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Los Angeles teachers have much to cheer about. Less than a month after the district’s school support workers received a contract with 30% salary increases, United Teachers Los Angeles came away with a mammoth deal of its own.

On April 13, the district made what it called a “historic offer” of 19% in pay hikes over three years. The union promptly rejected it as inadequate but five days later accepted what it called a “groundbreaking” agreement with increases of 21%.

By January 2025, it will bring the average Los Angeles teacher salary to an estimated $106,000 a year.

The post-deal reactions from the district and the union were a contrast in styles.

“Proud of what we can do with our labor partners when we negotiate in good faith and come to an agreement that serves our hardworking employees as well as our students and families,” tweeted Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Update from Los Angeles Unified. To view the latest agreements with our labor partners, please visit https://t.co/w9y5Sd2yJh. pic.twitter.com/I2cX4q3dEx

— Los Angeles Unified (@LASchools) April 15, 2023

“While Carvalho and the district spent the past year ignoring and undermining educators, students and parents, UTLA members fought for a fair contract that meets the urgent needs of today and builds a strong foundation for public schools,” read the union statement.

Carvalho is sanguine about the district’s ability to bankroll these deals. “The state has provided two back-to-back, very solid budget years with a cost-of-living adjustment that allowed us to compose these offers,” he said. Nevertheless, he made a trip to Sacramento earlier this month to lobby for more school funding.

It has been widely reported that the district has $5 billion in reserves, which, for a total budget of $14.2 billion, is excessive. Less widely reported is that half of the reserve is already committed or is one-time federal COVID relief money. The district has yet to release data on the total cost of the new contracts.

Los Angeles also has 35,000 fewer students than it did two years ago, and the district forecasts the loss of another 121,000 by 2030. Since state funding is based on enrollment, that is going to make it difficult to sustain the district’s spending levels.

Carvalho may think he bought himself at least a year of labor peace, as the support employees’ contract expires in June 2024 and the teachers’ contract in June 2025. But the unions don’t seem eager to beat their swords into plowshares.

“We still have a long way to go,” said SEIU Local 99 steward Jennifer Torres. “This is the foundation.”

“We have maximum power right now, and it’s going to keep evolving from this point on even further,” said teachers union Secretary Arlene Inouye.

So did Carvalho get “schooled” by the unions, as Politico believes, or — to further the metaphor — is he planning to “graduate”?

Carvalho is flashy and at ease in front of the camera. He has often been rumored as a candidate for higher office, and if he has any aspirations in California, he must at least hold the public employees unions at bay. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Carvalho is somewhere else when the district’s bills come due.

The implications for Los Angeles are only part of the picture, since other teachers unions may now see the last few months as a model to follow.

The Oakland Education Association is currently holding a strike vote, which would be an “unfair labor practices” walkout similar to the one that shuttered Los Angeles schools for three days last month. The state labor board has still yet to determine whether that strike was legal, and a faction with the Oakland union is planning a wildcat strike if the authorization vote fails.

Intentionally or not, Carvalho and the Los Angeles school board have reset the market for public school employees. But if the enrollment figures are any indication, parents will continue to take their business elsewhere.

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April 3 and 4 marked the last two of four “acceleration days” for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The optional extra tutoring was designed to help make up for instruction lost during COVID school closures.

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned. United Teachers Los Angeles voted to boycott the extra days. Then, after negotiations, the district rescheduled them for winter and spring breaks, irking SEIU Local 99, the union representing school support workers. And whatever benefit the extra days might have brought was undone by the three-day walkout organized by both unions March 21 to 23.

One would think that, going forward, the district might try a different approach to adding instructional days, and that the teachers union might consider a different response.

But who are we kidding?

Last week, the L.A. school board approved the district calendar for the next three years. “The new instructional calendars address the need to mitigate learning loss by shortening the winter recess and extending options for summer programming,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said. The plan is to shorten the three-week winter break to two weeks.

The seven-member school board unanimously approved the changes, and the press release includes positive comments from five of them. It also states that the district “undertook an extensive process of gathering input through surveys, focus groups and presentations from families, staff and labor partners.”

Unfortunately for Carvalho and the board, those surveys, focus groups and input from labor partners all indicated an overwhelming preference for a three-week winter break.

The district justified the change on the grounds that three weeks off “creates challenges for our neediest families that must be considered in decision-making.” Also, most large districts in other states have a two-week break, as do most districts in southern California.

Not one to overlook an opportunity for activism, the teachers union immediately filed an unfair labor practice charge, created a Twitter hashtag and ramped up an organizing drive against the change.

The district can't ignore the 70% of LAUSD families that oppose a two-week winter break.

Make your voice heard. Let the Board and @LAUSDSup that there is #NoCalendarWithoutUs https://t.co/TWPcZ6KXEK pic.twitter.com/mw3RckUB6w

— United Teachers Los Angeles (@UTLAnow) April 4, 2023

“School calendar changes are mandatory subjects of bargaining and UTLA leadership immediately sent a demand to bargain to the district,” reads a statement on the union website. “This calendar move exemplifies Carvalho’s refusal to bargain in good faith and his willful disdain of worker rights. By openly disregarding labor law and ignoring the voices of parents and staff, Carvalho continues to prove that he is not a leader. The school board’s approval demonstrates a failure to hold Carvalho accountable.”

A district representative told EdSource that calendar dates are “at the sole discretion of the superintendent and the Board of Education,” and that the district held two meetings to discuss the calendar with its unions — but UTLA sent a representative to only one.

Carvalho and the board seem to have learned nothing from their previous encounter on this issue and are blithely waving the red cape in front of the charging bull. The union will gore them again, but one wonders how often it can continue to place itself on the side of less school versus more.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays at The 74.

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If you’ve ever read a science fiction story, you know the dangers of time travel. Someone returns to the past and alters something that completely remakes the present and the future, usually with disastrous effect.

So it went last month with Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Carvalho was forced to shutter schools while the district’s 30,000 support employees, led by SEIU Local 99, went on a three-day strike. Members of United Teachers Los Angeles walked out in solidarity.

The day after the strike ended, Carvalho and the union announced a tentative agreement. The three-year deal raised salaries by a reported 30%. Carvalho called it a “precedent-setting, historic contract.”

It’s historic, in the sense that most of it takes place in the past.

The agreement contains a 6% pay hike retroactive to July 2021, another 7% retroactive to July 2022 and yet another 7% to take effect this July. In January 2024, the district will raise all support employee wages by $2 an hour. The district and the union both say this constitutes another 10% increase for the average employee.

