State Teachers Union Faces Calls for Change

In the shouting match over education reform, no voice booms louder than the California Teachers Assn., the union representing 300,000 public school teachers.

The union possesses an unparalleled network of activists--able and willing to serve as campaign workers for politicians the teachers favor. As one of the largest sources of campaign contributions in the state, the union has virtually guaranteed access to the highest levels of government. And, above all, the union benefits from the goodwill the public offers to its members--the state’s teachers.

Yet, despite all those advantages, magnified by a longtime ally in the governor’s office and a public apparently willing to spend more on the state’s schools, CTA officials head into 2000 after a year filled with surprising obstacles.

Even within the union’s own ranks, calls for change are mounting. Concern about its image played a role in the CTA’s decision to launch a million-dollar statewide radio campaign in the fall highlighting ways in which teachers are helping to improve schools.

The first half of this two-year legislative session found the union compromising hard and fast rules to dodge a public spat with Gov. Gray Davis. But 2000 may be less kind and gentle.

Davis plans to keep education as his dominant theme. Union-backed teacher training programs and incentives for people to become teachers were core components of his State of the State address this week.

At the same time, Davis has already shunned a major part of the union’s agenda for 2000, opposing a CTA-backed initiative planned for the November ballot to boost state education spending to the national average.

The experience of Dave Patterson, a neophyte Sacramento lobbyist, illustrates why the CTA may continue to experience difficulty at precisely the moment when union officials had expected their ability to dominate state education debates would be at its peak.

Patterson discovered the power of the teachers union in his first weeks on the job. He also found that it could be beaten.

“There was many a night that sleep didn’t quite come,” said Patterson, the lobbyist for the state’s 160 charter schools.

Since California’s first charter school opened in 1993, supporters have hailed them as a symbol of liberation from public education’s status quo. For the teachers union, charters were more palatable than using tax funds to help pay private school tuitions, but not much more; for charters, freedom includes the right to ignore union contracts.

Last spring, enthusiasm about the first Democratic governor in 16 years led the CTA to renew its quest to unionize charter schools. Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) agreed to shepherd a bill.

Patterson’s directive was clear: Stop the Migden bill. Now.

So began a crash course in Sacramento politics. Patterson visited key legislators to tell his story; some of the CTA’s seven lobbyists had always been there first.

A key test came when Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) cast a deciding vote for the bill, setting it free from the Assembly Education Committee.

Aroner doesn’t even sit on the Education Committee. At least she didn’t until Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) made her a member for a day to get the bill passed. Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles teachers union organizer, has received nearly $270,000 in campaign cash from the CTA over the past four years.

That maneuver was a prime example of the CTA’s clout. But this time it wasn’t enough.

Busloads of charter school parents, teachers and students converged on the sun-baked Capitol steps from as far away as Truckee and Pasadena. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who in 1975 signed the collective bargaining law that made the CTA a true union, publicly scolded the union for being “an educational Goliath.”

Davis sent word of a certain veto.

Suddenly Patterson found himself at the table with enough chits to make union representation merely an option for charters--a bill Davis would sign into law.

The CTA does not easily admit defeat. It always intended to compromise, said Governmental Affairs Director John Hein: “If you start off in Sacramento with your bottom line, you get less than that.”

But Patterson suspects that he benefited from a backlash.

The CTA has traditionally balked at changes in teacher tenure, killed efforts to tie teacher pay to student test scores or other standards designed to measure teaching effectiveness, and defended bilingual education even when union members appeared to have mixed feelings about the issue.

“The CTA spends most of its time making sure as little as possible puts teachers at risk,” said Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles). “That’s their function.”

That function leads critics to accuse the union of defending the status quo even when it hurts the education of children.

“Everyone up there is really tired of CTA and the me-too and it’s-all-mine type of game,” Patterson said. “I don’t have money . . . I don’t have a lot of the things that make Sacramento work, but I also don’t have the baggage.”

Troubled Relationship With Governor

By all outward signs, 1999 was to be a year when criticism over those sorts of issues would not matter. With the first Democratic governor in 16 years, elected with the help of $1.2 million in union money and muscle, an improving economy and a Legislature controlled by Democrats, union officials expected to rule.

But instead, the union found its relationship with the new governor troubled from the start. Davis’ initial list of education advisors included union opponents. His education secretary, former state Sen. Gary Hart, counts among his legislative successes an end run around the CTA to establish union-free charter schools.

And the union had a mixed view of Davis’ first education reform proposals, feeling they reduced the ability of teachers to control how they taught in favor of more top-down control by the state.

The union had to swallow compromises it disliked. The hardest-fought measure was teacher peer review, in which teachers evaluate and assist struggling colleagues. The CTA fears that teachers judging colleagues puts members in an untenable position.

