Should Teacher Legislation Go to the Head of the Class?

While much remains to be done, significant strides have been made in a decade of commitment to improving California’s public education. Test scores are up, class sizes are downand per pupil spending is inching closer to the national average.

Public opinion polls consistently rank education as California’s top priority, and taxpayers have shown they are willing to invest in our public schools. Over the past 15 months, voters in 109 school districts approved more than $11.3 billion in bonding authority for school construction.

If public school reform is going to succeed, those who are responsible for producing results must be held accountable, and parents, students and policymakers must have meaningful data to evaluate academic performance.

That is why California has adopted new standards and testing programs to measure student progress, reward success and identify problems that must be addressed.

However, a new proposal backed by the California Teachers Assn., or CTA, would essentially eradicate every step we have made in reforming our public schools.

The measure, AB 2160, would transfer control of our children’s education from parents and elected school boards to union negotiators. Decisions about what our schools teach, the books they use, the standards and objectives that are established, new academic programs that should be implemented, the degree to which parents are involved and even the maintenance of school facilities would be subject to negotiation during the collective bargaining process.

School boards are elected to set local school policy. They hold public hearings to give parents and members of the community an opportunity to air divergent views. School boards are responsible for ensuring that the community’s expectations and our children’s educational needs are met.

The CTA plan would render school boards, and the parents they represent, powerless. And unlike school board meetings, decisions about how our schools are run would be made behind closed doors, with no public input or scrutiny by the news media.

Giving union negotiators the power to leverage our children’s education against union demands for better wages, benefits and working conditions is simply wrong.

The greater the number of issues to be resolved at the collective bargaining table, the greater the drain of resources from instructional programs. With virtually every school issue subject to negotiation--from the number of parent-teacher conferences to the details of the mathematics curriculum--collective bargaining would be a yearlong process, diverting the attention of administrators and occupying the time of teachers who should be in the classroom.

Teachers should play an influential role in determining what is taught in the classroom--and they do. Seven of the 17 members of the Curriculum Development Commission are teachers, as were 13 of the 21 commissioners on the Academic Standards Commission. Their expertise and insights are highly respected, and teachers should always be consulted when education policy is determined.

This measure is not about giving teachers more input. It’s about a powerful special interest group trying to seize control of the public school system at the expense of schoolchildren.