Nevertheless, it’s not the amount that’s going to cause headaches for Carvalho, the school board, parents and students in the near future. The district and the union weren’t oceans apart on the money before the strike occurred. Where Carvalho went wrong was in the timeline of the settlement.

Lost in all the happiness and relief about the contract is that the strike supposedly wasn’t about wages and benefits. Such a walkout would have been illegal, since the union hadn’t completed all the procedural steps before calling a strike. SEIU did so to protest the district’s alleged unfair labor practices.

SEIU accused the district of interrogating workers about union meetings and threatening to fire them if they walked out. The union even claimed that food service workers were locked in a cafeteria to prevent them from voting on a strike. Taking these accusations at face value, the district could not have prevented the strike, short of admitting it had committed these violations.

The strike might end up being deemed illegal anyway. An unfair labor practices strike is legal if unfair labor practices have occurred. These haven’t been adjudicated, and if they’re found to be baseless, the union will be penalized.

But it won’t matter. The reality is that the walkouts prompted Carvalho and the board to settle on the union’s terms. So what happens to the district’s future?

There isn’t going to be much of a lull. “Carvalho has been put on notice that he better move on our demands,” read an email from the teachers union to its members. “If that movement is not enough to settle the contract that UTLA members deserve, we will move to the next round of this fight.”

The union wants a 20% raise over a two-year contract. But the contract expired in June 2022, so the two years are this school year and next. It’s clear the teachers aren’t reluctant to strike, and SEIU Local 99 will be sure to back them up. So we might see a repeat of last week’s actions, only this time it will be the teachers union organizing an unfair labor practices strike, with SEIU striking in solidarity.

Carvalho might be able to head it off by caving early, but the reprieve would be only temporary. The new contracts would both expire in June 2024, right about the time all federal COVID subsidies will have run out. How much labor peace will Carvalho be able to buy then?

He seems unaware of his impending fate. “This agreement’s going to make a lot of superintendents very nervous,” he said. “And that’s a good thing.”

We’ll see who is the most nervous superintendent a year from now.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays at The 74.

United Teachers of Los Angeles and SEIU 99 members rally outside of City Hall on March 15. (Getty Images)

The vast majority of Los Angeles Unified School District employees will not be at work for most of this week, leading to the closure of schools. SEIU Local 99, which represents 30,000 support workers, called a strike because of what it calls unfair labor practices by the district. United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents 32,000 teachers, joined the job action in what it calls a solidarity strike.

The terminology is important, because a strike for economic reasons during contract negotiations has certain procedural requirements and time-consuming steps, including mediation and fact-finding. The two unions’ contracts also have no-strike provisions, which is why both notified the district they were terminating their expired contracts.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho pledged to negotiate around the clock to avert the strike, then requested an injunction from the state labor relations board — all to no avail. The two unions had no inclination to call it off.

Read more: Carvalho faces ‘defining moment’ as L.A.’s largest unions prepare to strike

I believe the timing and length of the walkout is a calculated effort on the part of the unions not only to apply bargaining pressure to the district, but to undo Carvalho’s signature effort to address the effects of lengthy pandemic school closures: acceleration days.

The teachers union filed an unfair labor practice complaint and called for a boycott of the first acceleration day, asserting that changes to the school calendar were a mandatory subject of collective bargaining.

After negotiations, the union agreed to the four days, to be held for two days each during winter and spring breaks. This didn’t please SEIU Local 99, which preferred the original plan of four Wednesdays spread throughout the school year.

The final two acceleration days are scheduled to be held April 3 and 4, but they are hardly acceleration days anymore, due to the unions’ decision to hold deceleration days this week.

Holding a strike on a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday almost certainly guarantees that a large number of students (and school employees) won’t show up Friday, either. There go your four days of additional instruction.

The district could add make-up days to the calendar, but as UTLA reminded its members, “they will have to negotiate that with us as a union.”

The unions seem unperturbed by school closures of any sort. The teacher strike in 2019 closed schools for a week. Unions were largely responsible for in-person instruction being delayed until late August 2021. Both SEIU Local 99 and UTLA are ready for traditional, open-ended strikes unless significant raises and other demands are met.

As showing up at school has taken a backseat to other concerns among district employees, many students have followed suit. Enrollment has fallen dramatically, and chronic absenteeism continues to be a problem.

Teachers union President Cecily Myart-Cruz notoriously claimed, “There is no such thing as learning loss.” She’s wrong. The only thing kids learn from closed schools is that neither they, nor the schools, are important.

cta.org

The political action committee of the California Teachers Association is making a heavy financial commitment to endorsed school board candidates in the state, with LA Unified candidate Rocio Rivas its largest beneficiary.

The CTA/ABC statewide PAC funds candidates for all state and legislative offices, but it also provides the bulk of campaign contributions for local school board candidates.

This November, CTA is funding 287 board candidates in 125 school districts — from Los Angeles, with 430,000 students, all the way down to Big Pine, which enrolls 155 students. The state union dispensed more than $1.8 million for those candidates.

CTA designated $330,600 for Rivas’s campaign. But that’s not the sum total of the union’s largesse. CTA has a rule that the state union cannot contribute more than 65% of the total campaign budget. In other words, if the state union is spending $1.8 million, its local affiliates are adding a minimum of $970,000, and perhaps much more.

In the case of Rivas, United Teachers Los Angeles must spend at least $178,000 of its own money, and probably more.

As the largest school district in the state, a Los Angeles school board race is expected to receive a lot of state union attention. But even tiny campaigns will see outsized contributions. CTA sent $1,500 to the American Bear Education Association for two school board candidates. That’s not much, but that school district has only 750 students, and the local union has only 39 members.

Money can be decisive in any election, but it’s just part of how teachers unions can affect school board campaigns. For one thing, they can turn out volunteers and can call on the expertise of the experienced staffers on the union payroll. Plus some school board candidates are people they already know well as colleagues.

In his new report for the Manhattan Institute, Michael Hartney found that about one in 10 school boards in California have educator majorities. So far this year, union-backed school board candidates in the state won 70% of the time.

At the risk of stating the obvious, school boards are supposed to represent the public at-large, not just school employees. Representing employees is the union’s job.

LA Unified is used to seeing well-funded challengers to union candidates, thanks to the presence of wealthy charter school advocates. But it is an anomaly in the rest of the state and the country. This may be starting to change. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed 30 school board candidates this summer, and 19 of them won, with 6 more making a runoff. Conservative groups have also formed PACs to contest school board elections in a number of other states.

