The Post editorial page started going after MCEA back in February, trying its best to affect the appeal of the union's support. Well, the primary returns are in and the endorsements can be compared. So who had the better record - the Post or MCEA?
The newspaper and the union disagreed on fourteen positions. Here are the results of their choices.
So when the Post and MCEA went head-to-head, the union won in 11 of 14 races.
Here are their records from 2006 through 2009.
So during this period, when the Post and MCEA made opposing endorsements, the union won in 8 of 11 races. This means that the result of the Post's anti-MCEA campaign has been to increase the union's comparative winning percentage.
Showing posts with label Post vs MCEA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post vs MCEA. Show all posts
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Post vs. MCEA: Primary Results
Monday, July 19, 2010
In Defense of George Leventhal
In its 2010 County Council endorsements, the Washington Post did not merely inform its readers as to the virtues of its picks; it also attacked Council Member George Leventhal. The Post said:
The one at-large incumbent we do not endorse is George L. Leventhal. A two-term council member, he has prodded the county to extend primary health care for uninsured and low-income residents and pushed other worthwhile initiatives involving transit and job growth. However, by pandering to public employee unions, he has also played a key role in fostering a culture of entitlement that led directly to unbridled spending, outrageous perks and irresponsible budgets. He was not alone in coddling the unions, but he led the charge.The accusation that Leventhal bears primary responsibility for the county’s budget problems is both grossly unfair and breathtakingly hypocritical. Here’s why.
Montgomery County certainly has a record of substantial spending. Following is the total tax-supported spending of the county government since FY 2004, which was the first budget on which Leventhal voted.
But MANY people had a role in these increases, not just Leventhal. The key players on budget decision-making are:
1. The Superintendent of Schools, who negotiates the three school union contracts and proposes the public schools budget to the Board of Education. The current Superintendent is Jerry Weast, who has served since 1999, not George Leventhal. The Post has long been a cheerleader for Weast.
2. The Board of Education, which approves the union contracts negotiated by the Superintendent as well as the overall school budget. Leventhal has never been a school board member. Most sitting school board members have at some point been endorsed by the Post.
3. The County Executive, who negotiates non-school union contracts and proposes the overall budget to the council. Leventhal has not served in this position. Both Executives in recent years, Doug Duncan and Ike Leggett, have been endorsed by the Post. In fact, the Post called Duncan “the fifth, and best, county executive” immediately after his final term spending spree.
4. The Chair of the Education Committee, who reviews, changes and passes out the school budget. Since 2002, the occupants of this position have been Mike Subin, Mike Knapp and Valerie Ervin, all of whom have been endorsed by the Post. Leventhal has never served in this position.
5. The Council President, who bears overall responsibility for passing the budget. Since 2003, the Presidents have been Mike Subin, Steve Silverman, Tom Perez, George Leventhal, Marilyn Praisner, Mike Knapp, Phil Andrews and Nancy Floreen. All except Perez were endorsed by the Post.
To the extent blame must be assessed for the county’s budget problems, it cannot fall on Leventhal alone. He was one of many people – including the executives, school board members, Council Members and committee chairs – who backed the contracts and budgets of prior years. Those who bore greater responsibility were invariably supported by the Washington Post. And so the Post has told its readers to vote for a large group of politicians who have collectively spent more than it would like, but rather than accept its own responsibility, the Post pins all the blame on one Council Member merely because it is seeking to make an example of him in its feud with the teachers union.
Has the Post no shame?
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Post Endorsements Challenge the Apple
The Post has released its endorsements for County Council and they are a direct challenge to MCEA in two ways.
First, the Post has endorsed a rather different group of candidates than have the teachers. Compare their picks:
At-Large
Post: Marc Elrich, Nancy Floreen, Hans Riemer, Duchy Trachtenberg
Apple: Marc Elrich, George Leventhal, Hans Riemer, Becky Wagner
District 1
Post and Apple: Roger Berliner
District 2
Post: Royce Hanson
Apple: Craig Rice
Half the time, the Post has picked opposite from the teachers. The Post’s choices are constrained by the relatively small number of viable candidates, but when they had a real option, they chose it.
Second, the Post’s endorsements are remarkably early. In the last two cycles, their council picks were announced on September 1 and September 4. It appears that they are making early picks this time to allow their supported candidates to spread word of their backing and to throw in a couple extra editorials to hammer their message home. Make no mistake: the Post’s editorial board is not a disinterested observer; they want to be a real player in our elections. They have an ideological agenda against the public employee unions rooted in their operation of private schools and their own union-bashing history. Their attack on George Leventhal for “leading the charge” on “coddling the unions” reflects this.
Past elections in MoCo have been characterized by battles between developers and civic activists. This time, we will see the Post duke it out with MCEA. It will be an election like no other.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Why the Post Hates MCEA
Once again, the Washington Post has unleashed a screaming tirade against the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) and other county employee unions. In its latest attack, the Post upholds Fairfax County as a model of good government because it prohibits collective bargaining for public employees and it calls on MoCo politicians to reject all public sector union contributions. And of course, MCEA gets special thrashing for its “outsized electoral clout.”
What accounts for this?
The Post’s basic argument, which it repeats over and over again with little new data to back it up, is that cowardly MoCo politicians are slaves of the teachers union and allowed the county’s budget to bloat because of excessive salaries. We rebutted that theory months ago by demonstrating that MoCo teacher salary increases were not out of line with other jurisdictions and that MoCo’s school budget was less dominated by compensation than the school budgets in Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Loudoun, Manassas and Prince William. The Post knows all this because they read this blog every single day and cherry-picked our data. And while public employee unions are unquestionably influential, they were clobbered this year and are badly divided. Nowhere in its editorial does the Post mention that many county employees are about to be furloughed and that MoCo teachers will now have to endure larger class sizes. The Post is not about to allow facts to interfere with its propaganda.
