ONE UNION'S WAR AGAINST CHOICE
Although the CTA likes to present its own interests as synonymous with those of children ("what's good for us is good for the kids too"), few people buy that anymore. The truth is the CTA is a labor union, says Maureen DiMarco, Governor Wilson's secretary of child development and education: "They shouldn't be mistaken for an educational organization." Sacramento Bee Editor Peter Schrag puts it more bluntly, calling the CTA "probably the most reactionary of the major professional organizations in American education" - "it often resists anything not in its own interests or contrary to established routine."Consider for example the case of Newport Beach Senator Marian Bergeson who, when she was still in the Assembly in 1981-82, proposed a bill that would allow students in the bottom quartile of school achievement to go to either another public or non-parochial private school, transportation provided. "It was specifically aimed at low income parents," says Bergeson. Even though the bill satisfied many of the objections the CTA now says it has with Proposition 174 in that it didn't aid parochial schools or help the middle class, the CTA bottled it up in committee. (A decade later when Governor Wilson nominated Bergeson to replace Bill Honig, the CTA remembered her having once flirted with vouchers and blocked the appointment.)
IN 1989, ever alert to the threat of vouchers, the CTA had nine parental choice bills killed in a single day by having them referred to "interim study." Two years ago, Assemblyman Gil Ferguson of Newport Beach offered a bill to offer $3,000 scholarships to students from schools that scored in the bottom 10 percent on state standardized tests so that they could attend the private school of their choice. Naturally, says Ferguson, "the CTA was furious. They killed it in the education committee." They did the same thing to Assemblyman Quackenbush when, four years ago, he first introduced a bill to allow students to transfer between school districts. On that occasion, he says, CTA supporters "vilified" him, delivered "diatribes" against his bill, and claimed that in giving parents the right of interdistrict transfer he was encouraging both white flight and paving the way for vouchers. For four years straight the CTA opposed Quackenbush's bill. It was only this year –after 174 qualified for the ballot and Quackenbush agreed to a 1 percent cap on the number of students who could transfer out of large districts like the LAUSD each year –that the CTA dropped its objections and the bill became law."
As to why it took so long for the CTA to pass something that was overwhelmingly favored by parents from every ethnic and social class (according to a 1990 Gallup poll upwards of 70 percent of persons interviewed favored choice), Quackenbush says the CTA needed time to adjust to the philosophical proposition that "children are the property of their parents and not the school district."
