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A court ruling on Tuesday striking down job protections for teachers in California deals a sharp blow to unions... Read more: 

We can't call it a tidal wave because the numbers involved are still relatively small, but there are certainly more local affiliates of the National Education via Michigan, Iowa Locals Leave...

Teachers unions face moment of...

CUHS teachers association leave union | teachers, association, union - Corning...

Three Small Locals Oust California Teachers...

Teachers Vote Out CTA, Opt For Independent Model Sacramento, CA – In the past few weeks, three different teachers’ groups had the opportunity to vote on whether to continue to be represented by the California...

It appears that Governor Jerry Brown’s recently unveiled 12-Point Public Employee Pension Reform Plan is gaining traction over a wide swath of California voters and not just fiscal conservatives. Periodically the Sacramento Bee publishes an interesting debate between two writers titled “Head to...

September 6, 2012 Dear Colleague, I recently met with Rafael Ruano, a lawyer, who has a very interesting proposition for the teachers of California. His message in its entirety is pasted in below. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to...

CTA spent over $200 million on politics in the decade prior to 2010. What should be an outrage to CTA members is that it was ONLY $200 million! That is a little more than 10% of their huge budget, where is the other 90% going?Of course, it goes to a bloated CTA and NEA organization...

 A recently obtained a list of CTA contributions from its Association for Better Citizenship political action committee shows that a proportionally great deal of it  is going to San Bernadino and San Fransisco. 

Teachers Vote Out CTA

Teachers Vote Out CTA, Opt For Independent Model

Sacramento, CA – In the past few weeks, three different teachers’ groups had the opportunity to vote on whether to continue to be represented by the California Teachers Association (CTA) or be represented by an independent association comprised of their own members. When the votes were counted by officials from the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), teachers in each group voted overwhelmingly in favor of an independent model and against CTA.

Teachers from Corning Union High School District, Millville Elementary School District, and Springville Union Elementary School District submitted petitions to decertify CTA as the recognized representative of their teacher bargaining units. The teachers also indicated that they wanted to be represented by newly created teacher associations that are not affiliated with CTA. Instead, these independent associations may choose to retain a labor law firm to provide them legal services.

“For those of us that supported this change, it came down to saving a substantial amount of money in dues, securing a higher level of service for our members, and regaining control of our Association and our agenda,” states Lance Alldrin, President of the newly created Corning Independent Teachers Association (and former President of the Corning Teachers Association, the CTA affiliate at Corning Union HSD).

California teachers pay $1,000 or more in union dues under the CTA model. Independent teachers associations have complete autonomy on setting dues, but the typical savings is at least $500 per year for each teacher.

“We are excited to be able to partner with some tremendous teachers throughout the state,” says Rafael Ruano, attorney with Goyette & Associates, the Sacramento-based law firm that assisted these three teachers’ groups through the decertification process and is now continuing to represent the new independent associations. “Teachers have been essentially stuck in a monopoly arrangement with CTA charging extremely high dues and providing a level of service that many teachers feel is not a good value,” explains Ruano, “with Goyette, we can provide teachers with ready access to attorneys and tailored representation that allows each association to focus their energy and resources on the issues that matter most to them.”

While CTA is a major player in California politics, that is not necessarily a good thing for some teachers. “While we appreciate the things that CTA does with regard to lobbying for educational funding, many of our teachers felt disconnected to CTA as they have used dues to support social issues that many of us don’t feel have a direct connection to education,” offers Alldrin.

“We expect another round of decertification petitions to be filed next year,” says Ruano, and encourages any teachers interested in learning about the process to visit www.svorcan.info/caindependentteachers.

GOVERNOR BROWN’S 12-POINT PENSION REFORM PLAN GAINING TRACTION

It appears that Governor Jerry Brown’s recently unveiled 12-Point Public Employee Pension Reform Plan is gaining traction over a wide swath of California voters and not just fiscal conservatives. Periodically the Sacramento Bee publishes an interesting debate between two writers titled “Head to Head.” Head to Head pits conservative Ben Boychuk and liberal Pia Lopez on a wide range of political issues. The November 2, 2011-piece caught my eye. The question debated between Mr. Boychuk and Ms. Lopez was: “Does Brown’s pension reform plan go far enough in curbing costs?” Not surprisingly, Mr. Boychuk says it does not but give Governor Brown credit for a good start. I was most surprised, in fact shocked, that Ms. Lopez supported Governor Brown’s pension reform plan. Ms. Lopez sets forth a thoughtful analysis of the Brown Plan and concludes that while it does go far enough it is in fact a good idea.

