Waiting for Superman

[Neal Boortz]

Yesterday I watched the movie �Waiting for Superman.� This is an
independently produced movie about the state of American government
education. To put it bluntly, this movie left me completely outraged. I
am now more convinced than I ever was that the teacher�s unions, the
American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association,
are the most two most profoundly dangerous organizations in our country
today. You can take every inner city gang, add the KKK and the Arian
Nation � and throw in organized crime and all the drug dealers � and not
do the damage teacher�s unions are doing to our country and our children.

Click on the link. Find a way to watch the move. Host a house party
where your friends and neighbors can watch with you. You�ll never regret
it.

http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/

[Paul F Austin]

On 7/17/2012 1:00 PM, Neal Boortz wrote:
> Yesterday I watched the movie �Waiting for Superman.� This is an

> independently produced movie about the state of American government
> education. To put it bluntly, this movie left me completely outraged. I

> am now more convinced than I ever was that the teacher�s unions, the

> American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association,
> are the most two most profoundly dangerous organizations in our country
> today. You can take every inner city gang, add the KKK and the Arian

> Nation � and throw in organized crime and all the drug dealers � and not
> do the damage teacher�s unions are doing to our country and our children.

>
> Click on the link. Find a way to watch the move. Host a house party

> where your friends and neighbors can watch with you. You�ll never regret
> it.
>
> http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/
>

The NEA and AFT both wrap themselves in the "for the CHILDRUUUUN" trope
but are what you should expect for a union: "for the MEMMMMMBERS".

No teacher left behind. Even pederasts.

Paul

[really real]

I haven't seen the movie, and I'm not aware of all the issues involving
education and the teachers' union, but the sentiment behind this is obvious.

If we could only get rid of all the unions in America, we could compete
again with China and Sri Lanka and all those other countries where
people work without rights or decent wages.

And once we get rid of unions, we can get rid all those socially
destructive benefits that came from unions, like sick leave, safety
rules, and holidays.

[tomcervo]

Yes. A trust fund baby talks to software billionaire college dropouts
and Michelle Rhee, and understands everything about educational
policy. I'd like to see them all get a sub's licence and take over an
ordinary classroom for one day.

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but

Paul F Austin <pfau...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> On 7/17/2012 1:00 PM, Neal Boortz wrote:

>> Yesterday I watched the movie ?Waiting for Superman.? This is an

>> independently produced movie about the state of American government
>> education. To put it bluntly, this movie left me completely outraged. I

>> am now more convinced than I ever was that the teacher?s unions, the

>> American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association,
>> are the most two most profoundly dangerous organizations in our country
>> today. You can take every inner city gang, add the KKK and the Arian

>> Nation ? and throw in organized crime and all the drug dealers ? and not
>> do the damage teacher?s unions are doing to our country and our children.

>>
>> Click on the link. Find a way to watch the move. Host a house party

>> where your friends and neighbors can watch with you. You?ll never regret

>> it.
>>
>> http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/
>>
>
> The NEA and AFT both wrap themselves in the "for the CHILDRUUUUN" trope
> but are what you should expect for a union: "for the MEMMMMMBERS".
>
> No teacher left behind. Even pederasts.
>
> Paul

A fantastic movie, one of the best docu's ever. In spite of taking the
teachers' unions to task, it was not made by a conservative, but by
Guggenheim, the guy behind 'An Inconvenient Truth.'

Sometimes the cute graphics get in the way of the compelling tale of human
destruction that is organized public education in this country, but at the
end of the picture I was literally in tears. OK, I'm an old softie, but the
movie makes an eloquent case for reform by documenting the injustice done to
kids without the resources or sophistication to challenge the status quo.

Sadly, this is entirely avoidable. As the movie documents in chilling
fashion, if the bottom 10% performing teachers were removed from the system,
grade scores and graduation rates would sky rocket. However, overcoming an
entrenched union with powerful friends in Washington, and school systems
that are the victims of municipal politics, is easier said than done.

