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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.

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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.

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

By all accounts, it’s a great time to be a California union activist. Statewide political offices are in Democratic hands. The legislature is solidly liberal. The state GOP shows no signs of life. Government revenues are up. Government spending is up.

Where is there a dark cloud in the Golden State?

Apparently it sits over the governor’s office, if we take recent reports at face value.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have regulated hospital closures, prompting the president of the California Nurses Association to accuse him of “abandoning both patients and communities” and the CNA government relations director to likening the veto to “a death sentence for many Californians.”

On the education front, Newsom vetoed a union-supported bill that would have required public schools and colleges to provide at least six weeks of paid maternity leave for all employees.

A California Teachers Association representative called the veto “unfortunate.”

In fact, Newsom vetoed three of the six bills CTA co-sponsored this legislative session.

SB 468 would have required the state to reevaluate tax credits and exemptions that do not have a sunset date. AB 258 would have provided grants to school districts for additional student support services. AB 1322 would have established a state Office of School-Based Health Programs.

Newsom also vetoed a CTA-supported bill that would have standardized paid release time for union work.

That’s not to say Newsom is an impediment to the union agenda. He signed bills to further regulate charter schools, and on CTA’s most important issue — spending — well, let’s just say the union has nothing to complain about, according to this slide behind the governor that shows education spending over the years. But Newsom’s own wishes have become a consideration, which is not something the teachers unions had anticipated.

Newsom seems to be trying to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Jerry Brown, in delivering on high-profile legislation while refusing to sign on to every item on the liberal wish list. He is clearly worried that another recession could jeopardize not only the state’s economy, but the political fortunes of himself and his party.

He should be equally worried about following in the footsteps of former California Gov. Gray Davis, who ended up being recalled in 2003. Davis was expected to sign whatever came across his desk, but he ultimately vetoed more than 1,100 bills during his five years in office. There were others that he signaled he would veto, leading to their demise in the legislature.

Two of these were heavily union-supported measures to expand the scope of collective bargaining and to require charter schools to be unionized.

Davis tried to buy union support with increased school spending, but when he opposed a union-proposed tax increase ballot initiative, then-CTA President Wayne Johnson called him a “tightfisted, penny pinching, shortsighted bureaucrat.”

Davis was described as an “incrementalist,” and that was his downfall, because the state’s interest groups wanted instant gratification. When voters recalled him and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Davis was philosophical.

“You can’t just sit in Sacramento and talk to other legislators, well intentioned, lobbyists from the AARP or Consumers Union, again all well intentioned, and think that is the universe in which we function,” he said.

Even in a state dominated by one political party, the governor often has to walk a fine line between the desires of the majority of Californians and the desires of those who show up in his office. Jerry Brown was able to keep his balance. Gray Davis was not. How will Newsom do?

Getty Images

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report

The School and Communities First ballot initiative might be the biggest and most expensive school funding campaign battle in California history. Or, it might peter out as so many other similar attempts have in the past. There is evidence to support either view.

The proposed measure, now seeking a November 2020 election date, would radically alter the provisions of Proposition 13, the state’s landmark property tax limitation initiative approved by voters in 1978. The new initiative would maintain Prop 13 protections for residential homeowners but eliminate them for many commercial properties, creating what is commonly called a split-roll property tax.

Though the election is more than a year away, the California Teachers Association has already begun its work on the campaign and is prepared to fund it with millions of dollars. Over last weekend, CTA placed the initiative on its front burner, devoting the entirety of its annual Political Activist Academy to preparing union representatives for the job to come.

The attendees were chosen from union local affiliates across California. They were informed that after the conference, they would be given materials and opportunities to engage CTA members and the public, and would be expected to continue their work as part of a cadre activists through the 2020 election.

They were trained in messaging for both internal and external audiences and instructed on signature-gathering to place the initiative on the ballot.

The messaging won’t be too complicated, as this two-page campaign fact sheet uses the words “corporate” or “corporation” eight times and adds references to “wealthy,” “concentrated wealth” and “ultra-rich.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti addressed the CTA activists at the academy and pledged his support for the initiative.

