In recent months, sponsors of tax increases have filed the necessary paperwork to obtain a ballot title and summary for multiple tax increases, including two versions of a Prop. 30 tax extension. Critics of higher taxes say that an extension of Prop. 30 violates the promise made in 2012.

“Prop. 30 was creatively advertised and sold to the voters by a union, the California Teachers Association, which depicted it as a ‘temporary’ tax to support public schools,” contends former Democratic State Senator Gloria Romero. “But even while Prop. 30 was being pitched to voters as a temporary tax increase, no one in the political world actually believed it. In fact, discussions were already underway before its passage about extending Prop. 30 tax increases beyond the two expiration dates.”

Version 1: Prop. 30 Tax Extension

In September, attorneys on behalf of the Alliance for a Better California, a coalition of education unions, organized labor and health care providers, introduced the “School Funding and Budget Stability Act,” which would impose higher income taxes on high-wealth earners for the next 12 years. The $9 billion in anticipated higher tax proceeds would go towards schools. That also explains why the California Teachers Association is among the proposal’s biggest supporters.

“Temporarily extending these critical revenues will help keep our state budget balanced, and prevent devastating cuts to programs affecting students, seniors, working families and health care,” Gale Kaufman, a longtime Democratic strategist and representative of the coalition, told the Educator, the CTA’s monthly magazine.

Under the plan, California residents earning more than a half-million dollars per year would continue to pay Prop. 30’s higher income taxes until 2030. The quarter-cent sales tax increase would expire next year as scheduled.

Version 2: Prop. 30 Tax Extension

Not content with one tax hike, the same group introduced a second Prop. 30 tax extension in December. The measure would impose Prop. 30’s higher tax rates on those earning more than $250,000 per year — with the proceeds allocated in a slightly different manner.

In an apparent bid to gain support from California’s hospitals, “The California Children’s Education and Health Care Protection Act of 2016” would allocate up to $2 billion towards Medi-Cal spending.

“Whether this version truly represents a joint teachers union/health care effort remains to be seen,” explains Loren Kaye, president of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education. “The health care union has not indicated its position on this approach; indeed, in a bizarre twist, it recently sued the CHA for entering into negotiations with CTA in the first place.”

“Amid this uncertainty, one fact remains unassailable: the CTA has a measure ‘on the street’ for which they can begin collecting signatures. Everything else for now is speculation,” he added.

Sponsors of the tax increase say it is desperately needed to avoid catastrophic cuts to schools and other public services.

“Unless we act now to temporarily extend the current income tax rates on the wealthiest Californians, our public schools will soon face another devastating round of cuts due to lost revenue of billions of dollars a year,” the sponsors of the ballot measure wrote in a draft initiative. “We can let the temporary sales tax increase expire to help working families, but this is not the time to be giving the wealthiest people in California a tax cut that they don’t need and that our schools can’t afford.”

Prop. 30 Tax Extension Could Backfire

Many economists fear that any Prop. 30 income tax extension could backfire and further drive high-income earners out-of-state. California’s $115 billion General Fund budget has become increasingly dependent on income tax revenue, which frequently fluctuates based on the stock market.

“(T)he initiative to extend Prop. 30 taxes, rather than solving a problem, creates a worse one,” writes Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist for the UCLA Anderson Forecast. “Our current greater dependence on high-income earners to balance the state budget makes us more vulnerable.”

Nevertheless, many state political observers say that a tax extension, which could generate upwards of $11 billion in revenue, is likely to pass in 2016. At a recent economic summit, “Controller Betty Yee predicted that a Proposition 30 extension and a cigarette tax will be on the 2016 ballot and both would pass.”

That assessment comes even as one-time supporters of Prop. 30 question the rationale for its extension.

“In a time of financial crisis, Prop. 30 made sense,” the Los Angeles Daily News recently editorialized. “But the state is no longer in crisis, and any ballot measure playing off the fear of a return to dark days should be seen for the political ploy it is by unionists seeking to protect their own interests.”

