(A very happy sesquicentennial to the California Teachers Association. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

150 years of the California Teachers Association

By Dean E. Vogel

Today, May 9, marks the 150th anniversary of the California Teachers Association. Between the time that President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and the time he delivered the Gettysburg Address, John Swett founded the California Educational Society, which was to become the California Teachers Association.

It’s a long history and it’s a proud history. Since its inception in 1863, CTA has been at the forefront of every major victory for California’s public schools and colleges. You may be interested to know that:

In 1866, CTA secured funding to establish free public schools for all children in California.

In 1911, CTA led the fight to establish community colleges.

In 1927, CTA won a major legal victory when the state Supreme Court ruled that a school board couldn’t fire a female teacher simply because she got married.

In the 1940s, CTA emerged as one of the few “mainstream” organizations in California to protest against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Edit by Brian: There is much more over the flip.

In 1988, CTA drafted and won passage of Prop. 98, the minimum funding guarantee for K-14 education.

In 1995, CTA won Class Size Reduction for grades K-3 after a massive media and lobby campaign.

In 2005, CTA won a major Prop. 98 lawsuit against the state and created the Quality Education Investment Act, which used the settlement to fund proven reforms at lower-performing schools.

And in 2012, CTA was instrumental in the passage of Prop. 30, preventing $6 billion in cuts to schools, and for the third time defeated an onerous “paycheck deception” initiative.

For 150 years, with the help of their union, teachers have helped make sure all students have an opportunity at a quality public education. And we continue to do so today. As classroom experts, teachers know firsthand what works. That’s why the California Teachers Association has been championing proven reforms for all students, especially those who are struggling.

Through its internationally recognized and innovative Quality Education Investment Act, CTA is leading efforts to make sure at-risk students get the resources they need to succeed. QEIA uses research-based reforms like smaller class sizes, more counselors and better teacher training. The program’s success can be seen in communities across the state as it helps close the achievement gap for many lower-income students.

Under the umbrella of the CTA Foundation for Teacher and Learning, the Institute for Teaching is an incubator for educational innovation. Through its successful grants, teachers are able to propose and lead change based on what is working in their classrooms.

After years of effort, CTA members have created and are advancing a framework for fair teacher evaluation that puts the emphasis on constructive reform, not punishment. We believe the goal of any evaluation system is to strengthen the knowledge, skills and practices of teachers to improve student learning.

We are excited to be celebrating 150 years of advocacy on behalf of our profession and our students. We know there are many challenges ahead for California’s schools, but working in partnership with the public, we know we can meet them just as we have for the past century and a half.

Dean E. Vogel is president of the California Teachers Association.

Former Assembly Speaker hopes to mediate with California Teachers

by Brian Leubitz

If you are planning to come to the CDP convention in Sacramento in a couple of weeks, it will be no secret that the teachers are an important constituency within the party. And they are critical for elected officials due to their willingness to fight, and spend, for the causes they consider important. Fabian Nunez knew this as Speaker, and he still knows it. But now he might get a chance to see the other side of labor, as he has agreed to represent Michelle Rhee’s “StudentsFirst” organization, a group that focuses on school reform, the extensive use of metrics for teachers, and being something of an opponent to teachers’ unions.

In an interview, Nunez, a Democrat who cut his political teeth as a union operative, said he hopes to play the role of mediator for StudentsFirst and labor leaders, though he made it clear that he thought the CTA had abused its clout with lawmakers. He cited the union’s successful efforts last year to kill legislation that would have sped the dismissal process for teachers who abused students.

Teachers unions said the bill was an attack on teachers’ due-process rights, giving school boards, rather than an administrative judge and two educators, final authority over dismissals.

“When that bill died, I think it gave a lot of people heartache,” Nunez said. “I think there are a lot of labor Democrats who are coming to the conclusion that we can’t read from the CTA script anymore.”(LA Times)

Of course, that bill has become a flashpoint for a lot of so-called reformers, but when it comes down to it, both major teachers unions have worked on negotiating a bill that can work to move potentially abusive teachers out of the classroom quickly while still maintaining a fair process. And just last week, Sen. Alex Padilla, the author of that original controversial bill, signed on to work with Asm. Joan Buchanan on the subject. Padilla is now the principal coauthor of AB 375 – Teacher Discipline and Dismissal and AB  1338 – Mandatory Reporting of Sexual and Child Abuse. (Press release here or over the flip)

But the ills of California education can be plainly spotted by anybody who understands simple arithmetic. We are chronically underfunding our schools. There are only 4 states that spend less per pupil than us, all of which are lower cost states. We are 43rd in educational results, perhaps higher than where we should be given our spending.