CTA lobbyists won a major concession: Programs would be negotiated locally instead of mandated one-size-fits-all by the state. But lobbyists were unable to remove the governor’s hammer: More than $400 million in district funds is tied to successfully launching a peer review program.

On other measures, the governor vetoed two bills the union backed, but also killed two others the union opposed.

By summer, during the union’s annual conference, the mere mention of Davis or his reforms drew boos. Union President Wayne Johnson summed up the disappointment: Davis is “100% better than [Republican opponent Dan] Lungren, but 50% less than we hoped for.”

Davis carefully avoids specific mention of differences with the CTA. But a source close to the governor says he was irritated that the union expected to haggle over his reforms and “incredulous” that it took on charter schools again.

“He’s taken aback by their unwillingness to see how dangerous it is to continue to look like business as usual,” the source said.

Seeing the CTA as Teachers, Not a Union

Despite the setbacks CTA has experienced, it is still a mighty force. Behind its might is a carefully concocted mixture of discipline, size, political savvy, and, most of all, public trust.

A 1998 Harris Poll asked people whom they trusted to tell the truth. Teachers were at the top at 86%, followed by priests. Trade unions landed at the bottom at 37%, just below journalists and politicians.

Infuriating union foes, the public perceives the CTA more as a group of teachers--and therefore trustworthy--than as a union.

Opponents insist that if California teaching salaries rank 10th in the nation and overall education funding ranks 40th, someone’s been raiding the cookie jar.

Yet instead of “political hardballers,” the union is “seen as a group of professionals that bond together, more like doctors,” said Ken Khachigian, a past White House advisor who fought the CTA and lost in 1993 when he headed a campaign to provide tax-funded vouchers for private school tuition.

Union President Johnson maintains that no one understands the problems of schools better, or more closely represents the desires of the public, than 300,000 college-educated teachers--mostly women, average age 43 and almost half Republicans, half Democrats.

The union is not shy about using its influence. Legislators who take on the CTA find that their own education proposals go nowhere.

Republican Sen. Ray Haynes of Riverside is a frequent CTA critic. He has seen bill after bill get bottled up in committee.

Haynes has “never been my friend on anything else,” said former CTA lobbyist Owen Waters. “I never thought it was important enough to go meet with him.”

The other education groups in Sacramento--associations of school boards, administrators and the like--meet weekly with the CTA to settle on joint positions and usually present a united front--further enhancing the CTA’s power.

None of the groups share the CTA’s wealth. In the last decade, the CTA dipped into its $400-per-teacher annual dues to give candidates roughly $10 million in cash and millions more in campaign volunteers and literature. The other groups together distributed less than half that amount.

Nor can the other groups beat the union’s tightly disciplined organization.

About 150 full-time field staff representatives oversee 1,500 teachers each, bringing teachers’ concerns up to the union’s headquarters in Burlingame and the union’s campaigns down to teachers.

The staff network oversees a political army unmatched by any other, with lead teachers trained at annual institutes where topics range from how to influence a local school board election to how best to approach an Assembly member.

More than any other lobby, the CTA can offer candidates political cradle-to-grave service, helping them define their education platforms and win campaigns, then providing them well-documented legislation to carry.

In her last election, when Sacramento Democrat Deborah Ortiz found herself in a hotly contested battle for a state Senate seat, the CTA lent her one of its top lobbyists, who helped organize local teachers to work phone banks and walk precincts. When education emerged as a key campaign issue, Ortiz relied on the CTA to bring her up to speed. The union also added $36,000 to her campaign, two-thirds of it in the final crucial weeks before the election.

After Ortiz won, she carried one of the CTA’s priority bills. Ortiz argues that she took on the bill because she is a pro-labor Democrat, not as repayment.

Speaker Villaraigosa defended his assistance to the CTA on the charter school bill in similar fashion. Anyone who thinks such actions are a quid pro quo for campaign contributions misses an important piece of the puzzle, he said: He supported the union long before it supported him.

“My wife’s a teacher, I worked for the teachers union, and I believe that teachers are the most essential element in a quality education,” he said. “Philosophically, we agree.”

Buying Access to the Highest Levels

What political contributions buy, lobbyists and politicians agree, is access. In the case of the CTA, which over the past seven years consistently ranked among the top five contributors to legislators, that access is to the highest levels.

Every year the CTA reviews up to 4,000 pieces of legislation to decide which to work for, which to ignore, which to oppose.

Even Republicans--who get only 8% of the campaign contributions the union distributes, and rarely carry union-sponsored bills--find they cannot match the CTA’s knowledge, particularly in an era of term limits.

“As much as I want to blame CTA for being slow to look at reforms, the rest of the education interest groups are empty, powerless, incompetent, politically inept or all of the above,” said former Assembly Minority Leader Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino).

