The AFT is hoping to get more members to follow Logan’s example. As part of a new partnership with Special Olympics, the national union recently signed on to help sponsor the first USA National Games in Ames, Iowa, in July. At the games, the AFT will provide transportation for athletes, coaches, volunteers and family members as they move from their dorms and hotels to the Festival Village and event locations. The union also has endorsed the Special Olympics’ “SO Get Into It” service-learning curriculum for all grade levels, which consists of lesson plans, activities and videos promoting student and teacher awareness and understanding of—and involvement in—Special Olympics.

The aim of Special Olympics is to empower individuals with intellectual disabilities to become physically fit and productive through sports training and competition. It offers children and adults year-round training and competition in 26 Olympic-type sports.

Over the years, Logan has been involved with the program at every level—from local competitions to the World Games—as a coach, official, coordinator and any other job that needed to be filled. “I love sports and I love working with special needs kids,” she says. “So this seemed like a perfect match.”

As a special ed teacher, Logan says, she doesn’t always see big gains with her students in the classroom. School is something that often is hard for them, so they get frustrated and angry. Outside of school, “they exhibit skills we never see in the classroom,” she says, noting that they are more confident and outgoing.

Regular education students also have a great experience when they volunteer with Special Olympics, she says.

“The students in the high school see the athletes in a different way,” Logan explains. “Many of them come back very impressed. It really is an eye-opener for them.” And the same enthusiasm holds true with other school staff: “I haven’t had anyone yet say it was a waste of time to volunteer.”

Cleveland private school voucher program comes up short—again
Study finds no test-score advantage at voucher schools in Cleveland

“The Evidence on Education Vouchers: An Application to the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program” reports that students at voucher schools show “very modest” gains in achievement. “Overall, we find no academic advantages for voucher users; in fact, users seem to perform slightly worse in math,” the report concludes. And, contrary to claims made by some groups, the 2006 study also found no academic advantage for subgroups such as black students in voucher schools.

The new report generally mirrors earlier findings by the Indiana Center for Evaluation at Indiana University, which had been hired by the state to evaluate the Cleveland voucher program. The IU study found no difference academically between public school students and those attending voucher schools in Cleveland. Significantly, the state-sponsored study did show that voucher schools were attracting students from higher-income families— most of whom already attended nonpublic schools—and that students who ultimately left voucher schools and re-enrolled in public schools achieved at lower levels than any other group.

State lawmakers seem undeterred by the growing body of research showing that Cleveland voucher schools serve more advantaged students—and yet they perform no better, and often perform worse, than traditional schools. Ohio moved to expand its voucher program for the 2006-07 school year.

The new law makes vouchers of up to $5,000 available for students in districts deemed to be in “academic emergency” for three consecutive years. Academic emergency is the state’s lowest designation. That change added 14,000 students to voucher eligibility.

But student and parent interest has been lukewarm at best: Ohio received only 8,000 voucher applications for 2006-07. And now, Ohio is considering relaxing the rules even more to gin up interest in vouchers.

A bill before the legislature as American Teacher went to press would expand eligibility to students in districts under “academic watch” (the state’s second lowest designation) for three consecutive years. That would increase the pool of potential applicants by 27,000, according to the Ohio Federation of Teachers.

Contract fears a strawman in school staffing concerns
New AFT report shatters 'urban legend' of unions and hard-to-staff schools

“This assumption is, literally, an urban legend,” says AFT researcher F. Howard Nelson, author of a new paper examining the relationship of collective bargaining and teacher mobility. In high-poverty school districts with collective bargaining, the school transfer rate among teachers is 7.5 percent—the same as the national average for all teachers. In high-poverty schools where teachers do not have a union contract, the transfer rate is a much higher 11.3 percent.

“This is the exact opposite of what people assume,” Nelson says. “To find higher-than-average transfer rates among teachers in high-poverty schools, you actually have to look to the nonbargaining districts,” he points out. The conclusions presented in the new AFT report, “The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Teacher Mobility,” frequently turn conventional wisdom on its head when it comes to the relationship between union contracts and staffing issues in high-poverty urban districts.

“Intuition is important for educational research—but data trumps intuition every time,” says Nelson. The AFT report draws heavily from what Nelson calls the “gold standard” of data in this area: the latest federal Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the related 2000-01 Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS). The studies encompass a nationally representative sample of more than 50,000 public and private school teachers. Among the other findings in the report:

■   New teachers are evenly distributed between low-poverty schools (6.1 percent) and high-poverty schools (5.7 percent) in urban districts with collective bargaining. In states without collective bargaining, however, new teachers are placed in high-poverty schools at three times the rate of low-poverty schools (10.1 percent versus 3.3 percent).

■   About half of transfers from high-poverty schools with collective bargaining will go to a school in another district. About 60 percent of teachers in schools without collective bargaining will opt for a different district.

■   Most transfers are voluntary, with only 10 percent of transferred teachers reporting being laid off or involuntarily transferred. In high-poverty urban schools, teachers working under a union contract had lower rates of involuntary transfer (3.2 percent) compared with teachers working without a contract (11.7 percent).

“The data really shatters the myth that seniority-based layoffs are creating staff upheavals in districts with collective bargaining,” Nelson observes.