The California Teachers Association can’t realistically unionize all charter schools, so it promotes laws that limit their numbers.

In Golden Missed Opportunity, recently published in City Journal, I examined the options that families in California have if they want to remove their children from failing public schools. The pickings in the Golden State are rather slim, and those options we do have — charter schools, homeschooling and the Parent Trigger — are constantly imperiled by a governor and state legislators who typically do the bidding of the California Teachers Association, the largest state affiliate of the National Education Association.

Charter schools are public schools which aren’t bound by the bloated union contracts that stifle so many traditional public schools. California has over 900 charter schools that currently educate about 400,000 students. To the union’s consternation, only about 15 percent of these schools are unionized. Of course, the union would like to see a 100 percent rate, but accomplishing that would take too much effort and money. Additionally, the flexibility that non-unionization offers is one of the attractions of charter schools for many teachers.

So instead of unionizing, CTA tries to eviscerate current charter laws or get caps on the allowable number of charters. At this time, there are three pieces of CTA sponsored legislation working their way around Sacramento. In fact, just last week the state assembly voted 45-28 to approve one of them, AB 1172. The bill, now in the Senate Rules Committee, was authored by State Assemblyman and former teacher and union activist Tony Mendoza. If AB 1172 becomes law, it would allow a school board to block the creation of a new charter school if it would have a “negative fiscal impact” on the school district. However, “negative fiscal impact” is never really defined, and California charter law already has clearly defined reasons why new petitions can be denied.

Also worth noting is that charter schools get less funding than traditional public schools. According to the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst Office, in 2010-11, new charters got $721 less per pupil than traditional public schools.

In a press release, President of the California Charter School Association Jed Wallace, referring to AB 1172, said that,

“This bill is an attack on charter school students who choose to attend charter schools. California has been a leader in the charter movement, and has the highest number of charter schools and charter school students in the nation. Those numbers rise every year due to parent and student demand for better public education choices. We cannot condone any measure that would deny parents and students the right to choose the best public school.”

And of course, Wallace is right. At this time, charters make up about 10 percent of all public schools in California. Keeping the percentage that low would severely limit the options that parents have in deciding where to send their children to school. This agenda-driven legislation reflects nothing more than the teachers union flexing its muscle in an attempt to keep its political power from eroding. And if children and families are hurt in the process, so be it.

One last note: To give you an idea of the political weight of CTA, the union was the biggest spender on candidates and causes in California in the years 2000-2009, when they spent over $211 million. Additionally, Common Cause has just released the 2011 Campaign Finance and Lobbying Report and CTA was number one here also, spending $6.57 million. Given these numbers, it’s hardly surprising that CTA is easily the biggest power broker in the state.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.

Children in the Golden State will get a better education when teacher quality becomes a priority

In perhaps the most in-depth study on the subject to date, three Ivy League economists studied how much the quality of individual teachers matters to their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation and higher adult earnings. (The authors of the study define “value added” as the average test-score gain for a teacher’s students “…adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores.”)

The only caveat from the authors is that using test scores in teachers’ evaluations could lead to “teaching to the test or cheating.” Nothing new here. Some people, when involved in any kind of competition, will try to gain unfair advantage or cheat outright. Typically, it’s a small part of the population and those who do should lose their jobs and face criminal charges.

The lesson is clear: test scores can give us a great deal of information about who the really good teachers are. But California Governor Jerry Brown, unfazed by the blockbuster study, actually called for less testing in his recent State of the State address.

No, Governor. In fact, we need more testing. In California, English and math are tested yearly starting in second grade. But history and science are tested only every few years. Tests should be given in the four core areas every year. As a former American history teacher, I could never figure out why there was no 6th or 7th grade history test. Why wait for grade 8 and throw in a few questions from the 6th and 7th grade curriculum? Never made any sense to me.

Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Lance Izumi wrote in the Orange County Register last week,

“Brown’s education agenda contains a mishmash of proposals, some of which are steps backward and some that are mildly positive. On the clearly negative end, the governor, who has never been a fan of student testing, wants to reduce the number of tests and increase so-called ‘qualitative assessments.’ Trouble is, the reason tests are important is because they offer objective quantifiable data to measure student progress and the effect of teachers and schools on learning.”

While Jerry Brown’s call for less testing is wrongheaded, it isn’t surprising. Testing as a tool of assessing student progress has been around since Day 1, but using student test scores as a measure of teacher effectiveness has caused a backlash in some quarters. There is subset of teachers who laments that there is “more to teaching than just test scores.” And of course they are right, to a point, but they take their case to an extreme and dismiss testing completely. The ringleaders of the anti-testing zealots are the teachers unions, and their agenda has nothing to do with kids or their education. The California Teachers Association, by far the biggest political spender in the state, is about power and ensuring that the disastrous status quo is not disturbed.

