ONE UNION'S WAR AGAINST CHOICE
IN 1989, having been involved in two or three subsequent projects, all of which were ground to powder in the public school maw, Alibrandi put together a committee of 15 or 20 people to write a parental choice initiative that would be independent of public school input or control. This initiative (the voucher plan) caught the eye of state Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who in the summer of 1990 showed up in Alibrandi's eighth floor conference room to offer the voucher committee a deal: If the committee was willing to restrict its initiative to the public schools, Honig would help get it through the Legislature. "But if you include outside schools," said Honig, "we will oppose you tooth and nail. We have $14 million and we will bury you."In the end, the voucher committee turned down Honig on the grounds that a choice plan limited to public schools was no real choice plan at all. "That is like saying you can buy any kind of car you want as long as it's GM," says Alibrandi, "that you can go to any restaurant you want as long as it is McDonalds."
The CTA reacted swiftly to the rejection of the Honig compromise, contacting every educator or businessman on the Alibrandi committee (by then called EXCEL, the Excellence Through Choice in Education League) and telling them that the CTA no longer considered them friends of public employees. "As a matter of fact," says Alibrandi, "they effectively cut off second contributions from a lot of those people. One of those guys said to me, 'Joe, if I wake up in the morning and there are a lot of teachers picketing my business up and down the state, I am out of business.' Someone else said, 'The most expensive contribution I ever made was the one I made to Proposition 174.'"
Even so, this kind of harassment was small potatoes compared to their master plan to keep the voucher initiative from ever reaching the voters. As CTA President Del Weber later explained at the 1992 summer convention of the National Educational Association (the CTA's parent union), the CTA "decided to do something very dramatic, something nobody has ever tried in the nine decades that the initiative has existed in this state. We decided to create an organized campaign to block an initiative from getting enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
"We realized that we would be accused of acting in an 'undemocratic' manner. What was wrong, after all, with letting the people vote on an issue?
"Our answer was firm. There are some proposals that are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters."
IT WAS not surprising perhaps that a plan that started out contemptuous of the democratic process would ultimately end up mired in allegations of deceit and fraud. Even before the signature gathering campaign started on January 1, 1992, says American Petition Consultants President Mike Arno, he was offered a $400,000 "retainer" not to represent the voucher initiative. When he declined, the CTA, he said, paid $500 monthly retainers to rival petitioners to tell them where his people were gathering their signatures. Then when Arno's petitioners set up their tables, flying squads of activists would appear to harass his field workers, argue with potential signers, join hands and surround the signature gatherer tables, threaten "to send [petitioners] to the hospital" and, when all else failed, offer bribes. People who had already signed petitions were asked to fill out forms asking to have their signatures removed from the ballots.
