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NEA $1M to Kennedy Institute

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From our Education Intelligence Agent: The National Education Association board of directors approved a $1 million donation from the union’s contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. The contribution will be made in $200,000 installments over the next five years. Among other things, the institute will have a training program for incoming U.S. Senators. Hmm. If the first senator-elect to use it is Scott Brown, I think the NEA may need to do some extra training.

MassDOT Developers Must Be Stopped

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Dear Secretary Mullan, Last year, I criticized manual toll collection, saying “Few other government services are executed with the deliberate inefficiency and expense of manual tolling.”. But I have a confession – its practices like this that make my job necessary. That’s why I’m so concerned about the MassDOT Developers project. What could be a standard issue example of overly long and complex government procurement, with expensive consultants, millions of dollars of custom code, and little interest in actual customers, is becoming something very different. Although in a pilot phase, they’ve shown the ability to bring products to market quickly, leverage outside skillsets the state could never hope to hire, and do it at minimal cost. Most importantly, the results […]

Nit Twit

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Twittering is not something I do, but Dearest Colleague Poftak does. Seems Republican gub candidate Charlie Baker criticized Guv Patrick for having to be kicked and dragged to support hard changes to schools that are failing. I suppose all is fair in politics and war, but I wonder if the response from Sydney Asbury, the Guv’s campaign manager (“Gov Patrick delivers where you & Weld failed and MA kids now benefit- facts beat spin every time”) shows the weakness I have seen over and over in the Guv’s staff. They don’t know history, and it hurts them. Just weigh this: Ed reform of 1993 + best academic standards in the country + kickoff of MCAS process + charter cap lift […]

Nearing victory on charters

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President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Duncan changed the conversation on charter schools with their call for urgent action to lift arbitrary caps on charter public schools and promote good schools via the Race to the Top competition. The conference committee agreement on the education bill does a lot that builds on the proven performance of the Commonwealth charter school model. And the addition of 27,000 new charter school seats is vitally important. There are two problematic provisions. The RTTT calls for states to scale up proven charter providers, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and SABIS networks. Yet one provision in the final compromise requires non-high schools to backfill open positions in the first half of the […]

NEA: $26M to Advocacy Groups

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From our man in Havana (the Education Intelligence Agency) comes an analysis of NEA’s financial disclosure report for 2008-09 fiscal. What did our EIA agent find? The national union contributed almost $26 million to a wide variety of advocacy groups and charities. The total more than doubles the amount disbursed in the previous year… In this list, EIA has deliberately omitted spending such as media buys, or payments to pollsters or consultants that have no obvious ideological component… All of these were paid for with members’ dues money (the union’s federal PAC is a separate entity funded through voluntary means): A Smarter Colorado – $87,000 ActionAid UK – $5,000 All Stars Helping Kids – $5,000 Alliance for Justice – $7,000 […]