Under that ruling, employees may get a refund on dues specifically identified as going for political purposes. But attorneys for Rebecca Friedrichs argue that the CTA’s history shows all its dues are essentially used for political ends. Friedrichs opposes much of the CTA’s agenda, starting with the union’s strong support of far-reaching teacher job protections and the relatively quick granting of tenure.

The case has the potential to shake up California’s political climate. The CTA and the California Federation of Teachers give more money to candidates and causes than any other entity and are considered to have more influence over the state Legislature than any other groups. Based on what’s happened in other states, the CTA and CFT could lose one-third of all dues if Friedrichs succeeds and mandatory assessments are no longer allowed.

‘Not if, but when’ present law is overruled

What’s striking about this case is that the CTA appears to already assume it’s going to lose. In July of last year, the union distributed a 23-page memo discussing a post-Friedrichs world at a meeting of local district union leaders. Its title: “Not if, but when: Living in a world without Fair Share.” (“Fair Share” is how the CTA describes the law mandating all teachers pay “agency fees.”)

The memo ends with an upbeat tone:

CTA Will Be Ready!

 

Over the years, CTA has responded to many attacks and crises that have threatened to dismantle our organization and our core belief that every child in California deserves a first-class education. By and far, we have prevailed because of the organizational strength of our membership, the efforts of our talented staff, and our shared commitment to our mission to protect and promote the well-being of our members and to improve the conditions of teaching and learning in California.

 

Planning, organizing and preparedness will ensure our continued organizational strength and survival and help us adapt to an ever-changing environment.

Nevertheless, the reasons for the CTA’s fatalism are plain. Friedrichs v. CTA got to the Supreme Court in much speedier fashion than many cases. At least four justices supported bringing it before the high court for review, and one has already made his views plain:

Twice, Associate Justice Samuel Alito has stated in opinions of recent years that Abood v. Detroit Board of Ed., the 1977 case that established the constitutionality of fair share fees, was shaky. In a 2014 opinion in Harris v. Quinn, Alito said that precedent was “questionable on several grounds.”

That’s from Politico.

The Local Control Funding Formula — championed by Gov. Jerry Brown as “truly revolutionary” at its signing ceremony — was supposed to give additional funding to districts to directly help each student they had who was an English learner, a foster child or from an impoverished household. But the Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in January that none of the 50 state school districts it surveyed, starting with Los Angeles Unified, had adequate safeguards in place. Many districts are using the extra dollars for general operations or to pay for raises for teachers.

Now the state Department of Education has issued guidelines in response to an inquiry from Fresno Unified about whether LCFF dollars can go to teacher raises. In an April 14 memo that received no attention until it was obtained by the EdSource website last week, Jeff Breshears, administrator for the Department of Education’s Local Agency Systems Support Office, wrote:

You have asked under what circumstances is it permissible to use “supplemental and concentration funds” to fund a percentage salary increase on a district salary schedule for all teachers in a district. As you describe this salary increase, it appears to be a straightforward across the board salary increase without any condition for additional or enhanced level of service. In such case, a district is essentially “paying more” for the same level of service. As a general proposition, such an increase will not “increase” or “improve” services for unduplicated pupils, and the use of supplemental and concentration funds in this manner would not be appropriate.

CTA says there are few restrictions on funds

This sets the stage for battles in school boards, the courts and the Legislature. The Department of Education’s position that LCFF dollars must be used in a targeted way appears to contradict the actions of dozens of school districts, according to the LAO and published reports from around the state. Those district actions have already drawn concern from the caucus of African American lawmakers in Sacramento. At a January hearing of the state Board of Education, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, testified on behalf of the caucus over fears the reform was not being implemented properly.

Weber has already clashed with the California Teachers Association and its allies over teacher tenure. An LCFF fight looks to be next. EdSource reports that the union thinks there are few restrictions on how the extra dollars can be spent:

The California Teachers Association interprets the law differently. The Local Control Funding Formula was created to give maximum flexibility to school districts, and that includes creating competitive salaries to reduce teacher turnover, said Claudia Briggs, communications assistant manager for the CTA.