The real reason the Post hates MCEA and teacher unions across the country is simple: money. The Washington Post Company is not a newspaper. It is a multi-industry conglomerate dominated by its Kaplan Inc. subsidiary, which accounts for a majority of its revenues and employees. The Post newspaper lost $357 million in operating income over the last two years. Without profits from Kaplan, the newspaper might already be in bankruptcy.
Most people think of Kaplan as an education testing company. But in fact, it is a wide-ranging education firm that is continually expanding its services. One of its many business lines is private schooling. Kaplan operates Kaplan Academy, which it describes as “a flexible, results-oriented online high school” in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon and Washington. That is just one of several private Kaplan schools including:
Kaplan College Preparatory School: “A premium online school for students grades 6-12 with one-to-one college admissions and academic support.”
Kaplan High School: “A self-paced online high school for students grades 9-12 with flexible start dates. Available everywhere.”
Kaplan University High School: “A quality online education tailored to meet the demands of busy adult lifestyles.”
In addition, Kaplan Virtual Education (KVE) “partners with private schools, academies and service providers around the world to offer educational options to students.” It also “works with states, school districts, and other education providers to improve student achievement and increase graduation rates through alternatives to traditional high school… KVE can provide everything from supplemental online curriculum to comprehensive, certified instruction, administrative services, and technical support.” In its last annual report, the Washington Post Company wrote that KVE “operates charter and private virtual schools that offer online instruction to students in grades 6 through 12. KVE also provides instructors and curriculum and manages virtual schools for 19 school districts throughout the U.S. At year-end 2009, KVE was providing courses to approximately 3,850 students.”
That’s right, folks, the Washington Post Company is a direct competitor to public school teachers! Every time it writes an editorial promoting vouchers or charter schools or slamming teacher unions, it is using one part of its business (its newspaper) to promote another part of its business (Kaplan). And it is doing so without disclosing any of the above to its readers. None of this is an accident because of Kaplan’s critical importance to the Post Company’s bottom line. In 2009, Kaplan had positive operating income of $195 million, the most of any company subsidiary. The Post’s newspapers lost a combined $164 million.
In almost every article the Post writes about Facebook, it discloses the fact that Post owner Donald Graham is a member of Facebook’s Board of Directors. So what would happen if the Post began disclosing its operation of private schools in every article or editorial it writes about teacher unions? Why isn’t it doing so already?
Now we all know the answer to that.
Disclosure: Your author has worked for sixteen years in the labor movement, but never for any public employee union.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Post vs. Apple: Endorsement Record by the Numbers
Yesterday, nearly half of the elected state and county officials in Montgomery County debated the relative endorsement value of the Post and the Apple Ballot. Today, we’ll look at the recent comparative record of those endorsements as well as others.
Below, we show the results of all state legislative and county races in MoCo since 2006 as well as the endorsements of the Washington Post, the Gazette, the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), Progressive Maryland and the Sierra Club. All races are primaries unless otherwise indicated.
All five organizations had winning records overall. But the big differences came in races in which they chose to endorse non-incumbents. The two newspapers trailed the three other endorsers, with the Gazette having almost as many losers (ten) as winners (twelve). So much for the claim in a recent Gazette article that it is a “rarity” for anyone to win without the backing of the Gazette.
Now we should not make too much out of these records. Progressive Maryland and the Sierra Club sat out a lot of races, including all of the school board contests. Progressive Maryland's requirement that two-thirds of its Board of Directors agree to its picks probably kept it out of several close races. And out of these five organizations, few would disagree that the Teachers give the most tangible aid to their favored candidates. After all, the Washington Post does not dispatch hundreds of its employees to hand out “Post Ballots” on election day.
It gets more interesting when the Apple is compared to the newspapers on endorsements on which they disagree. Here is the Apple’s record against the Post since 2006:
And here is the Apple’s record against the Gazette since 2006:
Reasonable observers can disagree on the relative merit of each endorsement. But the majority of MoCo politicians have picked the Apple over the Post and we agree. Our hunch is that even given the Post’s bloody and misinformed campaign against MCEA, Montgomery voters still have more respect for teachers than for the anonymous mandarins of the Post.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Politicians Debate Endorsement Value of Post vs. Apple Ballot
The Washington area’s paper of record has launched an all-out holy war against the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), the county’s most powerful labor union. From a political perspective, this is important because both of their endorsements are considered among the most desirable in the county. If the Post is determined to annihilate MCEA, their endorsements may be headed in different directions. And so we asked a group of elected officials this question:
If you had a choice between getting endorsed by the Post OR getting on the Apple Ballot, but not both, which of the two would you pick and why?
Here is what they said.
Elected Official:
Apple for two reasons:
1. I’ve been elected before with endorsement from the teachers and not the Post.
2. People coming to the polls usually only take the Apple Ballot in with them when they go in to vote - they count on it.
Elected Official:
WashPost. Here’s why:
* I believe the Apple is respected by voters and especially teachers. However, I believe the WashPost is even more well known and even more widely respected. Walk up to an average person on the street, ask them what the Apple Ballot and the Washington Post is. They will likely know the latter but not the former. The Washington Post is a revered and historic institution (see: Woodward/Bernstein).
* The Apple Ballot has a good record of winning in 2006 MoCo races. However, they often endorse candidates who are more likely to win anyway. So their record has to be taken with a grain of salt. The MCEA will endorse people based on politics of who they owe favors and whom they need to work with after the election. I believe the WashPost is more principled since they don’t need to worry about contracts or worry about retribution from politicians who were jilted.
* Last time after I was endorsed by the MCEA, I was asked to pay $6,000. Would be great to save that money.
* There is a possibility that the War that the WashPost is waging on MCEA will reduce the effectiveness of the Apple Ballot. But the MCEA is unable to diminish the Post’s effectiveness. I think it might be difficult for the MCEA to solicit its endorsed candidates for $$$ since the WashPost has raised such a stink about it.... So if they have less money to publicize the Apple, they will be less effective.
