ONE UNION'S WAR AGAINST CHOICE
For an organization purportedly dedicated to education they take positions that consistently undermine the ability of school principals to maintain standards and enforce discipline. They oppose dress codes, standardized tests, ranking of schools by test scores, home schooling, teacher testing as a criterion for job promotion, and any plan to rank teachers according to their competency. They recommend that teachers not sign petitions for charter schools (designed to give parents, teachers, and principals more autonomy). They oppose selling or leasing unused school buildings to private schools. They routinely block any bills that would allow financially strapped school districts to use parents to rake leaves, mow grass, or paint the school. Although they give lip service to the notion of greater parental involvement (the single factor with the strongest correlation to student achievement), in practice they flee from it as a vampire flees the dawn. (Teachers don't like to be bothered by parents, says one Glendale school teacher. "They interfere with our mission.")What is their mission?
In a June 1984 pamphlet entitled "Guidelines for Academic Freedom in the Public Schools," the CTA Tenure and Academic Freedom Committee argued that one of their goals had to be to oppose the New Right's emotional appeal to social issues. "Who dares take on religion, free enterprise, patriotism, and motherhood?" argued the Academic Freedom Committee. "We do - and we must!"
Lots of organizations complain about things they don't like, but the CTA puts its money where its mouth is. "The CTA is the biggest spending lobby in the state," says Stanford's Terry Moe. "It's virtually impossible to get something out of the Legislature that the CTA opposes."
Two reasons: The CTA donates vast sums to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to distribute to Democrat candidates. And secondly, the CTA's political director is Alice Huffman, a long time political activist (she was once state chairwoman of the Black American Political Association of California) with such close ties to Brown that newcomers to Sacramento sometimes assume she's a member of his staff.
Although the CTA has been around now for nearly 130 years, it dates its recent heady rise to power to the election of President John F. Kennedy who in return for National Education Association campaign support, quickly signed an executive order permitting collective bargaining for federal employees. Similar changes quickly followed at the state level until today, in the words of Forbes Senior Editor Peter Brimelow, teachers unions today enjoy a highly enviable status, that of "near-monopoly supplier to a government enforced monopoly consumer."