The prospect of yet another partisan battlefield is regrettable, but it should at least be viewed in the context of the current situation, in which the teachers unions mostly have their way.

California Teachers Association headquarters in Burlingame, California. (UnionHalls via Twitter)

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For the last 45 years, teachers unions have been the predominant political force in California, using their clout from the governor’s office down to the state’s 1,037 school districts.

Except for one: the Clovis Unified School District, just north of Fresno.

While there are a number of tiny districts in California without a teachers union, Clovis is unique because it has more than 2,100 teachers but has never unionized. When collective bargaining for California public school teachers became law in 1976, Clovis educators decided they preferred to form a faculty senate rather than organize a teachers union.

The senate performs many of the same duties of a union, but with a clear difference: Most decisions regarding pay, working conditions and other matters are made by joint committees composed of senate and district representatives. “If there’s a committee, we’re on it,” said Duane Goudy, the faculty senate president. “If there’s a meeting, we are part of it.”

School support workers have since been unionized by the independent California School Employees Association, but the teachers have stuck with the senate. And there are no dues.

Now the California Teachers Association has launched an effort to unionize this last bastion of resistance. Efforts to drum up support have been underway since July, getting some local press attention. But nothing all that organized appeared until early this month, when the Association of Clovis Educators emerged, complete with a logo, website, multiple social media accounts, a podcast, a press release and an open letter announcing its intention to form a union.

The letter was signed by 72 Clovis employees who constitute the organizing committee. If a majority of the district’s teachers sign a petition collected by the union, it will be submitted to the state government’s labor relations board. Once the signatures are verified, the union would be declared the exclusive representative and no secret ballot election would be held.

“The vision of the faculty senate is quaint,” said association spokeswoman Kristin Heimerdinger. “When the district was smaller, it was a more viable model of representation that doesn’t work now that the district is larger.”

A typical union organizing drive has only one adversary to deal with: the administration or management. But the Clovis union and its state union backers will have another: Clovis Teachers for Clovis.

While not nearly as sophisticated and wide-ranging as their counterparts, this group of school district employees wants to save the faculty senate and reject the union.

“Their job is not to do what’s best for kids,” said Joni Sumter, one of the group’s organizers. “Their job is to be the union. It’s our job to do what’s best for kids, and at every level in this district, that’s what we’ve done – all these years that’s what we’ve done.”

Clovis Teachers for Clovis also has a list of supporters. Of the 477 people who have put their name to the list, 228 are certificated professionals who would be in the proposed bargaining unit. Remarkably, another 41 support employees, who are covered by a union contract, also support retaining the faculty senate.

The California Teachers Association does not find it cost-effective to organize small groups of employees. That is why it tends to target large charter school networks in an effort to unionize an entire network under a single contract. Clovis is the last district in the state where the union can potentially add a couple of thousand new members in one fell swoop. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling in 2018, the union’s efforts require recruiting new members one by one. It can no longer rely on agency fees from non-members.

The state union’s membership hasn’t recovered since the secession of the 19,000-member California Faculty Association in 2019. If it can organize Clovis teachers, not only would it add to union rolls, it would eliminate a model for nonunion representation that has stood for 45 years.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Students of civics might think the California state budget is crafted by the elected representatives of the citizenry, who debate and amend proposals working their way through various committees, ultimately leading to a spending plan with majority support and the signature of the governor.

All that happens, of course, but no budget makes it to the governor’s desk without at least the tacit approval of the state’s public employee unions. Since public education alone makes up a minimum of 40 percent of the state budget, the California Teachers Association has an outsized influence over the construction of that budget.

This has been true for at least the 27 years I have covered the union’s operations. In 2000, for example, then-President Wayne Johnson boasted to his members about how he had the governor and state legislative leaders on the phone with him, falling over themselves to place more money in the education budget, until Johnson finally relented at an additional $1.84 billion.

This year’s budget, however, rivals any previous examples of teacher union benefits sewn into state law.

• Imaginary money. The budget relies on two sources of funding that do not exist, and may never exist. First, it hopes that the U.S. Senate will approve, and President Donald Trump will sign, the HEROES Act, which contains $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments. Should that fail to happen, California will issue $12 billion in deferrals to school districts. Deferrals are essentially IOUs to be paid in the next fiscal year. This is also money that doesn’t yet exist.

Should deferrals become necessary, the state also authorizes school districts to transfer money from any account they hold to any other account in order to pay their bills. Money targeted for a specific purpose or program can be used for any purpose or program. Districts can also use the proceeds from the sale or lease of property for any general fund purpose.

• Funding tied to last year’s attendance. School districts are supposed to be funded according to the number of students they teach. This budget funds them according to the number of students they taught last school year. This leads to some serious inequities, as school districts with falling enrollment will receive funding for students they no longer have and districts with rising enrollment will have to teach more students with the same amount of cash.

This imbalance is especially egregious when it comes to charter schools. Unions are vocal about their desire to limit the growth of charters in the state. Overall, enrollment in the state’s public schools fell by more than 63,000 students over the past two years. Charter school enrollment grew by more than 46,500 students over the same period.

One group has already sued the state on behalf of a handful of charter schools, though a victory would also benefit those traditional public school districts with growing enrollment.

• No layoffs. Until July, California school districts cannot lay off teachers or other certified professional employees for budgetary reasons, unless that employee is an administrator or supervisor. The layoff ban includes probationary teachers. School districts are also prohibited from laying off bus drivers, custodians and food service personnel until July, including probationary employees. Aides in classroom and extracurriculars are still subject to layoff and will probably suffer the lion’s share of job losses.
• Fewer instructional minutes. The state will keep the same number of instructional days in the school year, but the number of instructional minutes per day was cut for every grade level: 20 minutes shorter for kindergarten; 50 minutes shorter for grades 1 to 3 and one to two hours for upper grades. As drastic as those cuts are, they are a significant improvement over what students received this spring. One English learner advocacy group survey revealed 76 percent of teachers said they offered less than three hours of live instruction each week after the state shut down schools in March.
• Less accountability. The California School Dashboard, though flawed, provides information on schools and districts, including academics, absenteeism, graduation and suspension rates, and college readiness. This data will not be published in 2020, and the state Department of Education will not be allowed to identify any district that is deficient on any of its measures.

Despite these major victories in the budget, the union already has its eyes on a bigger prize.