Elected Official:
I would prefer the Apple Ballot - more people are influenced by it.
Elected Official:
If the election were held today… Apple Ballot by a nose. In a local race where schools and education rate near the top of what voters deem most important, the teachers’ endorsement is instant credibility. For someone running at the federal level, the Post probably noses out Apple Ballot in terms of influence over voters.
Elected Official:
The Post because with my record on education there is no way I could lose the real support of teachers who vote in my district. Besides, an editorial opinion by the newspaper of record is like pure gold.
Elected Official:
Tough call. When push comes to shove, I’d take the Post endorsement if I had the ground forces to pass out reprints of it. If not, I’d take the teachers because those guys have serious coverage on the ground.
Elected Official:
Toss up. The Post endorsement would normally trump in my opinion but because the paper waits until the Sunday before election day to typically make its selections, it’s not as useful to candidates as it otherwise would be if they endorsed a few weeks earlier. We have to run through hoops in 24 hours to try to print materials that say “Endorsed by the Washington Post” and it is costly. The Apple Ballot endorsements are done early enough in the year to include their logo on our yard signs and other materials. Not to mention how helpful it is to have MCEA/teacher volunteers passing the ballot out at each polling place.
As far as the voter is concerned, I think they appreciate the viewpoint of both sources. Perhaps for BOE and County Council candidates, who have more control and impact on the education process in the county, the Apple Ballot carries extra weight. With state legislators, we handle so many more issues than education, that the WaPo endorsement is more a statement of the entire candidacy and on a range of issues.
Elected Official:
I believe that the credibility of the Post is weak. Older people seem to take the Post seriously, but the younger voters and more diverse communities do not. Social networking tools, blogs and radio play a stronger role. Teachers are very well regarded, and the school system has worked hard in creating a collaborative environment based on student achievement outcomes.
Elected Official:
The Post. At the end of the day, the Apple Ballot is a tool of a special interest group, albeit one I support. The reality is that they are only concerned about their teachers. Meanwhile the Post, I hope, would base their endorsement on a variety of factors.
Elected Official:
Apple Ballot, every time.
Dem voters use the Apple Ballot to cut through the clutter and confusion of down-ballot candidates and issues. They don’t know who we are, but they know they like teachers and education. If we’re good enough for the teachers, we’re good enough for them.
Elected Official:
Apple Ballot, hands down. The Post is well and good, but the Post is not going to be doing mailings, buying TV time, and deploying an army of teachers on a day off from school standing at the polls handing out literature with my name on it.
Elected Official:
Apple.
In our system where state and county officials are on a crowded gubernatorial ballot every four years in a closed primary with low turnout and low name recognition of candidates, and no threat of a challenge in the general election, the Apple Ballot carries much more weight than the Post.
Elected Official:
Easy. Apple Ballot. Has nothing to do with clout. Everything to do with my values. I don’t give a ______ about what a newspaper thinks.
Elected Official:
Apple Ballot. People are still more likely to grab an Apple Ballot when they walk into a polling station on Election Day and early voting days. There may be less luster with the Apple Ballot due to recent Post editorials, but there are less and less Post readers these days so negative media will not have much impact on views towards the Apple Ballot. Perhaps if the negative media occurred a few years ago, then it might have had a greater impact on the Apple Ballot. I think less people care who the Post endorses with each passing election. It is still a worthy endorsement - to get the Post endorsement - but I think its impact is diminishing and will continue to do so.
Elected Official:
The Post presumably looks at a Council Member’s total record; MCEA has a narrower focus. Therefore, a Post endorsement is more substantial. As to which has more impact, that is a close call, and may be different for each individual District Council Member, depending on their district, than At-Large Members.
Elected Official:
If the unions behave “badly,” make a fight out of pay issues which will likely be off the table because of how bad things are, then they are going to offend many voters. More so, because in the primary these are the voters who pay most attention. I have yet to talk to anyone who says raise taxes, protect union raises, I’m happy to pay for it. Unions could poison the water by pushing too hard and tarnish the value of their endorsements. On the other hand, if they’re proactively part of the solution, they could get big credit for helping the county get over the hump. Or they could hand the Post an issue that they’ll beat elected officials to death with.
The Apple is worth more than any other union endorsement, but not if we get in a major fight over the budget. If that’s avoided, and the Post is deprived of this issue, then Apple trumps Post. I think the Post editorials have been damaging, judging by the comments I’m seeing, but it’s February and will be hard to keep alive. But a budget fight changes everything. Look at it this way, the data shows income loss in virtually every income bracket. COLAs and steps against a background of declining incomes for very many county residents will be a story that keeps on giving for the Post. The truth is that the Post and the Unions have largely endorsed the same candidates, so a scenario that was either/or would not be a good scenario.
Elected Official:
If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said the Post. Interestingly, given the number of negative editorials the Post has written about the Council and various issues over those past two years, I would have anticipated that there would have been a real increase in negative reaction associated with those articles because that tended to be the case previously when the Post wrote similar pieces. I have been surprised that there has been very little response on the part of County residents which would lead me to believe that either people aren’t reading the editorials, or don’t care what is being written. Either way it shows a pretty significant decline in influence. I am not sure that I consider the Apple Ballot the holy grail, but if you have a crowded field in an at-large race or even a district primary I think it would be much more helpful to have the Apple Ballot, because at the end of the day it is also feet on the ground at polling places and is a good brand being handed out to voters by teachers which also puts a good face on the candidate they endorse.
Elected Official:
The Post, although both endorsements in general matter less than they used to. The Post has fewer readers, so the time that candidates have time to publicize the endorsement, along with the number of voters who vote early (possibly before the Post endorses), makes a potentially big difference, and the general reputation of pubic employee unions has declined.
