Anaheim Teachers Union Faces A Gathering Storm

February 5, 2015 By Ed Ring 5 Comments

If you drive by Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim, California, nothing seems amiss. With modern buildings, partially surrounded by a park, the school seems like a tranquil refuge. Like so many settings in sunny Southern California, palm trees and sycamores compete for space on the spacious lawns, beckoning skyward, swaying in the warmth of a slight breeze. By appearances, Palm Lane seems a perfect place to send your children to get an education.

Appearances can be deceiving. Palm Lane does not deliver educational excellence to its students, and it is the latest epicenter of an escalating war for control of California’s failing public schools.

Despite investing to create and maintain an impressive campus, academic achievement at Palm Lane has been sadly deficient. According to a report earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, “In 2013 a mere 38 percent of students scored proficient or better on state standardized English tests and 53 percent in math. About 85 percent of its students are Latino and 60 percent aren’t native English speakers.”

Parents at Palm Lane School were not aware of the school’s designation as a failing school, but they noticed improvement when a new principal, Roberto Baeza, arrived in 2013. During 2014, however, the Anaheim City School Board (ACSB) demoted Mr. Baeza and he now works at another school. Parent protests led to the involvement of Senator Huff’s office, along with former State Senate majority leader Gloria Romero.

Back in 2010, Senator Huff, a Republican, joined with Democratic Senator Gloria Romero to pass “Parent Trigger,” a law that permits parents to take over the management of a failing school if a majority of them sign a petition. To get onto the list of eligible schools, among other things, a public school has to fail to meet academic performance improvement goals for four consecutive years. Palm Lane has failed to meet improvement targets for over a decade.

While concerned parents began to organize to gather signatures to invoke the provisions of Parent Trigger, the Anaheim Elementary Teachers Association – that’s “teachers union” in plain English – tried to discourage the effort. As noted in the Wall Street Journal article, “In an October newsletter, the union warned teachers that ‘If you see signature gatherers or unusual people on your campus, contact the office, and depending on the situation, approach them and inquire why they are there or what they need.’ While teachers by law can’t tell parents not to sign the petition, the union said ‘it is okay to make statements such as: If I were a parent at this school, I wouldn’t sign the petition.’”

Eventually, signatures representing about 65 percent of students were gathered despite efforts by teachers to discourage it. Under Parent Trigger, petitioning parents may choose from among a group of options, one of which allows them to turn the failing school their children attend into a charter school. That is the option selected by the Palm Lane parents. That’s the worst possible option for the teachers union.

How the union is handling this challenge to the status-quo is revealing and typical. They have positions of authority over these children and the ability to influence parents both through their children and through meetings and communications directly with parents. Since the petitions were turned in, the union has been organizing meetings with parents, where, needless to say, the charter school option is not presented in a positive light. In one of these meetings, one of Senator Huff’s district representatives, who was invited to the meeting by concerned parents, had to contend with physical and verbal intimidation from union operatives.

There is understandable reluctance on the part of the Anaheim Elementary Teachers Association to see a change in management. But the way they are handling the situation is creating a movement. There are hundreds, if not thousands of schools in California that have failed according to the criteria specified in the Parent Trigger law.

Charter schools work. They work because they have the management flexibility to, for example, terminate incompetent teachers and retain excellent teachers even during layoffs. Each charter school has the independence to try creative approaches to effective teaching. They are laboratories where the science of education is advanced far more quickly than in highly regimented traditional schools where student achievement must be accomplished without violating union work rules. Even more important, when charter schools fail, and some of them do, they can be swiftly shut down or reorganized. Charter schools offer hope to literally millions of K-12 students in California.

If Parent Trigger succeeds in turning Palm Lane into a charter school, it won’t end there. The teachers union knows this. But all their money and influence cannot stand up to a grassroots, bipartisan movement of parents who love their children, and activists of diverse backgrounds and ideologies who care about the future. They know that, too.

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

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California’s New, Big, Nonpartisan Political Tent

December 4, 2014 By Ed Ring Leave a Comment

“In politics, a big tent or catch-all party is a political party seeking to attract people with diverse viewpoints and thus appeal to more of the electorate. The big tent approach is opposed to single-issue litmus tests and ideological rigidity, conversely advocating multiple ideologies and views within a party.”

–  Wikipedia, “Big Tent”

Something is happening in California. An unstoppable movement for reform is building, attracting support from conscientious Californians regardless of their age, income, race, gender or political ideology. The metaphor of a “big tent” aptly describes the approach that reform leaders are finally embracing.

The fabric of this big tent is supported by two poles, one representing restoring quality education, the other representing restoring financial health to California’s public institutions. But the big tent metaphor breaks down somewhat if it describes a political party. Because most of California’s reform leaders no longer care who gets it done, or what political party takes credit. They just want to Californian children to get quality educations, and they just want to restore economic opportunity to ordinary citizens.

For years, the powers that oppose education reform and fiscal reform have painted reformers as either Republican fanatics, bent on dismantling government, or Democratic traitors, beholden to “Wall Street Hedge Funds.” But this argument is wearing thin. On the topic of education reform, here are three reasons why Californians, all of them, are waking up:

(1) The Vergara Decision:  This case pits nine Oakland public school students against the State of California, arguing that (a) granting tenure after less than two years, (b) retaining teachers during layoffs based on seniority instead of merit, and (c) the near impossibility of dismissing incompetent teachers, is harming California’s overall system of public education, and is disproportionately harming public education in low income communities. Earlier this year, in a Los Angeles Superior court decision, the judge wrote: “The evidence of the effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.” In return, the California Teacher’s Association had this to say in an official press release:

“All along it’s been clear to us that this lawsuit is baseless, meritless, and masterminded by self-interested individuals with corporate education reform agendas that are veiled by a proclamation of student interest” (ref. CTA press release).