Ms. Lopez’s opinions are consistent with a recent LA Times poll which found that over 75% of State Democrats supported significant public employee pension reform. California’s Public Sector employee unions should note the direction of public opinion and plan accordingly. While there seems to be wide public support for the Brown Plan, it still has to pass the Democrat-controlled Legislature before it ever reaches voters as a ballot initiative–a total longshot. Notwithstanding, the Brown Plan is tame compared to other pension reform plans that may show up on next year’s ballot such as a 100% defined contribution plan and mandatory freezes on all pay levels tackling the problem of the massive underfunding of existing pension obligations. Recently, a Little Hoover Commission report found that the ten largest pension plans in California had a collective 240 billion shortfall over the next 30 years. Critics argue that the Brown Plan does not come remotely close to meeting this shortfall.

For today’s California public sector employee union it is imperative that they keep their enemies close and their friends closer.

California Teachers Empowerment Network Letter

September 6, 2012

Dear Colleague,

I recently met with Rafael Ruano, a lawyer, who has a very interesting proposition for the teachers of California. His message in its entirety is pasted in below. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Or if you’d like to speak with Mr. Ruano directly, his contact information is included at the end of his message.

Sincerely,

Larry Sand

A Better Model

The big teachers’ unions have been taking from teachers for decades, often pushing policies that build their membership and power but don’t necessarily improve working conditions or wages for the very teachers they claim to represent – let alone improve the educational system. The power of CTA in California seems too big, too entrenched to ever change. But what if there was a better model, and the shift to that model could happen one school district at a time?

In California, individual teachers can opt out of paying a portion of their union dues by becoming an agency fee payer. That can save a teacher hundreds of dollars a year, but they are still forced to pay as much as $700 a year or more. Teachers who become agency fee payers also lose many benefits of union membership, including the right to vote on their contracts.

The Better Model is an independent public teacher association that controls its own destiny. By contracting out for expert legal and labor representation, but retaining for its members all policy and decision-making authority, teachers can easily save half of their current dues ($500/year or more) and get better and more responsive representation than the big union model.

CTA apologists will say that such a model would be risky and leave the teachers unprotected by the vast resources of the statewide organization. The thing is that tens of thousands of California public employees are already doing it. Hundreds of public employee associations are independent – meaning, they are simply not attached to CTA, SEIU, AFSCME, or one of the other large national and international unions. Public employee associations represent California public employees that work for the state, counties, cities and special districts, including police officers, nurses, managers, firefighters, general employees, and everything in between. There are even public school teachers operating under this model, including traditional public and charter schools.

This model works. Ask around. Chances are that your local police officers’ association or deputy sheriffs’ association are not affiliated with a statewide or national union (though they probably belong to a lobbying organization and/or legal defense fund) and they pay substantially less than teachers do in dues.

The truth is that CTA and CFT have had a virtual monopoly of teacher representation in California. While we can debate the long term success or failure of such representation statewide and nationally, there is no doubt that locally, the big union model is not responsive, not independent…but it is very expensive.

California Independent Teachers was founded by labor and legal professionals that have been working for independent employee associations for decades. We know that this works; we make our livings from making sure that we provide superior value and responsive representation to our association clients.

If you are interested in talking to someone with CIT about their model and about the steps that need to be taken to decertify CTA in your district, go to www.svorcan.info/caindependentteachers or call (888) 993-1600. Thank you.

Rafael Ruano

In Response to Troy Senik's Article: Worst Union in America

CTA spent over $200 million on politics in the decade prior to 2010. What should be an outrage to CTA members is that it was ONLY $200 million! That is a little more than 10% of their huge budget, where is the other 90% going?

Of course, it goes to a bloated CTA and NEA organization that has hundreds of very well-paid employees. It certainly does not go towards CTA labor negotiators or attorneys. Local CTA associations rely on teachers to do the heavy lifting on bargaining and negotiations teams, getting CTA negotiators only when absolutely necessary. Discipline cases and school site problems are handled primarily by teachers (stewards) instead of CTA attorneys (they only have 11 CTA attorneys on staff and actually say on their website that they would be too busy if CTA members were allowed to call them directly with questions…!).