Cohn’s reasoning builds off the premise that the nation’s second-largest school district is so sluggish and unresponsive that it is beyond repair:

LAUSD’s governance structure is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced by smaller units of school governance that are much more capable of delivering educational change that better serves students and their parents. In addition to being nimble and flexible, smaller school districts are physically closer to the parents they serve, and can initiate change strategies in a much more timely fashion.

Breakup would be good for struggling kids

And he also notes the timing is right because of the new education spending rules kicking in. The rules are billed as shifting resources to the neediest students:

The argument for breakup becomes even stronger today when you consider the important equity promise of Gov. Jerry Brown’s remarkable LCFF/LCAP school funding reform initiative, which places even greater authority at the local level to get things right for kids. When Los Angeles Unified screws up, more than half a million California youngsters are denied a critical opportunity to get a decent education during their one shot at using education to alter their life chances.

Cohn, who is the director of the Urban Leadership Program at Claremont Graduate University, made those observations in an essay for EdSource. The piece is unsparing:

Last October, you had students at Jefferson High School still walking the halls and in auditoriums without scheduled classes even though school had started back on Aug. 12. Even worse, you had a superintendent giving a deposition in court (Cruz v. California) that he was powerless to get these students scheduled in the right classes, and that he needed assistance from the State of California to get this basic responsibility done. …

The missteps of the district are legion – everything from expensive attorneys arguing for the district that a middle school student was mature enough to consent to have sex with a teacher to the billion-dollar iPad and MiSiS technology debacles and school board elections where records have been broken for adult special-interest-group spending.

No single event better captures the failure of this system than the recent revelation that 75 percent of the current class of 2017 is not on target to meet the school board’s 2005 adopted policy requirement that all students must meet UC/CSU A-G college entrance requirements in order to receive a high school diploma …

District shows callousness to disabled students

Cohn also offers an anecdote that implies the district is not just poorly run but cruel. He wrote that it resisted providing minimum legally mandated help to disabled students even after a federal decree. This “intransigence” speaks to larger problems of lack of accountability and slowness in implementing change, Cohn suggests.

Cohn’s tenure in San Diego was marked by school board battles, and he faced criticism for the district’s perceived hostility to charter schools. But his run in Long Beach was remarkable, as these details from his bio point out:

During his tenure as Superintendent, the LBUSD achieved record attendance, the lowest rate of suspension in a decade, decreases in student failure and dropout rates, and an increase in the number of students taking college preparatory classes. Through exemplifying this commitment to leadership and improved student achievement, he won the McGraw Prize in 2002, and the district won the Broad Prize in 2003.

Having a distinguished educator from next door knock the Los Angeles Unified is unusual and has caused buzz in education circles — not the general media. Still, Cohn’s criticism is so harsh that he may face a counterattack from the CTA and its largest local branch, United Teachers Los Angeles. They branded former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, as “dangerous” when she began criticizing the union and LAUSD in 2007. When Romero ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2010, she finished third in the primary after facing a brutal series of CTA-funded attacks.

“Independently planned by a diverse and growing coalition of individuals, schools, and organizations, National School Choice Week features thousands of unique events and activities across the country. The Week allows participants to advance their own messages of educational opportunity, while uniting with like-minded groups and individuals across the country.”

California is a mixed bag on school choice. It has been a leader in charter schools, which are public schools that operate without most of the red tape of regular schools. According to the California Charter Schools Association, the number has grown from 31 in 1994, the first year they were allowed, to 1,130 in 2014.

Parent Trigger Law

Another development is the Parent Trigger Law, authored by former Democratic state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles. It allows a majority of parents in a failing school to “fire” the administration, and start over on a more successful model.

It has succeeded in a couple of cases, including Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto.

But it has faced numerous challenges. It just overcame one. Romero wrote last month in the Orange County Register:

“The California Senate Legislative Counsel issued last week a sweeping opinion, concluding a controversy as to whether a school district – Los Angeles Unified, in this case – can proclaim itself exempt from California’s historic Parent Trigger law….”