“We appreciate and recognize that this budget agreement averts immediate education cuts and thousands of educator layoffs, but without additional revenues, it also kicks difficult funding problems down the road,” said President E. Toby Boyd, before launching into a pitch for the union-backed split-roll property tax initiative, designated as Proposition 15 for the November ballot. The measure would increase taxes on many commercial properties while leaving residential property taxes at current levels.

If traditional school funding problems have been kicked down the road, the state budget will steamroll over the funding of many California charter schools. I suspect the union sees this as a feature and not a bug.

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The National Education Association finally threw its weight into the Democratic presidential primaries, announcing Saturday night that it recommended Joe Biden for the nomination.

A Biden endorsement is hardly a surprise; he is an establishment candidate, and NEA is a major player in the Democratic Party establishment. Biden’s string of primary wins and the departure of all but one of his major rivals made this move inevitable, but the timing was sudden and raised a lot of questions.

I am told that on March 12, NEA President Lily Eskelsen-García called for an unscheduled virtual meeting of the union’s PAC Council and board of directors for Saturday, March 14. Its purpose was to recommend Joe Biden.

The union has touted its “unprecedented engagement” with members to determine which candidate to choose. But it isn’t well understood, even inside NEA, that regardless of the process used to interview and evaluate candidates, it is the NEA president alone who decides which one to bring forward for an endorsement vote. The union’s representative bodies aren’t presented with a choice of candidates, only an up-or-down vote on the president’s choice.

The first concurrence must come from the council, consisting of state affiliate officers, members of the national board and executive committee and special-interest caucuses. Each state’s votes are weighted by the amount it contributes to the PAC.

If the council approves, then the recommendation goes to the NEA Board of Directors, consisting of 170 representatives from state affiliates.

The short notice for the virtual meeting during the height of a global pandemic didn’t sit well with some NEA representatives, particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders. One took to Facebook to express her dismay:

There was resistance during the virtual meeting as well. One prominent Sanders supporter within NEA tweeted this comment:

I was in contact w a couple of NEA Board members while the meeting was going on. It was a coordinated, rushed push from the top. The Board vote was close, only a few votes shorts of no endorsement. Many Board members expressing frustration w timing & process. Ugh…‍

— TrekkerTeach (@trekkerteach12) March 15, 2020

Many wondered why the action had to be taken not only prior to the Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, but before Sunday night’s nationally televised head-to-head debate between Biden and Sanders.

NEA’s officers told the board that polling showed strong member support for Biden. I haven’t yet learned the results of that polling, only that some 22,000 members were asked to participate and about 1,700 responses informed the survey.

Once the endorsement was announced, Sanders supporters swamped the Twitter feeds of NEA and its officers.

Are you an #NEAforBernie rank & file member ‍ Disappointed with yet ANOTHER #EarlyEndorsement for the neoliberal candidate, @JoeBiden? VOTE with your NEA PACby PULLING it and sending it to Bernie Sanders instead! Send a STRONG message to NEA! #Bernie2020 pic.twitter.com/SrhaIfEA5u

— Susan DuFresne (@GetUpStandUp2) March 15, 2020

NEA won’t be happy about any loss of PAC money, but it’s a drop in the bucket. The main purpose of the endorsement is to free up at least $25 million for the union’s super PAC to spend on Biden’s behalf. Since this money comes from member dues, there is no way to withhold it.

Sanders supporters within NEA see this move as a repeat of 2015, when NEA endorsed Hillary Clinton months before any primary or caucus and was coordinating that endorsement with the Clinton campaign four days after she announced her candidacy.

Sanders supporters made a similar effort then to delay an endorsement, but it failed. NEA told its activists that Clinton won 82 percent support in the PAC Council. That was substantial, but only because 29 percent of council voters abstained. The board of directors then seemingly bowed to the inevitable, endorsing Clinton 118-40, with 8 abstentions.

NEA did not announce the vote totals this time around, though I have hopes of obtaining them soon.

So after every effort to avoid a repeat of the infighting that plagued the union in 2015, NEA finds itself in much the same situation. The union angered and alienated its Sanders factions, including the nation’s second-largest local affiliate, United Teachers Los Angeles.

Now, there is a Change.org petition demanding NEA switch its endorsement to Sanders. It has almost 1,500 signatures as I write this.

NEA (and the American Federation of Teachers) could have avoided all this angst if they had just commissioned a large-scale survey of their membership and released the results. As with most things NEA does, its endorsement process is very big on inputs — town halls, videotaped interviews, questionnaires — and not so big on outcomes, the vote itself. That’s a closed and rushed process, and it’s no wonder many members are irate about it.

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Two Bay Area teacher union locals followed the lead of United Teachers Los Angeles and endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

The Oakland Education Association (2,605 active members) and United Teachers of Richmond (1,666 active members) issued a joint statement in support of Sanders, calling him “the candidate that will fight to bring true investments for better schools and communities.”

The national and state teacher unions are reluctant to endorse primary candidates without a clear front-runner, opening the door for local unions to go their own way. UTLA’s representative bodies endorsed Sanders in November.

Just as UTLA did when advocating for the Sanders endorsement, the two Bay Area unions were dismissive of other Democratic candidates. Their statement cited a litany of “failed policies” and claimed “longstanding Democratic Party leaders have been a part of these problems.”

The unions say the votes of their representative bodies came after “a month-long vote/survey of members.” Neither union released the results of those votes/surveys.

The restrictive nature of the endorsements suggests that certain local officers are trying to build momentum for a Sanders endorsement by the California Teachers Association. This would not only provide Sanders with a boost over the other candidates, but free up CTA funds and resources for independent expenditures on his behalf. As it stands now, these three locals are limited in what effect they can have on a statewide primary.

A recent poll by the LA Times and UC Berkeley shows Sanders with a lead in the state, and if he wins, a CTA endorsement could soon follow. But even that isn’t a guarantee of a national teachers union endorsement. Only the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers presidents can decide which candidate to put forward for a recommendation, and they have a lot of competing pressures from other state affiliates.

Union Power for UTLA/Facebook

It’s election season — not just for America’s political parties, but for United Teachers Los Angeles. The union mailed ballots to members this week. They will vote by mail or online, with the results to be tabulated Feb. 28. Active members will choose the UTLA president and other top officers for the next three years.

