the state assessment. the gaps between 2006 and 2012 for Reading and Math both grew slightly. Unfortunately, performance for low income students declined in 2013. (We’ve submitted a request for the 2013 data on students who are not eligible for Free & Reduced Lunch.)
These performance statistics reflect students who are at Exceeds Standard and above. You see, KSDE doesn’t require students to be able to read grade-appropriate material with full comprehension (as defined by KSDE) to Meet the Kansas Reading standard. Students are not required to usually be accurate on all grade-level Math tasks to be Proficient and Meet the Kansas Math standard. KSDE and the State Board of Education reduced performance standards to the point where the U.S. Department of Education says Kansas has some of the lowest performance standards in the nation.
By the way, if you’re disturbed by the alarmingly low achievement levels of All Students who are low income, you’ll be appalled by the results for 11th grade students. One year away from entering the workforce or going on the post-secondary work, only 37 percent of low income 11th grade students can read grade appropriate material with full comprehension. Math drops off to 29 percent.
As is often the case with institutional interests, it’s all about the money. This little gem was included in the KNEA email.
“Spalding’s [Friedman Foundation] conclusion to his presentation comparing school finance formulas from our regional states is that there is no way to compare effectiveness of the various formulas except by looking at their results. So that begs the question, since Kansas’ results are among the highest in the nation, doesn’t that mean we have an effective school finance formula? What would happen if we actually funded our system?!”
Yep…it’s all about the money with this teacher union.
As for the claim that “…Kansas’ results are among the highest in the nation,” KNEA also knows that to be falsely driven by demographics. Simply put, there are two-to-three-year achievement gaps between White students and those of color…and Kansas is Whiter than many states. Here are the actual 2013 national rankings and scores showing that Kansas is actually just slightly above average overall (although White and Black students are slightly below average).
Pretending to have high achievement based on low performance standards and demographic skews is harmful to students, and ignoring that tens of thousands of students are falling farther behind is downright shameful. But that’s what happens when institutional interests prevail over student needs.
P.S. I shared this information and our school staffing data with KNEA leadership and offered to get together in a public or private setting to discuss the facts. I thought they would at least be interested to explore the fact that regular classroom teachers have only increased 7 percent over the last twenty years, while students increased 6 percent and non-teachers increased 40 percent. So far…crickets.
Kansas teachers reject union representation in one district
Rejection of Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) by teachers in a small Kansas school district could start a trend. From Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry.
By James Sherk and Michael Cirrotti.
Teachers in Deerfield, Kansas, just did something unusual — they voted to decertify their union. The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) no longer represents them.
Teachers disliking their union representation do not make news, but teachers actually leaving their union do: The law makes it very difficult for teachers to remove unwanted unions.
Unlike most public officials, unions do not stand for re-election, so their members cannot regularly hold them accountable. Workers can remove an unwanted union only by filing for decertification. But bureaucratic obstacles make it difficult to hold a vote on decertification. The hoops Deerfield’s teachers had to jump through illustrate this problem.
Joel McClure, the teacher who led the effort, submitted the appropriate paperwork to the Kansas Department of Labor in November 2012. But Kansas teachers can request a vote only in a two-month window every three years. KNEA officials contested the petition by claiming that the teachers missed the December 1 deadline. (The Department of Labor had misplaced the initial petition paperwork.) Then the KNEA objected that the teachers’ attorney was not certified in Kansas and that they did not have enough signatures. However, the teachers prevailed and voted out their union—in June, just eight months after the initial submission.
When asked why they went through such protracted effort, the teachers said their union ignored their concerns. They wanted instead to be actively involved in negotiations and work collaboratively with the school district. “The desire is for teachers to participate at the [bargaining] table, to have free access to information,” McClure said. “In our little school district, there’s no reason we can’t sit down at the table and work out our issues.”
Now they can. But most other teachers never get to choose their bargaining representatives. Their unions formed in the 1970s and have never stood for re-election since. In some of Kansas’s largest school districts, not one teacher voted for the current union. Teachers who do not want a prolonged legal battle get stuck with their union by default.
