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

In 1962, as tensions ran high between school districts and unions across the country, members of the National Education Association gathered in Denver for the organization?s 100th annual convention. Among the speakers was Arthur F. Corey, executive director of the California Teachers Association (CTA). ?The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective,? Corey told the crowd. ?You can?t go out on an illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good citizenship the next.?

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

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

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

The CTA?s most important resource, however, isn?t a pool of workers ready to strike; it?s a fat bank account fed by mandatory dues that can run more than $1,000 per member. In 2009, the union?s income was more than $186 million, all of it tax-exempt. The CTA doesn?t need its members? consent to spend this money on politicking, whether that?s making campaign contributions or running advocacy campaigns to obstruct reform. According to figures from the California Fair Political Practices Commission (a public institution) in 2010, the CTA had spent more than $210 million over the previous decade on political campaigning?more than any other donor in the state. In fact, the CTA outspent the pharmaceutical industry, the oil industry, and the tobacco industrycombined.

All this money has helped the union rack up an imposing number of victories. The first major win came in 1988, with the passage of Proposition 98. That initiative compelled California to spend more than 40 percent of its annual budget on education in grades K?12 and community college. The spending quota eliminated schools? incentive to get value out of every dollar: since funding was locked in, there was no need to make things run cost-effectively. Thanks to union influence on local school boards, much of the extra money?about $450 million a year?went straight into teachers? salaries. Prop. 98?s malign effects weren?t limited to education, however: by essentially making public school funding an entitlement rather than a matter of discretionary spending, it hastened California?s erosion of fiscal discipline. In recent years, estimates of mandatory spending?s share of the state?s budget have run as high as 85 percent, making it highly difficult for the legislature to confront the severe budget crises of the past decade.

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

Weber and his followers weren?t successful in keeping the proposition off the ballot, but they did manage to delay it for two years, giving themselves time to organize a counteroffensive. They ran ads, recalls Ken Khachigian, the former White House speechwriter who headed the Yes on 174 campaign, ?claiming that a witches? coven would be eligible for the voucher funds and [could] set up a school of its own.? They threatened to field challengers against political candidates who supported school choice. They bullied members of the business community who contributed money to the pro-voucher effort. When In-N-Out Burger donated $25,000 to support Prop. 174, for instance, the CTA threatened to press schools to drop contracts with the company.

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

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