UTLA elections were once sleepy affairs where small turnouts of members reelected officers or installed heirs-apparent when the incumbents were term-limited out. That all changed in 2005, when UTLA President John Perez became the first incumbent defeated in the union’s history. He lost handily to A.J. Duffy, whose slate emphasized Perez’s do-nothing tenure and cozy relationship with the district.

Accurate or not, challengers in union elections almost always accuse incumbents of failing to be militant enough. Duffy was backed by a progressive coalition of union activists and served the maximum of two three-year terms.

But his chosen successor was unexpectedly defeated by Warren Fletcher in 2011. Fletcher was also backed by a progressive caucus within UTLA, but when his first term was up, he was defeated by Alex Caputo-Pearl, who, unsurprisingly, won with the backing of a progressive caucus within UTLA.

Now Caputo-Pearl is term-limited out, but he is running for a UTLA vice president post. He and his slate endorsed Cecily Myart-Cruz for president. She currently holds the vice president slot Caputo-Pearl is seeking.

Myart-Cruz, Caputo-Pearl and their Union Power slate are running on their record, particularly on the teacher strike of 2019. But they face challengers. Outside observers will see little to distinguish them on external issues; every candidate wants more from LA Unified and increased organizing of members to get those things. It often takes some reading between the lines to determine where the challengers differ from the incumbents.

Marisa Crabtree is a candidate for president on the ElevatEd slate. There is nothing on their platform that a union activist might find objectionable. You have to go to Crabtree’s statements to find where she thinks the current leadership is lacking.

“I remember thinking that the topics we discussed [at a UTLA Board meeting] had nothing to do with what my teachers at my school or any of the other teachers in that room really cared about, and yet no one was pushing to make those topics the center of our discussion,” she wrote on her slate’s website. “I realized the union doesn’t represent all voices. It was at the moment I decided to stand for all students and teachers.”

Crabtree’s campaign emails criticize the way “UTLA had begun to prioritize politics over the profession” and could only “muster enough defense to maintain the status quo, and just enough offense to make a political superstar out of our current union president.”

Another candidate, Innocent Osunwa, received 60 votes for UTLA president in 2014 and garnered eight write-in votes for Hilda Solis’s seat in the 32nd Congressional District in 2008. His concerns about UTLA’s operations seem to be mostly procedural.

By way of contrast, candidate Greg Russell sees the current leadership as a “monopoly … of politicians and yes men.” He accuses UTLA of “repeated fraud” and of “sacrificing the needs of membership to make UTLA into a part of the Democratic Party.” Russell received 575 votes when he ran for the office of UTLA secondary vice president in 2011.

I don’t know if candidate Soni Lloyd has a chance to win, but he has two of the ingredients traditionally necessary for ousting incumbents: the backing of a progressive slate and the belief that the current leaders aren’t militant enough.

Lloyd is the choice of the CoreLA slate, and his candidate statement concludes with the phrase “Power to the teachers against the traitors.” He calls for abolishing charter schools and accuses the union of being complicit in the privatization of the school system. Lloyd asserts that the UTLA political action committee “routinely borrows money from UTLA membership so your money is used to finance privatizer politicians whether you contribute or not.” He says union leaders “continue to follow a losing model of shoveling tons of money at essentially anti-labor candidates for school board seats hoping for a miraculous turn around in the state of things.”

Turnout for UTLA elections usually hovers around 25 percent, which means a winning candidate needs a highly committed bloc of activists more than broad appeal. It’s possible that one of these candidates could muster that kind of effort.

But these challengers do lack one attribute for success. Multiple candidates tend to split the opposition vote in union elections. The best they can hope for is that one of them makes it into a runoff against Myart-Cruz, at which point a unified effort could bring victory. Otherwise, it looks like a walkover for her, Caputo-Pearl and the Union Power slate.

The California Teachers Association is “310,000 members strong,” according to its website. But it’s difficult to track that number over time, or assess its impact on California school districts, because our only sources of information have been the union’s public pronouncements.

Until now.

Culled from figures present in CTA internal documents, I have compiled a table with the membership numbers for each of 981 local affiliates as they stood at the start of the current school year, with the same figures for the start of the 2018-19 school year for comparison. These are active members, who are those currently working in California’s public schools. CTA also has a number of retired, student and associate members, not included here.

CTA New Numbers (Text)

Overall, the union had 304,349 active members as of Aug. 31, 2019. This was a loss of 22,818 members from the previous year. The bulk of the loss, almost 19,000 members, was due to the departure of the California Faculty Association from CTA last June.

United Teachers Los Angeles, which is by far CTA’s largest local, added 143 members. Other large locals with membership growth included the Fresno Teachers Association (40 members), Elk Grove Education Association (37), San Bernardino Teachers Association (34) and Sacramento City Teachers Association (40).

Others did not fare as well. The San Diego Education Association lost 108 members, United Educators of San Francisco lost 181, Teachers Association of Long Beach lost 54 and the Oakland Education Association lost 361.

Certainly the first full year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling had a negative effect. The decision ended the public-sector union practice of charging representation fees to nonmembers. Heightened teacher activism had mixed results. UTLA’s six-day strike resulted in membership growth, but Oakland’s seven-day strike led to a 12.2 percent loss.

With as much attention as we pay to CTA and its big-city affiliates, it’s important to note that almost half of CTA’s locals have fewer than 100 members. Seventeen have only one member. These small locals make up just 5.1 percent of CTA’s membership, but they accounted for 11.6 percent of the state union’s membership losses this past year, once we remove the faculty association’s unique departure from the equation.

Most locals had modest swings one way or the other, and local conditions may account for an acceleration in either direction. It will take more years of similar data to evaluate the presence of any trends, assuming I will still be able to get my hands on such numbers in the future.

Getty Images

The California Teachers Association has made the passage of a split-roll property tax initiative its top priority for 2020, allocating an initial investment of $6 million for the campaign. But three months into signature-gathering to place the measure on the November ballot, the union is having a difficult time elevating its members to the same level of enthusiasm.

The Schools and Communities First campaign has set a goal of 1.6 million signatures by the March 4 filing deadline. The plan was to have volunteers, particularly union members, collect 450,000 signatures, while signature-gathering firms made up the difference. Each union involved with the campaign was given a quota, and CTA’s is 150,000 signatures.

The overall collection rate has been steady. The campaign reached 250,000 signatures after about a month, and 500,000 after about two months. The latest information I have states the campaign has reached 745,000 signatures.

To make its goal, the campaign will have to ramp up its efforts over the final six weeks. The main reason is that volunteers have failed to keep pace with the paid signature gatherers.

