??New York Times??: “In School Takeover, Newark Union Tries to Prove It’s Part of the Solution”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/nyregion/04school.html. Hey, look, it’s a story about the NTU doing something other than “political maneuvering”:http://dailynewarker.com/2007/03/26/infuriating-2/. While I’m glad to see the union undergoing some reform at our schools, the priorities of this organization are pretty out of sorts. This times article reveals that the NTU has spent $62,000 to date on a billboard ad campaign bent on slinging mud at the city administration — more than half of what they’re spending to reform the Newton Street School.
When teachers are removed from their schools here, their first phone call is often to the powerful Newark Teachers Union. But now the union is telling as many as a dozen teachers at the troubled Newton Street School that they have to leave because they do not fit in with a plan to improve the school.
“It was probably the hardest thing that I’ve had to do,” said Joseph Del Grosso, the longtime union president, who helped push through raises for teachers this spring during a state budget crisis, and went to jail for nearly three months in 1971 for taking part in a teachers’ strike.
The 5,000-member teachers’ union, the largest in New Jersey, is part of a takeover team at Newton, one of the city’s worst-performing public schools. For the past six years, it has failed to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” on state achievement tests, the standard required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
In September, union officials will join representatives from the school, the district and Seton Hall University on the school’s governing committee, overseeing daily operations at Newton. The school has 487 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, most of them black and poor.
The union, which has a $3.5 million annual budget, has already spent $100,000 on teacher training and a retreat, and has set aside another $100,000 this year for professional development and to help pay for staff, supplies and field trips for the students at Newton. The union and Seton Hall are also leading a campaign to raise $250,000 from business and community leaders to create a school garden and a playground.
“With their help, we really want to make this a model school,” said Charles P. Mitchel, associate dean of the College of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall, who praised the union for using its resources to help students directly.
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[...] $100,000 into an improvement program at Newton, though they had poured more than half of that into political attack billboard ads around the [...]