So the system rots from within, and the dropout factory continues to operate
- one of the great _preventable_ tragedies of our time.



Terry
--
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls |/
drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own |/ Gentoo Linux
despair, against our will, comes wisdom through |/
the awful grace of God." -Aeschylus |/

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but

really real <reall...@shaw.ca> wrote:

> On 7/23/2012 2:30 AM, Paul F Austin wrote:
>> On 7/17/2012 1:00 PM, Neal Boortz wrote:

>>> Yesterday I watched the movie ?Waiting for Superman.? This is an

>>> independently produced movie about the state of American government
>>> education. To put it bluntly, this movie left me completely outraged. I

>>> am now more convinced than I ever was that the teacher?s unions, the

>>> American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association,
>>> are the most two most profoundly dangerous organizations in our country
>>> today. You can take every inner city gang, add the KKK and the Arian

>>> Nation ? and throw in organized crime and all the drug dealers ? and not
>>> do the damage teacher?s unions are doing to our country and our children.

>>>
>>> Click on the link. Find a way to watch the move. Host a house party

>>> where your friends and neighbors can watch with you. You?ll never regret

>>> it.
>>>
>>> http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/
>>>
>>
>> The NEA and AFT both wrap themselves in the "for the CHILDRUUUUN" trope
>> but are what you should expect for a union: "for the MEMMMMMBERS".
>>
>> No teacher left behind. Even pederasts.
>
>
> I haven't seen the movie, and I'm not aware of all the issues involving
> education and the teachers' union, but the sentiment behind this is obvious.
>
> If we could only get rid of all the unions in America, we could compete
> again with China and Sri Lanka and all those other countries where
> people work without rights or decent wages.
>
> And once we get rid of unions, we can get rid all those socially
> destructive benefits that came from unions, like sick leave, safety
> rules, and holidays.
>

This film doesn't hold that pov. It takes a very sophisticated approach to
the roadblocks put up by the unions to educational reform. It advocates for
reform of the unions, not their dissolution or defanging (a la Wisconsin).

[Heynonny]

On 2012-07-23 11:50:09 -0400, tomcervo <paradi...@gmail.com> said:

>
> A trust fund baby talks to software billionaire college dropouts
> and Michelle Rhee, and understands everything about educational
> policy. I'd like to see them all get a sub's licence and take over an
> ordinary classroom for one day.

It's been totally discredited. Rhee is a fraud and a cheat. And
teaching today is the hardest job there is, teachers are basically riot
control with no authority; a wonder any learning goes on at all.

But that doesn't change the fact that schools have to improve for any
hope of our national survival. They got that much right. The unions
have demonstrated no inclination to help.

[moviePig]

On Jul 23, 1:59 pm, Heynonny <nos...@noway.com> wrote:

One of the greatest circumstantial advantages in life is to fall, even
briefly, under the influence of a high-quality mentor ...which most of
us understand better than we understand that, by definition, there
aren't enough of them to go around. (I was unrealistically furious
when my child was assigned an 8th-grade science teacher who, though
acknowledged as ossifyingly mediocre, was unfireable.) Imo, and like
it or not, any "solution" must be along the lines of multiplying the
reach of exceptional educators -- summoning, e.g., the specter of TV
as the primary instructor...

--

- - - - - - - -
YOUR taste at work...
http://www.moviepig.com

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but

Heynonny <nos...@noway.com> wrote:

> On 2012-07-23 11:50:09 -0400, tomcervo <paradi...@gmail.com> said:
>
>>
>> A trust fund baby talks to software billionaire college dropouts
>> and Michelle Rhee, and understands everything about educational
>> policy. I'd like to see them all get a sub's licence and take over an
>> ordinary classroom for one day.
>
> It's been totally discredited. Rhee is a fraud and a cheat. And
> teaching today is the hardest job there is, teachers are basically riot
> control with no authority; a wonder any learning goes on at all.