Despite this accelerated activity, the campaign does face significant hurdles. A Public Policy Institute of California survey released late last month revealed fading support for a split-roll property tax. Forty-seven percent of likely voters favored the idea, with 45 percent opposed. Perhaps more worrisome for the campaign was the fact that independents rejected it by a vote of 54 to 36 percent.

In order to win, the campaign would need large margins in the state’s major cities, but the poll showed only 51 percent support in the Los Angeles region and 55 percent in San Francisco, which was the high-water mark for the entire state.

There may be any number of explanations for this weak showing, but the survey offers a compelling one. Respondents were asked if the state would experience good or bad economic conditions in the next 12 months. They chose bad, 54 to 37 percent. And more chose bad regardless of political party, ideology, region, gender, race, age, education or income.

There is another reason for Californians to be skeptical about the initiative. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the measure will raise $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion, once administrative costs and reduced income tax revenues are factored in. Public education would receive 40 percent of that money. Assuming those revenues materialize, that would be somewhere between $2.6 billion and $4.6 billion.

California’s education spending has increased by more than $33 billion since 2012. During that time, enrollment fell, and is expected to continue to fall dramatically.

So while some might consider the split-roll tax a money grab, it really doesn’t provide enough to make a contentious and expensive campaign worthwhile. It is much more reasonable to assume that the goal is to undo Proposition 13 entirely. Since there is no chance that could happen using one wrecking ball, the Schools and Communities First initiative seeks to be the first to chip at the Prop 13 structure and pave the way for future demolition.

As difficult as it may be to believe nowadays, when teacher unions deem charter schools their mortal enemies, there was a brief period of time when they took a different approach. Affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers once created their own charter schools. They were to be established as models for how excellent schools could be if the best educational and labor practices espoused by the unions were followed.

NEA’s motto is “Great Public Schools for Every Student.” Here’s what happened when the union tried to construct one great public school for 450 students.

In 1996, NEA created the Charter School Initiative. It was a project to build and support six charters around the country. The national union put $1.5 million behind the effort. Then-NEA President Bob Chase told a congressional subcommittee that “charter schools can become a positive vehicle for reform within public schools, depending on how they are developed, funded, structured and governed.”

Chase was convinced that “when charter schools are created along the lines that our members have chosen, professional educators applying best practices and teaming with parents and community members, that they do indeed offer hope for positive changes within our public school system as a whole.”

He did express concern that many charter laws “do not require charter school students to take state assessments, thereby making it difficult to compare their achievements with students in other public schools.”

Support for the idea reached the highest levels of government. The U.S. Department of Education under the Clinton administration funded a joint project between NEA’s initiative and SRI International dedicated to “the cross-fertilization of ideas and practices between charter schools and other public schools.”

Only four NEA charters opened, one of which was the Kwachiiyoa (pronounced koo-chee-OH-ah) Charter School in San Carlos, California.

The word kwachiiyoa comes from the Kumayaay people of the San Diego area and is loosely translated to mean “everyone a learner, everyone a teacher,” which became the school’s motto.

The school was designed to serve some 450 elementary students and originally scheduled to open in September 1997. But like many charter schools, particularly at the time, it had difficulties securing a location. Kwachiiyoa ultimately found a home at the former Cleveland Elementary School campus, which in 1979 had been the site of the notorious “I don’t like Mondays” school shooting.

Kwachiiyoa opened in September 1999, ostensibly with the full support of NEA, the California Teachers Association, the San Diego Education Association, the local school board and the teachers college at San Diego State University. The San Diego Union-Tribune called it “perhaps the most enthusiastic charter school launch the city had seen.”

By design, the school had no principal. It was to be run by a 12-member governance council consisting of six teachers, two parents, two community partners, one education support employee and one student. “The governance structure of Kwachiiyoa Charter School is based on the philosophy that teachers are professionals whose voice in school management and operations is essential to achieving academic goals,” read a school goals document. Goal No. 1 was “high student achievement.”