She quoted the Leg Counsel:

“[T]he legislative intent in enacting [the law] … was to allow parents or guardians of pupils enrolled in schools that have been underperforming … to request specified interventions. It would be inconsistent with that legislative intent to conclude that … [they] … are deprived of the remedy set forth … on the basis that a school district has received a federal waiver whose purpose is to relieve that district solely from compliance with federal performance requirements. [I]t is our opinion that the … waiver … does not exempt that school district from compliance with the [law].”

And she noted a controversy in Anaheim:

“parents at Palm Lane Elementary School in Anaheim are mobilizing to turn around their school. Already they have faced obstacles imposed on them by some hostile school board members and school officials, but the parents have surmounted each obstacle and could become the first parents in Orange County to succeed in using the Parent Trigger law on behalf of their children.

“At a time when too many people complain about the lack of parent involvement in their kids’ educations, these parents should be celebrated as everyday heroes.”

No vouchers

However, the school voucher program active in several states has not done well here. It gives each student a voucher, or scholarship, to the school chosen by him and his parents. The school could be public or private.

Facing fierce teacher-union opposition, it twice was heavily defeated at the polls: with Proposition 174 in 1993. And with Proposition 38 in 2000.

That’s probably a lost cause here for school-choice fans.

But overall, parents do have more choices in California for their kids’ schools than 20 years ago. Charters are secure and spreading. And the Parent Trigger Law has survived legal challenges, albeit its progress remains slow.

“The fight for education reform has reached a critical juncture. Many want to see whether politicians continue to kowtow to powerful special interests, or muster the courage to stand up for millions of poor and minority children seeking justice when the Education Committee reconvenes.

“What leadership will newly elected Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, exhibit? Will he show allegiance to his former employer – CTA – and urge the bill’s passage? Or as the first modern-era Latino Senate president, will he respect a court ruling on behalf of poor and Latino students, urge defeat and instruct the Legislature to start rewriting statutes now deemed unconstitutional?

“I’m hoping for the latter.”

Many years on the CTA payroll

Romero’s reference to De Leon working for at least five years for the CTA (and its parent organization, the National Education Association) gets to a striking point about elected Latino Democrats in California. All too often they were not just union members but union employees/leaders before seeking office. John Perez, the now-former Assembly speaker, is one of many Latino Dems in this camp. So their decision on whether to side with mostly white teacher unions or the Latino kids in their home districts is further complicated. Meanwhile, I’m struck by how many times commenters on the Vergara decision dismiss it as an inconsequential, sure-to-be-overruled ruling by a headline-hunting judge. It may be overruled. And any judge who invokes Brown vs. Board of Education is plainly hoping to make a splash. But inconsequential? Hardly.

Vergara goes national; will “schism” come to CA?

This Politico story from Tuesday illustrates where things are headed.

“Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.

“The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead role in the public relations initiative.

“The involvement of such high-profile Obama alumni highlights the sharp schism within the Democratic Party over education reform.

“Teachers unions have long counted on Democrats as their most loyal allies. But in the past decade, more and more big-name Democrats have split with the unions to support charter schools, tenure reform and accountability measures that hold teachers responsible for raising students’ scores on standardized tests.”

So far that “schism” hasn’t been a huge element in California politics. But between the Vergara fallout and Democratic reformer Marshall Tuck’s November general election challenge to CTA appendage/state school superintendent Tom Torlakson, 2014 could be the year it begins dividing CA Dems the way it has Dems in such states as New York and Illinois. Good.

This is supposedly reflected in the priorities of Gov. Rick Perry. A phone message I got expressed disbelief that I praised Texas public schools and called them broadly better than California’s. A male voice said something along the lines of … “Have you seen how little they pay for K-12? It’s obscene.”

That is not a good argument. In fact, it’s another argument for Texas.

