In Response to Troy Senik’s Article:
Worst Union in America
Originally Posted on May 21, 2012 by admin
CTA spent over $200 million on politics
in the decade prior to 2010. What should be an outrage to CTA members is that
it was ONLY $200 million! That is a little more than 10% of their huge budget,
where is the other 90% going?
Of course, it goes to a bloated CTA and
NEA organization that has hundreds of very well-paid employees. It certainly
does not go towards CTA labor negotiators or attorneys. Local CTA associations
rely on teachers to do the heavy lifting on bargaining and negotiations teams,
getting CTA negotiators only when absolutely necessary. Discipline cases and
school site problems are handled primarily by teachers (stewards) instead of
CTA attorneys (they only have 11 CTA attorneys on staff and actually say on
their website that they would be too busy if CTA members were allowed to call
them directly with questions…!).
California teachers pay about
$1,000/year in union dues and 80% goes to CTA and NEA. Of the rest that stays
local, a huge chunk goes to CTA and NEA anyway, in the form of conference and
training fees for CTA and NEA events.
Teachers do have an alternative. They
can decertify from CTA and be independent teacher associations.
http://caindependentteachers.com/
Police, fire and many other public
sector employees in California often do not belong to a big union, but rather
pay much more modest dues to their local association, which uses those dues to
hire labor attorneys and negotiators to handle the association’s needs. There
are certainly problems with California’s economy and budget woes, but public
employees did not cause the recession. Public employee associations that work
collaboratively with the City, County or District they work for can and have
been able to keep public services working despite the economy and the state
government’s ineptitude.
CTA, though, is simply sucking money
from teachers without giving much in return, other than helping perpetuate a
broken system statewide.
Read the Article below or click here
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-association.html
TROY SENIK
The Worst Union in America
How the California Teachers Association
betrayed the schools and crippled the state
In 1962, as tensions ran high between
school districts and unions across the country, members of the National
Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization’s 100th annual
convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the
California Teachers Association (CTA). “The strike as a weapon for teachers is
inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,” Corey told
the crowd. “You can’t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back
to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.”
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SEAN DELONAS
Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May
2011, when the CTA—now the single most powerful special interest in
California—organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for higher taxes in
one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens
of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators
incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting
companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week’s
centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and
student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the
building’s hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100
demonstrators for trespassing, including then–CTA president David Sanchez. The
protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were
undergoing important statewide tests that week. With the passage of 50 years,
the CTA’s notions of “good citizenship” had vanished.
So had high-quality public education in
California. Seen as a national leader in the classroom during the 1950s and
1960s, the country’s largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes
of Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings. The
Golden State’s education tailspin has been blamed on everything from class
sizes to the property-tax restrictions enforced by Proposition 13 to an influx
of Spanish-speaking students. But no portrait of the system’s downfall would be
complete without a depiction of the CTA, a political behemoth that blocks
meaningful education reform, protects failing and even criminal educators, and
inflates teacher pay and benefits to unsustainable levels.
The CTA began its transformation in
September 1975, when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Rodda Act, which allowed
California teachers to bargain collectively. Within 18 months, 600 of the 1,000
local CTA chapters moved to collective bargaining. As the union’s power grew,
its ranks nearly doubled, from 170,000 in the late 1970s to approximately
325,000 today. By following the union’s directions and voting in blocs in
low-turnout school-board elections, teachers were able to handpick their own
supervisors—a system that private-sector unionized workers would envy. Further,
the organization that had once forsworn the strike began taking to the picket
lines. Today, the CTA boasts that it has launched more than 170 strikes in the
years since Rodda’s passage.
The CTA’s most important resource,
however, isn’t a pool of workers ready to strike; it’s a fat bank account fed
by mandatory dues that can run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the
union’s income was more than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA
doesn’t need its members’ consent to spend this money on politicking, whether
that’s making campaign contributions or running advocacy campaigns to obstruct
reform. According to figures from the California Fair Political Practices
Commission (a public institution) in 2010, the CTA had spent more than $210
million over the previous decade on political campaigning—more than any other
donor in the state. In fact, the CTA outspent the pharmaceutical industry, the
oil industry, and the tobacco industrycombined.
All this money has helped the union
rack up an imposing number of victories. The first major win came in 1988, with
the passage of Proposition 98. That initiative compelled California to spend
more than 40 percent of its annual budget on education in grades K–12 and
community college. The spending quota eliminated schools’ incentive to get
value out of every dollar: since funding was locked in, there was no need to
make things run cost-effectively. Thanks to union influence on local school
boards, much of the extra money—about $450 million a year—went straight into
teachers’ salaries. Prop. 98’s malign effects weren’t limited to education,
however: by essentially making public school funding an entitlement rather than
a matter of discretionary spending, it hastened California’s erosion of fiscal
discipline. In recent years, estimates of mandatory spending’s share of the
state’s budget have run as high as 85 percent, making it highly difficult for
the legislature to confront the severe budget crises of the past decade.
