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While I respect the job that unions have done to protect the rights of employees, I think that the pendulum has swung way too far when it comes to the power and influence of public employee unions in California. Unlike private industry unions, public employee unions are able to influence the selection of those who have the responsibility to approve their contracts. Additionally, often management employees receive the same salary increases and benefits that their staff receive. Thus, the people in charge of the negotiations have a built-in conflict of interest. Any increases they approve for their employees most often end up coming to them as well.

I thought that this piece by Steven Malanga provided an interesting background explaining how the public employee unions gained their political power in our state.

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.

California’s government workers took longer than many of their counterparts to win the right to bargain collectively. New York City mayor Robert Wagner started a national movement back in the late 1950s when he granted negotiating rights to government unions, hoping to enlist them as allies against the city’s Tammany Hall machine. The movement intensified in the early sixties, after President John F. Kennedy conferred the right to bargain on federal workers. In California, a more politically conservative environment at the time, public employees remained without negotiating power through most of the sixties, though they could join labor associations. In 1968, however, the state legislature passed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, extending bargaining rights to local government workers. Teachers and other state employees won the same rights in the seventies.

These legislative victories happened at a time of surging prosperity. California’s aerospace industry, fueled by the Cold War, was booming; investments in water supply and infrastructure nourished the state’s agribusiness; cheaper air travel and a famously temperate climate burnished tourism. The twin lures of an expanding job market and rising incomes pushed the state’s population higher, from about 16 million in 1960 to 23 million in 1980 and nearly 30 million by 1990. This expanding population in turn led to rapid growth in government jobs—from a mere 874,000 in 1960 to 1.76 million by 1980 and nearly 2.1 million in 1990—and to exploding public-union membership. In the late 1970s, the California teachers’ union boasted about 170,000 members; that number jumped to about 225,000 in the early 1990s and stands at 340,000 today.

The swelling government payroll made many California taxpayers uneasy, eventually encouraging the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 (see page 30), the famous initiative that capped property-tax hikes and sought to slow the growth of local governments, which feed on property taxes. Government workers rightly saw Prop. 13 as a threat. “We’re not going to just lie back and take it,” a California labor leader told the Washington Post after the vote, adding that Prop. 13 had made the union “more militant.” The next several years proved him right. In 1980 alone, unionized employees of California local governments went on strike 40 times, even though doing so was illegal. And once the Supreme Court of California sanctioned state and local workers’ right to strike in 1985—something that their counterparts in most other states still lack—the unions quickly mastered confrontational techniques like the “rolling strike,” in which groups of workers walk off jobs at unannounced times, and the “blue flu,” in which public-safety workers call in sick en masse.

But in post–Proposition 13 California, strikes were far from the unions’ most fearsome weapons. Aware that Proposition 13 had shifted political action to the state capital, three major blocs—teachers’ unions, public-safety unions, and the Service Employees International Union, which now represents 350,000 assorted government workers—began amassing colossal power in Sacramento. Over the last 30 years, they have become elite political givers and the state’s most powerful lobbying factions, replacing traditional interest groups and changing the balance of power. Today, they vie for the title of mightiest political force in California.

I've said repeatedly that simply throwing more money at public education isn't going to improve achievement and close achievement gaps. I don't believe that K-12 public education in our state spends the significant funds (about 40% of the state budget) very efficiently or effectively. With those caveats, I thought that Brian Green, Megan Fox and the folks at Funny or Die did a good job with this video calling for increased education funding. I love how the guy from the Governor's office keeps popping in dropping off more kids and telling motivational stories of the Governor's life.

John Fensterwald on The Educated Guess blogged about this Education Sector report written by Robert Manwaring. California Education Geeks will probably recognize that name. Robert worked for the LAO and for the Governor as an education policy expert. He has seen first hand how California has failed in its efforts to reform failing schools.

The report uses Markham Middle School in Los Angeles Unified as an example of failed reform efforts. In 1997, Markham was identified as a low performing school. Now 12 years later, after participation in every program for failing schools, over $3M in extra funding and many changes in leadership, the school's performance is as bad as ever with only 11 percent of students at grade level in English and 3 percent at grade level in Math. By any measure, this is a failing school.

After 11 years of continuous, often overlapping reforms, the expenditure of over $3 million dollars in extra funds, and the creation of enough school improvement plans to denude wide swaths of the nearby Angeles National Forest, Markham Middle School is still, educationally speaking, a wreck. Sixteen percent of teachers are working under an emergency credential, 30 percent of classes in core academic subjects are taught by teachers who are not “highly qualified” under NCLB, and many teachers are teaching English to the largely immigrant student population without proper training in teaching English language learners.

The lack of a stable, high-quality teaching force is one of the reasons academic results at Markham are poor and not improving. In 2005, only 12 percent of eighth- graders were proficient in English and 4 percent proficient in algebra. In 2009, those percentages had gone down slightly to 11 percent in English and 3 percent in algebra.

Nobody believes that it’s easy to turn schools like Markham around. But it’s clear that the policies of the last decade have not worked. In part, that’s because ultimate responsibility for improving Markham has been left with L.A. Unified, which has its own considerable problems to overcome. This is true for many low-performing schools, which are left reliant on districts for school improvement even when district-level neglect and mismanagement are key factors in the school’s low performance. One strategy for overcoming this problem is strengthening the state role in fixing poor-performing districts. But California again provides an example of how this task is often stymied by those who oppose any reform that threatens the jobs and authority of people within the education system.