Our schools need additional resources, so teachers aren’t forced to spend their own money buying supplies for their students and that all students have the tools to be successful. I don’t doubt that the former Speaker has the best of intentions for our students, but maybe he can help push for some additional resources while he’s at the work of reforming. Our students, and their teachers, deserve better.

Photo credit: Former Speaker Fabian Nunez with Michael Moore, courtesy Randy Bayne

PRESS RELEASE Padilla and Buchanan Join Forces to Protect Children

Dear Calitics Community,

In solidarity with California teachers sitting-in in Sacramento, I sent out the following press release earlier today:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, May 6, 2011

Contact: Campaign Press Office (916) 996-9170 [email protected]

CAPITOL OCCUPATION: Congressional Candidate & Teacher Endorses Emergency

Actions; Marcy Winograd to Use Campaign Phone Bank to ‘Save our Schools’

VENICE – Marcy Winograd, a public high school teacher and congressional

candidate (CA-36) will use her campaign phone bank to support the California Teachers

Association “State of Emergency” week of action, May 9-13, at the State

Capitol and across the state.

The press release continues below the jump…

In solidarity with teachers sitting-in in Sacramento, lobbying

legislators throughout the state and tabling on college campuses,

Winograd will call voters to support tax extensions to keep teachers on

the job.

“Did you know California faces a state of emergency? I’m Marcy

Winograd, teacher and congressional candidate, asking you to help me

save our schools,” will be the message voters hear when they receive a

series of calls from the Winograd for Congress campaign.

Statewide, 20,000 state teachers and health and human service

professionals just received pink slips. In the Los Angeles Unified

School District, 5,000 teachers face lay-offs.

Winograd teaches English at Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles,

where 19 teachers received pink slips. “That’s half of our English

department,” said Winograd. “What a travesty that in one of the richest

nations in the world, we are starving our schools – getting rid of

teachers, increasing class size, and closing summer school. Why is it

that our nation always has money for war, but never for education?

Investing in our youth is investing in national security.”

To support the week-long emergency actions, Winograd will join teachers

on the picket line in Los Angeles, phone bank to voters in the 36th

District, speak to classes at El Camino College in Torrance, and conduct

radio interviews about the budget crisis in our schools. The actions are

designed to pressure Republican lawmakers to pass tax extensions to help

balance the budget.

“It is wrong to balance the budget on the backs of my students,” said

Winograd. “Our young people deserve a quality public education. For

some, it’s literally a matter of life and death because we know that

students who drop out of school too often drop into a life of crime –

and eventually to prison. In Congress, I will make funding education a

national priority, so we can fully staff our schools and provide our

students with an exciting and relevant curriculum.”

It’s no secret that not everybody in the Democratic institutional organizational front has been totally on board with Gov. Brown’s plan on the budget.  But until this point, dissent has been quiet and not out in the media.  The President of the California Teachers Association changed that recently:

“I believe that as much as our governor has been extremely transparent and honest in doing what he told folks he’d do – which is let the people decide – it’s too late for that,” Sanchez said in a phone interview. “Once you put it on the ballot after June, it’s no longer an extension, it becomes new taxes. And once they’re new taxes, the people won’t support that. I think the Legislature ought to do that themselves.”(SacBee)

Now, Sanchez makes some good points here.  He is correct on the ballot prospects. Most of the polling that I’ve seen shows a very difficult passage for a measure that is merely a resumption of the former taxes rather than just an extension of the Arnold Schwarzenegger increases.  It could probably be done, but it would take a fair bit of money to make it happen.

On the other hand, passing the taxes in the Legislatures is “merely” a matter of getting two Republican votes in each house.  That would be something approaching a Herculean task in the current climate.  It would mean finding legislators who were unwilling to even put it on the ballot who would want to actually pass the taxes.  Perhaps it happens as the all-cuts budget becomes the nightmare that it will eventually become, but the odds seem long, perhaps longer than passing a tax measure on the ballot.

Sure, Brown would have to ditch his campaign promise, but those things happen.  Regrettable perhaps, but political realities make for difficult choices.

But, perhaps this is a more reasoned play (and not really all that troubling to the Brown administration) than you might initially suspect.  This is a far better bargaining position than what Brown started off with of only getting Republican votes for a ballot measure. Why not demand more from them?