 

“We believe the law is clear: The money can be used to attract and retain quality teachers in the classroom, to lower class sizes and to restore programs that were cut,” said Briggs.

That is not how the governor described the LCFF when lobbying for its passage in spring 2013. In the press release from his office after he signed the law, Brown declared it would “direct increased resources to the state’s neediest students” — not to general operating funds.

However, Brown has said little about the controversy over the law’s implementation. Nor has Tom Torlakson, state superintendent of public instruction.

The idea was that welfare would go back to being temporary to get families back on their feet, not a permanent lifestyle.

In recent years, including under the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, things have returned more to the Welfare State model. This is especially true in California, once one of America’s wealthiest states, but now the one with the highest level of poverty, at about a quarter of our people.

According to the Lucille Packard Foundation, 58 percent of California kids now are eligible to receive free or reduced-price school meals.

Now, California schools even are becoming centers for signing families up for Covered California, the state’s implementation of Obamacare. Reported EdSource:

In school libraries and courtyards from Sacramento to Los Angeles and beyond, trained enrollment counselors have been invited to set up folding tables, commandeer desk space and corral parents before the Feb. 15 sign-up deadline for Covered California, the state’s online health insurance marketplace created under the federal Affordable Care Act.

And the outreach will increase. Under a new state law, all California schools must include in their 2015-16 enrollment packets information about options for health care coverage and how to get help with the sign-up process. The law, Assembly Bill 2706, authored by Roger Hernández, D-West Covina, is intended to reduce the number of children who are eligible for health insurance subsidies but remain uninsured.

For perspective, here’s an excerpt from a 1987 interview with Moynihan, still relevant today:

There is a lot of vigorous research on welfare being done again, and it has really told us things we didn’t know. One of the most important things is that people who receive welfare cannot be regarded as one undifferentiated mass of people, and you can’t treat them all alike.

For instance, about a quarter of mothers who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children do so for less than one year. These are self-sustaining, capable people who have had a sudden divorce or separation. They’ll get their lives put back together and we won’t see them again.

At the other end of the spectrum – about a quarter of the people – are those who are unmarried and in real trouble and go on welfare very young. If you don’t get hold of those people very quickly and work very hard and put a lot of resources into them, you have a spoiled life. And their children have fairly chancy prospects.

When you know these things, the problem doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming. You don’t have to change the way people behave, because nobody knows how to change the way people behave. But you’ve got to make more equitable arrangements in areas like child support.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Question: Are working-class communities smarter than wealthier school districts by not putting increased school parcel taxes on local election ballots?

This is not the conclusion suggested in a new study released May 2013 by EdSource, a non-profit education research center in Oakland.  The study, “Raising Revenues Locally: Parcel Taxes in California School Districts 1983-2012,” suggests that lower-income school districts should catch up with the 12 percent of school districts that recently have passed local school parcel taxes.

Most of the school districts that have passed such taxes, however, have been in super-wealthy residential enclaves in Northern California.  A parcel tax, which is assessed on each individual parcel of property regardless of size, is placed on top of state funded school revenues and local property taxes.

But are school parcel taxes mostly a status symbol?  Or do they bring about better academic performance and higher property values in working class neighborhoods?

The EdSource study found that school parcel taxes actually pay for the provision of luxury public school services that are of no help to less advantaged areas, except perhaps but to provide more jobs to cultural elites and unions.

Local school districts in less wealthy areas want to bring in more outside state revenues, rather than imposing more taxes on already struggling families. Education policy leaders need to understand that, in working class families, many teenage children need to take jobs and don’t have time for the extracurricular activities funded by the parcel taxes.

Nor do many working-class parents have the time and an extra car to transport their children to sports, band practice or other activities.  Working-class students and their parents also are less likely to want more school counseling, high school course electives, diversity curriculum consultants, assistant coaches and librarians, and more arts and music classes.

But do low-income areas get more “bang for their education buck” if they raise their local taxes to provide more school funding?