It’s time to bring in Chuck DeVore, Orange County assemblyman turned Austin think tanker. DeVore suggests the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a good baseline to compare states. It measures fourth- and eighth-graders in math, reading and science and breaks down the results by the performance of white, Latino and African-American students.

So guess what happened in an analysis of the NAEP results for the eight biggest states? According to what Chuck wrote last year for the San Francisco Chronicle, it’s a rout.

“Looking at the most recent NAEP testing data for fourth and eighth graders in math, reading and science as well as looking at race and ethnicity and considering the eight biggest states, there are 24 categories to measure (e.g., eighth-grade science results for African American students, etc.). The 2009 results showed Texas as having the strongest scores in 11 of 24 categories while California was last in 15 of 24 categories. Further, Texas showed no areas of weakness compared to the national average.”

Texas makes case for Gloria Romero’s CA civil-rights argument

So Texas, the hellhole that pays obscenely little for K-12 education, stomps California — including specifically with the Latino and African-American students who are supposed to be oppressed in a Southern state like Texas as opposed to an enlightened state like California.

Gloria Romero is so right: The biggest civil rights issue in California by far is that the needs of the majority Latino students in our public schools are trumped by the needs of the largely white California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers.

In Texas, where teachers unions don’t dominate public education, Latinos do much better. That is not a talking point. As the NAEP scores show, it is the truth.

It should matter in the CA debate over education far more than it does. When you look at California’s actual deeds — not its rhetoric — our state government certainly celebrates ignorance far more than Texas.

But in the U-T San Diego, I made the case that another Democratic faction has far more reasons for dissent:

” … if any part of the Democratic coalition should consider bolting over basic calculations of self-interest, it is Latinos. They are poorly served by the state’s public education system — which is dominated by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, the most powerful forces in the state Democratic Party.

“Everywhere around California, there is a cold war playing out between teachers unions and those who want to shake things up to help Latino students.

“In San Diego Unified and elsewhere, we see a renewed assault on charter schools that are often championed by minority parents unhappy with the status quo.

“In Sacramento city schools, an Obama administration-endorsed effort to improve the performance of struggling, largely minority schools is being sandbagged by the local chapter of the CTA — because the program seeks to determine which teachers are most effective in helping students from impoverished families.

“In Los Angeles Unified, this reflexive effort to protect veteran teachers above all else has long since left sanity behind. For the worst of many examples, a teacher who fed semen-laced food to his poor, mostly Latino elementary school students couldn’t be fired because of the immense job protections dictated by the local CTA chapter. Administrators had to pay him $35,000 to get him to resign.”

Teachers blame kids, parents — absolve themselves

“This disconnect between the interests of Latinos and the interests of the teachers unions that dominate California’s Democratic Party is hammered home by these unions’ increasingly open attitude of ‘don’t blame us for not being able to educate these kids.’

“Yes, of course, it’s going to be more difficult to help a student whose parents aren’t English speakers or who have other difficulties related to poverty. Nevertheless, it is a matter of fact that some teachers, schools and districts do objectively better at educating these students than others. Yet instead of supporting a “best practices” approach to help these kids — as Sacramento schools are trying to do — the CTA and CFT try to nuke any change in the status quo that might cost any teacher anywhere her or his job.

“If college admission policies drive a wedge between Asian-Americans and the California Democratic establishment, public education policies should be 100 times more likely to divide Latinos and state Democrats.”

Career comes first. The kids? Bleep ’em

Instead, Latino lawmakers by and large never pick fights with the CTA and CFT. With the gigantic exception of former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, Latino Dem electeds want to stay on the career-advancement gravy train. As I detailed in 2012, they’ll even put up with a CTA member feeding semen to Latino elementary-school kids:

“The Berndt case prompted state senator Alex Padilla, a Los Angeles Democrat, to introduce legislation that would have made it easier for districts to fire sexual predators. That bill never made it out of a state assembly committee. Lobbyists from the CFT and CTA portrayed it as an assault on teachers’ due-process rights, and legislators fell right into line with the unions. As for Berndt, instead of firing him, the union-dominated Los Angeles Unified hierarchy paid him $40,000 to resign.