California teachers pay about $1,000/year in union dues and 80% goes to CTA and NEA. Of the rest that stays local, a huge chunk goes to CTA and NEA anyway, in the form of conference and training fees for CTA and NEA events. 

Teachers do have an alternative. They can decertify from CTA and be independent teacher associations. http://svorcan.info/caindependentteachers/

Police, fire and many other public sector employees in California often do not belong to a big union, but rather pay much more modest dues to their local assoaciation, which uses those dues to hire labor attorneys and negotiators to handle the association’s needs. There are certainly problems with California’s economy and budget woes, but public employees did not cause the recession. Public employee associations that work collaboratively with the City, County or District they work for can and have been able to keep public services working despite the economy and the state government’s ineptitude. 

CTA, though, is simply sucking money from teachers without giving much in return, other than helping perpetuate a broken system statewide.

 

Read the Article below or click here http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-association.html

TROY SENIK
The Worst Union in America
How the California Teachers Association betrayed the schools and crippled the state

In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization’s 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). “The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,” Corey told the crowd. “You can’t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.”

Illustration by Sean Delonas

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SEAN DELONAS

Fast-forward nearly 50 years to May 2011, when the CTA—now the single most powerful special interest in California—organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for higher taxes in one of the most overtaxed states in the nation. A CTA document suggested dozens of ways for teachers to protest, including following state legislators incessantly, attempting to close major transportation arteries, and boycotting companies, such as Microsoft, that backed education reform. The week’s centerpiece was an occupation of the state capitol by hundreds of teachers and student sympathizers from the Cal State University system, who clogged the building’s hallways and refused to leave. Police arrested nearly 100 demonstrators for trespassing, including then–CTA president David Sanchez. The protesting teachers had left their jobs behind, even though their students were undergoing important statewide tests that week. With the passage of 50 years, the CTA’s notions of “good citizenship” had vanished.

So had high-quality public education in California. Seen as a national leader in the classroom during the 1950s and 1960s, the country’s largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes of Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings. The Golden State’s education tailspin has been blamed on everything from class sizes to the property-tax restrictions enforced by Proposition 13 to an influx of Spanish-speaking students. But no portrait of the system’s downfall would be complete without a depiction of the CTA, a political behemoth that blocks meaningful education reform, protects failing and even criminal educators, and inflates teacher pay and benefits to unsustainable levels.

The CTA began its transformation in September 1975, when Governor Jerry Brown signed the Rodda Act, which allowed California teachers to bargain collectively. Within 18 months, 600 of the 1,000 local CTA chapters moved to collective bargaining. As the union’s power grew, its ranks nearly doubled, from 170,000 in the late 1970s to approximately 325,000 today. By following the union’s directions and voting in blocs in low-turnout school-board elections, teachers were able to handpick their own supervisors—a system that private-sector unionized workers would envy. Further, the organization that had once forsworn the strike began taking to the picket lines. Today, the CTA boasts that it has launched more than 170 strikes in the years since Rodda’s passage.

The CTA’s most important resource, however, isn’t a pool of workers ready to strike; it’s a fat bank account fed by mandatory dues that can run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the union’s income was more than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA doesn’t need its members’ consent to spend this money on politicking, whether that’s making campaign contributions or running advocacy campaigns to obstruct reform. According to figures from the California Fair Political Practices Commission (a public institution) in 2010, the CTA had spent more than $210 million over the previous decade on political campaigning—more than any other donor in the state. In fact, the CTA outspent the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, and the tobacco industrycombined.

All this money has helped the union rack up an imposing number of victories. The first major win came in 1988, with the passage of Proposition 98. That initiative compelled California to spend more than 40 percent of its annual budget on education in grades K–12 and community college. The spending quota eliminated schools’ incentive to get value out of every dollar: since funding was locked in, there was no need to make things run cost-effectively. Thanks to union influence on local school boards, much of the extra money—about $450 million a year—went straight into teachers’ salaries. Prop. 98’s malign effects weren’t limited to education, however: by essentially making public school funding an entitlement rather than a matter of discretionary spending, it hastened California’s erosion of fiscal discipline. In recent years, estimates of mandatory spending’s share of the state’s budget have run as high as 85 percent, making it highly difficult for the legislature to confront the severe budget crises of the past decade.