Going back to the ballot, whether through the initiative process or the Legislature, really isn’t looking all that attractive.  And that’s the reality that CTA and others are looking at.  Eventually, sometime this spring, some consensus will have to form on a plan to move forward, but that just needs a bit more hashing.

Say what you will about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Zombie Death Cult – they learn from their mistakes.

In the 2005 special election they made it easy for labor unions and progressives to unite to defeat his proposals. The attacks on unions were like red cloth to a bull, and that enabled a big and broad coalition to come together to deal Arnold a significant defeat.

Arnold never abandoned his goals of breaking the power of his Democratic and progressive enemies. This time he and his Republican allies in the Legislature decided on a different approach – offering unions a Faustian bargain designed to screw them no matter which option they choose, as today’s Sacramento Bee explains:

Unions last month were attacking the budget deal for including a limit on future state spending growth and $15 billion in cuts to state programs. The spending limit must be approved by voters in Proposition 1A to take effect.

Fearing that unions could mount a successful opposition campaign, lawmakers and Schwarzenegger crafted the budget deal so that increased taxes on income, sales and vehicles would last up to an additional two years if Proposition 1A passes.

The strategy assumed that the additional state tax revenue, worth as much as $16 billion between 2011 and 2013, would provide enough incentive for unions to let Proposition 1A go unchallenged.

The deal even included a specific deal with the devil for the California Teachers Association – Proposition 1B, which would restore $9 billion in educational funding in 2011 and afterward, which is also predicated on the passage of the spending cap. CTA has taken an “interim support position” on Prop 1B but like SEIU has not taken a position yet on Prop 1A.

These tactics on the part of Arnold and the Republicans is part of a broader strategy to force progressives and Democrats to defend bad deals, and leave room for conservatives to score points by opposing them. The Howard Jarvis Association and Meg Whitman have both come out against Prop 1A and may spend some money to try and defeat it.

To me the answer for progressives seems clear – reject the deal with the devil and strongly oppose Prop 1A. (In fact, there is a strong case for opposing all the propositions on the May ballot but right now my focus is the spending cap.)

The tax increases would not immediately disappear, but would expire in mid-2010 along with the rest of the current budget deal. Since we’re going to have to mount a big fight anyway at that time, why agree to a crippling spending cap that will at best provide just a few years of new revenues at a truly enormous long-term cost?

Keep in mind this chart from the California Budget Project on the likely effect of a spending cap on future budgets:

Those are enormous cuts that we’ll face in the next decade. If Democrats, progressive activists, and labor unions don’t oppose this thing, then we’ll be letting the devil get our soul.

As Capitol Alert reports, the California Teachers Association has approved an effort to put a 1% sales tax increase on a 2009 special election ballot. The full text of the measure can be found here 9PDF link). The article claims the tax is expected to raise between $5 and $6 billion annually. According to an earlier report on the proposed tax:

89 percent would go to K-12 schools, and the rest to community colleges.

The measure would restrict use of the revenue to specific purposes that include class size reduction, funding art, music and vocation education courses, and salaries for teachers and other school employees.

The money couldn’t be used for administrative costs, and legislators and the governor couldn’t touch the revenue. The money would be allocated to school districts based on their average daily student attendance.

CTA’s decision to move ahead with the plan is likely a recognition that the current budget mess is not going to be resolved without catastrophic cuts to schools. But is this the right move?

Sales taxes are often described as “regressive” taxes since they hit the poor harder than the rich. Over the last few decades California has relied more and more on the sales tax to fund services. As a result the lowest 20% pay more taxes than the highest 20% of income earners in California.

And yet sales taxes are more progressive than the alternative, which are cuts to schools that will hurt working Californians far more than a sales tax. Teachers help support working families and the small businesses that depend on their spending. For centuries – literally – education has been understood to be a key route toward economic security and prosperity for working people. Without access to a quality education, that route is closed. Given that situation a sales tax is more affordable and valuable to the lower 20% than cuts.

When assessing taxes and spending this simple equation needs to be kept in mind:

Income and property taxes > sales taxes > service cuts

That raises the question of why CTA proposes a new sales tax, instead of raising income taxes on the upper incomes and restore progressivity to California taxation. This could be as simple as restoring the tax brackets of 1992-98 that helped fuel broad economic growth.

It’s unclear why CTA chose not to go this route. The personal income tax is a volatile tax, but so is the sales tax, especially in an era when Americans are spending less and saving more.