In 1991, the CTA took to the ramparts
again to combat Proposition 174, a ballot initiative that would have made
California a national leader in school choice by giving families universal
access to school vouchers. When initiative supporters began circulating the
petitions necessary to get it onto the ballot, some CTA members tried to
intimidate petition signers physically. The union also encouraged people to
sign the petition multiple times in order to throw the process into chaos.
“There are some proposals so evil that they should never go before the voters,”
explained D. A. Weber, the CTA’s president. One of the consultants who
organized the petitions testified in a court declaration at the time that
people with union ties had offered him $400,000 to refrain from distributing
them. Another claimed that a CTA member had tried to run him off the road after
a debate on school choice.
Weber and his followers weren’t
successful in keeping the proposition off the ballot, but they did manage to
delay it for two years, giving themselves time to organize a counteroffensive. They
ran ads, recalls Ken Khachigian, the former White House speechwriter who headed
the Yes on 174 campaign, “claiming that a witches’ coven would be eligible for
the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.” They threatened to
field challengers against political candidates who supported school choice.
They bullied members of the business community who contributed money to the
pro-voucher effort. When In-N-Out Burger donated $25,000 to support Prop. 174,
for instance, the CTA threatened to press schools to drop contracts with the
company.
In 1993, Prop. 174 finally came to a
statewide vote. The union had persuaded March Fong Eu, the CTA-endorsed
secretary of state, to alter the proposition’s heading on the ballot from
PARENTAL CHOICE to EDUCATION VOUCHERS—a change in wording that cost Prop. 174
ten points in the polls, according to Myron Lieberman in his book The Teacher
Unions. The initiative, which had originally enjoyed 2–1 support among
California voters, managed to garner only a little over 30 percent of the vote.
Prop. 174’s backers had been outspent by a factor of eight, with the CTA alone
dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.
As the CTA’s power grew, it learned
that it could extract policy concessions simply by employing its aggressive PR
machine. In 1996, with the state’s budget in surplus, the CTA spent $1 million
on an ad campaign touting the virtues of reduced class sizes in kindergarten
through third grade. Feeling the heat from the campaign, Republican governor
Pete Wilson signed a measure providing subsidies to schools with classes of 20
children or fewer. The program was a disaster: it failed to improve educational
outcomes, and the need to hire many new teachers quickly, to handle all the
smaller classes, reduced the quality of teachers throughout the state. The
program cost California nearly $2 billion per year at its high-water mark,
becoming the most expensive education-reform initiative in the state’s history.
But it worked out well for the CTA, whose ranks and coffers were swelled by all
those new teachers.
The union’s steady supply of cash
allowed it to continue its quest for political dominance unabated. In 1998, it
spent nearly $7 million to defeat Proposition 8—which would have used student
performance as a criterion for teacher reviews and would have required
educators to pass credentialing examinations in their disciplines—and more than
$2 million in a failed attempt to block Proposition 227, which eliminated
bilingual education in public schools. In 2002, the union spent $26 million to
defeat Proposition 38, another school voucher proposal. And in 2005, with a
special election called by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger looming, the CTA came
up with a colossal $58 million—even going so far as to mortgage its Sacramento
headquarters—to defeat initiatives that would have capped the growth of state
spending, made it easier to fire underperforming teachers, and ensured
“paycheck protection,” which compels unions to get their members’ consent
before using dues for political purposes. (A new paycheck-protection measure
will appear on the November 2012 ballot.)
Cannily, the CTA also funds a wide
array of liberal causes unrelated to education, with the goal of spreading
around enough cash to prevent dissent from the Left. Among these causes:
implementing a single-payer health-care system in California, blocking
photo-identification requirements for voters, and limiting restraints on the
government’s power of eminent domain. The CTA was the single biggest financial
opponent of another Proposition 8, the controversial 2008 proposal to ban gay
marriage, ponying up $1.3 million to fight an initiative that eventually won
52.2 percent of the vote. The union has also become the biggest donor to the
California Democratic Party. From 2003 to 2012, the CTA spent nearly $102
million on political contributions; 0.08 percent of that money went to
Republicans.
At the same time that the union was
becoming the largest financial force in California politics, it was developing
an equally powerful ground game, stifling reform efforts at the local level.
Consider the case of Locke High School in the poverty-stricken Los Angeles
neighborhood of Watts. Founded in response to the area’s 1967 riots, Locke was
intended to provide a quality education to the neighborhood’s almost
universally minority students. For years, it failed: in 2006, with a student
body that was 65 percent Hispanic and 35 percent African-American, the school
sent just 5 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, and the dropout
rate was nearly 51 percent.