A comparison of a wealthy and less wealthy school districts

Below is a table excerpted from the EdSource study that shows the top five school districts in relying on school parcel taxes in California. These five school districts generate from 24 to 31 percent of their revenues from local parcel taxes.

Note how the Berkeley Unified School District raises about $29 million from local parcel taxes, on top of already existing property taxes that also pay for schools. Parcel taxes make up 25 percent of Berkeley’s total school district revenues.

Parcel Tax as Share of Districts’ Revenues: Top Five School Districts, 2011-2012

Next is a table constructed by this author from a computer program supplied by the California Department of Education that provides an automatic comparison of school districts of similar size.  

The common factor here is the Berkeley Unified School District. It’s in the chart above, and in the chart below.

Here’s what to note below: BUSD provides about 31 percent higher revenues per student than the Milipitas and King Canyon Unified School Districts.  Most of Berkeley’s higher revenue comes from parcel taxes.

Comparable School Districts per California Dept. of Education

So, what does the Berkeley Unified School District get for about 30 percent greater public school revenues from parcel taxes? And for having lowest average class size: 18.1 students per class? Its achievement on Academic Performance Index test was no better than schools with a lot less money: all did not achieve at the mandated levels.

Comparison

On the second chart, compare BUSD’s with the less-wealthy Kings Canyon Unified School District. It has mostly minority students, lower average teachers’ salaries, a higher average class size and about 26 percent lower revenues per student than BUSD. But Kings Canyon got just as much educational “bang for their tax buck” as Berkeley; albeit they also did not achieve high enough on the API.

What Berkeley apparently did get, however, is enhanced property values as shown in the above table. Berkeley’s average property value of $749,400 was five times the $146,400 of Kings Canyon.

The above comparison of schools is representative of nearly all school districts in the state. The data was not cherry picked by this writer to slant the results.

In California, wealthier school districts often provide luxury educational services funded by school parcel taxes. Less wealthy public school districts would get no guarantee of greater academic performance by raising parcel taxes to fund mainly luxury educational services and jobs mostly for the benefit of cultural elites and unions.

The same trend would hold true for Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed policy to shift a greater proportion of public school funding to more disadvantaged schools by reducing the budget allocation to suburban schools.

This only would lead to wealthier suburban schools passing even higher parcel taxes to back-fill the state school funding they lost.  But none of this cost shifting and tax shifting would have much, if any, benefit on educational outcomes. It might lower property values, and thus property taxes, in wealthier school districts, unless they backfilled the lost revenues with parcel taxes.

Returning to the question at the start of this article: Are less wealthy school districts smarter to not impose school parcel taxes on their communities?  Apparently so.

By Chris Reed

There are none so blind as those who will not see. EdSource does a 1,500-word analysis of a new study showing far higher turnover of superintendents in large school districts than smaller ones in California, discusses several theories, but never even mentions the fact that teacher union power is particularly extreme in big school districts — and teacher unions are fickle, demanding, hard-to-please masters.

In Los Angeles Unified, it took a judge’s ruling to get the union-dominated district to begin obeying a 1971 state law requiring that teacher evaluations include student performance.

In San Diego Unified, the state’s second largest district after L.A., employee compensation — primarily teacher salaries — consumes 93 percent of the operating budget. And that’s after the school board mustered the will to bargain to delay a 7 percent raise that all represented employees were supposed to get this school year. I’ve actually seen San Diego Unified documents that project employee compensation in coming years would top 100 percent of the operating budget.

Which is a mathematical impossibility.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent, much smaller, Poway Unified district, the union has much less clout, and the compensation chunk of the operating budget is only 85 percent.

In San Diego Unified, there have been three superintendents in four years, and the latest is a figurehead — a former admiral hired because the local union knew he knew his place. In Poway Unified, the superintendent is an aggressive, take-charge guy with job security.

Still wonder why big districts have more turnover of superintendents, EdSource?

Of course, EdSource is in good company. In 2009, The New York Times wrote 8,000 words about California’s dysfunction that ignored public employee union power, which remains incredible to this day. Given where this state was in 2009, that may never be topped.