The law should give workers more choice about who represents them. Kansas legislators are reviewing Kansas HB 2027, which would require teachers unions to stand for re-election every two years and allow individual teachers to negotiate separate contracts. This would make unions more accountable to their members while allowing great teachers to negotiate for even better pay.
Americans trust teachers to educate our children. We should also trust them to choose who should represent them.
Michael Cirrotti is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please click here.
Teachers union members to be proud of
Critics of public schools usually explain that they’re not faulting individual teachers. Instead, they target their criticism at the teachers union, bureaucratic school administration, or “the system” in general.
So when we observe the actions of teachers, we’re correct to wonder if they’re acting as citizens, or as teachers representing their school districts, or as union members, or in some other role. This issue is important when we take notice of the actions of teachers at a recent meeting of the South-Central Kansas Legislative Delegation in Wichita.
Here’s a message tweeted during that meeting from Judy Loganbill, a Wichita school teacher and until this year, a member of the Kansas House of Representatives:
Loving the schooling the legislators are getting today. #conservativeasskicking #ksleg
— Judith Loganbill (@JudyLoganbill) March 2, 2013
This salty language inspired by political conflict: Is that Judy Loganbill citizen, teacher of young children, or union member speaking?
This glee spilled over to Facebook:
Randy Mousley is president of United Teachers of Wichita, the Wichita teachers union. Parents of Wichita schoolchildren might be interested in knowing which role he’s assuming when taking credit for his invention: Citizen, union leader, teacher, or something else?
The real war on Kansas workers
“What workers decide to do with their paychecks is none of the Government’s business.”
Isn’t that a wonderful statement? It succinctly states the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which is that each person owns themselves and the fruits of their labor. Their paychecks, in this case. The author says that government has no business deciding how workers spend their pay, which I would interpret as meaning that government has no business levying taxes on income.
But I don’t think that’s what the author of this sentence meant.
Instead, the author of this statement wants more of Kansas workers’ paychecks diverted to government though taxation. That’s how the groups he’s represented are paid, and they always want more.
This statement comes from a petition at SignOn.org started by Colin Curtis, a Kansas political activist who has worked for public employee organizations. It’s in response to a bill that provides, in part, “It shall be unlawful for any professional employees’ organization, as defined in K.S.A. 72-5413, and amendments thereto, to use any dues, fees, assessments or any periodic payments deducted from a member’s paycheck for the purpose of engaging in political activities as defined in subsection (c).”
If this bill becomes law, public employee unions won’t be able to have government deduct these payments for them. They’ll have to fundraise like everyone else.
But if all you read was the petition that Curtis started, you’d think the bill does much more: “It’s time for the Government to get off of workers backs, out of their paychecks, and to end these outrageous attempt to strip workers of their First Amendment rights simply because they chose to join a union.”
A paycheck deduction isn’t a first amendment right. Not even close.
But I do understand why public employee unions like Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), our state’s teachers union, are worried about this legislation. If their members had to consciously make donations for political purposes (instead of automatic deduction), teachers might start wondering if the union is really worthwhile.
And I do agree with Curtis when he writes “It’s time for the Government to get off of workers backs.”
I wish he and Kansas public employee union leadership really meant this.
More about HB 2023
In her newsletter, Kansas State Representative Amanda Grosserode explains this bill:I received a great deal of correspondence on this issue with most of it coming from outside the district. There was some confusion and misinformation about the legislation’s contents, which is to simply ban state or other units of government from making payroll deductions for members of public sector unions for the purpose of contributing to the union’s political action committee. For purpose of simple clarification:
- Dues for membership in an employee organization (union) will still be able to be processed through a paycheck deduction.
- Contributions to a political action committee (PAC) will not be allowed through a paycheck deduction.
- The language that restrains political activity for a public employee organization is not new law. That language was expanded.
- Political activity such as endorsements and contributions would be prohibited from the public employee organization which it is already prohibited from doing.
- Endorsements, political contributions to candidates, and other participation in engaging in ballot measures are to be from the Political Action Committee arm and not the organization arm.
Some misinformation that I have seen:
- The bill does not stop any employee organization from being involved in lobbying for or against legislation. It does not stop individual employees from advocating for or against legislation.