Throwing up your hands and claiming, 'it's too hard,' is not an answer to
the problem. It _would_ be a helluva lot easier if teachers were rewarded
for their success with students, instead of the tenure-centered model we
have now in public education.

>
> But that doesn't change the fact that schools have to improve for any
> hope of our national survival. They got that much right. The unions
> have demonstrated no inclination to help.
>

[really real]

> A fantastic movie, one of the best docu's ever. In spite of taking the
> teachers' unions to task, it was not made by a conservative, but by
> Guggenheim, the guy behind 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
>
> Sometimes the cute graphics get in the way of the compelling tale of human
> destruction that is organized public education in this country, but at the
> end of the picture I was literally in tears. OK, I'm an old softie, but the
> movie makes an eloquent case for reform by documenting the injustice done to
> kids without the resources or sophistication to challenge the status quo.
>
> Sadly, this is entirely avoidable. As the movie documents in chilling
> fashion, if the bottom 10% performing teachers were removed from the system,
> grade scores and graduation rates would sky rocket. However, overcoming an
> entrenched union with powerful friends in Washington, and school systems
> that are the victims of municipal politics, is easier said than done.
>
> So the system rots from within, and the dropout factory continues to operate
> - one of the great _preventable_ tragedies of our time.
>

I used to be a teacher in Canada where the problems might not be so bad.
I saw a number of incompetent teachers protected by the union, but the
real problem was that administrators were too incompetent or lazy to
follow the rules and get them fired properly.

I also saw a lot of good teachers being attacked by incompetent
administrators and these teachers badly needed union protection. I'd say
it was a trade off. For every incompetent teacher the union protected
and kept working, there was at least one good teacher who was driven out
of teaching for the wrong reasons, like political ideology, or not being
part of an old boys network.

In America, it might be worse. I should watch the movie.

[really real]

>
> Throwing up your hands and claiming, 'it's too hard,' is not an answer to
> the problem. It _would_ be a helluva lot easier if teachers were rewarded
> for their success with students, instead of the tenure-centered model we
> have now in public education.

Th problem with rewarding successful teachers is it all comes down to
marks on standardized tests. A good teacher is one who imparts those
immeasurable lessons that encourage lifetime learning and wisdom.

Tenure is necessary so that teachers can have the security to teach the
way they want to and not get fired based on the whims of an administrator.

In Canada, if a teacher gets three unsatisfactory reports from an
administrator, then the teacher is fired. A public education system
needs a process like that to protect education.

[Michael OConnor]

> No teacher left behind. Even pederasts.

That footage of the rubber rooms where the teachers (some of them were
in there for years) who were under investigation for various offenses
and awaiting hearings, were drawing a full salary and benefits while
sitting around and reading the newspapers or playing cards, was
appalling, as was the "trading day" (or whatever they called it in the
film) where schools trade their bad teachers with other schools like
they're trading baseball cards.  These substandard teachers are just
sent to a different school and a year or two down the line they are
shipped off somewhere else so schools are just passing the buck by
allowing this to happen.

The percentage of incompetent or bad teachers who get fired are a
small fraction of one percent, thanks to the unions who protect their
own.  You can be in the Teachers Union and any crime short of murder
will not get you fired from the Union, and even if you are arrested
and charged with Child Pornography it often takes several years to get
you drummed out of the teaching profession, while you continue to draw
your salary and full benefits and work on your pension.  There are a
lot of problems with the US educational system, and approximately 90
percent of them are tied to the Unions, although the parents (who do
have an responsibility to know what their kids are doing in school and
 have to make sure they are learning it and few seem to do so) have a
role in the problems. Not knocking teachers in general, there are a
lot of good teachers out there, but there are also a lot of bad
teachers out there too and once they get into the Union those bad
teachers are nearly impossible to get rid of.