“Siding with classroom sexual predators over Latino students and parents was no big deal for the CTA-affiliated United Teachers Los Angeles. Consider what happened in November 2009 at Gratts Elementary School (94 percent Latino enrollment) in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Latino parents who wanted to convert the struggling school to a charter and force out poor teachers were warned in Spanish-language fliers that they risked deportation for their efforts. UTLA denied any involvement with the scare tactic, but union members were the sole suspects.

“It might seem remarkable that the California legislature’s powerful Latino caucus tolerates union bullying and intimidation, but then most of the caucus members — including Assembly Speaker John Pérez, a former organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers — ascended through the labor movement. By allowing the CTA and CFT to dictate the agenda, Latino legislators are keeping the best teachers out of schools where they’re most needed and helping channel the worst teachers to the most troubled schools. They evidently prefer keeping mum to risking teachers’ union support.”

To repeat a point I made in the U-T San Diego’s pages, many Latinos’ assumption that Republicans just don’t like immigrants or minorities or Latinos make it unlikely they would even consider switching parties. But should that anti-GOP view make them blind to the fact that when it comes to public education, California Dems are objectively anti-Latino?

Of course not.

But one organization that has figured this out is the California ACLU. It has sued school districts — and won — over policies mandating that students pay for instructional materials that should be free. Why were students forced to pay? To free up funds for employee compensation.

The ACLU has also sued — and won — over teacher assignment/retention policies that concentrate the worst teachers at California’s most struggling schools, and that often lead to teachers at such schools instructing students in fields other than the ones they were trained in. Why would the establishment have such dubious policies? To preserve the jobs of teachers, even bad teachers and those who can’t find teaching jobs in their areas of expertise.

Court challenges work better than counting on Legislature

Perhaps encouraged by the efficacy of court challenges to the California education status quo — as opposed to failures to improve K-12 policies via the Legislature — a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur has launched an ambitious lawsuit. Seth Rosenblatt, a Harvard-educated member of the San Carlos school board, writes on the Ed Source education website that the fallout from Vergara v. California could be gigantic.

“The Vergara case is premised on the legal theory that the California Constitution’s guarantee of students’ equal opportunity to quality education is incompatible with current laws (specifically five statutes in the California Education Code related to permanent employment, dismissal procedures, and seniority-based layoffs) that do not allow local school districts to manage their teaching staffs based on quality and effectiveness. The plaintiffs claim that because effective teachers are so crucial to ensuring students’ academic success, ignoring teacher effectiveness is tantamount to not giving all students a quality education. They further argue that such harm is borne disproportionately among minority and low-income students. …

Without debating the arguments of the case itself (and my goal is not to create such a debate in this forum) and not being an attorney, I would not attempt to handicap the lawsuit’s chance of success. However, there is no doubt that there is much dissatisfaction among school districts, school board members, administrators, and even many teachers around the myriad of human resource rules contained in the Ed Code. It is difficult to argue that the way teachers are evaluated (or not evaluated), how dismissal notices are handled, and “last in first out” rules are compatible with building a public education system in a 21st century design. And certainly many communities have stories where such regulations have disproportionately negatively affected those schools and students with the greatest needs. The lawsuit has created interesting alliances – for example, although the Los Angeles Unified School District was originally a defendant in the case (it’s since been dropped), Superintendent John Deasy is expected to testify for the plaintiffs.”

Forcing a new paradigm on teacher hiring, evaluation

The Vergara case is scheduled to begin Jan. 27. Eventually, if Students Matter has its way, it could be transformative.

“Regardless of whether one is supportive or not of Vergara, the immediate implications of its potential success would be staggering, and it would completely make moot all of the current discussions around Sacramento on this topic. Relationships between local school districts and their bargaining units would be forever altered, and school districts and teachers would have to quickly find a new paradigm for hiring, evaluating, and firing staff. However, the folks at Students Matter are quick to point out that Vergara would not eliminate due process protections that currently exist in California Government Code for all public employees, including teachers.”