- Other organizations are unable to contribute to candidates or endorse candidates except through a PAC. This is very common. It is usually a federal tax issue that is involved. Most organizations have an educational and lobbying wing which is separate financially and by tax filings from the political action committee wing which endorses and financially supports candidate.
- No individual’s first amendment right is restricted. Individuals always can speak out.
My husband is a member of a public employee organization. This bill will not stop his dues being paid by paycheck deduction. This bill does not impact in any way his ability to advocate for or against an issue or legislation. It does not stop his organization from lobbying on legislation before the Legislature. It will only stop our family from contributing to a political action committee by way of a paycheck deduction.
I voted Yes on 2023. It is inappropriate for the state or any unit of government to be in the business of making payroll deductions for political purposes.
It’s not the teachers, it’s the union
Can there be a point where demagoguery has been spread so deep and thick that no one believes it?
Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), our state’s teachers union, advises teachers “Be prepared for a long hard ride — they are indeed out to get you.”
The union also wrote: “But beyond this, you need to ask your legislator if he or she has any respect for teachers at all. The war now being waged against public school teachers by the House is offensive and disrespectful. Within weeks of witnessing teachers in Newtown, Connecticut die for their students and a teacher in Taft, California put himself between his student and a gunman, the Kansas legislature seeks to de-professionalize the teachers of Kansas.”
In another email, KNEA wrote: “It gets worse! This is Day 11 in the War on Kansas teachers and the dawn was greeted with the introduction of HB 2123 — the Scott Walker Act of Kansas. … All of these bills are political payback for the public sector workers who, through their unions, tried to present an alternative view of Kansas’ future.”
In another: “Battle for free speech continues — HB 2032 — ‘silence the teachers‘ — heads for the full House.”
KNEA, can we talk? It’s not teachers that Kansans dislike. It’s you — the union and its leadership — that citizens recognize is a harmful force: First, to Kansas schoolchildren, and second, to Kansas taxpayers.
Kansas teachers union: No competition for us
Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), our state’s teachers union, is an effective force that denies Kansas parents the choice as to where to send their children to school. The union also works hard to deny teachers choice in representation.In Bullying Teachers: How Teachers Unions Secretly Push Teachers and Competitors Around, Joy Pullmann states the problem: “In routine tracking of education-related legislation, The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News has uncovered evidence that teachers unions across the country routinely inhibit teachers from joining or speaking out about competing, nonunion teachers associations.”
Pullmann explains legislation from 2011 when Garry Sigle, who is Executive Director at Kansas Association of American Educators, supported equal access to teachers.
In 2011, House Bill 2229 would have given the state an equal access law regarding teacher associations. It stalled in the Senate and found no sponsors this year. In the meantime, public school principals in Kansas have refused to let Garry Sigle, executive director of the state’s AAE affiliate, even enter their schools because the local union affiliate would file a labor grievance against the schools if they did. Similar and repeated instances in the state are documented below.
The legislative page for this bill is Substitute HB 2229 by Committee on Federal and State Affairs — Teachers; professional employees association; equal access act. The last notation on the calendar is “Died in Senate Committee.” The bill would do these things, according to the supplemental note prepared by Kansas Legislative Research:
To give equal access for all professional employees’ associations to the professional employees physical or electronic school mailboxes;
To allow equal access for all professional employees’ associations to attend new teacher or employee school orientations and other meetings; and
To not designate any day or breaks in a school year by naming or referring to the name of any professional employees’ association.KNEA opposed this legislation. The committee in which it died was chaired by Pete Brungardt. Brungardt’s campaign was supported by KNEA, but he was defeated in the August 2012 primary election.
Reporting more about Kansas, Pullmann writes:
Many superintendents and principals in Kansas will not even let Garry Sigle give teachers information about his nonunion teacher organization. One superintendent told Sigle, “Why would I want to [let you talk to teachers in my district] if I knew that would create an issue between me and a union I have to negotiate with?” Sigle said. He asked the superintendent how many of his district’s teachers were in the NEA. Thirty or 40 percent, the superintendent said. So Sigle asked to speak to the others. The superintendent wouldn’t allow Sigle to speak to even nonunionized teachers. In one school, Sigle had an appointment to speak at a teacher in-service. “When the local NEA found out, they raised such a ruckus that [the principal] had to call and cancel me.”
