Dear Colleague, 

On September 9^th, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 419 into law, which extends the current K-3 ban on suspensions for “defiant and disruptive” behavior in California to grades 4-8. The law suggests that “restorative justice practices, trauma-informed practices, social and emotional learning, and schoolwide positive behavior interventions and support, may be used to help pupils gain critical social and emotional skills” as a way to right the wayward student. It’s important to note that the statute doesn’t pertain to violence, robbery and other more serious offenses.

The impetus behind the bill appears to be race-based. While black students made up 5.6 percent of the total enrollment in California for academic year 2017-18, they accounted for 15.6 percent of total suspensions for willful defiance, according to the state education department. Of course, it goes unmentioned that black kids actually commit a disproportionate amount of the suspense-worthy offenses. Black teachers understand this. A recent Fordham Institute teacher survey showed that they, more than white teachers, feel suspensions aren’t used enough.

To see the text of the new bill, go here. To read a contrarian view, go here.

On the school choice front, Education Post CEO Chris Stewart has written a powerful piece about “The Three R’s of Parents Who Want to Raise Free Children.”

One of my favorite Gandhi quotes is, “There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.” I’ve never found a person who disagrees, even among the most ardent believers in the transformative power of public schools. Parents matter most.

Yet, if we believe parents and guardians are the first and most important teachers in the lives of children, why do we allow the various authorities to limit their options and usurp their desires?

Because, of course, while we say we believe in parents, trust them, and respect them, in truth, there is a collective suspicion about “bad” parents who deserve none of the trust and respect.

But, if our goal is to find solutions to the educational failure that compounds year by year, all logical roads lead back to parents or guardians and their ability to access educational opportunities.

That means school choice (and even the right to choose no school at all), and that scares people to death.

To continue reading, go here.

The California State Senate has passed AB 1505 and is one step closer to Gov. Newsom’s desk for his signature. The original bill would have been a death knell for the state’s charter schools, but after negotiations with all interested parties, a compromise was reached. The California Charter School Association is upbeat, assuring parents “that the most critical protections were maintained and that new provisions would be focused on our values of equity, quality, predictability and co-existence within our public education system.”

 AB 1505 ensures that:

• Charter schools that are closing the achievement gap are granted a streamlined renewal, with the ability to now be renewed up to seven years.
• There is restoration of an appeals path to counties and the State Board of Education when a new or renewing charter school petition has been denied.
• Any consideration of the fiscal impact of a new charter school petition must be balanced with the academic needs of the students who are going to be served.  
• A five-year transition exists for non-core charter school teachers to secure appropriate certification.

To learn more, go here. To see the bill’s history, go here.

Regarding teacher pay, Newark, NJ did something interesting in 2012. With the help of Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg, Newark teachers signed off on a contract that linked pay to student achievement. It was a interesting plan that gave teachers a choice. According to Chalkbeat, “About a third of Newark teachers took advantage of an option that let them remain on the traditional pay scale. And fewer than 200 teachers per year – about 7% of the current teaching force – received the ‘highly effective’ bonuses, while a similar number of low-rated teachers were prevented from earning raises, according to union and former district officials.”

The plan worked. Newark retained almost all of its top-rated teachers: In the 2016-17 school year, 97 percent of teachers who were rated “highly effective” the previous year stayed in the district, but 54 percent of teachers rated “ineffective” were gone.

Now, with the Zuckerberg money drying up, a new contract has been signed, and sadly PFP has been eliminated. Local teacher union president John Abeigon pulled no punches in a note to his members, “This contract removes the last vestiges of corporate reform from the district,” and is a “message to our enemies that your evil is not welcome in Newark or any other public schools.”

To read more, go here.

In the “better late than never” department, Mary Grabar has written a book excoriating “A People’s History of the United States.” Howard Zinn’s book, which was first published in 1980 and has sold some 2.6 million copies, is aimed at high school and college students. In a review, Federalist executive editor Joy Pullmann writes that Zinn’s book is “concentrated poison.”

Using a careful review of his source materials and claims, as evidenced by her nearly 1,000 footnotes, Grabar documents quite clearly and conclusively that Zinn is not only a plagiarist but a liar. His presentation of key events and figures of American history, such as Christopher Columbus, slavery, the NAACP, World War II, and the civil rights movement, also straight-up regurgitates Communist propaganda.