As John Fensterwald suggested, Markham Middle is a poster child for why more of the same old reforms won't lead to any better results than we've seen at Markham. Throwing more money at schools to implement the "other major governance restructuring" option, which in most cases simply means more of the failed strategies that got them there in the first place with the effort led by district staff who allowed the school to fail originally. Read the rest of this post!

I enjoyed this Ruben Navarrette column with Sandy Kress' comments on President Obama's reauthorization of ESEA. I've always found Sandy's comments, as someone intimately involved in the development of NCLB, to be very interesting.

So far, so good, thought Kress. But then he took a closer look at what the Obama administration has planned for NCLB, which is due to be reauthorized this year. And he considered the impact that those changes would have on efforts to hold teachers and schools accountable for student performance.

What Obama is offering, Kress told me, is a watered-down version of education reform that lets most schools off the hook.

“I think there is a huge flaw in the blueprint,” Kress said. “And it’s in the part that relates to accountability.”

For Kress, making schools accountable means putting them on notice that they’re being watched by the federal government and expected to do a better job of educating minority and disadvantaged students.

“That’s why we’re here,” Kress said. “We’re not here for everybody to do great or to solve every problem. The historic role of the federal government, ever since Lyndon Johnson, is that the United States has an interest in disadvantaged students and their success and in closing the achievement gap.”

This is where Obama really falls short, Kress contends. One of the president’s big mistakes, he said, is rolling back the involvement of the federal government in favor of more local control by leaving it to states and school districts to decide how to make progress.

You remember local control. That’s the governing principle that essentially handed the power over the system to teachers unions because they contribute so much money to the campaigns of labor-friendly school board members. The unions in turn put the job security of their members ahead of the educational well-being of students, and thus helped put our public schools in bad shape. You see, local control isn’t the solution; it’s one of the problems.

According to Kress, an even bigger problem is that while NCLB put pressure on all schools with a certain percentage of minority or disadvantaged students, the Obama plan bears down only on the worst 5 percent of schools. Stay out of that group and you escape scrutiny and can do pretty much what you want. Also, whereas NCLB provided students in failing schools with tutoring and public school choice, the Obama plan discards those remedies.

“That’s a huge sellout,” said Kress, “and a problem because, at the end of the day, it’s not like anyone has found a way to fix these schools.

But under NCLB, at least conceptually, there was the idea that, if they can’t fix your school, you could flee your school or you could at least get tutoring that helps you survive.”

Kress thinks the result is outrageous and that it turns back the clock on education reform. In light of this, I asked him to grade the Obama administration for its efforts.

“I was thinking B-plus until I saw the recommendations,” he said. “Now it goes down to a D-plus.”

That’s brutal, but it seems appropriate. After all, Mr. President, accountability starts at the top.

I thought this Education Week posting by Rick Hess provided an interesting perspective on the Race to the Top results. By rewarding the states with nearly 100% support, they're encouraging other states to weaken their reform efforts down to something that NEA and its affiliates will accept in order to get the extra funding.

Secretary Duncan yesterday set the unfortunate precedent that nothing matters for RTT applicants so much as the ability to beg, wheedle, and cajole lots of signatures of support from school boards, superintendents, and union locals. States like Florida and Louisiana, which had bold and action-packed plans (noteworthy, in large part, because they were willing to forge ahead with only a limited number of school districts and union locals), lost out to states like Tennessee and Delaware which traded off boldness in order to get everyone to play. Hell, Georgia (!) finished third. (As one tracker of RTT noted, "I would have gone absolutely stark raving ape $%&@ had Georgia won.")

My view of transformative change has always been that it will come by encouraging those state leaders with the tools and the support to identify and ardently back similarly situated local counterparts. This requires explicitly not holding up the convoy to accommodate the slowest ship in the fleet, but betting on the fastest ships by leveraging their exclusivity and first-mover status (kind of like RTT had sought to do until yesterday).

The alternative is to make sure the convoy moves no faster than the slowest ship in the fleet. In a political context, this means that the most recalcitrant get to regulate the speed and direction of reform. Obviously, education schools have preached this kind of stakeholder "buy-in" for decades--touting it as the key to widespread, transformative improvement. Me, I'm dubious. Either way, by crowing of Delaware and Tennessee that "both states have statewide buy-in for comprehensive plans," our earnest Secretary of Education has signaled that job one for round two is for states to sign up as many boards, reticent supes, and union locals as possible. Given that his round one restraint means he will have nearly $3.5 billion to give away in round two of RTT, this is all the more significant.

The impact of Duncan's decision is already clear. In a press release slugged "Department of Education sends clear message that collaboration of all stakeholders is key," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel declared victory. He said, "In announcing today's winners of the Race to the Top program, the Department of Education is sending a clear message that collaboration among all stakeholders is essential if we are serious about improving our schools. With this first round selection, the department also is signaling that states must have collaborative partnerships and comprehensive plans that demonstrate high standards if their applications will be considered viable in future phases of the Race to the Top program."