Even after bills leave the Legislature, the CTA sees to it that teacher representatives sit on the Department of Education committees that determine how they are carried out.

Gov. Davis was so concerned about the potential for softening of his proposals in the Department of Education that he withheld $1 million from the department’s 1999-2000 budget to be delivered only when he is satisfied.

Once cleared by the department, the new laws drift down to districts where union officials do not have to fight to be heard; contracts give them a legally mandated voice. In fact, a Republican movement toward local district- and school-based control has been readily embraced by the CTA because that is arguably where unions can exert the most influence.

California Union Not Seen as Reform Leader

Across the United States, teachers unions have taken public criticism to heart, adopting new reform methods.

The movement, called “new unionism,” emphasizes taking greater responsibility for school quality. “Simply put, in the decade ahead, we must revitalize our public schools from within or they will be dismantled from without,” said Bob Chase, president of the National Education Assn., the CTA’s parent group.

In some areas, new unionism has meant peer review programs, union-sponsored charter schools and even unions helping administrators shut down failing schools.

California has rarely been a reform leader, in part hamstrung by the CTA’s own elaborate organization, in which positions on issues are prescribed in an inch-thick handbook and changes must be voted on by a 660-member council.

One former lobbyist described the situation as like a huge oil tanker going through environmentally sensitive habitat, moving “really slowly.”

Within the CTA, United Teachers-Los Angeles has played an eclectic role that mirrors divisions within its own organization, pushing for reforms in some arenas and for retrograde policies in others--with varying degrees of success.

It is UTLA, for example, that continues to hold the hardest line on the right of teachers to choose their school, leaving struggling schools in poorer areas with the most inexperienced staff.

On the other hand, it was also UTLA that nudged the CTA toward compromise on Davis’ peer review proposal, in part because the Los Angeles union already planned to start such a program.

Young Teachers Push for More Support

Shortly after Johnson took office as CTA president last June, he pledged to make the union more progressive. He wants to open a group of CTA-sponsored charter schools and push for a state law that would allow local unions to play an official role in curriculum reform--a push bound to be controversial with school administrators.

In the radio ads that ran throughout the fall, Johnson sought to unite teachers with concerned parents against politicians and bureaucrats who use “our public schools as a testing ground for the fad of the week.”

The CTA’s own extensive polling shows that teachers and the public want the union to increase its role in issues that affect teaching and learning.

Those sentiments are especially pronounced among the quarter of the state’s teachers under age 36--who also desperately want their union to provide support and guidance in how to teach.

By the CTA’s estimates, 20% of new teachers quit within three years and half within five years. In internal surveys, they were more likely to cite working conditions than low wages. Older teachers’ top concern is politicians who tinker with schools, union polls show. Mid-career teachers cite the desire for a bigger role in school governance.

But teachers under age 35 said they needed help figuring out ways to get parents more involved in their children’s education. And teachers under 25 are the most likely to say they want the CTA to provide them with avenues for seeking the advice and counsel of their colleagues, a request that has led the union to expand statewide mentor programs.

In a compromise that some see as a watershed, the CTA in 1999 negotiated a state budget deal that raised starting wages but, for the first time, also tied teacher bonuses to school performance.

For the March primary election, the CTA has teamed up with business leaders on an initiative that would reduce the vote needed to pass local school construction bonds from a two-thirds majority to the simple 50%-plus-one majority needed for state bonds.

In November, the CTA hopes to ask voters to pass a plan to require the state to raise per-pupil spending to the national average over five years, at a cost of almost $5 billion.

Success in the CTA’s endeavors will depend on public confidence that communal interest has replaced self-interest. Even union backers fear that may be a hard sell with Johnson at the helm because of his history: As UTLA president in the late 1980s, he led one of the state’s most bruising strikes.

Asked about this, Johnson shakes his head. Like the CTA as a whole, he feels he has been misunderstood: “I’m a very peaceful kind of person, I really am. But if you want to fight, I’m going to fight.”

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Top CTA Contributions

Following are the elected state officials who have received $35,000 or more from the CTA during the past decade. Amounts indicate only cash campaign contributions, not in-kind support such as staff, phone banks and mailers, which in some cases doubled the contribution. All but three of the top recipients were Democrats and an additional $1.6 million was contributed to the state Democratic Party.

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Note: Many of the politicians held various offices during the decade.

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Source: Times computer analysis of Secretary of State campaign contributions data, 1988-98.

Teacher Compensation

Although teachers unions are under pressure to take the lead in crafting school reform, salaries remain a top priority for them. Unions nationally and in California have succeeded in winning steady pay raises over the past 15 years.

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Sources: American Federation of Teachers, National Education Assn.