In 1991, the CTA took to the ramparts again to combat Proposition 174, a ballot initiative that would have made California a national leader in school choice by giving families universal access to school vouchers. When initiative supporters began circulating the petitions necessary to get it onto the ballot, some CTA members tried to intimidate petition signers physically. The union also encouraged people to sign the petition multiple times in order to throw the process into chaos. “There are some proposals so evil that they should never go before the voters,” explained D. A. Weber, the CTA’s president. One of the consultants who organized the petitions testified in a court declaration at the time that people with union ties had offered him $400,000 to refrain from distributing them. Another claimed that a CTA member had tried to run him off the road after a debate on school choice.

Weber and his followers weren’t successful in keeping the proposition off the ballot, but they did manage to delay it for two years, giving themselves time to organize a counteroffensive. They ran ads, recalls Ken Khachigian, the former White House speechwriter who headed the Yes on 174 campaign, “claiming that a witches’ coven would be eligible for the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.” They threatened to field challengers against political candidates who supported school choice. They bullied members of the business community who contributed money to the pro-voucher effort. When In-N-Out Burger donated $25,000 to support Prop. 174, for instance, the CTA threatened to press schools to drop contracts with the company.

In 1993, Prop. 174 finally came to a statewide vote. The union had persuaded March Fong Eu, the CTA-endorsed secretary of state, to alter the proposition’s heading on the ballot from PARENTAL CHOICE to EDUCATION VOUCHERS—a change in wording that cost Prop. 174 ten points in the polls, according to Myron Lieberman in his book The Teacher Unions. The initiative, which had originally enjoyed 2–1 support among California voters, managed to garner only a little over 30 percent of the vote. Prop. 174’s backers had been outspent by a factor of eight, with the CTA alone dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.

Illustration by Sean Delonas

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.

Illustration by Sean Delonas

One of the most noticeable changes at Locke has ramifications statewide: when Green Dot took over, it required all teachers to reapply for their jobs. It hired back only about one-third of them. That approach is unimaginable in the rest of the state’s public schools, where a teaching job is essentially a lifetime sinecure. A tiny 0.03 percent of California teachers are dismissed after three or more years on the job. In the past decade, the LAUSD—home to 33,000 teachers—has dismissed only four. Even when teachers are fired, it’s seldom because of their classroom performance: a 2009 exposé by theLos Angeles Times found that only 20 percent of successful dismissals in the state had anything to do with teaching ability. Most terminations involved teachers behaving either obscenely or criminally. The National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based education-reform organization, gave California a D-minus on its teacher-firing policies in its 2010 national report card.

Responsibility for this sorry situation goes largely to the CTA, which has won concessions that make firing a teacher so difficult that educators can usually keep their jobs for any offense that doesn’t cross into outright criminality. With the cost of the proceedings regularly running near half a million dollars, many districts choose to shuffle problem employees around rather than try to fire them.

Even outright offenses are no guarantee of removal, thanks to CTA influence. When a fired teacher appeals his case beyond the school board, it goes to the Commission on Professional Competence—two of whose three members are also teachers, one of them chosen by the educator whose case is being heard. The CTA has stacked this process as well by bargaining to require evidentiary standards equal to those used in civil-court procedures and coaching the teachers on the panels. One veteran school-district lawyer calls the appeals process “one of the most complicated civil legal matters anywhere.” As the Times noted, “The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but [the Commission on Professional Competence] balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh.” The commission was also the reason that, as the newspaper continued, the district was “unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop”; the district had failed to “prove that the two were having sex.”

Another regulatory body dominated by CTA influence is the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the institution responsible for removing the credentials of misbehaving teachers. A report released in 2011 by California state auditor Elaine Howle found that the commission had a backlog of approximately 12,600 cases, with responses sometimes taking as long as three years. Because the CTC—which was created by an act sponsored by the CTA—is made up of members appointed by the governor, the CTA is able to bring its political pressure to bear on determining the commission’s makeup. In September 2011, for instance, one of Governor Jerry Brown’s appointments to the CTC was Kathy Harris, who had previously been a CTA lobbyist to the body.