[Lil Abner]

On 7/23/2012 3:30 AM, Paul F Austin wrote:
> On 7/17/2012 1:00 PM, Neal Boortz wrote:

>> Yesterday I watched the movie “Waiting for Superman.” This is an

>> independently produced movie about the state of American government
>> education. To put it bluntly, this movie left me completely outraged. I

>> am now more convinced than I ever was that the teacher’s unions, the

>> American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association,
>> are the most two most profoundly dangerous organizations in our country
>> today. You can take every inner city gang, add the KKK and the Arian

>> Nation – and throw in organized crime and all the drug dealers – and not
>> do the damage teacher’s unions are doing to our country and our children.

>>
>> Click on the link. Find a way to watch the move. Host a house party

>> where your friends and neighbors can watch with you. You’ll never regret

>> it.
>>
>> http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/
>>
>
> The NEA and AFT both wrap themselves in the "for the CHILDRUUUUN" trope
> but are what you should expect for a union: "for the MEMMMMMBERS".
>
> No teacher left behind. Even pederasts.
>
> Paul

Some teachers are on board with the change but most are not. socialists
and other change artists have been inaugurated by the likes of Harvard
and went on a mission to change America since the sixties perhaps earlier.
Ordinary Americans cannot keep on to top all the fires thus the
opportunities of the dedicated groups to infiltrate and dominate and
change us into another European socialist society.
Small schools, small classes and individuality have been shoved out to
further the regimentation and socialist indoctrination agendas.

[T987654321]

If you gave a rip about your kids future you'd get them out of the governments indoctrination and warehousing system.

[tomcervo]

On Jul 23, 1:59 pm, Heynonny <nos...@noway.com> wrote:

When you look at the "helpers"--like Rhee, and the charter school
entrepreneurs (Murdoch's got a MAJOR investment in online learning,
for one)--that's understandable.
One of the most useful lessons I ever taught was to slap some peanut
butter on bread and fold it over and have that for a morning meal--to
tide a kid over until his free lunch, the only good meal he'll get
that day. F*ck "Superman"--watch the 4th season of "The Wire" if you
want to see the reality that some of these kids come from--and when
they get to school, they're supposed to be thinking about slope of a
line?

[really real]

>
> When you look at the "helpers"--like Rhee, and the charter school
> entrepreneurs (Murdoch's got a MAJOR investment in online learning,
> for one)--that's understandable.
> One of the most useful lessons I ever taught was to slap some peanut
> butter on bread and fold it over and have that for a morning meal--to
> tide a kid over until his free lunch, the only good meal he'll get
> that day. F*ck "Superman"--watch the 4th season of "The Wire" if you
> want to see the reality that some of these kids come from--and when
> they get to school, they're supposed to be thinking about slope of a
> line?

You'd feed a kid peanuts!!???! Kids nowadays are allergic to peanuts
>

[gtr]

On 2012-07-24 00:57:19 +0000, T987654321 said:

> If you gave a rip about your kids future you'd get them out of the
> governments indoctrination and warehousing system.

And turn them over to Christian schools?

[really real]

Okay, I watched the movie last night, and it was more manipulative and
trashier than I thought it would be.

The movie starts with the premise that public schools in America are all
to be avoided. The reason seems to be that some schools are worse than
others.

Admittedly, America does have low education rates compared to other
countries. But America also has worse poverty rates than these
countries, worse infrastructure, worse crime rates etc etc.

The movie claims that the old concept that bad neighbourhoods create bad
schools is wrong, and that it's the bad schools that are creating bad
neighbourhoods. This is absurd.

It shows that when charter schools open up that spend more time on basic
subjects, and have school on Saturday, the motivated students who flock
to these schools do better. What a surprise.

And when the Superintendent in D.C. tried to get the public schools to
have longer hours, the teachers' union objected. Did she offer more pay
for working longer hours or for working an extra day?

The most telling scene for me was the principal complaining about the
process to fire a bad teacher, involving three reports, weekly help for
the teacher, and timelines. "Why are there timelines," he asked, as if
it were a union plot to keep bad teachers.