This year I think the Post will matter more than the Apple Ballot, because I don’t think it will be much if any advantage to candidates this year to have union endorsements because of the unwillingness of union leaders to fully and publicly recognize the severity of the budget problem and agree that ANY pay raises are out of the question. In fact, furloughs are all but certain. The more that unions argue or hold out for any pay raises, the more they hurt themselves with the general public. If union leadership continues to hold out, it could be that union endorsements will hurt a candidate this year, even in a Democratic primary. Since teachers are not generally viewed by the public as a typical union, and since the teachers union is the largest, the teachers endorsement will continue to be the most important union endorsement. In addition, if the Post runs numerous editorials, as they have, that describe union influence as outsized and connect it to unaffordable pay increases and tax increases, that increases the influence of the Post's endorsements.
One other difference: as a humorist once noted, not many organizations buy ink by the barrel, as does the Post.
Elected Official:
I’d pick the Post as long as they did it far enough in advance to get the word out. Sometimes, they endorse so close to Election Day that it doesn’t matter much.
Elected Official:
The Apple Ballot, of course. The Post did not endorse me in my last election; MCEA’s Apple has endorsed me every time - and I got ELECTED!! Enough said.
Elected Official:
Off the record, MCEA has data showing a stronger response to the Apple Ballot endorsement than to the Post endorsement. Off the record as well, at this point as a voter I wouldn’t trust either one. The Post doesn’t know what it is doing most of the time in local elections and can be easily bamboozled by a few well-placed phone calls from certain people. In large election years, it endorses people for local office that the editors have never even met. If your name is on the Apple Ballot, the voter just has to guess about why exactly you are there - it may be mostly because of your positions, it may be mostly because of your race or gender or sexual preference (being the right identity at the right time), it may be because the union leadership wants to send someone a message. One thing is for sure - it is not primarily about the candidate’s commitment to what the kids need, unless you believe that what is good for MCEA is good for the kids’ education (just like what is good for GM is good for America). Of course, the union leadership really believes with unquestioning faith that this statement is true.
Elected Official:
Easy: I would pick the Apple because it is closer to my values (support for teachers, support for working people, belief in education) than the Post (arrogant union-busters). Even if I lose the election, I would rather stand with teachers than with the cynical elitists who comprise the Post’s editorial board.
However, the real question is: who would you rather punch in the nose: Lee Hockstader or Jon Gerson? The answer to that one is not so easy. Both are little tyrants who believe they are entitled to exert disproportionate control over county politics.
###
The above sample constitutes about half of all MoCo elected officials at the county and state levels. While most of them respect both endorsements, twelve expressed a preference for the Apple Ballot, six expressed a preference for the Post and four did not have a clear choice. Let’s bear in mind that these opinions were given in the immediate aftermath of three Post attacks on MCEA in three weeks. We will bring some data to this debate tomorrow.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Rank and File Teachers Fight Back Against the Post
Following is an open letter sent by a group of Montgomery County public school teachers to the Post's editorial board about their recent editorials targeting the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA). The letter is not an official communication from the union.
An Open Letter to the Washington Post Editorial Board:
Who is Turning Democracy Upside Down?
Over the course of the past few years many of us who teach in public schools and remain loyal subscribers to the Washington Post have observed an anti-public schoolteacher bias in both the nature of your editorials and content. Most recently, an editorial entitled “Rotten Apple” followed by a lead story in metro section entitled “District reported 220 allegation of abuse by teachers,” then again in an editorial entitled “Union Scare Tactics” and once again in “Cash in the Barrel” ignited those of us who are both public school teachers and loyal Post subscribers to act. For this reason many of us are cancelling or suspending our subscription to the Post for a week.
The bias is most prominently featured on the editorial page in articles such as “Rotten Apple” and “Union Scare Tactics” in one-sided attacks against the need to fairly compensate teachers via broad side attacks and innuendo against those organizations that work on our behalf to ensure excellent public schools, fair working conditions and adequate pay. Ironically, these broad attacks against public school teachers are being put forth by a newspaper whose parent company’s KAPLAN INC is in direct competition for public school tax dollars with unionized public schools teachers.
To claim that organizations such as Montgomery County Education Association do not represent classroom teachers infers that we, classroom instructors, are either too unintelligent to select good union representation or are cynical, money grubbing dead weight unqualified to shape this nation’s future, who hide behind our unions for protection. Neither is true! Unions such as the Montgomery County Education Association provide a critical check to administrative demands, which too often are poorly thought out or have the potential to result in a weaker teaching corps. The existence of effective teacher unions is the reason why public educations in states with union friendly laws tend to be so much stronger than public education in right-to-work states.
In “Rotten Apple,” “Union Scare Tactics” and “Cash in the Barrel” the Post used ambivalent language in its claim that Montgomery County teachers received a 23% raise in the past three years and failed to recognize that we elected to allow the county to break its contract with us that would have resulted in a 5% Cost of Living Adjustment in 2009. Federal government employees received a 21.5% pay increase using the Post criteria during the same time. Context is important!
The Post also claimed that MCEA shakes down political candidates in return for an endorsement. In reality, MCEA asked these candidates to contribute to the MCEA PAC so that it can put out promotional materials that would benefit the endorsed candidates. Unfortunately, MCEA’s PAC is not as well endowed as those representing the private sectors in a large part because its members earn modest salaries. Candidates voluntarily give to the MCEA PAC in order to promote their candidacy not because the union’s toxicity, but as a result of its credibility with Montgomery County voters in promoting what is good for public education.