Here’s just one example, from page 222 and 223 in Grabar’s book. She shows how Zinn selectively quoted from American documents to make it look like the United States was interested in getting Vietnam’s natural resources, not in defending it from a communism our nation understood to be evil and dangerous. The very same documents Zinn quotes actually prove the opposite of the points he makes with them when one reads the material he left out.

To read more, go here.

Earlier this month, Mike Antonucci posted a most interesting document: “The California Teachers Association 2019-20 Membership Handbook.” This 46-page “guide to membership processing” is loaded with minutia, some of which may affect you. For example, it mentions “Commitment Cards.”

By signing a Commitment Card, a member agrees to the Maintenance of Dues provision, where a member may revoke their annual dues obligation during an annual 30-day window period, which is not less than 30 days and not more than 60 days before the anniversary date of signing the Commitment Card.

Local chapters can use the Commitment Card as part of its member engagement efforts when having one-on-one conversations with a member about the local chapter’s successes, what is planned next, and how the member’s involvement and support strengthens their union’s efforts.  Locals that are successful in getting members to commit can be more confident in having the support of its active members for each year, and in return better plan the budget and activities to support those members.

To see the entire document, go here.

A recent piece in The Wall Street Journal also concerned itself with union membership. Authored by Mark Janus’ lawyer, Bill Messenger and National Right to Work Foundation president Mark Mix, the op-ed claims that a specific aspect of the Janus decision has been overshadowed. The authors claim that while the ruling affirmed that state and local workers have the legal right to stop such payments, the decision also requires that the government “obtain proof that workers voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently waived their First Amendment rights not to subsidize union speech before deducting union dues or fees from their paychecks.”

“To be effective, the waiver must be freely given and shown by ‘clear and compelling’ evidence,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “Unless employees clearly and affirmatively consent before any money is taken from them, this standard cannot be met.”

Yet the federal government and many states and localities continue to deduct union dues without evidence that workers waived their speech rights, usually based on pre-Janus authorization forms that come nowhere close to demonstrating a waiver. Labor Department figures suggest unconstitutional deductions could be coming out of the paychecks of as many as 7.2 million government employees nationwide. The fix is simple: Governments must cease transferring wages to unions until they amend their dues-deduction policies to comply with Janus.

To read the op-ed, go here.

On that note, if you have any questions, or have experienced any problems because of your decision to leave your union, please let us know and we will do our best to help you – possibly getting you legal assistance, if necessary. We will also be able to share your concerns with other teachers across the state. And talking about sharing, please pass this email along to your colleagues and encourage them to join us.

Also, anyone wishing to donate to CTEN can do so very simply through check, money order or PayPal - http://www.ctenhome.org/donate.html  As a non-profit, we exist only through the generosity of others. Thanks, as always. 

Sincerely,

Larry Sand

CTEN President

Dear Colleague,

Mike Antonucci wrote an article last month that should be heeded by any teacher who is planning to quit their union. He writes,

If a member decides to resign and revoke her dues authorization, and it is within the time window, she must send a written notice via U.S. Mail to CTA Member Services at the union’s headquarters in Burlingame, according to the application form.

But wait. According to a CTA handbook distributed to local affiliates throughout the state, a resigning member must make a drop request in writing and deliver it by U.S. Mail or in person to the local’s headquarters. The letter must contain a formal request to drop membership and an original signature.

Until this bit of union trickery is resolved, we are suggesting that, should you decide you want out, use the form we have linked on the CTEN home page and send copies by certified mail, return receipt requested to:

·         your local union

·         CTA Member Services at 1705 Murchison Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010

·         your school district

There are other bits of union chicanery that Antonucci includes in his piece. To read it, go here.

In other union news, the Pacific Legal Foundation in partnership with the Liberty Justice Center has filed a lawsuit which has several components. It primarily concerns itself with SB 866 – a California state law signed the same day that the Janus decision was made. The law specifies that public employers cannot “deter or discourage public employees, or applicants, from becoming or remaining members of employee organizations.” The bill also prohibits employers from disclosing the date/time/place of the new employee orientation “to anyone other than employees, the exclusive bargaining representative, and a vendor who is contracted to provide a service at the new employee orientation.”

It forbids the university from talking to them about their union membership, dues, or even the Janus decision. Enter UC San Diego employees Mike Jackson and Tory Smith who, after the Janus ruling was handed down, tried to exercise their rights by resigning from the Teamsters Union.

The union denied their demand, saying they were locked into membership until the collective bargaining agreement expires in 2022. And when Mike and Tory asked the university’s human resources department how to resign, they were told a California state law—a Gag Rule statute—expressly prohibits the university from talking to them about their constitutional rights related to union membership and dues.

