If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries.

Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.

Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.

It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? (more…)

The unshackling of the MSM — and, to a lesser extent, their erstwhile brethren in the Democratic Party — from the clutches of the nation’s teachers’ unions continues apace.

In defiance of what must have been intense pressure from organized labor and the Los Angeles education establishment, the Los Angeles Times just published an incredible series of stories on the effectiveness of the city’s 6,000 teachers.

The Times, which over the years hasn’t exactly been a great friend of conservatives, has shown tremendous bravery in going forward with this package, which juxtaposes students’ performances on standardized tests with the teachers in their classrooms. The paper calls it a “value-added analysis.”
Among other things, the study found that:

After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.

Predictably, L.A  teachers’ union boss A.J. Duffy has called for a “massive boycott” of the Times because the data and the stories might be “leading people in a dangerous direction.” (more…)

Let’s face it. From the 2004 New York Yankees to that statue of Saddam Hussein, most of us get a kick out of seeing the mighty fall. And that’s essentially what’s happening to teachers’ unions all over this nation. For all the good they did when they were first formed 50 to 75 years ago, teachers’ unions have devolved into opponents of meaningful educational reform.

Teaching is steady work and in most states the pay is now about the same as a mid-level manager in business, but the profession requires substantially fewer days of work per year. And sure, there have been recent layoffs, but even in bad economic times, those who remain in the classroom manage to secure substantial raises and maintain their Cadillac health care plans while most of the rest of us in the private sector must beg our employers for a paltry increase and hope we don’t get sick. Still, good teachers themselves remain largely popular in their respective communities — and justifiably so.

So why are teachers’ unions losing clout? One big reason is that after decades of reflexive support, the news media are finally starting to turn against them. That’s right. Journalists and editors, many of whom belong to labor unions themselves, are finally waking up to the plain fact that taking courses and simply showing up to work every day — the standard measures that the unions demand in determining wages — are poor incentives to improve performance.

A story in yesterday’s Washington Post on the recent ratification of a new D.C. teachers contract, which calls for using student improvement as a measure of teacher evaluations, was as balanced a piece as you will ever see. In addition, the Post’s progressive editorial board has been remarkably supportive of D.C. school Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s plans to make it easier to remove chronically underperforming teachers from the classroom. Commendably, the Post’s editorial page has also been a proponent of nationwide school reform in general. (more…)

In researching my article on “Rubber Room” teachers, who are paid not to teach after being accused of a crime, I came across some information that deserves further discussion. The problem is much worse than the media would have you believe.

The teachers in these programs are the ones who managed to escape prosecution but are considered too great a risk to be allowed to return to teaching. Or else they’re the accused waiting for judgment. Or they’re people the schools can’t get rid of due to tenure deals.

In 2004, Hofstra University professor Dr. Carol Shakeshaft published a report for the United States Department of Education titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.” It was presented to Congress as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. In it, Shakeshaft stated:

As a group, these studies present a wide range of estimates of the percentage of U.S. students subject to sexual misconduct by school staff and vary from 3.7 to 50.3 percent. Because of its carefully drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career presents the most accurate data available at this time. (more…)