According to multiple CTA sources, volunteers overall collected only 60,000 signatures, or 13 percent of their quota, by the end of 2019. CTA’s performance was even worse, with the teachers union managing to turn in only 17,000 signatures, or 11 percent of its quota. In an internal memo, one CTA official said the union’s efforts were falling “woefully short” of its goal.

CTA is calling on its activists to “move into overdrive” as the deadline approaches, so teachers across the state and their friends can expect to be bombarded with requests to sign petitions.

It’s virtually certain that when all is said and done, the initiative will have enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, but it’s just as certain that it will be due to the work of paid signature gatherers, who are ahead of pace.

The campaign also benefited from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s veto of a bill that would have made it a misdemeanor to pay signature gatherers based on the number of signatures they collected. With the bounty system still in place, CTA and its allies can buy what they need. However, it will mean the campaign will have spent precious funds that will be unavailable when the opposition tools up.

United Teachers of Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl (Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Images)

In the summer of 2015, Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, gave a state of the union speech in which he alerted members to the dire necessity of raising dues by 33 percent. Without the increase, he said, UTLA would be “bankrupt or dramatically weakened” in the years to come.

Though there was considerable squawking from the rank-and-file, they ultimately approved the increase in February 2016.

Did the increase have an impressive effect on UTLA’s finances and avert a cataclysm to its bottom line? An examination of the union’s financial disclosure reports to the Internal Revenue Service both before and after the dues hike indicates it didn’t do much except pad UTLA’s payroll and bank account.

Before the increase went into effect, UTLA collected $41 million in dues, of which about $9.4 million was spent on officer and staff compensation. The union’s net worth was about $28.5 million, of which about $7.9 million was in non-interest-bearing cash. This hardly appears to be a case of impending doom.

The dues increase led to an additional $5.8 million in revenue, of which about $1.4 million was added to staff salaries and benefits. The number of UTLA employees earning more than $100,000 ballooned from 12 to 23 in just two years.

The union had other windfalls. Its legal expenses fell by more than one-third, and its accounting expenses by two-thirds.

So where did the bulk of the increase end up? In cash, apparently. UTLA’s non-interest-bearing cash assets stood at almost $11.6 million at the end of the 2017-18 school year, an increase of more than 47 percent in two years.

The dues hike might never have passed had it been sold to the membership as a means to boost staff compensation and add to already large bank account. There was never any danger of UTLA going bankrupt. But since the union’s dues increases no longer require a rank-and-file vote, its leaders no longer have to resort to subterfuge. They can pass dues hikes on their own.

California State Auditor Elaine Howle can’t be making too many friends among the state’s education policy establishment.

After releasing a report concluding that the state’s system for financing public education “has not ensured that funding is benefiting intended student groups and closing achievement gaps,” Howle followed up with another, warning that the Sacramento City Unified School District would soon face insolvency unless drastic measures were taken.

Sacramento’s situation is hardly unique. Districts across the state are approaching financial crisis even as California increased education expenditures by extraordinary amounts — about 50 percent in the last five years.

Howle’s report on Sacramento is remarkable for its candor. Any Californian can understand her explanation for what happened and why.

“Sacramento Unified increased its spending by $31 million annually when it approved a new labor contract with its teachers union in 2017,” she wrote. “Despite warnings from the Sacramento County Office of Education that it could not afford the agreement, the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Education approved the agreement without a plan for how it would pay for it.”

Unlike most school districts, Sacramento Unified pays 100 percent of the health care coverage for its teachers and their dependents. The auditor found this cost the district an average of $35,000 annually for each teacher. District officials were warned in 2003 that this benefit was unsustainable, but they failed to address it in six collective bargaining agreements negotiated since then.

The district used its reserves and one-time revenues from the state to cover ongoing costs, which only delayed the inevitable.

How could this happen? Simple. The district valued labor peace over fiscal responsibility. The Sacramento City Teachers Association threatened a strike in 2017, and the district was under a great deal of pressure — most notably from Mayor Darrell Steinberg — to avoid one. A deal was brokered by the mayor, with district and union officials “hammering out the details at the mayor’s Greenhaven home over soda and kettle corn, according to Steinberg,” the California Teachers Association reported on its blog.

The Kettle Corn Contract may end up being the cause of the district’s bankruptcy and a state takeover.

The local union is not blind to the situation. “We also have given the district several ideas that we think they could use right away to start to make an immediate impact,” said David Fisher, president of the Sacramento City Teachers Association.

Howle looked at those ideas and didn’t pull her punches.

“Although both Sacramento Unified and its teachers union have proposed changes to stabilize the district’s finances, we found that the proposals are unlikely to solve the district’s ongoing financial problems,” she wrote. “In fact, several proposals from the teachers union would increase costs dramatically.”

Howle has her own recommendations. They include cutting salaries by 2 percent, capping at 75 percent the district portion of health coverage and having employees contribute 3.5 percent of their salaries toward retiree health benefits.

Fisher’s response was predictable. “Well, right now, we have a huge teacher shortage,” he said. “So, any discussion of trying to cut pay for teachers at a time when it’s this huge shortage is kind of shortsighted.”

Since 2016, enrollment in Sacramento Unified has increased by 150 students. The district has hired 255 additional teachers. If there’s a shortage of teacher candidates, it’s because they have already been hired.

It’s understandable that Fisher wants to protect the benefits his members have already received. But by doing so, he is abetting a state takeover. This will guarantee that future Sacramento teachers will receive much less than they would have working for a financially stable district.

That’s shortsighted.

Somehow I missed last month’s report from the California State Auditor on one of former Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature education policy accomplishments: the Local Control Funding Formula.

The formula simplified the way the state funded K-12 education in local school districts, giving every district a base amount of money, then adding supplemental funds for those with large numbers of English learners, youth in foster care and children from low-income households.

Credit: California State Auditor

In the six years since the formula was instituted, California has increased education spending by almost 50 percent. So is all that extra money, and the system designed specifically to get it to the neediest students, working?

There is no way to know, says the state auditor.

The report concluded that the state’s approach “has not ensured that funding is benefiting intended student groups and closing achievement gaps.”

The reason: “The state does not explicitly require districts to spend their supplemental and concentration funds on the intended student groups or to track their spending of those funds.”

The auditor called the current accountability requirements “essentially meaningless.”

What’s worse, and frankly is even hard to believe, the formula actually has a disincentive for districts to spend the supplemental funds on targeted student populations. Any unspent funds “essentially can be used for any purpose in subsequent years,” including pay raises or pensions, the report says.