To read more about the case, go here

In other union news, CTA took a huge loss when the California Faculty Association, which represents some 19,000 employees of the California State University system, ended its affiliation with both CTA and NEA after a 38-year relationship. Mike Antonucci writes,

There have been tensions between the two organizations in recent years concerning higher education representation on the state union’s governing bodies. CFA shared a single seat on CTA’s board of directors with the state union’s other higher education affiliate, the Community College Association. CFA is CTA’s second-largest affiliate, behind only United Teachers Los Angeles.

To read more about the CFA defection, go here.

PDK released the results of its yearly poll recently, and it seems that teachers are not collectively happy. From the summary of the report:

• 60% of teachers say they’re unfairly paid, and 55% say they’d vote to go on strike for higher pay.

• Pay isn’t the only concern. Seventy-five percent of teachers say the schools in their community are underfunded. Fifty-eight percent say they’d vote to strike for higher funding for school programs, and 52% say they’d vote to strike for greater teacher say in academic policies on standards, testing, and the curriculum. 

• Parents and the public overall stand with them; 74% of parents and 71% of all adults say they would support a strike by teachers in their community for higher pay. Even more — 83% of parents and 79% of all adults — say they’d support teachers striking for a greater voice in academic policies. Similarly high percentages of teachers say they would support teachers in their own communities if they went on strike for any of these reasons. 

However, the problem with this – and many surveys – is that they assume those questioned have enough information to give an informed response. For example, how many of those polled know that for the 2016–17 school year, the average salary of full-time public school teachers was $58,950 in the U.S. But this figure excludes hefty benefits like health insurance, paid leave, and pensions. According to the Department of Labor, such perks comprise an average of 33 percent of total compensation for public school teachers. When they are added in, teachers’ average annual compensation jumps to $87,854. And even that amount does not include unfunded pension liabilities and certain post-employment benefits like health insurance, which are not measured by the Department of Labor.

Additionally, how many of those polled know how much K-12 educators actually work compared to other professionals? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, teachers work 1,398 hours per year on average, whereas lawyers put in 2,036 hours per annum, almost 50 percent more time on the job than teachers. Dentists (1,998 hours/year) and accountants (2,074 hours/year) also work many more hours than teachers.

To see the results of the PDK poll, go here. To get another take, go here.

Bill Evers, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has written an alarming piece for The Wall Street Journal concerning California’s proposed “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.” The “guide,” written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats, is for teachers to use as a resource. A few examples:

…Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

… Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list.

Also, many Jewish groups were outraged that the curriculum supported the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, never mentioned that anti-Semitism has been a problem, and gave scant mention to the Holocaust.

Well, the good news is that enough sensible people were outraged, and deluged the state board of education with complaints. The leaders then admitted the curriculum “falls short and needs to be substantially redesigned.”

To read Evers’ WSJ piece, go here. On the decision to reevaluate, the Jewish Journal weighed in here and the Los Angeles Times here.

Kerry McDonald, senior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, is a big proponent of “unschooling,” which opposes the traditional public school model. Her preferred method of school choice is to home school, which is how she and her husband educate their four children. In a recent interview with The Epoch Times, she talks about the first time she walked into a homeschooling situation and found it enchanting.

This was in stark contrast to a student-teaching practicum I was doing that same semester. There I experienced a local public elementary school with its forced socialization, command-and-control environment, age-segregated classrooms with a static handful of teachers, and disconnection from the larger world. I never realized this contrast, of course, because my childhood had been spent in public schools; but witnessing these two entirely different learning environments for the first time triggered my fascination with alternatives to mass schooling and education choice more broadly, and is what prompted me to attend graduate school in education policy at Harvard University.

To read more, go here

The new school year is a very busy time for teachers, and CTEN will do its best to keep up with post-Janus doings in addition to any other issues pertinent to education and teachers, and keep you informed as things happen. If you have any questions, or have experienced any problems because of your decision to leave your union, please let us know and we will do our best to help you in a timely manner. We will also be able to share your concerns with other teachers across the state. And talking about sharing, please pass this email along to your colleagues and encourage them to join us.

Also, anyone wishing to donate to CTEN can do so very simply through check, money order or PayPal - http://www.ctenhome.org/donate.html  As a non-profit, we exist only through the generosity of others. Thanks, as always. And happy new (school) year!

Sincerely,

Larry Sand

CTEN President