The timelines are there to stop a principal from writing three bad
reports in three days, or dragging the process out so that a bad report
can remain effective for ten years. And it's true that if the timelines
aren't followed, the principal has to do the process again. This is the
same principal that causes courts to dismiss charges against guilty
people because the police don't follow procedure. There's no way around
it to keep the system fair.

I taught in a school that had a bad teacher, and the principal set out
to fire him but missed the timelines by a few days. I would have fired
the principal( meaning send him back to classroom as a teacher.) The
movie gave a statistic about how few teachers get fired. If that is
true, then it strikes me that there are a lot of principals who should
get fired.

That rubber room where teachers sit and wait years for their hearings
really rankled some viewers. But you can't take a person's wages away
until they are found guilty. It's very easy for a student to claim abuse
against a teacher. Why does the process take so long? I'd fire the
governor for not funding this process properly.

I think this movie really did a disservice to public education in
America. Of course some schools are better than others, and some
teachers are better than others. But you can't pay teachers extra for
productivity. Teachers aren't coal miners, and student learning can't be
summed up in standardized test scores.

The movie seems to be calling for a system where teachers can be fired
at will. This would make teachers become parrots of the principals
whims. Most of those principals were physical education teachers.

One of the narrators talked about how it took him three years to become
a good teacher. The movie seems to be asking for a system that would
have fired this teacher before those three years.

And the movie also makes going to college the panacea that is going to
save America and its students. But look at all the college educated
unemployed today. You've got to have more than decent test scores to
figure out how to live your life in today's economy. And don't forget,
America has to compete with countries that teach evolution.

One of the narrators talked about how

[Lil Abner]

Don't buy into the America has lower education rates. It just isn't the
case. It was a favorite blame for the loss of jobs in this Country to
the Global sacrifice of America for the wealth of the bunch.
Just don't believe anything a politician tells you in Washington and
very little of what you hear in the media. It all about change for one
side or the other and special interest groups.

[tomcervo]

Obviously you're not walking into a public school for the first time
in your life, with a steadicam, so your opinion is worthless.

Was the DC supe Rhee? She tells an amusing story about masking-taping
her third grade kid's mouths shut because they couldn't pass quietly
in the hall. She went into administration shortly after that. I wonder
if she counts herself among those incompetent teachers who found
another line of work?

I do know most districts around here would have had her on unpaid
suspension that morning, and extra security in the building until she
was out of it to restrain the parents looking to flatten her.

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but

Yes, absolutely, you are 100% correct in your assessment. The good teachers
are not rewarded for their results any more than the bad teachers are
punished for theirs.

If you took the money you paid bad teachers and increased the salaries of
good teachers, you would get much better results for your education dollar,
and you would bring the powerful incentive of rewarding originality in the
classroom. You would also attract a better quality student at the teacher
colleges.

Today, teachers who stray off the reservation are ostracized by their fellow
teachers; the one who stands out is pounded back down. Conformity and
solidarity are all that matter.

>
> In America, it might be worse. I should watch the movie.
>

[Harold Burton]

In article <f55123e4b4748cdf...@WSB.com>,

Troy Senik
The Worst Union in America
How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and
crippled the state
Spring 2012

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.�

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
industry combined.

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 expos� by the Los 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.

[T987654321]

On Monday, July 23, 2012 7:21:42 PM UTC-7, gtr wrote:
> On 2012-07-24 00:57:19 +0000, T987654321 said:
>

> &gt; If you gave a rip about your kids future you&#39;d get them out of the
> &gt; governments indoctrination and warehousing system.

>
> And turn them over to Christian schools?

or Jewish schools or private schools, or home schools or Islamic schools, or the hard knocks school, anywhere other than the brain destroying institutions of government.

[gtr]

If you give a rip about your kids future, I'm not sure how government
funding of a school destroys a brain more rapidly than being taught a
fucked-up curriculum.

[gtr]

On 2012-07-24 23:13:17 +0000, Rockinghorse Winner said:

> If you took the money you paid bad teachers and increased the salaries of
> good teachers, you would get much better results for your education dollar

That would be easy. All you have to is figure what "good" and "bad" means.

So far no one has managed to establish that.

[Steve Daniels]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:30:07 -0700, against all advice, something
compelled really real <reall...@shaw.ca>, to say:

You can feed a kid a peanut if it's wearing a helmet.

[really real]

Indeed, the "good" teachers are supposedly the ones that rise to the top
and become administrators. Others think that teachers who become
administrators are teachers who want to leave the classroom and
therefore weren't really good teachers.

Still others think that the scum rises to the top

[really real]

>
> Troy Senik
> The Worst Union in America
> How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and
> crippled the state
> Spring 2012

I can't blame a public teachers union for being against publicly funded
private schools, which is what the voucher system is all about. If you
have a charter school, or a private school, or any school that isn't a
public school, you can restrict entry to problem students, and teach for
longer hours than a public school has. The voucher system thus really
weakens public education.

Believe it or not, teacher unions are trying to protect public
education. Vilifying them is bad politics.

>
> 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.�
>
> 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
> industry combined.
>
> 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 expos� by the Los 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.�

[Harold Burton]

In article <OiIPr.41517$7y4....@newsfe23.iad>,

really real <reall...@shaw.ca> wrote:

> >
> > Troy Senik
> > The Worst Union in America
> > How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and
> > crippled the state
> > Spring 2012
>
>
> I can't blame a public teachers union for being against publicly funded
> private schools

God forbid that private schools should prove how incompetent teachers
protected by unions are.

> which is what the voucher system is all about. If you
> have a charter school, or a private school, or any school that isn't a
> public school, you can restrict entry to problem students, and teach for
> longer hours than a public school has. The voucher system thus really
> weakens public education.
>
> Believe it or not, teacher unions are trying to protect public
> education. Vilifying them is bad politics.

Total nonsense. Read the rest of the article below. Teachers' unions
are on record for protecting clearly incompetent teachers. It's their
job and they do it well.

> > 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 organization1s 100th annual convention. Among the

> > speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California

> > Teachers Association (CTA). 3The strike as a weapon for teachers is
> > inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,2
> > Corey told the crowd. 3You can1t go out on an illegal strike one day and
> > expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.2
> >
> > Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May 2011, when the CTA�now the single
> > most powerful special interest in California�organized a 3State of
> > Emergency2 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 week1s

> > centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of
> > teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system,

> > who clogged the building1s 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 CTA1s notions of
> > 3good citizenship2 had vanished.

> >
> > So had high-quality public education in California. Seen as a national

> > leader in the classroom during the 1950s and 1960s, the country1s

> > largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes of
> > Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings.

> > The Golden State1s 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

> > system1s 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 union1s power grew, its ranks

> > nearly doubled, from 170,000 in the late 1970s to approximately 325,000

> > today. By following the union1s 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 Rodda1s passage.
> >
> > The CTA1s most important resource, however, isn1t a pool of workers
> > ready to strike; it1s a fat bank account fed by mandatory dues that can
> > run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the union1s income was more
> > than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA doesn1t need its
> > members1 consent to spend this money on politicking, whether that1s

> > 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
> > industry combined.
> >
> > 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 schools1 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 teachers1 salaries. Prop. 981s malign effects
> > weren1t limited to education, however: by essentially making public

> > school funding an entitlement rather than a matter of discretionary

> > spending, it hastened California1s erosion of fiscal discipline. In
> > recent years, estimates of mandatory spending1s share of the state1s

> > 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. 3There
> > are some proposals so evil that they should never go before the voters,2
> > explained D. A. Weber, the CTA1s 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 weren1t 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, 3claiming that a witches1 coven would be eligible for
> > the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.2 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 proposition1s 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. 1741s backers had been outspent by a factor of eight,

> > with the CTA alone dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.
> >

> > As the CTA1s power grew, it learned that it could extract policy

> > concessions simply by employing its aggressive PR machine. In 1996, with

> > the state1s 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 state1s history. But it worked out

> > well for the CTA, whose ranks and coffers were swelled by all those new
> > teachers.
> >

> > The union1s 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 3paycheck protection,2 which
> > compels unions to get their members1 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 government1s

> > 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 area1s 1967 riots, Locke was intended
> > to provide a quality education to the neighborhood1s 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

> > school1s 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 3from first in the

> > number of campus crime reports in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School

> > District] to thirteenth,2 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 Wells1s 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 3a
> > total fabrication,2 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 union1s 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 school1s 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 state1s 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, it1s seldom because of their
> > classroom performance: a 2009 expos� by the Los 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 doesn1t 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 3one of the
> > most complicated civil legal matters anywhere.2 As the Times noted, 3The

> > 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.2 The commission was also the reason that, as the
> > newspaper continued, the district was 3unsuccessful in firing a male

> > middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the

> > metal shop2; the district had failed to 3prove that the two were having
> > sex.2
> >
> > Another regulatory body dominated by CTA influence is the state1s

> > 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 commission1s makeup. In September 2011, for instance,
> > one of Governor Jerry Brown1s appointments to the CTC was Kathy Harris,

> > who had previously been a CTA lobbyist to the body.
> >

> > The CTA1s most recent crusade for job security made clear that the union
> > was prepared to jeopardize the financial future of California1s 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 didn1t take into account the
> > state1s downturn in revenues�meaning that schools could budget for
> > activities even though there wasn1t 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 state1s
> > median household pulls down. That1s for an average annual workload of

> > 180 days, only two-thirds of the average total in the private sector.

> > Don1t 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 that1s

> > 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 state1s economy in tumult, however, prospects for the teachers1

> > 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 Analyst1s 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 won1t be

> > possible if its next generation of would-be entrepreneurs attends one of

> > the Golden State1s 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 won1t come from elected officials, at least
> > for now. The CTA1s size, financial resources, and influence with the
> > state1s 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. It1s unlikely that salvation will come from Governor Brown,
> > either. The man who originally opened the door for the CTA1s 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 CTA1s top lobbyist. Brown also avoided including any changes to

> > CalSTRS in his October announcement of proposed pension reforms,

> > probably because he had learned Schwarzenegger1s 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 California1s
> > pundit class by getting the state legislature to pass the nation1s first
> > 3parent trigger2 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 3parents were

> > never given the full picture . . . [or] informed of the great progress

> > already being made2�despite the fact that McKinley1s 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
> > 3insufficient2 on a handful of technicalities, such as missing dates and
> > typos. Though the union1s 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 California1s public school

> > system. Despite their inferior resources, they have fought the CTA not
> > by participating in direct political conflict but by undermining the

> > union1s moral standing. These organizations reframe the education

> > question in starkly humanitarian terms: In the California public school

> > system, are anyone1s interests more important than the students1? It was

> > a question that the CTA itself might have asked back when teachers

> > entered the classroom to 3teach good citizenship.2

[Harold Burton]

Not exactly. Some pretty good examples of bad are described below, note
how the teachers' unions defend them.

Troy Senik
The Worst Union in America
How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and
crippled the state
Spring 2012

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.�

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
industry combined.

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 expos� by the Los 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.�

[really real]

>>
>> Believe it or not, teacher unions are trying to protect public
>> education. Vilifying them is bad politics.
>
>
> Total nonsense. Read the rest of the article below. Teachers' unions
> are on record for protecting clearly incompetent teachers. It's their
> job and they do it well.
>

Not true. A teachers union protect the rights of teachers, including
incompetent teachers. An incompetent teacher deserves a fair process
when he gets fired. Without a fair process, no teacher is safe from
being fired for political or vindictive reasons.

Its the same as criminals having the right to a fair trial.

Any principal who can't fire an incompetent teacher is incompetent.

[gtr]

There are lots of metaphors one can use instead of dealing with
specifics. It's more fun too!

[really real]

>> Indeed, the "good" teachers are supposedly the ones that rise to the
>> top and become administrators. Others think that teachers who become
>> administrators are teachers who want to leave the classroom and
>> therefore weren't really good teachers.
>>
>> Still others think that the scum rises to the top
>
> There are lots of metaphors one can use instead of dealing with
> specifics. It's more fun too!
>

Specifically, in my teaching career, the principals are not the ones who
knew the difference between a good and bad teacher. Almost all the
principals had been P.E. teachers, and they had a conflict between the
kind of sports team-man ship they promoted and the kind of real critical
thinking that a good teacher tries to impart.

And very little of this critical thinking shows up in the standardized
tests.

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but

You aren't familiar with the acheivement test score data, are you?

[gtr]

On 2012-07-25 20:17:50 +0000, Rockinghorse Winner said:

>> If you give a rip about your kids future, I'm not sure how government
>> funding of a school destroys a brain more rapidly than being taught a
>> fucked-up curriculum.
>
> You aren't familiar with the acheivement test score data, are you?

I'm not, though I have three friends that are teachers in the public
school system that would talk my ear off if I let them over how badly
they hate the "no child left behind" approach and the standardized
tests.

I also know that Christianists have been trying to destroy the American
public school system for a a good 30 years so they can make a lot of
money, so I don't think abandonment is a good alternative to a broken
public system.

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but
gtr <x...@yyy.zzz> wrote:

The schools have been dying a slow death since the 60's, when standards
started to decline, (and the students shortly followed suit). No surprise
there, as students will generally not rise above the expectations set for
them, which in the inner city are not very exalted.

Those who run private schools, most of which are religious, found a good
niche for educating whichever students were well off enough or lucky enough
to escape the dropout mills. I doubt they would want to destroy the public
schools anyway - without the collosal failure that is public secondary
education, they would lose half their student body....

[Seth]

In article <afiu081b83ct73obo...@4ax.com>,

Steve Daniels <sdan...@gorge.net> wrote:
>On Mon, 23 Jul 2012 18:30:07 -0700, against all advice, something
>compelled really real <reall...@shaw.ca>, to say:

>>You'd feed a kid peanuts!!???! Kids nowadays are allergic to peanuts
>
>You can feed a kid a peanut if it's wearing a helmet.

The kid or the peanut?

Seth

[gtr]

On 2012-07-25 23:28:56 +0000, Rockinghorse Winner said:

> The schools have been dying a slow death since the 60's, when standards
> started to decline, (and the students shortly followed suit). No surprise
> there, as students will generally not rise above the expectations set for
> them, which in the inner city are not very exalted.

Actually it depends on how you parse the numbers "when they began their
decline" frequently starts with when they began collecting data by more
rigorous standards. And they began adding rural and ethnic communities
into the full statistical mix. And all kinds of other factors.

Urban school have been in conspicuous decline--in some urban areas but
not others. The poorer the area the worse the decline. So perhaps
money and a safe environment is more important that the evil government
versus the Religionists.

> Those who run private schools, most of which are religious, found a good
> niche for educating whichever students were well off enough or lucky enough
> to escape the dropout mills.

Well off enough to avoid dropout mills. Is that kind of nonsensical?
If they are well off enough they are likely going to a good school,
therefore not a dropout mill.

> I doubt they would want to destroy the public schools anyway...

The sooner they can get Federal money to Christianist schools the
better, and the more the better. That's the philosophy. And also they
get to produce good tithing citizens, and get more money for their
Christianist activities as well.

It's ALWAYS about money.

[Rockinghorse Winner]

* It may have been the liquor talking, but
gtr <x...@yyy.zzz> wrote:

Apparantly so. :\

[Steve Daniels]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:17:02 +0000 (UTC), against all advice,
something compelled se...@panix.com (Seth), to say:

The kid, especially if the helmet is made of peanuts.


--

Having Mitt Romney at your cocktail party is the social equivalent of two people not turning up.

- Timothy Stanley 4/25/12