Shortly before Locke reached this
nadir, the school hired a reform-minded principal, Frank Wells, who was
determined to revive the school’s fortunes. Just a few days after he arrived, a
group of rival gangs got into a dust-up; Wells expelled 80 of the students
involved. In the new atmosphere of discipline, Locke dropped “from first in the
number of campus crime reports in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District]
to thirteenth,” writes Donna Foote in Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the
Trenches with Teach for America. Test scores and college acceptance also began
to rise, Foote reports.
But trouble arose with the union when
Wells began requiring Locke teachers to present weekly lesson plans. The local
CTA affiliate—United Teachers Los Angeles—filed a grievance against him and was
soon urging his removal. The last straw was Wells’s effort to convert Locke
into an independent charter school, where teachers would operate under severely
restricted union contracts. In May 2007, the district removed Wells from his
job. He was escorted from his office by three police officers and an associate
superintendent of schools, all on the basis of union allegations that he had
let teachers use classroom time to sign a petition to turn Locke into a
charter. Wells called the allegations “a total fabrication,” and the signature
gatherers backed him up. The LAUSD reassigned him to a district office, where
he was paid $600 a day to sit in a cubicle and do nothing.
Luckily for Locke students, the union’s
rearguard action came too late. In 2007, the Los Angeles Board of Education
voted 5–2 to hand Locke High School to Green Dot, a charter school operator.
Four years later, as the final class of Locke students who had attended the
school prior to its transformation received their diplomas, the school’s
graduation rate was 68 percent, and over 56 percent of Locke graduates were
headed for higher education.
One of the most noticeable changes at
Locke has ramifications statewide: when Green Dot took over, it required all
teachers to reapply for their jobs. It hired back only about one-third of them.
That approach is unimaginable in the rest of the state’s public schools, where
a teaching job is essentially a lifetime sinecure. A tiny 0.03 percent of
California teachers are dismissed after three or more years on the job. In the
past decade, the LAUSD—home to 33,000 teachers—has dismissed only four. Even
when teachers are fired, it’s seldom because of their classroom performance: a
2009 exposé by theLos Angeles Times found that only 20 percent of successful
dismissals in the state had anything to do with teaching ability. Most
terminations involved teachers behaving either obscenely or criminally. The
National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based education-reform
organization, gave California a D-minus on its teacher-firing policies in its
2010 national report card.
Responsibility for this sorry situation
goes largely to the CTA, which has won concessions that make firing a teacher
so difficult that educators can usually keep their jobs for any offense that
doesn’t cross into outright criminality. With the cost of the proceedings
regularly running near half a million dollars, many districts choose to shuffle
problem employees around rather than try to fire them.
Even outright offenses are no guarantee
of removal, thanks to CTA influence. When a fired teacher appeals his case
beyond the school board, it goes to the Commission on Professional
Competence—two of whose three members are also teachers, one of them chosen by
the educator whose case is being heard. The CTA has stacked this process as
well by bargaining to require evidentiary standards equal to those used in
civil-court procedures and coaching the teachers on the panels. One veteran
school-district lawyer calls the appeals process “one of the most complicated
civil legal matters anywhere.” As the Times noted, “The district wanted to fire
a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with
cocaine residue at school, but [the Commission on Professional Competence]
balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh.” The commission was also the
reason that, as the newspaper continued, the district was “unsuccessful in
firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague
in the metal shop”; the district had failed to “prove that the two were having
sex.”
Another regulatory body dominated by
CTA influence is the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the
institution responsible for removing the credentials of misbehaving teachers. A
report released in 2011 by California state auditor Elaine Howle found that the
commission had a backlog of approximately 12,600 cases, with responses
sometimes taking as long as three years. Because the CTC—which was created by
an act sponsored by the CTA—is made up of members appointed by the governor,
the CTA is able to bring its political pressure to bear on determining the
commission’s makeup. In September 2011, for instance, one of Governor Jerry
Brown’s appointments to the CTC was Kathy Harris, who had previously been a CTA
lobbyist to the body.
The CTA’s most recent crusade for job
security made clear that the union was prepared to jeopardize the financial
future of California’s schools. Last June, it vigorously pushed (and Governor
Brown hastily signed) Assembly Bill 114, which prevented any teacher layoffs or
program cuts in the coming fiscal year and removed the requirement that school
districts present balanced budget plans. The bill also forced public schools to
prepare budget estimates that didn’t take into account the state’s downturn in
revenues—meaning that schools could budget for activities even though there
wasn’t money to pay for them. Since then, state officials have forecast that
revenues for the 2012 fiscal year will be $3.2 billion lower than they were
when the schools were making their budgets. Eventually, accommodations to
reality will have to be made—at which time the CTA will, of course, use them to
plead hardship.