Actually, teachers unions operate under the early 20th Century industrial mentality which stipulates that everyone can stick a widget on a car equally as well. Therefore, all widget stickers are equally good and all widget stickers should make the same amount of money. Substitute education for widget, teachers for widget stickers and students for cars, and you fully understand the teachers union model. Once this antiquated notion is truly grasped, the unions may find themselves in trouble, forced to acknowledge that some teachers are better than others, and that some are so bad that they shouldn’t be in the classroom at all. Once that is accepted as truth, better teachers might demand to be paid more than mediocre ones. And the good ones may not be so compliant if they’re the ones who get laid off instead of an inferior teacher who has been on the job longer. Thus, the whole concept of teachers as interchangeable industrial workers starts to unravel. And what could be worse for a group whose main lot in life is to keep acquiring buckets of money and enormous power being exposed as pushing a model that never should have been applied to the teaching profession in the first place?

The good news is that much of the rest of the country is catching on. Teacher quality has become a major topic of discussion with educators, the media and politicians of late. From Oklahoma to New York to Louisiana to New Jersey, states are getting serious about teacher evaluation, all using the results of standardized test scores as a significant part of the equation.

Good teachers matter a lot, and bad teachers can ruin a child’s future. Test scores are very helpful in identifying those teachers and value added methods are good ways to analyze test scores. But California, essentially governed by CTA, their bought-and-paid-for legislature and their man in the governor’s mansion will be the last state to do anything meaningful in this area. That means that one-tenth of the country’s children will continue to be victimized by a cartel that cares a lot about money and power and not a whit about them.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.

“Gov. Bobby Jindal took aim at one of the state’s largest teachers unions today for failing to take action against its executive director, one week after his controversial comments about school choice…

Michael Walker-Jones, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Educators, was quoted … as saying some low-income parents are not qualified to decide where their children should go to school, a comment the union later claimed was taken out of context. But in his address today to more than 800 business and political leaders at the 2012 Louisiana Education Summit, Jindal said the comments show a top-down, arrogant mentality.

‘I am amazed he is still representing the organization a week later,’ Jindal says. ‘I think the union should distance themselves from him. … These remarks reveal contempt for parenting.’…”

See the rest at: Business Report.

A story by Susan Edelman in the New York Post is getting traction with news outlets and their readers, because of the issues at stake involving millions of dollars of waste in New York’s notorious Department of Education.

You may have previously heard about the infamous “rubber rooms” to which teachers were assigned pending resolution of cases, in which the teachers were accused of some infraction, ranging from teacher incompetence to alleged child abuse. Here is a video about those rubber rooms which have now been closed.

Despite the closing of rubber rooms, however, and claims by officials that hundreds of cases that were pending, have been resolved, the story in the NY Post contends that teachers continue to be “reassigned.” Essentially there are no more rubber rooms, but teachers are still being assigned to do menial tasks, to do nothing, or to do clerical or secretarial functions.

The NY Post Edelman story makes a case in point about Alan Rosenfeld, who, by the way, could have retired already, “…continues to collect a $100,049 a year salary plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation, and sick pay…” (see EDELMAN)

Edelman makes the case about New York tax payer money waste:

“Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says….”

The key phrase in that quote is “Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE, says.”

Admittedly some progress has been made. Joe Coscarelli’s article in The Village Voice explains:

“The Department of Education recently returned 474 local teachers to the classroom in an attempt to rid New York City of the infamous “rubber room” sitters, in which educators accused of misconduct sit around and do nothing while collecting a full paycheck. The New York Post reports today that 159 disciplined teachers paid fines — some as high as $15,000 — to get back to work. Some were still ordered to training or to be tested for alcohol and drugs, but many just handled something “like a parking ticket,” with the average charge coming to $7,500.”

But this “progress” was apparently made after exposes brought to light the waste and alleged injustices, and corresponding outrage and activism forced administrative action by state officials.

Still the problem continues.

Taxpayers continue to pay for, not just alleged incompetence by teachers, but for the blatant pretended resolution of the problem of a racket of convenience and easy money, brokered between Government and a Teacher’s Union, a mix that provides a recipe for continued corruption, and politics as ususal that is emblematic of a system that will continue to foster corruption, until tax payers take it upon themselves to intervene en masse to effect change, and restore control to the people that system is supposed to serve.

Vanguard of Freedom Network / Patriot Action Network / Liberty News Network

The manual revels in the illegality of striking, comparing the unions’ efforts to drain more taxpayer dollars to the work of Gandhi. Strikes hurt children, of course, by depriving them of a stable school environment (it’s why they’re illegal, after all), but that argument would probably be unpersuasive to the teachers’ unions — they are unashamed about using children as political props:

“In terms of a bargaining message, the public responds most positively when we talk about children, quality in the classroom and the future,” the MEA manual states. “There may come a time when it’s appropriate to talk about money and benefits, but lay the groundwork first.”

The manual even suggests one slogan that it claims has worked for other locals: “It’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about our children.”

In other words: use the kids for political cover, and don’t let the public latch onto what we’re really after: “money and benefits.” Anyone who opposes using more taxpayer dollars to fund unions is “against children.”