Still, even a sales tax is better than education cuts and mass layoffs of teachers. As someone who hopes to start a family of his own in the coming years, I’d like to know that I can send my kids to a decent public school like I enjoyed as recently as the mid-1990s.

I’ll vote for this if it makes it to the ballot – and I suspect Californians will too. As we saw in November 2008, Californians are actually quite willing to tax themselves to fund specific projects, notably including mass transit. If thousands of teachers receive layoff notices and schools are slated for closure this spring, it seems highly likely to me that the CTA proposal will pass.

Some may criticize ballot box budgeting – but it is a byproduct, often necessary, of a legislative process that has been hopelessly broken by the 2/3 rule.

Yesterday I wrote a post about a SacBee editorial entitled “Shared Sacrifice”. Looking back, I think I probably focused a bit too much on the teacher pay, which was really a relatively minor side issue, and not enough on the question of Prop 98. Nonetheless, the name of the editorial certainly goes a fair bit towards inflaming itself.

But, the question of Prop 98 is a good one.  Certainly the SacBee got it right when they called it the CA Teacher’s Association’s sacred cow. And given that CTA is one of the most powerful interest groups in Sacramento, that’s not nothing.  However, is it a good thing?  I think that’s a fair question.

Let’s talk Prop 98 over the flip.

Looking at education funding, where we currently reside around 46th in the nation in per pupil spending, it is clear that Prop 98 alone is not the answer to all of our problems.  Prop 98 leaves our K-12 (and community colleges) insulated only when times are good.  When we hit a rough patch, they are vulnerable as well.  After all, it’s based on the total size of the budget, and with the pie shrinking, so does education funding.

Of course there were other options at the time of Prop 98, and there are other options now.  CTA has filed an initiative with the state that would increase the sales tax by 1% and give that money to schools. Any method is bound to have drawbacks, because at some point we must put some faith in our legislators to fairly and fully fund education, at all levels.

I’ve never been a huge fan of ballot box budgeting.  It converts a perfectly good representative democracy into a mess of direct democracy.  It requires citizens to fully understand issues in a few hours that the legislature argues over for months.  And ballot box budgeting doesn’t give us the flexibility to adjust in times of crisis. Like, say, now.

All that being said, Prop 98 shouldn’t be an amount to peg education spending. Prop 98 should be a floor. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need that.  We wouldn’t need to force our legislators to fully fund education, because they would just do it because that was the right thing to do.

Yet we have the Legislative Republicans, carrying their Grover tatoos right over their heart. Vowing to never increase revenue, above all else and all sound policy.  California grossly underfunds education, even when we meet Prop 98 spending levels.  Yet Prop 98 is the problem?

In 2005, California spent $8,067 per pupil, according to a 2007 Census Bureau study.  In the same year, West Virginia spent $9,005 per pupil. Wyoming spent $10,255/pupil, Alaska spent $10,830, and New York spent $14,119.  And yes, our cost of living is substantially higher than any of those states save New York. So teachers must be compensated at higher levels, and everything else is squeezed.  

And that’s the floor that Prop 98 has brought us, and that’s from 2005, a relatively stable budget year. Can’t we do better than lagging $1,000 behind West Virginia? Where do we go once we have produced a generation of under educated Californians? How do we continue to be the hub of innovation that we have been for so long?

No, Prop 98’s problem isn’t that it’s too high or too inflexible, it’s that it is irrelevant.  Or that it should be, but that it’s not.  There is no reason for a state like California to be constantly flirting with minimum spending levels like this.  There is no reason why we spend so little on what must be our greatest natural resource for the new economy.

So, forget Prop 98, that’s a red herring.  If you want to write an editorial entitled “Shared Sacrifice”, there is only one logical target: Prop 13. It has decimated our revenue base and threatened the “California dream.” We once knew that we could count on our state to provide all of us with a solid education that would place the state in good stead for the long haul.  And we didn’t have to worry about things like Prop 98, because we knew our legislators would fund education.

But no longer.  If we want to talk shared sacrifice, let’s look at the right place.

The No on 8 Campaign just released a new ad, this time focusing on the elimination of rights.  This is one of the most effective arguments against Prop 8: never before have we voted to eliminate rights, and we shouldn’t now.  It has done well in message testing in focus groups and the like, and if you are talking to friends, I highly suggest the tack. The ad trumpets a few prominent opponents to Prop 8, including the California Teachers Association.

Speaking of CTA, they have just reported a $1 million donation to No on 8.  (h/t Shane Goldmacher) Thank you teachers!