The CTA’s most recent crusade for job security made clear that the union was prepared to jeopardize the financial future of California’s schools. Last June, it vigorously pushed (and Governor Brown hastily signed) Assembly Bill 114, which prevented any teacher layoffs or program cuts in the coming fiscal year and removed the requirement that school districts present balanced budget plans. The bill also forced public schools to prepare budget estimates that didn’t take into account the state’s downturn in revenues—meaning that schools could budget for activities even though there wasn’t money to pay for them. Since then, state officials have forecast that revenues for the 2012 fiscal year will be $3.2 billion lower than they were when the schools were making their budgets. Eventually, accommodations to reality will have to be made—at which time the CTA will, of course, use them to plead hardship.

Such pleas seem impudent coming from the highest-paid teachers in the nation, with an average annual salary of $68,000. For a bit of perspective, if two California teachers get married (not an unusual occurrence) and each makes the average salary, their combined annual income would be $136,000, nearly $80,000 more than what the state’s median household pulls down. That’s for an average annual workload of 180 days, only two-thirds of the average total in the private sector. Don’t forget retirement benefits: after 30 years, a California teacher may retire with a pension equal to about 75 percent of his working salary. That pension averages more than $51,000 a year—more than working teachers earn in more than half the states in the nation. And that’s just an average; from 2005 to 2011, the number of education employees pulling down more than $100,000 a year in pensions skyrocketed from 700 to 5,400.

With the state’s economy in tumult, however, prospects for the teachers’ retirement fund look grim. CalSTRS is now officially estimated to have about $56 billion in liabilities and about 30 years left before it runs dry, though many outside analysts think that those numbers are too optimistic. A report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in November 2011 estimated that restoring full funding to CalSTRS would require finding an extra $3.9 billion a year for at least 30 years.

If California is to generate the economic growth necessary to mitigate its coming fiscal reckoning, it will need to retain its historical role as a leading site for innovation and entrepreneurship. But that won’t be possible if its next generation of would-be entrepreneurs attends one of the Golden State’s many mediocre or failing schools. And what little economic dynamism is left in California will be impeded if the union gets its way and the state increases its already weighty tax burden.

Meaningful change probably won’t come from elected officials, at least for now. The CTA’s size, financial resources, and influence with the state’s regnant Democratic Party are enough to kill most pieces of hostile legislation. For years, school reformers fantasized about a transformative figure who could shift the balance of power from the union through force of charisma and personality, taking his case directly to the people. Yet when that figure seemed to emerge in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, even he proved unable to alter the status quo, with his 2005 ballot initiatives to reform tenure, school financing, and political spending by unions all going down to decisive defeat. It’s unlikely that salvation will come from Governor Brown, either. The man who originally opened the door for the CTA’s collective bargaining has remained a steadfast ally of the union, firing four pro-reform members of the state board of education in his first few days in office and appointing a new group that included Patricia Ann Rucker, the CTA’s top lobbyist. Brown also avoided including any changes to CalSTRS in his October announcement of proposed pension reforms, probably because he had learned Schwarzenegger’s lesson that irking the CTA can lead to the demise of a broader agenda.

Parents, however, are starting to revolt against CTA orthodoxy. Unlike elected officials, parents—who want nothing more than a good education for their kids—are hard for the union to demonize. In early 2010, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit called Parent Revolution shocked California’s pundit class by getting the state legislature to pass the nation’s first “parent trigger” law, which lets parents at failing schools force districts to undertake certain reforms, including converting schools into independent charters. The law caps the number of schools eligible for reform at 75, but if early results are successful, it will become hard for Californians to avoid comparing thriving charter schools with failing traditional ones.

The CTA is fighting back, of course. In 2010, when 61 percent of parents at McKinley Elementary School in the blighted L.A. neighborhood of Compton opted to pull the trigger, the CTA claimed that “parents were never given the full picture . . . [or] informed of the great progress already being made”—despite the fact that McKinley’s performance was ranked beneath nearly all other inner-city schools in the state. Several Hispanic parents in the district also said that members of the union had threatened to report them to immigration authorities if they signed the petition. Eventually, the Compton Unified school board—heavily lobbied by the CTA—dismissed the petition signatures, with no discussion, as “insufficient” on a handful of technicalities, such as missing dates and typos. Though the union’s power had proved too much for the McKinley parents, an enterprising charter school operator opened two new campuses in the neighborhood anyway.