Go, Students Matter, go. If any status quo in California needs to be dynamited, it is the CTA-driven tyranny of our public schools.

Here’s more on David Welch, the Ph.D. tech entrepreneur with more than 160 patents who launched this reform effort.

“SACRAMENTO — The head of the Senate Transportation Committee praised Gov. Jerry Brown for preventing Bay Area transit workers from walking off the job Monday and said he is still considering legislation that would permanently take away their right to strike.

“Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) said in an interview that workers in the Bay Area have rights that few of their colleagues around the state share.

“’Of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and the Bay Area are the exception,’ he said. ‘All of the other large systems do not allow transit workers to strike.’

“DeSaulnier, who called himself ‘pro-labor and pro-transit,’ said neither labor nor management seems to want to change the current law, but the frequency of labor strife in the Bay Area Rapid Transit district has led him to look at the issue. The former Contra Costa County supervisor says that in the 22 years he’s been in elected office, workers have walked off the job or come close four times.”

Now when will minority lawmakers wake up?

The fact that affluent white Democratic lawmakers are beginning to internalize that union power isn’t always benign raises hope that California will finally have the much bigger political catharsis that it deserves: the eruption over the fact that the teachers unions which run Sacramento don’t care about struggling Latino and African-American students who make up a majority of kids at public schools.

I wrote about this last year for City Journal:

“[The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers] enforce a Sacramento status quo that holds minorities in contempt and elevates teachers’ and unions’ interests above all others.

“Consider the modus operandi of nearly every California school district. Where are the best teachers most needed? In struggling schools with impoverished, mostly black and Latino students. But thanks to union power, where are those teachers concentrated? In affluent, safe schools. The struggling schools wind up with newly hired teachers and, often, bad or troubled teachers who couldn’t make the grade at better schools but who, thanks to union rules, can’t be fired. The problem is even worse than it appears, because revenue-deprived school districts often lay off the most junior teachers to ease budget woes. Some schools lose most of their teaching corps, destroying any continuity or momentum a school in a poor neighborhood may have managed to build. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the practice led to a successful ACLU lawsuit to end the ‘last hired, first fired’ policy in poor neighborhoods.”

Speaker Perez: Is this really ‘social justice’?

Attention, John Perez: When are you going to stop siding with the CTA and the CFT over the kids in your district?

Gloria Romero — like Perez, a Los Angeles Democrat — is right: The California public schools system’s practice of giving more weight to the interests of adult employees than of students deserves to be seen as a civil-rights issue, not a political scrap. If the BART dust-up makes even a few more elected Democrats think about this bigger picture, it will be for the good of nearly all Californians. The K-12 status quo has got to go.

Out of a potential pool of more than 300 candidates, Department of Homeland Security Secretary and former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano was unanimously nominated to fill in the shoes of retiring UC President Mark Yudof. The UC Board of Regents will vote Thursday on her appointment. If approved, Napolitano will be the 20th president of the UC system and first woman to lead in its 145-year history.

UC Regent Sherry Lansing chaired a 10-member special search committee, by which Napolitano was recommended in a unanimous vote. In a statement, Lancing called Napolitano “a distinguished and dedicated public servant who has earned trust at the highest, most critical levels of our country’s government. She has proven herself to be a dynamic, hard-working and transformative leader.”

California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice W. Harris issued a statement echoing similar sentiments of praise:

“The nomination of Secretary Napolitano to become the next president of the University of California is a truly inspired choice worthy of this great system of higher education. Her focus on education as governor of Arizona and the skills and leadership she has demonstrated as Homeland Security secretary make her uniquely qualified to lead the University of California.”

Even Gov. Jerry Brown said Napolitano had “strength of character and an outsider’s mind that will well serve the students and faculty” and that it would be “exciting to work with her.” Which is rather interesting, considering he criticized the trend of hiring out-of-state presidents in 2011, and wanted UC and CSU officials to specifically seek out Californians.