In keeping with its design as a laboratory for cross-fertilization with district schools, Kwachiiyoa was to “help to prepare new teachers for the district and will also help veteran teachers prepare for certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.”

The school began with approximately 200 students. Its nine teachers all had state teaching credentials, and most had a master’s degree. They averaged 11 years of teaching experience. Class sizes were the same or lower than the district average.

The staff was unfailingly positive about the school’s mission, as shown in this promotional YouTube video and in its initial school accountability report from March 2000.

Three years later, Kwachiiyoa was the lowest-performing of the 121 schools in the San Diego Unified School District. It ranked lowest even when compared with other California schools with similar student socioeconomic backgrounds. For the 2002-03 school year, Kwachiiyoa was forced into a state intervention program for underperforming schools.

When it came time for the charter’s renewal, the union disappeared from the picture. The teachers tried to proceed with a new charter application without union support, but the district denied it based on the school’s record.

In a masterpiece of understatement, the San Diego school board concluded, “it is evident that the instructional program included in the original charter petition is not satisfactory.”

It would be inaccurate to blame this outcome on the implementation of the unions’ ideas, since the school board learned that the unions’ “had little or no involvement in the operations of the school in the prior chartering term.”

After noting that participation by the local union and San Diego State University was one of the primary reasons for approval of the original charter petition, the board discovered that virtually no collaboration had taken place. The teacher professional development program was never created, much less instituted.

The board mentioned that the original school director had been removed, but did not say by whom. Nor was she ever replaced, leading to herculean efforts by three teachers who, on top of their classroom duties, assumed administrative and financial responsibilities for the school.

Not surprisingly, they “had failed to maintain adequate financial records and adhere to commonly accepted accounting practices.” The district concluded that the “lack of school leadership clearly contributed to this breakdown of fiscal control and to the failure of the school’s academic program.”

Kwachiiyoa teacher Rhonda Schwartz summed it up succinctly when she told the Union-Tribune, “Somebody birthed this school and then they left us in the cold.”

Kwachiiyoa closed and another charter school was granted the site, though eventually the district sold the property and a developer turned it into homes.

The other three NEA charters remain open to this day, though they had trials and tribulations with the union at the time of their founding.

The president of the NEA local in Colorado Springs, who championed the CIVA Charter School, was subjected to a recall petition by her own members, though it ultimately failed.

NEA’s local affiliate in Norwich, Connecticut, and the Norwich school district both rejected the establishment of an NEA charter, so the national union appealed to the state and formed a new local specifically for the charter school. Unions usually insist that the local school district be the approving authority.

Teachers at the NEA charter in Hawaii wanted to join traditional school teachers on the picket line when they went on strike in 2001, but the union told them they couldn’t, because they were employees of the school and not of the state.

None of the charters has a formal union connection anymore.

The United Federation of Teachers charter school in New York City has had similar difficulties. UFT was forced to shut down its K-8 charter school for poor performance and a host of administrative problems. The school was criticized for failing to enroll English learners and special-needs students — a charge the union often levels at other charter schools. UFT continues to operate a charter high school whose performance is mixed, to be generous.

“Everyone a learner, everyone a teacher” was an appropriate slogan for the Kwachiiyoa failure. The unions thought to teach us about what makes a successful school but learned that it really wanted nothing to do with the responsibility.

There isn’t much to occupy California’s teachers unions politically for the rest of 2019, but that only allows them to accumulate more funds for what promises to be a very busy 2020 on the campaign trail.

Choosing a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, as well as controlling seats on the LA Unified school board, will head the list in the spring. Next fall’s campaign will feature drumming up votes for that Presidential nominee, and promoting the split-roll property tax initiative, should the latest version qualify for the November 2020 ballot.

Pair these with whatever legislation is in store for charter schools, collective bargaining, and teacher hiring, and the unions have a full political plate.

All of this activity requires a lot of money. The California Teachers Association, being the primary source of school campaign funding in the state, is well situated to throw it around.

CTA has a handful of segregated funds for political purposes, infused by the dues contributions of its 325,000 members. While each fund has a specific objective, they mutually support each other and the political goals of the union.