The Post’s parent company generates over $2.3 billion in revenues from Kaplan INC, a for-profit education service corporation. Some of those revenues have gone to subsidize the continued publication of the Washington Post. Kaplan benefits from the negative depiction of public schools and public school teacher unions as it is in essence a competitor for tax dollars. One of the many services KAPLAN offers is curriculum development and assessments for troubled school districts such as those in Philadelphia. Another service includes state assessment preparation for students in such states as Florida. It also offers a virtual high school that draws revenues from public school contracts to service gifted, special needs and home and hospital students as well as others. These services siphon tax revenues into the coffers of private companies, which renders the Post’s tireless support of charter schools and vouchers not only diaphanous, but insidiously self-serving.
In 2008, KAPLAN provided CEO Jonathon Grayer $46 million compensation package upon receiving his resignation according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet, the Post complains that private sector wages are stagnant and that Montgomery County should not raise the $18 million needed to give over 11,000 teachers who are primarily responsible for MCPS’s strong educational reputation, (a fact conceded by the Post,) a raise that will help the Montgomery County teaching corps maintain salaries indexed for inflation. This is nothing short of sickening. Further, the claim that MCEA practices political “thuggery” and scare tactics put forth in each editorial strikes many of us as a multinational corporation using its newspaper to intimidate and belittle its competition.
Stop demonizing public school teachers and the unions that represent us and ask yourself - who is turning democracy upside down!
Marc Grossman – Montgomery Blair High School
Kevin Murley – Montgomery Blair High School
Pamela Bryant – Montgomery Blair High School
Liana E. Smith – Takoma Park Elementary School
Gloria Condelli – Sherwood High School
Janet Berry – Montgomery Blair High School
Daniel Hutton – Takoma Park Elementary School
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Lenett Weighs in on the Post's War vs. MCEA
Senator Mike Lenett (D-19) sent the following email to his constituents regarding the Washington Post’s war on MCEA Monday.
Dear Friends:
Over the past four years, the partnership between the Maryland General Assembly and Maryland’s public school teachers has brought about tremendous progress for students around the state. Nowhere is that progress more measurable than right here in Montgomery County.
As a member of the Maryland Senate, I am a strong supporter of public education. I have fought for Montgomery County's fair share of education funding and school construction projects to ensure that our students are learning in modern and safe classrooms. Moreover, in a year when the legislature must make severe cuts from the state budget, I am committed to protecting state funds that support our public schools in Montgomery County.
I advocate strongly for public education because I believe it is the bedrock of our society as a whole and each child's potential as an individual. The high priority we accord to our education system yields results. The record speaks for itself. Maryland’s public schools have been ranked best in the nation for two consecutive years by Education Week magazine and Montgomery County’s schools are the best in the state. Our high school students rank best in the country on AP test scores. Test scores are rising, and dropout rates are falling.
We owe much of this success to the hard work and dedication of our public school teachers. That’s why I was particularly disappointed when I read the Washington Post’s repeated attacks on the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) this month. The Post’s editorials are flat out unfair to the men and women who have committed themselves to educating our children.
In particular, the Post takes issue with MCEA’s involvement in State and local politics. The editorials conjure up images of abusive union leaders pressuring candidates into making financial contributions to secure the union's endorsement. Nothing could be further from the truth. After MCEA endorses a candidate, the organization and the candidate work cooperatively to inform the public of the endorsement. Some candidates make contributions to MCEA to defray the cost of endorsement mailings. Others don’t. It’s as simple and harmless as that.
In my experience, when MCEA helps a candidate win, its members are committed to holding that person accountable as an elected official. Teachers’ efforts have kept public education at the top of our agenda, and their persistence has helped us get our fair share from Annapolis and secure the tools our students need to succeed. Working together, we have made public education a top priority in the State budget, and our schools are making real progress.
So I think it is fair to ask why the Post is making these attacks and where it is getting the inaccurate information upon which they are based? The unfair and misleading views expressed by the Post in this instance risk weakening our ability to maintain a top-notch education for our children.
Mike
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
My Response to the Washington Post
By Eric Luedtke.
Over the weekend, a couple of political acquaintances asked me why I haven’t blogged anything in response to the Post’s editorials attacking my colleagues and me. Truth is, I don’t really believe in responding to attacks like these. For the third time in as many weeks, the Post’s Lee Hockstader has used innuendo and hyperbole, schoolyard taunts and selective reporting to try to paint our involvement in elections as somehow nefarious. I could sit here and type a point-by-point response, but I doubt there’s much to gain. Hockstader will continue writing what he wants, true or not. The guy is, after all a pretty good rhetorician, managing in the same three editorials to say that our teachers should be paid well and that we make too much, to argue that public servants shouldn’t make their opinions known to the public, and a host of other logical contortions worthy of the best of classical sophists. In any case, I have better things to do than write a point by point; like digging through this bottomless pile of grading I just brought home with me. But one of Hockstader’s claims deserves a clear response: his insistence that Montgomery County’s teachers are thugs.
Here’s what we really are:
We are 12,000 people who have dedicated our professional lives to helping the children of our community achieve. We are the elementary school teachers who take your child’s hand on their first day of kindergarten, and the high school teachers who shake it as they walk across the stage at graduation. We are the special educators who meet the often profound needs of our students with disabilities, the ESOL teachers who guide children through an entirely new language, and the speech pathologists who help kids navigate one of the most important worlds they will encounter, the world of the spoken word. We are occupational and physical therapists who work with toddlers with special needs before they even reach school, so they’ll be ready to learn, and counselors who walk children through some of the most painful moments imaginable, so the vagaries of life don’t keep them from their education.
We inspire. We challenge. We lend an ear to listen, offer a helping hand, and, when necessary, give a shoulder to cry on.
Because we know that what we do is teamwork, not the work of individuals, we are strong believers in improving our profession. We’ve created a peer assistance and review program which offers support to new and under-performing teachers, a program which is now a national model. We’ve worked to embed professional development in everything we do, with staff developers at every school, because we expect ourselves to continuously improve. We’re fighting, as we speak, to develop new models of school leadership and collaborative planning that will lead to better results for our kids.