Napolitano’s lack of academic experience

Contrast that with the reaction of former state senator and education reformer Gloria Romero, who said she was “stunned” upon hearing the news. Romero told me the nomination was a “political placement” and “not wise for the UC system.” The University of California system, she said, is a “premiere institute of research scholarship and faculty.”

“I admire her for what she’s done,” Romero said of Napolitano. “She was a governor and did oversee the University of Arizona system, but this is the UC system.”

Romero questioned Napolitano’s credentials and said the UC president should be someone that would be qualified to oversee “the collaboration and development of curriculum, the training and appreciation for research, and equipping the next generation of scholars.”

She pointed to Charles Reed, the former chancellor of the California State University system, whose tenure, she said, was “always very contentious” because of his minimal ability to “understand or appreciate the role of faculty in the development of curriculum.”

When I asked former UC Regent Ward Connerly of the American Civil Liberties Institute if he thought Secretary Napolitano was qualified to oversee the UC system, he simply said, “Doubtful.”

“There is no evidence that she has any academic experience,” he said of Napolitano. “Faculty often insist on someone that has academic experience.”

Indeed, Napolitano’s credentials fall far short of current UC President Mark Yudof and those before him.

Yudof came to the UC system after being chancellor of the University of Texas system from 2002 to 2008. Before that, he was president of the four-campus University of Minnesota system during 1997-2008. He was also a faculty member and administrator at the University of Texas at Austin for 26 years and dean of its law school from 1984 to 1994, as well as the university’s executive vice president and provost from 1994 to 1997.

Robert C. Dynes, the UC president before Yudof, was a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley during his tenure from 2003 to 2008. He was also the chancellor for UC San Diego from 1996 to 2003, and had been a part of the UC system since 1990.

Former UC President Richard C. Atkinson served before Dynes from 1995 to 2003 and had been chancellor of UC San Diego for 15 years. He was also the former director of the National Science Foundation, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, former chair of the Association of American Universities, and a long-term member of the faculty at Stanford University.

These picks were all clear-cut academics. But the closest that Secretary Napolitano comes to these UC presidents is that she has a law degree. She has no research under her belt, no experience overseeing any academic systems, never taught a college class and isn’t even a native of California, even though proponents of Napolitano’s nomination say that, as governor of Arizona, she was focused “extensively on education.”

Playing politics with UC nomination

What we’re actually seeing, said Ward Connerly, is a “revolving door with academia and Democrat institutions.”

“If you go back and look at the Clinton era, for example,” he told me, “a number of academics were appointed in the second term of Clinton’s administration to prominent university positions.”

And it’s no secret the UC regents and faculty have been very supportive of Obama and his academic policies.

In fact, UC Regent Sherry Lansing, former CEO of Paramount Pictures and head of the search for the incoming UC president, had donated $1,000 to Barack Obama as early as 2004. She’s given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democrat Party, its candidates and its PACs.

The nomination looks like a win-win for the Obama administration, as Napolitano, who has become entrenched in scandals on sexual discrimination, immigration enforcement, the Boston bombings and downplaying terrorism, steps down from her post in the Department of Homeland Security. Additionally, Politico notes, her resignation gives Obama “major leeway” to pick a new DHS secretary without needing any Republican support, if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid follows through with his threat to go ‘nuclear’ and change filibuster rules.

It makes you wonder, asked Gloria Romero, “What is she doing? Who called whom? Who negotiated what and how did they place her? With these scandals brewing, it just doesn’t make sense.”

Ward Connerly told me it was “hard to say if faculty would oppose” such a nomination, or if the academic senate would respect her at all. “UC needs someone adept at bringing outside financial support,” he said. “While we seem to have turned a corner on the economy, UC is not out of the woods yet.”

The special session to vote on Secretary Napolitano’s nomination occurs Thursday, July 18, at 1:45 pm.

(Katie Hillery contributed research to this article.)

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.