Image via Wikipedia

The tactics come straight from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (an intriguing, oft-misunderstood book, one should note): the manual states, practically verbatim from Alinsky’s text, that union activists should “Pick a target—personalize—and polarize the opposition.” Who wants to be against children? It’s a delightfully deceptive piece of demagoguery.

Debate has raged on the right as to whether teachers’ unions are motivated by simple naivety or pure greed. Manuals like this lend credence to the latter view. (Albert Shanker, former head of the American Federation of Teachers, is reported to have remarked that “when school children start paying union dues, then I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”)

How our children benefit from teachers demanding a raise while everyone else has to tighten their belts — actually, at the expense of everyone else already tightening their belts — remains unexplained; it is simply taken for granted. Contrary to the unions’ suggested propaganda slogans, it is actually completely about dollars and cents; the handbook itself makes it quite clear that children are mere tools to aid in procuring more money and benefits to pad teachers’ pockets.

Teachers are not underpaid. The average high school teacher makes over $43,000 a year for roughly 200 days of work. Most teachers can additionally expect tenure, as well as full coverage for medical, dental, and psychiatric care. Teachers in my own county — Washington County, Maryland — receive a fourth of the day off for “planning,” and are able to “bank” unused sick days, saving them up for the future. Teachers around the country receive lavish pensions after just a few decades of work. Not only is this exponentially more exorbitant than what the vast majority of private-sector workers are used to — it’s funded at their expense. The image of the struggling schoolteacher making intense sacrifices so that she may teach inner-city children how to read is utter fantasy.

A recent political cartoon depicts two men at a bar. The first complains that evil Republican governors like Chris Christie and Scott Walker are trying to cut his pension benefits. The second turns to the first and says “What’s a pension?”

All of teachers’ outlandish, unsustainable benefits are funded completely at the expense of the taxpayer. The unions don’t care about the nation’s fiscal stability, let alone the children. While leftist protesters rage against “corporate greed,” they miss the astonishing avarice taking place every day amongst teachers’ unions and their cronies — as long as they can make out like bandits, the taxpayers — and their children — are just pawns in the game.

-Alex Knepper

Busting LAUSD and every other school district in the state for negligence should help kids, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when. In the meantime, giving families more educational options would be a great help, but don’t hold your breath, California.

With National School Choice Week underway, we see many positive things happening across the country. In states like New Jersey and Louisiana, governors are taking the lead in proposing ways to break the devastating monopoly that government run schools – their educrat leaders, corrupt and/or inept school boards and the powerful teachers unions — have held for far too long.

As an example of Big Education gone bad, I write in City Journal about a crime that has been perpetrated on the children of California for 40 years and the lawsuit that addresses it:

For nearly 40 years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has broken the law—and nobody seemed to notice. Now a group of parents and students are taking the district to court. On November 1, a half-dozen anonymous families working with EdVoice, a reform advocacy group in Sacramento, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the LAUSD, district superintendent John Deasy, and United Teachers Los Angeles. The lawsuit in essence accuses the district and the union of a gross dereliction of duty. According to the parents’ complaint, the district and the union have violated the children’s “fundamental right to basic educational equality and opportunity” by failing to comply with a section of the California Education Code known as the Stull Act. Under the 1971 law, a school district must include student achievement as part of a teacher’s evaluation. Los Angeles Unified has never done so: the teachers union wouldn’t allow it. To continue reading “A 40-Year Shame,” go to http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0119ls.html

However the above case is decided, there will undoubtedly be lawsuits, union pushback, teacher dissatisfaction and who-knows-what-else as the various special interests scramble to do what is best for themselves. And as always, children’s needs are left out of the equation.

One way to transcend big government-union school domination would be to develop a system of universal school choice, including vouchers and tax credits. To that end, Alan Bonsteel and I passionately make the case for choice in an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Daily News this past Friday.

As we honor National School Choice week beginning Sunday, one fact stands out: 2012 marks the year when there can be no turning back in school choice reforms.

Last July, The Wall Street Journal dubbed 2011 “The Year of School Choice” because of legislation that had been passed all over our nation. For example, North Carolina and Tennessee eliminated caps on charter schools. Maine passed its first charter school law. Twelve states either adopted new voucher programs or expanded existing ones. After first turning its back on the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, Congress reconstituted funding for it. To continue reading “School Choice Reforms are More Vital Than Ever,” go to http://www.dailynews.com/opinions/ci_19779002

While it would undoubtedly be a boon to education and save taxpayers money, school choice at this time is an extremely tough political sell in the Golden State. The entrenched special interests in California are in control and to make the needed changes will entail a long, bloody struggle. As such, taxpayers and parents must take the lead and force change via the initiative process.

In a future post, I will examine what options families in California do have if they want to remove their children from failing schools.
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Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues – information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

“CTEN” was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers’ unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand’s comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers’ unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates – Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition – Don’t Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where’s the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers’ unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year – one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California’s new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers’ unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.