Education Sector's Kevin Carey recently engaged in a little grammatical exegesis about a post on this blog: "Rule of thumb in sentence construction," Kevin wrote, "The word "but" does not belong after the words 'falsifying documents is wrong.' Whatever you're writing is sure to go downhill from there." 

I thought it was just the result of writer's block and Kevin's desire to put something up on the blog on Friday, but then I saw this announcement from one of Ed Sector's funders and realized it signaled a new direction for Ed Sector.

The Deep Pockets Foundation has awarded Education Sector a $240,000 grant to analyze the use of conjunctions, prepositions and articles in teacher union communications. Ed Sector's Kevin Carey, who will take the lead on the analysis, says, "No word is too small when it comes to unions.  There's a local in Alabama that almost always uses 'a salary increase' instead of 'the salary increase,' and that sends a clear signal about the union's resistance to education reforms."

Marguerite Roza, who will co-author report, says that cleaning up union communications will lead to billions of dollars in savings if she can put together the right formulas. Education Sector senior fellow Joe Williams is expected to analyze the NEA's communications.  "They typically use a series of prepositional phrases when a possessive is called for.  It's a clear attempt to put some distance between the NEA and the views it espouses."

Carey says the new grant likely will be the first of many.  "We used to think about ways to improve teacher quality and student assessments, but we agree with our funders that the path to better education is through a laser-like focus on unions and their blogs."

The Deep Pockets Foundation's annual report lays out an ambitious education policy agenda for 2008, with several new grants coming to Ed Sector, a nonpartisan, pro-union think tank:

• An upcoming study will look at the use of recycled paper in collective bargaining agreements,
• A panel of education experts will debate whether unions give 95% or 99.5% of PAC money to Democrats, and
• A white paper will propose to eliminate teachers' school lunch subsidies so the money can be used to pay teachers for bathroom duty.