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In remarks last week to the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Gov. Walker finally allowed us to peek behind the curtain to discover what he was REALLY trying to accomplish by using the nuclear option on the Wisconsin Education Association Council. By curbing collective bargaining for public school teachers, Walker told the crowd, public schools in the land of Fighting Bob LaFollette were able to drastically reduce their costs so that they could...get ready for this one...hire a boatload of more teachers in order to significantly reduce class sizes!

Latest news from the Mitten State: Legislators propose privatizing teaching. Lots of ways to accomplish this, including designating Michigan a "right-to-teach" state, preserving the right to collectively bargain for police, firefighters and private-industry unions, but making teacher unionizing illegal.

I still support charter schools as they were first envisioned, as laboratories where educators could work without fear of failure on new approaches to improve the larger public school system. And, like my UTLA predecessors Day Higuchi and the late Helen Bernstein, I support the idea of union-inspired charters to "field test" the policies we propose in collective bargaining.

In some districts it's called "merit" or "performance" pay. In others, it's simply called a "bonus." However they're branded, bonuses have become a center piece in corporate-reform strategies which are increasingly being used to undermine collective-bargaining agreements and pit teacher against teacher.

My interest was sparked by a June, 2011 notice on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's website of a $500,000 grant to the Future Is Now Schools, (FIN) a charter schools management organization founded by Steve Barr. FIN has been recently re-branded (some say divorced) from the LA-based Green Dot Public Schools, founded by Barr, and from Green Dot America, an effort by Barr to open charter schools nationally. The purpose of the grant is "to provide national support for the use of a scaled-down collective bargaining contract and to amplify the voice of reform-minded teachers in select cities by sharing organizing expertise."

School boards typically control massive amounts of money and assets that can be dished out through contracts for services, purchases of land, and diverted into charter schools and voucher programs. Despite school boards' power, however, until now board elections around the country have typically been fueled by door-to-door canvassing rather than high dollar fundraising. But increasingly, large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations are pouring into schools board races around the country to enact an agenda that attacks collective bargaining rights of teachers unions and increases the privatization of public education through charter schools and vouchers. The Denver Public School Board race, which took place yesterday, is a prime example of outside money from wealthy individuals and corporate funded groups flooding elections. That money proved to have a significant effect on last night's election for the union-back candidates opposed to the so-called "reform slate."

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

Looking back on 2011, we saw in K-12 education some continuation of the misguided obsession with teachers unions, as Republican governors sought to cripple public employee unions in Wisconsin and Ohio. To add to the drumbeat, authors Terry Moe and Steven Brill published high-profile anti-teacher union books. But if some politicians and pundits got it wrong, there was good news from voters, as Ohio residents in November repealed the wrongheaded attack on teachers and other public employees, and North Carolina voters backed a return to school integration in Wake County public schools, the state's largest district. 

I recently attended the New NY Education Commission (Who came up with that name?) meeting in Buffalo. For those of you outside of the Empire State, this commission pretty much summarizes the current state of education reform across the country: the real stakeholders,students, parents and teachers, have little voice in the dialogue. This commission was started by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo because of his misleading and false statement that New York is 38th in educational results.  The Commission is stacked with corporate and charter school types, with a few university leaders.  No teachers, no students.   Randi Weingarten, AFT President, is a member of this commission, but was not in attendance at the Buffalo meeting.

"In response to a request under the NJ Open Public Records Act (OPRA), Education Law Center has obtained a confidential proposal prepared for the Broad Foundation by the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) to "turnaround," take control, and potentially close over 200 public schools over the next three years.  NJ Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf submitted a draft "School Turnaround Proposal" to the Eli Broad Foundation in November 2011, seeking to secure millions in grant funds from the private, Los Angeles-based foundation. The draft formed the basis of a final proposal, submitted February 2012, requesting $7.6 million in grant funds."

"The always provocative Deb Meier makes the case that this year's meeting was actually more significant than our march and rally last July."

"This is must see though I know it is long. This workshop led by Mike Klonsky and featuring his brother Fred, Dr. Michael A. Walker-Jones, Executive Director, Louisiana Association of Educators, along with one of my Chicago pals Xian Barrett is loaded with meat. Even Leo Casey makes an appearance with a comment that may cause some comments. In the audience were John Elfrank-Dana, CL of Murry Bergtraum HS and Arthur Goldstein, CL of Francis Lewis HS."

TERRY MOE MADE his name in the early 1990s when, with John Chubb, he co-authored a much-discussed book arguing for a system of publicly-funded private school vouchers. The central thesis of Politics, Markets and America's Schools was that "direct democratic control" of public education was "incompatible with effective schooling." Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers would create efficient markets in education, and that "choice is a panacea."

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a "different type" of candidate to teaching - high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.