Throughout the state, teachers union leaders are urging their members to leave the classrooms they only recently reopened. As with the nearly two-year pandemic lockdown, the union says they’re walking out for the kids.
In a press release, California Teachers Association leaders said teachers in Contra Costa’s Mt. Diablo Unified School District are “united and ready to fight for the resources their students need.”
What are the resources? “MDEA educators… have not had a salary increase since 2017.”
The district says it can’t do that without violating state law, which requires school districts to balance their budgets and project balanced budgets three years into the future. The potential punishment for violations includes a state takeover of district schools.
Union leaders throughout California are fueling the fire in Sonoma County, advising the RPCEA to strike in a way that is most disruptive to district students and their families, and urging students to cut school and join the picket line.
Wayne Johnson, former president of CTA and United Teachers Los Angeles, outlined the strike strategy on RPCEA’s Facebook page:
Go for it. Do it two weeks before the end of school. Take your roll book, keys, final report cards, no graduation, no closing the books for the districts (sic) fiscal year. That is what we did in Los Angeles in May of 1989 we got a 24% pay increase over three years and 95% of our demands.
The end of the year is the most powerful time for teachers to strike. Be prepared for a huge backlash but if you do and stay strong, you win. I got death threats for threatening to not have graduation. I survived and we won. You can too!
RPCEA is employing the familiar tactic of understating teacher pay and benefits. A recent California Policy analysis shows RPCEA teachers’ compensation is actually significantly higher than union leaders acknowledge, especially when the cost of living and median household income in Rohnert Park is considered. To learn more, read the full CPC article here.
We’ve Just Left the Salon.com
California Policy Center made big news on the lefty news site, Salon. In “How this tiny Christian college is driving the right’s nationwide war against public schools,” reporter Kathryn Joyce reveals a vast conspiracy in which Hillsdale College in Michigan is pushing a far-right school curriculum into charter schools – including a school CPC helped create, the Orange County Classical Academy, a charter school serving a Latino-majority community in the City of Orange.
There’s much that’s materially wrong with that 14-word headline – never mind the sprawling, three-part series behind it. For instance, Joyce is never quite clear on the fact that charter schools are public schools. Unlike most public schools, however, charters are generally run without teachers unions. That difference allows principals to hire and promote teachers based on their performance, a fact that represents an existential threat to teachers unions. Bottom line: if there’s a “war” here, as Joyce pyrotechnically asserts, it’s CPC’s war against the California Teachers Association’s monopoly on public education.
But what’s most fascinating is to watch Joyce grapple with the idea that like-minded Americans might work together out of a sense of common purpose – that civic-mindedness or virtue motivate CPC and its allies, including Hillsdale College. From where Joyce stands – with her arms folded and a disapproving look on her face – that’s clearly a conspiracy. And at the center of that conspiracy she believes she has discovered something that will make the neutron bomb a conventional weapon – “Hillsdale's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right.”
If you read the Salon series (starting here), you’ll encounter some of your favorite California Policy Center personalities. And if you’re into such sport, drink every time you encounter the word “right-wing” as either a noun or adjective – but do not simultaneously operate heavy machinery.
CPC Launches Twitter Bot to Track Unions’ Political Donations
We are thrilled to announce our new project, California Union Watch, a Twitter bot that tracks campaign finance data from the California Secretary of State website and publishes public union contributions to California politicians in real time. The bot shares all government union contributions to California state election campaigns, including candidates for the state legislature and executive offices, as well as donations to propositions and political parties.
“By making campaign donations more accessible to Californians, we expect many people will be surprised to learn how much government unions are donating to Sacramento politicians every day,” said CPC policy analyst Brandon Ristoff, who developed the bot and is leading the California Union Watch project.
In its first two weeks, California Union Watch tweets had around 40,000 views. One post spotlighting the California Teachers Association’s whopping $85,000 contribution to the Democratic party earlier this month became CPC’s most-liked tweet of all time.
Peter Pan Medicine: SB871 would Mandate COVID Vaccines for All K-12 Students in California
California state Senator Richard Pan has introduced SB871, a bill that would mandate that COVID-19 vaccines be included in the list of required vaccines for all school-age children in the state and prohibit any personal belief exemption. Pan is ignoring the fact that kids are the age group least vulnerable to Covid. The state Department of Public Health’s own data shows (as of March 16, 2022) that children under 18 account for 0.0% of California’s Covid deaths.
“It’s hard to see how vaccinating that age group advances public health in any way,” writes CPC president Will Swaim in a recent article on the ill-conceived bill.
Consider this: After a year of making vaccines widely available, the state’s data also shows, 44 percent of all school-age kids – more than 3 million – are still unvaccinated.
“Vaccinating them now will be a massive undertaking in a state with a poor record of success where massive undertakings have lately ended in abysmal failure,” Swaim explains.
Schools would be emptied of children whose parents have decided for any reason that vaccinating children is unnecessary. By one estimate, more than a million California children could be forced back into remote learning.
Pan’s bill is even more outrageous when an unprecedented number of California children are already experiencing mental health crises after two years of strict Covid regulations that left kids isolated and afraid. Surveys of 1,200 California middle and high school students between April 2020 and March 2021 found that “63% reported having had an emotional meltdown; 43% said they had a panic or anxiety attack; and 19% described suicidal thoughts.” There is simply no reason to force hundreds of thousands of California students back into isolation.
Pan’s bill is likely to ignite even more parent outrage. That will almost certainly lead to noisy confrontations between school officials and angry parents – and that might account for the fact that Pan’s colleagues in the state Senate are pushing Senate Bill 1100, a bill that would encourage local school district officials to toss “unruly” parents out of school board meetings.
That’s the state of government and education in California today. Push a law to protect children that we know are not at risk from Covid and ignore the fact that the unnecessary “remedy” will actually hurt countless children in life-altering ways.
To learn more about SB871, read the full article here. You can also share your opinion on SB871 with us and your state legislator through CPC’s new Take Action tool.
“In a drought, water becomes more expensive – and the more water costs, the more valuable their investment.” – CPC co-founder Edward Ring in National Review on special interests that are banking on Californians living with water scarcity
Mask Theater is Alive and Well in Los Angeles: Larry Sand, president of California Teachers Empowerment Network, examines why teachers unions are still pushing masking in schools when data shows masks are harming kids.
