Meet 17 year-old Jonny Saunders (transcript at this link), a young man from Boise, Idaho who has helped spark a mini-revolution, a la Madison, here in Idaho.
The fight in Idaho is targeted directly at teachers, the only union with any strength at all in this "right-to-work" state. The superintendent of public education, Tom Luna, has proposed a new education plan that would slash 770 teaching positions across the state (a significant chunk in a small-population state), increasing class sizes and picking up the slack with online learning—every high school student would get a laptop.
The Idaho Statesman ran what in another state would have been a deal-breaking story, detailing how Luna's major campaign donors and cronies in for-profit education will cash in on his plan.
If Luna’s “Students Come First” proposal passes the Legislature, online education will be mandated in Idaho and a laptop will be available to every high school student. That means 115 school districts, with 82,000 high school students, will be in the market for computers, software and online courses.
Among Luna’s contributors in October 2009:
- K12 Inc. of Virginia, an online company with 81,000 students and operator of the Idaho Virtual Academy. In Idaho, IVA enrolls 2,930 students and received $12.8 million from the state in fiscal 2010. K12, its employees and major stockholders spent about $44,000 supporting Luna; $25,000 of that was funneled to an Idaho interest group for independent advertising on Luna’s behalf.
- Apollo Group of Phoenix, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, an online university with more than 400,000 students. Luna’s plan would allow high school students to earn college credits at state expense once they complete high school requirements. Apollo Group gave Luna $5,500.
- Executives of Scantron Corp., a Minnesota-based leader in testing technology that is aggressively expanding into online education. Scantron employees and family contributed $7,450.
Idaho's Republican-dominated legislature barely blinked at these revelations, having long been in the back pocket of corporate interests. It's just politics as usual in this state. But it's getting a very strong reaction from Idaho families and particularly students. Led by kids like Saunders and Tyler Honsinger of Boise High, hundreds of students across the state have staged three days of protests, walking out of class to protest the plan and to support their teachers. Tiny Clark County School District shut down school on Monday, when a quarter of their students left school. In Boise Wednesday, about 130 junior high students joined the walkout.
It seems to be working. The plan was presented to the legislature as three bills, one that would implement the teacher firings, huge class sizes, mandatory online learning appears to have stalled out in the Senate. The Education Committee passed it 5-4, but it was returned without a vote from the full Senate, and might not be acted on again. Eyes now are on the House Education Committee, where testimony continued to run at about 95 percent opposition.
The other two components aren't as blatantly pernicious, but are still very damaging to teachers. They would "give local school districts more power in labor negotiations with teachers’ unions (SB 1108) and implement a pay-for-performance plan for teachers (SB 1110). In Luna’s words, they give districts the chance to reward great teachers and get rid of bad ones." In other words, pit teachers against one another and break the union. That's the Republican way.