Such pleas seem impudent coming from
the highest-paid teachers in the nation, with an average annual salary of
$68,000. For a bit of perspective, if two California teachers get married (not
an unusual occurrence) and each makes the average salary, their combined annual
income would be $136,000, nearly $80,000 more than what the state’s median
household pulls down. That’s for an average annual workload of 180 days, only
two-thirds of the average total in the private sector. Don’t forget retirement
benefits: after 30 years, a California teacher may retire with a pension equal
to about 75 percent of his working salary. That pension averages more than
$51,000 a year—more than working teachers earn in more than half the states in
the nation. And that’s just an average; from 2005 to 2011, the number of
education employees pulling down more than $100,000 a year in pensions
skyrocketed from 700 to 5,400.
With the state’s economy in tumult,
however, prospects for the teachers’ retirement fund look grim. CalSTRS is now
officially estimated to have about $56 billion in liabilities and about 30
years left before it runs dry, though many outside analysts think that those
numbers are too optimistic. A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in
November 2011 estimated that restoring full funding to CalSTRS would require
finding an extra $3.9 billion a year for at least 30 years.
If California is to generate the
economic growth necessary to mitigate its coming fiscal reckoning, it will need
to retain its historical role as a leading site for innovation and
entrepreneurship. But that won’t be possible if its next generation of would-be
entrepreneurs attends one of the Golden State’s many mediocre or failing
schools. And what little economic dynamism is left in California will be
impeded if the union gets its way and the state increases its already weighty
tax burden.
Meaningful change probably won’t come
from elected officials, at least for now. The CTA’s size, financial resources,
and influence with the state’s regnant Democratic Party are enough to kill most
pieces of hostile legislation. For years, school reformers fantasized about a
transformative figure who could shift the balance of power from the union
through force of charisma and personality, taking his case directly to the
people. Yet when that figure seemed to emerge in Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger, even he proved unable to alter the status quo, with his 2005
ballot initiatives to reform tenure, school financing, and political spending
by unions all going down to decisive defeat. It’s unlikely that salvation will
come from Governor Brown, either. The man who originally opened the door for
the CTA’s collective bargaining has remained a steadfast ally of the union,
firing four pro-reform members of the state board of education in his first few
days in office and appointing a new group that included Patricia Ann Rucker,
the CTA’s top lobbyist. Brown also avoided including any changes to CalSTRS in
his October announcement of proposed pension reforms, probably because he had
learned Schwarzenegger’s lesson that irking the CTA can lead to the demise of a
broader agenda.
Parents, however, are starting to revolt
against CTA orthodoxy. Unlike elected officials, parents—who want nothing more
than a good education for their kids—are hard for the union to demonize. In
early 2010, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit called Parent Revolution shocked
California’s pundit class by getting the state legislature to pass the nation’s
first “parent trigger” law, which lets parents at failing schools force
districts to undertake certain reforms, including converting schools into
independent charters. The law caps the number of schools eligible for reform at
75, but if early results are successful, it will become hard for Californians
to avoid comparing thriving charter schools with failing traditional ones.
The CTA is fighting back, of course. In
2010, when 61 percent of parents at McKinley Elementary School in the blighted
L.A. neighborhood of Compton opted to pull the trigger, the CTA claimed that
“parents were never given the full picture . . . [or] informed of the great
progress already being made”—despite the fact that McKinley’s performance was
ranked beneath nearly all other inner-city schools in the state. Several
Hispanic parents in the district also said that members of the union had
threatened to report them to immigration authorities if they signed the
petition. Eventually, the Compton Unified school board—heavily lobbied by the
CTA—dismissed the petition signatures, with no discussion, as “insufficient” on
a handful of technicalities, such as missing dates and typos. Though the
union’s power had proved too much for the McKinley parents, an enterprising
charter school operator opened two new campuses in the neighborhood anyway.
Institutions like Locke High School,
Green Dot, Parent Revolution, and the Compton charters are glimmers of hope for
California’s public school system. Despite their inferior resources, they have
fought the CTA not by participating in direct political conflict but by
undermining the union’s moral standing. These organizations reframe the
education question in starkly humanitarian terms: In the California public
school system, are anyone’s interests more important than the students’? It was
a question that the CTA itself might have asked back when teachers entered the
classroom to “teach good citizenship.”
Troy Senik is a senior fellow at the
Center for Individual Freedom and an editor at Ricochet.com.
The prospects for healthcare reform may be chillier than DC weather, but Democrats in the House and Senate are turning their attention to another warmer but still significant national issue: the increasing number of runaway and throwaway youth who are being forced into prostitution. In response to the growing concerns that desperate, runaway teens will be forced into prostitution in a sluggish economy, Congress is pushing several bills to improve how runaway kids are tracked by the police, fund crucial social services, and prevent teens from being caught in sex trafficking. Here's the gist of what the new legislation is trying to accomplish:
