The Worst Union in America

[Limey]

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 exposé 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.


http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-
association.html