And because we know our students have wider needs, because we know our kids need more than what we can offer in our classrooms, we don’t let our work stop at the schoolhouse door. We are advocates. We fight to make sure every kid has the resources they need to learn. We work with civil rights and equity groups to fight the achievement gap, and with parents groups to ensure that families have a voice in our schools. We’ve struggled against a political culture and a mainstream media that think schools can be improved with sound bites, and offer simplistic one-word solutions like testing and vouchers and charters that don’t address the fundamental challenges of American education. And because our schools don’t exist in a vacuum, we work for better housing, health care, and nutrition programs.
But we haven’t done it alone. In this work, our 12,000 have been joined by hundreds of thousands of parents, students, and average Montgomery County residents who believe deeply in the work we do. They’ve supported us in myriad ways. Most profoundly, many have placed their trust in our ability to recommend strong pro-education candidates for office. And, because that is quite a responsibility to bear, we have created the most substantive, open, and democratic endorsement process I’ve ever heard of. Unlike, say, the Washington Post, we publicly release our endorsement criteria on our website and are posting our questionnaire as soon as it’s finalized. Our decision is made not by a small group of journalists who live outside the county and work in a downtown office, but by a democratically-elected body of hundreds of educators that meets monthly in Rockville.
Lee Hockstader seems to think that public servants don’t deserve the right and privilege of participation in a democratic society. We disagree. We will continue to speak out, continue to advocate for the children in our classrooms, for their parents, for our schools. We will continue to elect excellent leaders to public office, people for whom support for schools is a reality and not just a campaign slogan. Once elected, we will continue to hold them to account for their actions. And, when re-election time comes, we will support those who upheld their promises and unseat those who abandoned campaign pledges at the first shift in political winds.
Montgomery County’s children deserve the best, and whatever we have to do to give it to them, from the locker-lined hallways of our schools to the marble-lined hallways of Annapolis, we will do it.
Lee Hockstader can think what he wants. For my part, I count myself blessed to have as my colleagues and friends thousands of the best educators in America. And I am proud to be a member of and an activist for the Montgomery County Education Association.
Put that in an editorial, Lee.
Eric Luedtke is a social studies teacher at Loiederman Middle School, a board member of the Montgomery County Education Association, and co-chair of the MCEA Political and Legislative Services Committee.
Post Cherrypicks Teacher Salary Data
In its latest attempt to annihilate the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), the Washington Post may have done the unthinkable: cherrypick data from a lowly blog in order to manipulate its readers.
The Post ran editorials on February 5 and February 11 depicting MCEA as a “toxic influence” seeking to “squeeze enormous concessions” from MoCo taxpayers. Its new editorial focuses on former MCEA President Bonnie Cullison’s solicitation of contributions from elected officials in her unsuccessful run for national union office over a year ago. We will not contest the fact that MCEA is influential in county politics; indeed, your author labeled the union as “the 800-pound gorilla of MoCo politics” in his very first blog post. But the Post’s allegation that the union’s strength is harmful rests on the notion that it has extracted excessive contracts from the county government.
In its new editorial dated February 22, the Post writes the following:The intimate entanglement of interests between elected officials and the union is all about swapping favors, including some rather large ones that have put county taxpayers on the hook for many millions of dollars. Most officeholders, frightened of provoking the MCEA’s wrath, are loath to question any provision of the generous, and now unaffordable, contracts that the union has negotiated on behalf of teachers. In effect, local officeholders are so beholden to the union that they have forfeited their obligation to exercise independent oversight over contract negotiations.
We published extensive data on teacher salaries from the Washington Boards of Education six days before the latest anti-MCEA editorial. We published the average teacher salary quoted by the Post. In calculating growth rates for salaries, we picked 2004 as our base year. We compared MCPS salary growth to other suburban systems since 2004. We are not aware of comparative data pegged to 2004 having been previously published anywhere else. All of these items now appear in the Post editorial. Seeing as how computers with Post-registered IP addresses are consistently among our top viewers, it is a bit hard to believe that their replication of our methodology is a total coincidence.
One result is that the average salary for a Montgomery County teacher, $76,483, is the highest among suburban school systems in the Washington area, according to the Washington Area Boards of Education, a regional group. Another is that the salary of a typical Montgomery teacher -- one with 10 years of experience when the last contract went into effect in 2007 -- has jumped by 23 percent in the past three years, even as private-sector wages have stagnated. Since 2004, teacher salaries in Montgomery have increased at a significantly faster rate than in other suburban school systems -- the lone exception being Prince George's County, which started from a low base and has had to play catch-up.
Now here is the full spreadsheet on teacher salaries that we published. It tells a very different story than the Post is spreading to its readers.
For beginning teachers with bachelors degrees, MCPS teachers have seen an annual average salary increase of 3.1% since 2004, which ranked seventh among nine suburban school districts. For step nine teachers with masters degrees and all teachers combined, MCPS’s salary increase ranked second. For maximum teacher scale, MCPS’s salary increase ranked third. MCEA performed well, but its results are not out of line with the rest of the area. The Post also ignored the fact that the percentage of MCPS’s budget going to labor costs is identical to the area average and is below Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Loudoun, Manassas and Prince William. The totality of the evidence contradicts the Post’s central point that MCEA is abusing taxpayers by bullying politicians. And let’s not forget that MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast, who negotiated those salary increases, could not be bullied by King Kong!
We understand that the Post does not like unions and that it especially dislikes teacher unions. But the paper’s editorial writers have a responsibility to their readers to evaluate information fairly in arriving at their opinions. When the Post cherrypicks data assembled by a mere blog to manipulate its readers towards its preconceived conclusion, it is doing both its readers and its reputation a disservice.
Is it time to bring back the Boy King?
