That’s the sliver of good news. The bad news is that the law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday actually makes it even tougher to fire violent teachers and gives all teachers still more job protections. In an editorial urging Brown to veto the teacher-discipline bill earlier this month, the Contra Costa Times pointed out its huge shortcomings:

“The bill would establish a new set of expedited suspension and dismissal procedures for teachers who engage in ‘egregious misconduct,’ but it would limit the definition to specific child abuse, sexual misconduct and drug cases.

“It would not, for example, apply to teachers suspected of violent crimes. While it would immediately remove a teacher charged with murder from the classroom, that provision would first require the filing of criminal charges. Thus, a suspect could remain in the classroom during a police investigation.

“Here’s another example: Suppose a district attempted to dismiss a teacher for sexual misconduct but an administrative law judge hearing the case issued only a suspension. If there were subsequently another similar incident, the district could not use the prior suspension as evidence in the new case.

“Similarly, evidence of past violent behavior that was more than four years old could not be used in proceedings to bolster a dismissal case against a teacher for recent sexual abuse.”

More obstacles to ousting violent teachers

So while the Mark Berndts of the world — and common drug dealers — can get the boot relatively quickly under the new law, all other criminal teachers suddenly have many more tools to push back at attempts to discipline or fire them. As the Contra Costa Times notes …

” … the bill starts to extend criminal due process protections to teacher employment cases, even though courts have previously correctly said that the same standards should not apply. In a court of law, for example, a criminal defendant can remain silent. But in the workplace, and in discipline cases, a worker is expected to explain his or her actions.”

This is the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers letting everyone in Sacramento know they’re still in charge, Vergara or no Vergara.

That Jerry Brown would sign this atrocity into law is still more evidence that his carefully crafted media image as a noble genius governor is badly lacking in substance. Only a craven governor eager to kiss up to the CTA and CFT would have signed this bill.

In the meantime, however, we’re seeing some hilariously Orwellian comments from the head of United Teachers Los Angeles. This is from the L.A. Times:

“This decision today is an attack on teachers, which is a socially acceptable way to attack children,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president-elect of the Los Angeles teachers union. Instead of providing for smaller classes or more counselors, “you attack teacher and student rights.”

Up is down, left is right, right is wrong, teachers=students.

Oh, my. George Orwell long ago predicted in his novel “1984” that political speech would become this outrageously manipulative — this baldly, weirdly dishonest.

George was right.

Remember, Alex Caputo-Pearl is the head of the United Teachers Los Angeles. This is the same CTA chapter that got the Los Angeles Unified School District to approve the rules that prevented Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Berndt from being immediately fired after evidence emerged that he had fed his students semen.

If attacking teachers is a way of attacking students, what is a teacher feeding semen to a student? A teacher who can’t immediately be fired for this? A teacher whom school district officials believe they can’t remove from the payroll unless they pay him $35,000 first?

If Alex Caputo-Pearl has a response, I’ll let everyone know.

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 for three reasons, I don’t think the prospects for this reform are dead at all. I dealt with the first two in a U-T San Diego column today.

The first: My apologies to Jon Coupal and company, but I really think they were too clever by half with their measure last year:

” … the last time reformers brought paycheck protection before California voters — via Proposition 32 on the November 2012 ballot — they didn’t trust voters enough to just give them a straightforward up-or-down vote on whether union members should have a say on the use of their dues. Instead, the initiative included legally dubious provisions restricting corporate campaign spending that gave critics ample ammunition to depict it as a deceptive power play.

“The measure lost in a landslide. But state voters came fairly close to passing cleaner, simpler versions of paycheck protection in 1998 and 2005.”

The second: There has never been a more egregious case of union power trumping public sentiment than in this year’s Legislature:

“The appalling story of former Los Angeles Unified elementary schoolteacher Mark Berndt would make a simple version of paycheck protection much easier to pass in 2014 or 2016. After evidence turned up indicating Berndt had been feeding sperm to his students, district officials had no choice but to pay Berndt $35,000 to get him to quit because of job protections demanded and won by United Teachers Los Angeles.

“When the Berndt case triggered a public backlash, the state Legislature earlier this year passed a teacher-discipline measure that was billed as a smart way to keep perverts away from students. Instead, it actually gave teachers even more job protections.

“Nothing better illustrates the unions’ chokehold on Sacramento than this. If the CTA and the CFT had less money for political fights, maybe, just maybe, the public would have gotten its way — and parents wouldn’t have cause to think that state lawmakers worry more about protecting predatory teachers than the students of such teachers.”

The third reason is that quite a few veteran state journalists no longer have illusions about how unions have turned governance, especially at the local level, into something akin to looting. It’s no longer just Dan Walters and his occasional contrarian refusal to accept the surface motives claimed by Jerry Brown, Darrell Steinberg and John Perez. Instead, it’s the Bay Area News Group’s increasingly radicalized columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein and a wave of younger reporters at the San Jose Mercury-News, the Sacramento Bee and many online sites.

Even L.A. Times knows which way the wind blows

And even though their concern is always muted, there’s plenty of evidence that the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times is worried, too.

Consider this editorial from last week, headlined “Spend money on the students it’s meant to help.” It makes the same basic point as my CalWatchdog story from three weeks ago about Gov. Jerry Brown’s bid to direct more funds to struggling students being hijacked to put more money in operating budgets for teacher compensation:

“Under the draft rules, if administrators spent all the extra funding on teacher raises, middle-class students would be receiving more of the benefit than needy ones. If those students’ scores rose even slightly, the district could claim it had fulfilled the requirements of the third option.”