Sigle’s alma mater, Fort Hays State University, would not let him speak to students in their teaching program “because they have a student NEA group and just can’t seem to find time in their schedule.” Smith also highlighted access difficulties with student teacher programs in Utah. “I don’t think, as a school of higher education, it’s your job to limit the information your students get,” Sigle said. “It baffles me that a school would do that.”
A principal has told Sigle if he stepped foot into her school she would have to report him or the school’s NEA chapter would file a contract grievance against her. “She said, ‘I can’t even let you come into the building,’” Sigle said in astonishment.
Sigle’s op-ed in the Topeka Capital-Journal explained the problem in a different way, opening with:
As employees in a right-to-work state, teachers in Kansas have a choice about which employee association, if any, they wish to join. However, current state law does not treat all employee associations the same way.
In fact, the Kansas National Education Association has an unfair advantage, having state-sanctioned monopoly access to public school employees.
Kansas schools are lacking choice: none for students, little for teachers, topped off with coercion for taxpayers.
Public employee unions should be a non-partisan issue
Writing in Hoover Institution Policy Review, John O. McGinnis and Max Schanzenbach state what few seem to recognize: Everyone would be better off without public employee unions:For conservatives, taking on public employee unions provides a way to eliminate inefficient spending and create a polity of low taxes and lean government. For liberals, it provides a way to redirect spending to effective public goods, like better educational outputs, that public employee unions frustrate.
The authors explain how teachers unions, in particular, are harmful to taxpayers and — most importantly — children in public schools:
Public employee unions impose even more substantial costs on states beyond the unjustified direct benefits their workers receive. Their worst consequence is the distortions they create in the public policy arena. Because of their concentrated influence, they are able to substantially direct — indeed sometimes dictate — the shape of public policy in the area in which they are employed.
The most notorious example is public education. Teachers’ unions are the single greatest obstacle to improving education in this country. Unions are almost universally associated with seniority pay, job tenure (including layoffs based on seniority), inflexible work rules, and lack of productivity-based pay. Teachers’ unions are no exception: They make it difficult or impossible to fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more, or conduct layoffs in a rational fashion. Media reports have recently highlighted the difficulties in New York City. There, teachers earn tenure after only three years on the job, and a hearing to dismiss a teacher take years and costs hundreds of thousand dollars (teachers are paid in full for the duration of such hearings, although they don’t actually do any work). Although the city has stepped up its effort at dismissals, very few teachers are fired for incompetence. In many places, union rules on teacher assignments make it more difficult to match teachers with the pupils for whom they would make the most difference. The unions also make it harder to create flexible schedules that would make more efficient use of school facilities. In some states, such as Minnesota, unions have made it impossible for their educational systems to participate in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. In short, the teachers’ unions make the public school rigid, unproductive, and hidebound at great monetary cost to taxpayers and at educational cost to the children that they are supposed to teach.
In addition, because government controls the vast majority of education spending, teachers’ unions can use political power to throttle competition. Because private schools and charter schools do not necessarily employ union members, teachers’ unions see the growth of such schools as a danger to their size and resulting political power. As a consequence, they have tried to obstruct such initiatives at every turn. A recent shocking example is their ability to exert influence over the Democratic Congress in order to end the small-scale school voucher program for low-income students in the District of Columbia.
One does not have to believe that vouchers or charter schools are the solution to problems in education to see the influence of teachers’ unions as pernicious. The nation simply does not have full information about the most efficient way to educate its children or the best way to address a host of social problems. Democracy works through informal experiments. But teachers’ unions make it hard to conduct the necessary experiments, because their focus is simply on protecting the perquisites of their members. And teachers’ unions are extremely powerful. As Steven Brill pointed out in a recent New York Times Magazine article, they have contributed $57 million over the last 30 years to federal campaigns — more than any other union or corporation. And their contributions at the state level are even larger.
Teachers unions wrap themselves around an unimpeachable issue: the welfare of schoolchildren. The unions’ actual conduct, however, harms schoolchildren.
Full article at The Case Against Public Sector Unions.
Letters to the editor in your hometown newspaper may have the air of being written by a concerned parent of Kansas schoolchildren, but they might not be what they seem. 