Political Allocation Fund: This fund contains monies for the union’s political action committee, to be donated to candidates for state and legislative office. Member contributions are voluntary, but teachers have to check an opt-out box on CTA’s membership form to instead divert their portion to the union’s general fund. CTA expects to collect about $4.4 million annually for this fund.

Independent Expenditures Fund: As the name indicates, this fund allows the union to spend money on behalf of candidates, without contributing to them directly or coordinating with their campaigns. Members must opt out from this contribution also. CTA expects to collect about $2.5 million annually for this fund.

Initiative Fund: Each working CTA member contributes $36 annually to this fund, which supplies money to support or oppose certain ballot measure campaigns. The union collects about $9.4 million annually for this fund, but since major ballot initiative campaigns happen infrequently, there is a significant rollover of funds. At the end of last year, the fund’s balance was just short of $23.4 million.

Media Fund: About $16 from each working CTA member is allocated to media advertising and promotion, which comes to almost $3.9 million each year. The funds from this account are not all used for strictly political purposes, though the back-to-school ads, such as this one, often precede media campaigns for more funding. This fund also tends to accumulate more money than it normally spends. At the end of last year, its balance was $5.8 million.

Advocacy Fund: This fund is filled with another voluntary $20 member contribution, though getting it refunded or redirected requires obtaining a “voluntary contribution change form” from CTA and returning it within 30 days of joining. Half of it goes to the CTA Institute for Teaching, which, the union explains, “provides scholarships to members and supports teacher-led efforts to improve public schools.”

It doesn’t mention that out of the $2.8 million it collected last year, only $380,000 went to scholarships.

The other $10 goes to the Advocacy Fund. CTA describes its purpose only in a general way. The fund is meant to promote “policies to improve public education, such as additional funding for our public schools, smaller class sizes in all grades, and affordable college for all students. It also includes fighting back attacks on teachers and public schools, such as massive budget cuts, voucher programs, and legislation to decrease education employee’s pensions or attack teachers’ professional rights.”

At the end of last year, the Advocacy Fund contained $6.8 million. CTA doesn’t specify exactly how that money is spent, but we can presume that it is the primary source for union-sponsored campaigns such as Kids Not Profits.

All Told: CTA has more than $40 million available for various aspects of its political agenda, with more on the way at the end of every teacher pay period — and it can be supplemented by grants from the National Education Association.

Money doesn’t always guarantee success in the political arena, but CTA will never be able to credibly complain it couldn’t raise enough cash.

You have to give California’s public employee unions credit for their dogged determination to undo Proposition 13, the state’s landmark property tax limitation initiative approved by voters in 1978. Forty years of failed attempts and tens of millions of dues dollars spent without even managing to get an initiative to the voters have not dissuaded them.

This latest effort, dubbed the Schools and Communities First Initiative, actually began way back in 2015, when it was called the Make It Fair Initiative. It revived the idea of maintaining Prop 13 protections for residential homeowners but eliminating them for many commercial properties, creating what is commonly called a split-roll property tax. The campaign to place the measure on the November 2016 ballot was abandoned, even though the campaign committee boasted of a poll showing approval by 55 percent of likely voters.

But eager for a promised $11 billion a year from the initiative — including about $5.8 billion for K-14 education — supporters of Make It Fair did not disband, instead putting together a new campaign with a ballot initiative target date of November 2018. United Teachers Los Angeles and other unions contributed financially, but the California Teachers Association was not yet ready to commit. The campaign decided to postpone the initiative, even though UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl claimed polling was “very positive.” Ultimately, the campaign gathered enough signatures to place the measure on the November 2020 ballot.

Last January, the CTA decided to back the split-roll measure, paving the way for the possible infusion of millions of dollars from the union’s ballot initiative fund. The Schools and Communities First campaign committee currently has about $1.9 million cash on hand, twice as much as initiative opponents.