Institutions like Locke High School, Green Dot, Parent Revolution, and the Compton charters are glimmers of hope for California’s public school system. Despite their inferior resources, they have fought the CTA not by participating in direct political conflict but by undermining the union’s moral standing. These organizations reframe the education question in starkly humanitarian terms: In the California public school system, are anyone’s interests more important than the students’? It was a question that the CTA itself might have asked back when teachers entered the classroom to “teach good citizenship.”

Troy Senik is a senior fellow at the Center for Individual Freedom and an editor at Ricochet.com.

Where Is Your CTA Money Going?

 A recently obtained a list of CTA contributions from its Association for Better Citizenship political action committee shows that a proportionally great deal of it  is going to San Bernadino and San Fransisco. 

For November 2011 local elections, CTA donated $14,432 to county party committees, ranging from $80 to the Tehama County Democratic Central Committee to $3,500 to the Orange County Democratic Central Committee. 

In addition, the union PAC contributed $226,542 to at least 63 local elections. These ranged from $350 to the Chualar Teachers Association to support the school board candidacy of Rosalba Moreno  to $20,000 contributions each to the United Educators of San Francisco PAC and the San Bernardino Teachers Association PAC (three of four school board winners).

Here’s the full list of PAC contributions to local affiliates and their ultimate destination, if available:

Alvord – $3,000

Baldwin Park – $3,234 ($1,078 each to Jack White, Natalie Ybarra, and Mary Ferrer, school board candidates)

Banning – $2,000

Beverly Hills – $2,000

Brawley – $1,500

Burlingame – $600 (Measure E – education parcel tax)

Chaffey – $4,250

Charter Oaks – $1,800

Chualar – $350 (Rosalba Moreno, school board candidate)

Citrus – $2,000

College of the Canyons – $10,000

Compton – $5,000

Culver City – $3,000 (Nancy Goldberg, school board candidate)

Dixon – $1,400

Eastside – $2,000

El Centro – $500 (Patricia Dunnam, school board candidate)

El Monte Union – $1,500

El Segundo – $2,000

Empire – $1,000

Eureka – $2,500

Fairfield-Suisun – $9,466

Garvey – $1,450

Hacienda La Puente – $4,200

Hart – $8,000 ($4,000 each to Gloria Mercado-Fortine and Steve Sturgeon, school board candidates)

La Canada – $1,000

Laguna Salada – $830 (Yes on L – parcel tax increase)

Las Virgenes – $9,000 (Measure K – parcel tax)

Lynwood – $5,000

Modesto –  $9,000

Mountain View – $1,890

Newark – $575 (Measure G – school bond)

Newhall – $4,536 (Measure E – school bond)

Norwalk-La Mirada – $6,300

Oakdale – $4,000 (Synthia Jones – $3,000, Tina Shatswell – $1,000, both school board candidates)

Pacific Grove – $2,000 (Measure V – parcel tax)

Palmdale – $13,500

Perris – $1,000

Pomona – $6,000

Potter Valley – $1,000 ($500 each to school board candidates Tammie Smith and Diane Johnson)

Rio Hondo – $10,000

Riverbank – $2,000

Riverside – $4,000

Rosemead – $500 (Qui Nguyen, school board candidate)

Salinas – $1,600

San Bernardino – $20,000

San Francisco – $20,000

Sequoia – $5,000

South Tahoe – $1,400

Sulphur Springs – $2,200 ($1,100 each to Denis De Figueiredo and Rochelle Weinstein, school board candidates)

Sylvan – $3,436 (Steve Miller – $2,000, Chuck Rivera – $1,436, both school board candidates)

Temple City – $1,925

Ukiah – $3,500

Vacaville – $5,000

Visalia – $3,000 googletest

Westside Union – $1,400

Wilsona – $1,200

In each instance, the above money is in addition to whatever money may be raised and spent by the local affiliate. In large cities, this may be substantial. In smaller towns, this may be non-existent, giving the local teachers’ union power over local elections far beyond its numbers.