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.