Watch the plaintiff’s closing arguments in the Vergara case. Note how the plaintiff’s legal team was actually able to use the testimony of the defendant’s expert witnesses to support their own case.

(2) Parent Trigger Laws:  In 2010, the California State Legislature signed into law the “Parent Empowerment Act.” This law enables parents in failing schools to (a) transfer their child to a higher performing school, (b) permits parents to change policies at an underperforming school if 50 percent of parents sign a petition, and (c) requires the California Dept. of Education to regularly publish a list of the 1,000 worst performing schools in the state. Former State Senator Gloria Romero, the liberal Democrat who is largely responsible for getting passage of the Parent Empowerment Act, writes this week in UnionWatch about how the Los Angeles Unified School District tried and failed to exempt themselves from the law. But government employee unions in California are incredibly powerful, collecting and spending over two billion dollars in taxpayer funded dues per two-year election cycle. They literally can be in all places at all times. Read the slime job someone sympathetic to the union machine entered on Romero’s Wikipedia profile:

“Romero leads the California chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, an interest group funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers who support charter schools.”

(3) Charter Schools:  Here is an example of why claims that “Wall Street hedge fund managers” are somehow hoping to profit from private schools or charter schools (which are not private) are absurdly unfounded. The Alliance College-Ready Public Schools in Los Angeles is a network of 26 high schools, located throughout Los Angeles, which, like nearly all charter schools, consistently delivers superior educational outcomes at a fraction of the cost of union controlled public schools. But the Alliance network is a nonprofit. The capital investments necessary to launch these schools are funded by donations. There is no return on investment. And the benefactors of these schools have no political agenda – they are Democrats, Republicans, and independents. They are a perfect example of California’s new, powerful, big tent.

Financial reform issues are the other pole that supports the big tent. Despite accusations of “hedge fund managers” and “Wall Street” getting behind allegedly phony reform proposals for public education along with fiscal issues such as runaway pension costs, it is actually corrupt financial interests that join with government bureaucrats to perpetuate the abuse and prevent reform. The reason government services are being cut and infrastructure spending is neglected is because unionized government workers receive excessive pay and benefits, crowding out funding for everything else. Wall Street firms underwrite the bonds to cover the deficits and finance deferred maintenance. Wall Street firms (including hedge funds) invest the pension fund assets. People are connecting the dots.

The behavior of powerful government unions, opposing education and fiscal reforms that virtually everyone else supports, is finally exposing them – along with their partners, corrupt financial interests and crony corporations – as the root cause of the most severe challenges facing Californians. This issue is nonpartisan and transcends ideology. The big tent is filling up.

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

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Parent Power Returns In Los Angeles

November 13, 2014 By Blake Neff 1 Comment

The new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District has announced an abrupt reversal of a policy limiting parents’ ability to fix underperforming schools.

Since 2010, California’s public schools have subject to a so-called “parent trigger” law. The law allows the parents of children attending schools that have repeatedly demonstrated low performance to band together and take over the schools’ managment. Parents taking such an action can do things such as fire the principal or convert a school into a charter school.

While the law has only been used a handful of times in the past four years, the prospect of having LAUSD’s authority overthrown by a coalition of parents was off-putting to many of LAUSD’s educational bureaucrats. In August, then-Superintendent John Deasy boldly asserted that LAUSD was actually exempt from the law. Because LAUSD had received a special federal waiver from No Child Left Behind requirements that are also used to determine whether a school can be triggered, Deasy said the district’s schools were also by extension could not trigger a parent takeover.

Just two months after staking his claim, though, Deasy tumbled from power, pressured into resigning after a series of controversies that included the bungled implementation of a billion-dollar program to give an iPad to every LAUSD student.

Now, Deasy’s replacement, Ramon Cortines, has abandoned Deasy’s position on the parent trigger law, though he has refused to describe the move as a policy reversal.

“I think it is a part of giving parents a choice,” Cortines told the Los Angeles Times. “If they want to do something I need to support it.”

The announcement will protect LAUSD from any potential lawsuits spearheaded by the groups Parent Revolution, an LA-based reform organization that spearheaded the trigger law’s creations and has organized trigger campaigns in the city. Parent Revolution deputy director Gabe Rose, who told The Daily Caller News Foundation last August that a lawsuit was possible if the district did not change course, told the Los Angeles Times Tuesday night that the organization is already planning several different parent trigger campaigns in the city. The group, Rose said, had never viewed Deasy’s position as remotely tenable and had done nothing to curb its organizing efforts while the policy was in place.

Cortines’s shift on parental triggers is the latest in a series of rapid changes he has made since replacing Deasy. After scarcely three weeks in office, he has already induced the district’s chief technology officer to resign over the iPad debacle and a similar problem implementing school scheduling software, and has also announced an ambitious plan to reorganize the district to increase the autonomy of regional administrators.

This piece was originally posted on the Daily Caller News Foundation

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