This diversion can come with an additional monetary penalty at the taxpayers’ expense, since it “puts the districts at risk of stakeholders’ submitting complaints or filing lawsuits alleging that they have inappropriately spent the funds,” according to the report.

The funding issues are a major concern, but more worrisome is an attitude that permeates school systems beyond California. The auditor explained that districts did not effectively analyze “whether the services they provided had been successful, which makes it difficult for stakeholders to hold them accountable for continuing to fund effective services and eliminating ineffective services.”

The auditor concluded that California “needs to better establish the linkages between funding, services and student achievements.”

That seems to be a fair and sensible demand for any public outlay of money, much less one at the scale of California’s public schools. But it will never be satisfied, because too many people benefit from obscuring where it all goes.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

With 310,000 members, more than 400 employees and $200 million in annual revenue, the California Teachers Association is a large-scale enterprise. It wields great influence at the statehouse, but its presence is felt in the smallest communities throughout the state. Nothing happens in education or fiscal policy without a CTA hand in it.

We have fundamental knowledge of how the organization is run and what it believes, but we can still find some surprises as we dig through the mammoth 497-page CTA Organizational Handbook. We have embedded it here, but it’s not something you’ll keep on your nightstand. I’ll hit a few highlights.

CTAOrgHandbook1920 (Text)

Members elect their local officers and representatives to the union’s 731-member State Council, which the union considers its highest policy-making body. The State Council in turn elects the board of directors and executive officers.

Click the image to view a larger version

As with any representative body, there are a host of standing committees and advisory groups devoted to single issues, such as finance, special education, retirement and charter schools.

Few CTA members know that the union has an internal initiative process. The signatures of 10 percent of active members can force a statewide rank-and-file vote on any matter affecting CTA. Additionally, a vote of two-thirds of the State Council can put a referendum on any issue up to a vote of the rank-and-file. To my knowledge, neither of these provisions has ever been used.

CTA’s day-to-day operations are run by a staff of professional and support employees overseen by its executive director. Department managers handle matters like the state union’s communications, legal activities, accounting and government relations.

Click the image to view a larger version

Local affiliates take care of their own business, but at any time they can call on CTA labor relations consultants assigned to their region. These professional staffers provide services and advice on contract negotiations, grievances and political action. They are especially valuable to smaller affiliates, who could never afford such services if they had to rely on their own limited dues income.

In addition to describing CTA’s structure, the handbook also lists the union’s beliefs and policies. Some are surprising and informative.

It seems that quite a few of the union’s core beliefs are breached in practice. For example, “CTA believes charter schools can have a positive role in California’s education system. When not-for-profit charter schools are created by local, democratically elected school boards, they provide students, parents and CTA members with educational opportunities in the public school setting.”

Alas, that belief is accompanied by 28 detailed restrictions and the admonition that “all charter school employees should be organized as union members to ensure both quality education for students and professional/employment rights for school employees.”

That’s not the only case of a disconnect between CTA belief and action.

• “CTA believes that a school employee has the right to resign his or her employment at any time the employee chooses.” However, you can resign union membership and cease paying dues only during a 30-day window each year.

• “CTA believes majority rule is a fundamental of our democracy. Any initiative, local measure or state policy should be passed by 50% plus one.” However, CTA requires a two-thirds majority vote for locals to disaffiliate from the state union.
• “CTA believes any legislation or district regulations requiring faculty to swear to specific oaths of allegiance should be opposed.” CTA bylaws expect local affiliates to “maintain and extend loyalty to the Association.”
• “CTA believes the public’s business should be transacted in public. Public agencies must take their actions openly and their deliberations must be conducted openly.” Unless, of course, the public’s business is negotiating a contract with public employees.
• “CTA believes that to fulfill the mission of the U. S. Department of Education, the U. S. Secretary of Education must have a minimum of five (5) years’ teaching experience in public education.” Unless I’m mistaken, the only secretary who has ever filled this requirement was Rod Paige, secretary of education under President George W. Bush.

There may be a good reason why we know so little about how the CTA sausage is made. Although the union believes that “protection of sources of confidential information is essential to the continuance of a free press,” it simultaneously does its best to ensure that those sources within CTA don’t speak to the press.

The media policy as described in the handbook states, “No CTA elected leader or staff member shall initiate contact with any print or broadcast journalist to encourage or develop an article that in any way reflects on CTA policies or positions without the specific authorization of the CTA president or their designee. A request for such authorization will include a detailed account of the subject(s) the journalist wishes to discuss as well as the approach(es) they may be expected to take.”

A policy like this may go a long way toward broadcasting the party line, but it also forces dissenting or alternative views underground. Over the years, that has been good news for me personally, because those views have few other outlets to be heard. But it’s bad for well-rounded coverage of teachers unions.

Photo by Bauzen/GC Images via Getty Images

The representative bodies of United Teachers Los Angeles have voted to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. UTLA is the first teachers union to endorse a 2020 presidential candidate, which is more of an issue than whether UTLA support will significantly aid the Sanders campaign.

Any union’s endorsement of Sanders is not shocking. His pro-labor credentials are impeccable. What makes the UTLA move noteworthy is its dismissal of a host of other candidates, many of whom are just as worthy of union support. Couple it with UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl’s badmouthing of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and it’s fair to say the Sanders endorsement is also a shot across the bow of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

AFT President Randi Weingarten was quick to respond to the UTLA action with a press statement.

“As part of this AFT Votes endorsement process, we have enabled locals and state federations, if they choose, prior to any national endorsement, to endorse a candidate for the purpose of their state primary or caucus,” Weingarten wrote.

Let’s parse that sentence. The use of the word “enabled” implies that locals and state federations would not be able to endorse candidates without AFT approval. It’s highly doubtful that the national union has any control over how and when locals endorse candidates. Additionally, there is no indication that UTLA endorsed Sanders merely to boost him in the California primary.

Weingarten also included information that has not been previously shared with the public (or with AFT members, as far as I can tell). It serves no other purpose than to downplay UTLA’s action.

“We anticipate that other AFT affiliates may endorse other candidates prior to their states’ primary or caucus,” she said. “Our recent member polling indicates that Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren have healthy double-digit support, followed by Sanders and several other Democratic candidates.”

To me, this reads like, “UTLA endorsed Sanders, who, by the way, is running no better than third among our members.”

If UTLA has stepped on some toes at the national level, it also may have some problems at the school level.