Kurtz on Post vs. MCEA
Long-time Gazette columnist and current Center Maryland columnist Josh Kurtz breaks down the Post’s war on MCEA today. Unlike your author, Kurtz is not a labor movement lifer. Kurtz notes the Post’s own turbulent labor history and concludes:
So really, the Post is just reverting to type here. And with another political season upon us, as it tries to reassert its power over Montgomery County elections, the newspaper’s strategy seems pretty clear: to tear down the institution it sees as its biggest rival for winning the hearts and minds of county voters.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
On the Post’s War Against MCEA, Part Three
The Washington Post has twice depicted the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) as a “toxic influence” seeking to “squeeze enormous concessions” from MoCo taxpayers despite conclusive data to the contrary. Why is the Post targeting the teachers?
First, the Post has a long and virulent history of breaking its own unions that continues to the present day. Of the newspaper’s seven collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), four have expired. The Post’s agreement with its 435 mailroom workers expired on 5/18/03 and the company imposed its last offer in 2006. Any organization with such a history is bound to be permeated with hostility to labor from top to bottom.
Second, the Post is ideologically predisposed towards charter schools and vouchers, running three editorials in favor of them in less than two weeks. At the same time, the Post’s own reporters published an article on a new study by UCLA branding charter schools as “more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the country.” We do not express an opinion about the merits of charter schools or vouchers in this blog post, but the Post’s vigorous pursuit of them and its complaint that union leaders are “disturbingly inflexible” on them illuminates a long-running grievance by the Post against teachers unions.
Third, the Post editorial board’s allergy towards school unions is manifested by its close relationship with D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who rightly or wrongly is at war with her own teachers union. Last month, Rhee got in trouble for telling Fast Company magazine that some of the teachers she had recently laid off had “hit children” or “had sex with children,” comments which she subsequently softened. Post schools reporter Bill Turque went after Rhee for the details of those allegations, but Rhee ignored him and went directly to Post editorial writer Jo-Ann Armao instead. The resulting editorial called on Rhee to explain her comments but also condemned the union for allegedly “enabling some of these unfit teachers to stay in the classroom.” Turque then called out the editorial writer for rewarding Rhee’s efforts to avoid him, saying that the editorial board “has been steadfast, protective and, at times, adoring” of Rhee. Turque also said the Post’s editorials provided “a guaranteed soft landing spot for uncomfortable or inconvenient disclosures - kind of a print version of the Larry King Show.” Turque’s comments provoked such rage from Post editorial boss Fred Hiatt that Turque’s essay was first deleted and then watered down with no explanation to Post readers. This incident shows that the Post editorial board will scoop its own reporters and its news editors will alter its reporters’ content after it has been published in service of the newspaper’s jihad against education unions. In the case of the Post’s pursuit of MCEA, its editorial writers acted without any corroboration from the paper’s reporters – further evidence of the Post’s eagerness to condemn school unions.
Fourth, the Post’s editorial board displays a willful ignorance of how success is achieved in public schools that could be dispelled from reading their newspaper’s own reporting. The Post has repeatedly praised MCPS Superintendent Jerry Weast for his tenure in MoCo’s schools. But Weast’s achievements have depended in part on his ability to build a partnership with MCEA and the other education unions. The MCPS peer review program for teachers was profiled by the Post last year and is an example of a reform that could not have been achieved without enlightened leadership by both labor and management. And former Post columnist Marc Fisher contrasted MCPS’s culture of cooperation favorably with the bludgeoning style of Post darling Michelle Rhee only a year ago. Without the genuine give-and-take relationship that has been carefully built by both Weast and the three school unions, the unions may not have voluntarily given up the cost-of-living increases contained in their contracts a year ago – a concession that has never been credited by the Post. The experience of MCPS shows that there is more to be gained by mutual labor-management respect than the crude union-bashing favored by the bosses of the Post.
Finally, the Post’s excessive rhetoric about MCEA suggests an emotional investment in blasting the union. Consider its language. “Toxic influence.” “Twisted system.” “Scare tactics.” “Political thuggery.” Such terminology is beneath the august standards established by the titans who built the Post into the area’s paper of record decades ago. The rhetoric is especially unworthy when it cannot be justified by the facts. If the Post continues down the road of wanton and baseless condemnation of the teachers union simply because it is a teachers union, it will not damage MCEA’s reputation nearly as much as it will damage its own.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
On the Post’s War Against MCEA, Part Two
The Post has alleged in two editorials that the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) has abused its political power “to squeeze enormous concessions from the school system in past contract negotiations.” Let’s test that claim.
The Washington Area Boards of Education (WABE) releases annual reports comparing public school budget and performance statistics between suburban Washington school districts. If, as the Post alleges, MCEA is responsible for “skyrocketing payroll costs” and “extraordinary health and retirement benefits,” its members should be receiving monumental compensation increases relative to teachers in neighboring jurisdictions. Unfortunately for the Post’s editorial credibility, they don’t.
According to WABE’s report for FY 2010, MoCo teachers earn slightly more than teachers in other jurisdictions, but they work more scheduled days and more hours per day than in almost all the other districts.
MoCo teachers earn their salaries because of the county’s high cost of living and the relatively large class sizes they must face, especially in middle and high school.
MoCo teachers’ benefits are not out of line with other suburban school districts.
If MCEA members were grossly overpaid because of the union’s political power, they would be gobbling up a disproportionate amount of the MoCo public schools’ budget. In FY 2010, the MoCo public schools paid out 83.8% of its budget in labor costs. The average for suburban Washington school districts was exactly 83.8%. On this measure, MCEA is actually behind teachers in Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Loudoun, Manassas and Prince William.
Finally, MCEA’s salary increases have not been abnormally high compared to teacher pay hikes in the rest of the Washington area since FY 2004. MoCo teachers have done well but have lagged teachers in other counties (especially Prince George’s) in some classifications over the last six years. MCEA is not an outlier.
