NEIUPI

Our UPI bargaining team delivered another compensation proposal package and an evaluation proposal package to the administration’s team yesterday morning. In an effort to reach a satisfactory conclusion to bargaining, our proposals were modified once more to reflect the feedback collected from the members. Thanks again to all members who provided feedback on the remaining contractual issues. A summary of the proposals passed by the administration and your UPI team from June through September will be forthcoming. Bargaining sessions have been scheduled through the end of October. Tuesday mornings from 9 am – 12 pm in the Student Union.

Stop by and chat with your colleagues at the UPI tables this week, Wednesday and Thursday. Pick up the latest publications and UPI materials.

New report discussed in Inside Higher Education, you can find it at:

Who is teaching the teachers?

What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point

This was written by Rick Ayers, a former high school teacher, founder of Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and currently adjunct professor in teacher education at the University of San Francisco. He is the co-author, with his brother William Ayers, of the forthcoming “Teaching the Taboo” from Teachers College Press.

By Rick Ayers

While the education film Waiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled “Does Education Need a Katrina?” Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

Let’s examine these issues, one by one…

Read more at The Washington Post…

If you have been following the massive publicity swirling around “Waiting for Superman” and NBC “Education Nation”, you should not miss the article, “Grading Waiting for Superman” published in the Nation. You can find the article at:

Grading Waiting for Superman

Check out the latest on job satisfaction and salary disparity. Keep repeating, ” I am responsible for my own morale.”

September 27, 2010

There’s Some Bliss in Ignorance of Pay Gaps, Study of College Employees Suggests

By Peter Schmidt

A new study of employees at three University of California campuses suggests that letting workers make rough in-house pay comparisons hurts morale over all, by causing unrest among those at the bottom while having little impact on those on top.

Once given a chance to compare their pay with the salaries of others in the same department or occupation, those who fell below the median became less satisfied with their jobs and more likely to be looking for work elsewhere. The closer they were to the bottom, the more unhappy with their jobs they were likely to become, the study found.

Those whose pay was above the median did not seem to be affected one way or the other by the knowledge of how they compared with others, the study found. In a paper summarizing the study, the researchers involved said such a finding challenged the idea that relative pay and job satisfaction always rise in tandem. Under that idea, people should be made happier with their jobs by learning that they earn more than most others do.

Read more at the Chronicle…