The union can legitimately tout that it “overwhelmingly” endorsed Sanders, but it was a very small electorate with a severely truncated choice.

UTLA claims 34,000 members, but the voters numbered only in the hundreds. The union provided a timeline of its endorsement process, and it showed that as the electorate grew, support for Sanders fell.

On Sept. 11, the union’s board of directors voted 35 to 1 (97.2 percent) to begin the Sanders endorsement process.

On Sept. 18, the UTLA House of Representatives concurred, 135 to 46 (74.6 percent). That’s a total of 181 votes, even though the UTLA house has 350 members.

On Nov. 13, the union held an advisory vote of school chapter chairs and any rank-and-file member who showed up to regional meetings where voting was held. The union announced 72.5 percent voted to endorse, but we know only that “more than 500 elected site representatives voted.”

The next day, the UTLA House of Representatives officially voted 80 percent to endorse Sanders, but again, we didn’t get a vote total.

It’s possible that a vote of the entire membership would have resulted in a Sanders endorsement. Rank-and-file turnout for any UTLA election is traditionally low, but union leaders didn’t risk it. Political endorsements are democratically conducted within a top-down framework. It ensures that union representatives get a vote, but only for the candidate chosen by union leaders.

The California Teachers Association recently named Joe Boyd as its new executive director, replacing Joe Nuñez, who was mysteriously ousted in July after six years on the job. Boyd was most recently the executive director of CTA’s counterpart, the California Federation of Teachers. The executive director acts as the union’s chief of staff, overseeing CTA’s 400 employees and its day-to-day operations.

Boyd had previously worked for CTA in a variety of positions for 23 years, including regional organizer, charter school organizer and Executive Director of Teachers Association of Long Beach. He formed a public policy consulting firm called the Advocacy Resource Group. CTA posted his extended bio from that moribund firm’s web site, which lists just about everything Boyd has done in his adult life, from his time as a political science undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley to his hiring at CFT.

Despite this level of detail, there is a substantial omission from Boyd’s résumé. In 2014, he partnered with Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools — described by California Democrats for Education Reform as “one of the nation’s most successful charter school networks” — in forming the organization.

Barr left Green Dot in 2009 and went on to form Future Is Now Schools. He even began a short-lived campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles in 2016. He is a well-known but polarizing figure because of his ties to both the charter school movement and teachers unions. Barr’s claim to fame was his welcoming attitude toward the unionization of charter school employees.

His collaboration with unions didn’t end at the California border. Barr partnered with Randi Weingarten, then-head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers and now president of the American Federation of Teachers, to open the Green Dot New York Charter School.

But Barr’s close ties to union leaders didn’t inoculate him against all opposition. He battled with United Teachers Los Angeles over the conversion of Locke High to a Green Dot charter. And Barr’s career has taken shots from many union supporters over the years.

Boyd knew his partnership with Barr would be problematic, but he seemed very committed. “I wanted to get into the space where people can work together about things they agree on,” he told Education Week in an August 2014 interview. “This is about the politics of collaboration.”

In the same interview, he also mentioned that he retired early from the CTA specifically to take the California DFER job, which makes the omission from his bio even more curious. “I have an open line of communication with Joe Nuñez,” he said.

Nuñez is gone but not forgotten. Two members of CTA’s State Council submitted a new business item calling on the union to use an independent investigator to look into the handling of Nuñez’s firing. “A report that can be shared needs to be made to State Council outlining any improprieties, procedural violations or lack of due process in the firing,” reads the item.

Boyd’s entire union career overshadows this short foray into the world of “collaboration.” But it appears CTA was concerned that this association wouldn’t play well with its activists, so it scrubbed any mention of it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Getty Images)

For the next three weeks, United Teachers Los Angeles will conduct a campaign targeted at its own members. The goal is to persuade them to approve a UTLA endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States.

Chapter leaders will participate in an up-or-down advisory vote on the Sanders endorsement Nov. 13, followed by a formal endorsement vote by the UTLA house of representatives the next day.

The union calls this “the most open and democratic process that UTLA has ever engaged in for an endorsement.” However, no other candidates will be considered.

Certainly it is not surprising that a public employees union would want to endorse Sanders, who openly supports labor and UTLA in particular. What is unusual about the union’s action is its assessment of the national Democratic Party.

In the latest issue of United Teacher, the union’s member newsletter, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl makes some extraordinary statements about Democrats and the last two Democratic presidents.

“The Democratic Party will not beat Trump if it continues to attack its own base,” he wrote. “By supporting underfunding of schools and unregulated growth of charters, Democratic Party leadership has attacked its own base of people of color and working-class people.”

Caputo-Pearl didn’t stop there:

“By supporting unregulated growth of a vastly anti-union charter sector, Democratic Party leadership has undermined the pay, job security, and working conditions of educators, a job dominated by unionized women. Another attack on its base.

“Even if we defeat Trump, the Democratic Party will not address the most important issues in education without radically changing its approach. Bill Clinton did perhaps more to start charterization than any other president. Barack Obama doubled down on that with support for charters, standardized testing, competition for scarce funds through Race to the Top, and more.”

Caputo-Pearl summarily dismissed the other two current front-runners — former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “Joe Biden is cut from the same cloth as Obama on education. Elizabeth Warren has 45 policy plans, but none on public education,” he wrote.

Warren did release an education plan after United Teacher went to press, and it’s a veritable wish list for unions, at an estimated cost of $800 billion.

As with his process for endorsing a candidate, Caputo-Pearl’s assessment of how the results will play out is devoid of alternatives.

“By endorsing Sanders, the best result would be having him take on Trump,” he wrote. “The worst result would be not having him as the Democratic nominee, but having forced every Democratic candidate to shift in our direction on education. Then, we get behind the nominee and beat Trump.”

I can think of a few more “worst results.” Maybe Sanders becomes the nominee and gets trounced in the general election. Or maybe Biden or Warren win the nomination without UTLA and thus feel no obligation to the union, like maybe what happened in 2008 with Obama.

I think it is likely that UTLA will endorse Sanders, not because the members overwhelmingly prefer him to other candidates, but because unions don’t hold endorsement votes they think they might lose.

All this might seem vitally important to UTLA, but the public hardly feels the same way. A recent Gallup poll shows only 2 percent of respondents thought education was America’s biggest problem. “The government” was cited most, by 34 percent of respondents.

Whether UTLA’s endorsement of Sanders will give us better government is open to debate. Certainly, we will get more government if he wins.