NCTQ reviews SPS SEA contract for OSC
The National Council on Teacher Quality, an Education Reform propaganda engine, has reviewed the recent two-year contract between Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association, the teachers' union.
The review by the NCTQ compares the final contract language to the Seattle Public Schools’ Bargaining Platform and - inexplicably- the Our Schools Coalition’s platform as if the Our Schools Coalition had any kind of standing or qualifications. Inexplicable, that is, until we discover that the Our Schools Coalition commissioned the review. So when the question is "How closely does the contract align with OUR goals?", then things that are aligned with the OSC goals appear to be good and variances appear to be bad, without any determination of whether the OSC goals are good or bad.
This subtlety was either lost on Lynne Varner or intentionally omitted from her editorial about the review.
You can read it for yourself. Lines like this: "The six pages of the contract dealing with 'classroom control,' 'employee protection' and 'safety and security' read as if students (and their parents) are to be feared." give you a sense of the tone. It's not a scholarly effort. It sneers and casts doubts instead of speaking with authority "If anything, the contract may overemphasize collaboration at the expense of timely problem solving and responsiveness to individual teachers and schools." Note how it casts suspicion on efforts to collaborate and suggests that collaboration is antithetical to action but doesn't actually come out and say that plainly. Very weaselly.
The review by the NCTQ compares the final contract language to the Seattle Public Schools’ Bargaining Platform and - inexplicably- the Our Schools Coalition’s platform as if the Our Schools Coalition had any kind of standing or qualifications. Inexplicable, that is, until we discover that the Our Schools Coalition commissioned the review. So when the question is "How closely does the contract align with OUR goals?", then things that are aligned with the OSC goals appear to be good and variances appear to be bad, without any determination of whether the OSC goals are good or bad.
This subtlety was either lost on Lynne Varner or intentionally omitted from her editorial about the review.
You can read it for yourself. Lines like this: "The six pages of the contract dealing with 'classroom control,' 'employee protection' and 'safety and security' read as if students (and their parents) are to be feared." give you a sense of the tone. It's not a scholarly effort. It sneers and casts doubts instead of speaking with authority "If anything, the contract may overemphasize collaboration at the expense of timely problem solving and responsiveness to individual teachers and schools." Note how it casts suspicion on efforts to collaborate and suggests that collaboration is antithetical to action but doesn't actually come out and say that plainly. Very weaselly.
Comments
Yawn.
Dear fellow teachers - why are our jobs harder and harder each year? Because of the incessant barrage of dumb and unpaid for laws and regulations? Because the union leaders who treat our paychecks like an ATM are more interested in being Federal Way pooh-bahs living large in Olympia than they are in figuring out the messaging, tactics and strategy to stop the barrage?
How did anti worker right wingers like Walker Scott Perry Brown Scott win anywhere? Union "leaders" were more preoccupied with getting along to go along than representing the abused serfs paying the salaries of the "leaders"?
Kudos to Charlie & Melissa. Can I have my
DuesBack?
But we've discussed NCTQ enough on prior occasions to know what they are about and it's not like anything they say or do should surprise anyone by now. The sad thing is that folks like Varner actually buy into their outright, transparent propaganda.
I've never liked interlopers and self-anointed experts, but somebody obviously does, because they keep paying the freight for this anti-union pulp publishing think tank.
Not to go off on another tangent, but what passes for expertise these days ain't much. WSDWG