Full-time teachers are paid six-figure salaries to work for their union while keeping their school district seniority and pensions afloat. The dual work arrangements are built into union contracts.

“This has been going on for years, and it’s hard to know how widespread it is,” said Larry Sand, who has spotlighted the arrangements at unionwatch.org and heads the nonprofit California Teachers Empowerment Network. “It varies district by district and each contract has to be looked into. … A lot of the time, school board members don’t even know, or they are pressured by the unions to keep a policy in place.”

Built into the contract

As included in the teaching contract at the San Diego Unified School District, “when negotiations with the District are scheduled during working hours, association representatives will be released from work without loss of pay.”

The contract in the Bakersfield City School District provides a full-time leave of absence for the teachers union president to tend to association business: “The president shall be paid in the usual manner as if he/she were a regular employee of the District and shall suffer no reduction in salary.”

And in the Fountain Valley School District in Orange County, the union president can devote one day per week to union business, costing taxpayers up to $22,230 per year, according to unionwatch.org.

A union official who has received dual salaries said the arrangements are helpful.

“There is a lot of mutual benefit there,” said Michela Cichoki. “Some are teaching partners, and so there is a period of release for officers. And a lot of the time they are in meetings with the district, and they are teacher representatives on those committees, representing the teachers.”

In 2012, Cichoki received a pay package worth $242,754 for service as secretary-treasurer of the California Teachers Association. The same year, Cichoki was paid a package worth $118,818 from the San Bernardino City Unified School District for her work as a “hearing panel member.”

Cichoki’s case illustrates the complicated formula of reimbursement at the upper levels of the union/school district entanglement.

The union reimbursed the district for her package, although she was allowed to maintain her pension while gone by paying her share from her pocket.

“I was released from the school district while I was at CTA,” Cichoki said. “It’s in the [education] code that we can be released for union work, and the district can ask for reimbursement, and that comes from the union so that no taxpayer funds are paying for it.”

Dean Vogel, past president of the California Teachers Association, received a pay package worth $277,356 in 2012, the last year records are available. In 2013, while serving as president of the state’s teacher union, public records show he received $97,542 for working on “special assignment” in the Vacaville Unified School District.

The union may have reimbursed the district for Vogel’s pay package, as in the case of Cichoki. A spokeswoman for the CTA did not return calls.

Union work should be kept separate

Sand blames the local school board members for allowing teachers who should be in the classroom to instead conduct union work on taxpayer time.

“The school boards should be serving the public instead of serving the union,” Sand said.

The dual salary arrangements have drawn legal complaints in other states, similar to the noise being made by the teachers who contend they shouldn’t have to pay union dues that go to efforts they don’t support.

Some teachers also believe their union-connected colleagues shouldn’t be allowed to spend time outside the classroom when their job is to teach.

A lawsuit in Pennsylvania challenges the arrangement in the Philadelphia School District, where up to 63 teachers are allowed to gain seniority, accrue pension benefits and receive insurance, just as they would as teachers, while engaging in union activities.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

By Chris Reed

The California Teachers Association has taken a lot of hits of late. It tried to sell its 2012 decision to fight bills to make it easier to fire pervert teachers as about basic fairness to employees. That blew up, leading it to go along with legislation this year that will make it somewhat easier to give the boot to the Mark Berndts of the world.

The CTA’s biggest affiliate — the United Teachers Los Angeles — also took a big hit when L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy opened up the files to show how much insane teacher misbehavior that the UTLA had enabled over the years before the Berndt case finally emboldened Deasy and the L.A. school board to crack down.

A public-relations gambit and no more?

These black eyes, I believe, are the pertinent backdrop to understanding the CTA’s decision Wednesday to endorse Gov. Jerry Brown’s call to award slightly more funding to school districts with the biggest concentration of struggling-English learners. The CTA needs to burnish its image, and one way to do so is by chest-thumping over “social justice.”

“CTA President Dean Vogel for the most part lauded Brown’s blueprint during a Wednesday morning press conference. He noted that California’s student population includes big chunks of learners who are either poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch or are still absorbing English. He said covering the higher cost of educating those students is a recurring problem.

“Under Brown’s proposal, districts with high concentrations of poor, English learning and foster students would be eligible for extra concentration grants on top of the base grants every district would receive.

“‘It’s hard to say that you’re in support of this local control funding formula the way it’s presented by the governor and then say you don’t like the concentration grants,’ Vogel said. ‘The concentration grant is the piece of the formula that basically says we’re going to actually put our money where our mouth is. You can’t say year in and year out that it costs more to educate kids in poverty without giving them the money.'”

The CTA’s modus operandi — protect the status quo — may still prevail

That’s from the Sac Bee. Watch out for this to be good cop-bad cop theater. Vogel says the CTA is for helping out struggling students. But behind the scenes, CTA operatives will fight for the status quo in which veteran teachers end up at the safest, most affluent schools. Struggling English leaners? It’s their own fault — and their parents’ fault, too.

Fighting for the interests of adult employees is what the nation’s largest teachers union does. It’s the CTA M.O.

By Chris Reed

UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff’s blueprint for Democrats from a decade ago continues to reverberate. Lakoff stressed the emphasis of framing issues with the proper language and spoke of the power of metaphors. And so now we always hear government spending described as “investments.”

Now the teachers unions and their political pals/puppets are in their third or fourth year of their Lakoffian push to characterize all education reform efforts as being “corporate” and therefore evil. Take it away, Tom Torlakson:

“SACRAMENTO — California Democrats on Sunday condemned efforts led by members of their own party to overhaul the nation’s schools, arguing that groups such as StudentsFirst and Democrats for Education Reform are fronts for Republicans and corporate interests.

“Before delegates overwhelmingly passed a resolution excoriating the groups on the final day of the party’s annual convention here, speakers urged them to focus on protecting students and teachers.

“‘People can call themselves Democrats for Education Reform — it’s a free country — but if your agenda is to shut teachers and school employees out of the political process and not lift a finger to prevent cuts in education, in my book you’re not a reformer, you’re not helping education, and you’re sure not much of a Democrat,’ said state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, a registered Democrat whose office is nonpartisan. …

“‘Let’s be perfectly clear,’ [said California Teachers Assn. President Dean Vogel]. ‘These organizations are backed by moneyed interests, Republican operatives and out-of-state Wall Street billionaires dedicated to school privatization and trampling on teacher and worker rights.'”

But this rhetorical hard sell is going to be tough. As the L.A. Times’ account laid out, the president and a likely future Democratic gubernatorial candidate qualify for the list of corporate tools that Torlakson and Vogel lambaste:

“The advocacy groups are calling for increasing parental choice, tying student performance to teacher evaluations and changing how teachers are hired and fired. President Obama, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker are among the elected Democrats who support the groups’ efforts.”

Romero calls the issue of poor schools afflicting struggling minority students a civil rights matter, and she’s right. But at a more basic level, the fight over teacher competence and job protections is part of the larger battle over government’s purpose in California.

Is its primary function to provide public services or to provide government jobs?

Incredibly enough, as this weekend’s Democratic convention showed, California’s dominant political party believes it’s the latter.