And so the Post’s central point – that MCEA is gouging taxpayers – fails on casual inspection. We do not understand why the Post’s editorial writers chose not to disclose the above facts to their readers. Post-registered computers are invariably among the top viewers of this blog and we have used WABE data before.
The Post is missing one additional point that is worth mentioning. Suppose MCEA’s contract was as excessive as it contends and the county decided to cut it. The county would be prevented from doing so by the state’s Maintenance of Effort law, which mandates that counties must at least equal their prior year’s local spending per pupil to be eligible for state aid. When MCEA and the other school unions gave up their cost-of-living increase a year ago, the state punished the county with a $23 million fine. The Post understands this law very well as it opposes the fine. So the Post’s rush to demonize county politicians for failing to insist on concessions when it knows that they are prohibited from doing so by the state is illogical at best and misleading at worst.
Perhaps there is an explanation for the Post’s selective use of facts when it comes to MCEA. We will conclude with that tomorrow.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Another View on the Post vs. MCEA
U.S. News and World Report writer John Aloysius Farrell has weighed in on the Post's attacks on MCEA. Farrell's wife is a Montgomery County public school teacher. He concludes his rebuttal to the Post's accusations by saying:
...I think the Post owes the teachers a correction, if not an apology, for recklessly tossing around words like "corrupt" and "shakedown."
My wife works hard, and cares deeply about her job. She is no thug, and doesn't deserve to be called one.
On the Post’s War Against MCEA, Part One (Updated)
The Washington Post has launched two blistering editorials against the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) in less than a week, accusing them of being a “toxic influence” on county politics. Are they right?
The Post makes a two-fold argument about MCEA. First, they characterize the union’s practice of asking endorsed candidates to contribute to its PAC as “shakedowns, pure and simple.” The union uses that money to finance mailings and campaign materials promoting the candidates it endorses. Second, the Post describes the goal of the union as “squeezing unaffordable concessions from the county in contract negotiations - at taxpayers’ expense.”
Let’s examine each of the Post’s charges separately, starting with its description of MCEA’s request for PAC contributions from its endorsed candidates as “shakedowns.” First, there is no evidence that the union’s endorsements are predicated on candidates’ ability to pay into its PAC. In 2006, the union announced its endorsements on June 8, but did not receive its first PAC contribution from a candidate until August 21. If the union had insisted on a PAC contribution as a condition of endorsement, why did it wait ten weeks to collect money? Second, the Gazette has reported on MCEA’s solicitation of PAC contributions as far back as October 2006, noting that the union financed mailings on behalf of its endorsed candidates without the use of members’ dues. Clearly, MCEA has been open about how it runs its PAC for years. And finally, of the 43 candidates endorsed by MCEA in primaries from 2006 on, 13 did not contribute to their PAC. Those candidates were:
State Senators
Brian Frosh (D-16)
Mike Lenett (D-19)
Delegates
Jean Cryor (D-15)
Kathleen Dumais (D-15)
Brian Feldman (D-15)
Elbridge James (D-17)
Melodye Berry (D-19)
Heather Mizeur (D-20)
Charles Barkley (D-39)
Nancy King (D-39)
County Council
Howie Denis
School Board
Alies Muskin
School Board/County Council
Nancy Navarro
If the union is engaged in a “shakedown,” it is remarkably bad at it since almost a third of its candidates did not pay. And of the eight candidates listed above who won, we predict that all of them will again be endorsed by MCEA because of their records in office and regardless of their declining to contribute to its PAC. How can this be extortion if there is no punishment for not going along?
The politicians who are complaining to Post editorial writer Lee Hockstader about MCEA are driven by two motivations. First, many of them begrudge MCEA’s request that they contribute to its PAC even if the PAC proceeds are spent on mailings promoting them. Most politicians work very hard at raising money and regard it as a necessary but unpalatable chore. They want to exercise direct control over their resources and are loath to turn over their cash to anyone else. Their desire for control over their money, and not for good government, motivates their complaints.
Second, several politicians are taking this opportunity to settle scores with MCEA political strategist Jon Gerson. Gerson is a super-smart, wickedly funny man who is extremely knowledgeable about county politics. He served as campaign manager for Marilyn Praisner’s first school board race in 1982(!) and was former County Executive Neal Potter’s Director of Economic Development in the early 1990s. As bright and witty as Gerson is, he is resented by some politicians who regard him as occasionally overstepping his bounds. Their remarks about him to your author are often unprintable, but a G-rated version can be found in our latest Most Influential Series. It is no coincidence that the Post editorials mentioned Gerson by name twice as that is a reflection of the personal animosity directed against him by a portion of the county’s political class. But Gerson’s job is not to massage the quivering backsides of egotistical politicians – it is to advocate for the interests of teachers. As MCEA’s messenger, he would have a target on his back even if he wore a halo and wings to work. Multiple “pro-education” politicians have tried to humiliate Gerson by leaking to the Post even if it helps their editorial board smear his organization. It is noteworthy that none of them dare to take on MCEA openly but instead choose to whisper in the dead of night. What does it say about the character of a politician who contributes to the PAC and then snivels about it to the Post when he or she could simply tell the union no?
All of the above may be a deliciously entertaining spectacle of pettiness, but the gripes of politicians against Gerson are often too banal for coverage by even such an irresponsible rogue as your author (though the Post appears to be fixated on them). The Post’s second charge is far more serious: namely, that MCEA uses its power to extract “enormous concessions” from taxpayers. We’ll examine that allegation tomorrow.
Update: In the original version of this post, we mistakenly listed Senator Jennie Forehand and Delegates Kumar Barve and Luiz Simmons as not having contributed to MCEA’s PAC. In fact, as commenter John Cooper-Martin pointed out, their District 17 slate account contributed $6,000 to the PAC on 12/6/06. We have corrected the blog post to reflect that information.
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