Despite issuing assurances of widespread public support, the campaign made another abrupt change in plans. Supporters decided to refile the initiative in an effort to address some of its major difficulties with voters. The most notable of these was defining a small business exemption (50 or fewer full-time equivalent employees) for commercial properties with a market value of $3 million or less. The properties of larger businesses will be reassessed at least every three years.

The campaign is still touting public approval, even though the most recent poll showed support of 54 percent of likely voters — 1 percentage point less Make It Fair’s chances in the 2015 poll. Historically, successful California initiative campaigns begin with a large majority of support that gradually gets whittled down by Election Day.

Refiling the initiative requires petitions to place the new language on the ballot. The campaign is aiming for 1.4 million signatures, with CTA pledging to collect 150,000 once the measure clears the state’s administrative hurdles. The signature-gathering is expected to begin in late October.

CTA plans to use signature-gathering for the initiative as an organizing opportunity among its members and hopes to create some synergy in collective bargaining as well. The union has already created a sample resolution for school boards to adopt in support of the initiative.

The union’s website now has a page in support of the campaign devoted to “tax fairness” that includes this graph:

Whenever CTA addresses the question of tax fairness, I feel obliged to point out that the union now collects more than $200 million annually in revenue and pays no corporate income taxes.

A lot can happen in the remaining 14 months before Election Day 2020, but the split-roll initiative keeps chugging on despite its many fits and starts.

It was an eventful year for the Los Angeles Unified School District, with the run-up and launch of the teacher strike, the District 5 school board election and the Measure EE parcel tax initiative. Behind them all was United Teachers Los Angeles and its president, Alex Caputo-Pearl. He and his union have more plans for you and your wallet this school year.

Back in July 2016, Caputo-Pearl introduced his blueprint at the union’s leadership conference, famously announcing his plan to “create a state crisis in early 2018.” UTLA did not achieve all its goals, but it did get the strike it wanted, along with favorable media coverage.

Three years later, Caputo-Pearl was back with another speech to the leadership conference and another wide-ranging plan for California public education.

This one is called the New Deal for Public Schools, but it includes all the union’s old demands: lower class sizes, higher pay, increased funding and limits on charter schools.

“Our New Deal for Public Schools draws from the New Deal in the 1930s that reconstructed the economy,” Caputo-Pearl said. “It draws from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. It is a call to transform public education.”

A blueprint is one thing, but what will construction entail? Caputo-Pearl spelled it out:

January 2020 contract reopeners. UTLA can open negotiations on salary and two other issues. Union leaders have already made it clear that one of those issues will be for more psychologists and psychiatric social workers. Some members were frustrated that the settlement of the January strike did not adequately address special education staffing.

School board election. Four seats — in Districts 1, 3, 5 and 7 — will be contested in 2020. The primaries will be held in March, with a general election, if necessary, in November. UTLA will seek a definitive majority on the board. With that in mind, the union will step up its efforts to increase member contributions to its political action committee.

Health insurance bargaining. The agreement on health benefits was sealed a year before the strike, but it expires in December 2020. Negotiations on a successor agreement can begin as early as March.

Split-roll property tax. It came as a surprise to most observers that the Schools and Communities First campaign committee, formed to place an initiative on the ballot that would undo property tax limits for commercial businesses, decided to drop the measure that had already qualified for the November 2020 ballot in favor of filing a new, improved version. Initial polling was not great, and the campaign sought to reduce the measure’s effect on small businesses. However, it does mean starting the ballot initiative process from scratch, beginning with signature-gathering.

California unions have a long history of abandoning similar measures at great cost. In 2004, the California Teachers Association and National Education Association spent $3.4 million to gather signatures for a split-roll property tax ballot initiative, only to give up before the deadline.

In 2005, the unions spent another $2.1 million for the same purpose, and ended up with the same result.

This time, money seems to be no object, as the campaign recently received $1 million from an ally in the fight against corporate privatizers… the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is powered by Facebook money.

Caputo-Pearl provided one more hint of what may be in store for LA Unified. He repeated it nearly a dozen times in his speech to the UTLA leadership conference.

“Strikes work.”

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to LA School Report.