If anything puts the spotlight on the gap between union Democrats and real, honest-to-God social-justice Democrats, it is this.

If unions follow up on their Mark Berndt scandal power play by hijacking what’s billed as the most socially progressive education reform in California history, I think opposition to a clean “paycheck protection” bill fades in the newsrooms around the Golden State.

If it doesn’t, God help California. There will be nothing unions can’t get away with.

So when a Los Angeles Unified teacher feeds semen to his students and has to be bribed to quit, instead of enacting rules to make it easier to fire classroom sexual predators, the Legislature passes a fake reform that would have actually increased protections for pervert teachers.

So when a judge says districts must follow a state law requiring student performance be part of teacher evaluations, instead of compliance, we see the state cancel the standardized tests whose results could have been used against bad teachers.

And now here is the latest example of teacher unions’ hegemony in California: A much-trumpeted education reform enacted earlier this year is being hijacked in brazen fashion, further propping up the teacher-favoring education status quo.

The reform I refer to is Gov. Jerry Brown’s seemingly successful push this summer to divert school funding specifically to English-language learners, foster children and disadvantaged children because of his concern that they will lead difficult lives unless they get more out of school, with grim implications for the state’s future workforce. Brown didn’t say it, but these students are the biggest victims of the CTA/CFT chokehold on public education. Instead of having a school system devoted to getting the best teachers to where they’re most needed, we have a system devoted above all to protecting veteran teachers’ compensation. If minority kids suffer, the establishment ultimately doesn’t care.

CTA, CFT determined to free up operating budget funds

But Brown’s reform had a second, unrelated component: It eliminated 32 of 45 state requirements on how funds were spent by local districts.

Why was this paired with the focus on high-need students? To appreciate what’s going on here, you need to understand what’s been the biggest headache facing the teachers’ unions: The fact that in recent years, budget woes have prevented hundreds of thousands of teachers from getting pay raises except for the “step” raises most get for 15 of their first 20 years and the “column” raises they get for taking meaningless graduate coursework that doesn’t even have to be in the field they teach.

So what have teacher union-dominated school districts done to free up funds in the operating budget? Over the past five years, they’ve illegally forced students and their parents to pay for basic classroom instructional materials. And they’ve moved aggressively to use 30-year borrowing to pay for basic expenses like routine maintenance and for short-lived technological tools like laptops and iPads.

Now they’ve figured out another scam — one disguised by Jerry Brown’s flowery rhetoric. The legislation proposed by the governor “also sharply increased local authority over school decisions by reducing most state restrictions on how funds are used — reflecting Brown’s ‘subsidiarity’ theory that the closer decision-making is to those directly affected, the better quality it is likely to be,” I wrote in U-T San Diego. But even “before it passed the Legislature, the ‘revolutionary’ funding change was amended to weaken safeguards making sure the additional funds actually ‘followed’ the high-need students and weren’t diverted to adult compensation.”

Now the implementation of the law is being considered by the state Board of Education, where the staff functions as an extension of the CTA and CFT. Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s a key staff proposal before the board: School districts could meet their reform requirements by offering just one new program for high-need students. If they did so, unless that program was extremely costly, the result would be a big infusion of unfettered funds into districts’ operating budgets.

The state Board of Education is divided over the rules, with a final decision due in January. But don’t bet against the teachers’ unions getting their way. If that happens, it would mean that the most-ballyhooed education reform in California since Gov. Pete Wilson’s classroom-size reduction program ended up just being an elaborate way for the governor and the Legislature to reward their masters and patrons in the CTA and the CFT.

Ones and zeroes key to “Matrix,” teacher pay key to CA

Like Neo figuring out how life was coded to work in “The Matrix,” everything about California politics is much easier to understand once you realize that by far the top priority of by far the state’s most powerful group is protecting the interests of veteran teachers. Considering how easily Jerry Brown got his education funding change through the Legislature, it should have been obvious something devious was going on.

Now all is crystal-clear: This faux reform is actually the most sophisticated ploy yet to free up operating budget funds for teacher pay, using the cloak of social justice.

There’s not much money left in many districts. In San Diego Unified, for example, 92 percent of the operating budget goes to compensation. But the CTA and CFT don’t care. If we increasingly have Potemkin Village schools as a result, Californians will just have to deal with it.

When the people running the state see public schools primarily as a jobs program, such thinking is inevitable.

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.

The most obvious example is the fact that California has a 1971 state law — the Stull Act — that mandates student performance be included in teacher evaluations. This is just the sort of approach that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan like as part of their push to eliminate the 10 percent or so of teachers they say are too incompetent to be allowed in the classroom.

But guess what: The law has been ignored for decades in California. Why? Because for at least 20 years, the most powerful special interest in the state has been the teacher unions — the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. Keeping the CTA and CFT happy has been a higher priority in local school districts and in the Legislature than actually honoring a clearly written state law.

No job matches your specialty? So what? Here's your check

With monotonous regularity, stories come along to remind us of this dominance of the teacher unions. In the past two years, the main example has been the disgusting Mark Berndt scandal and fallout in California's largest school district. The veteran teacher couldn't be fired by Los Angeles Unified for feeding semen to students; he had to be paid $40,000 to quit. Since then, the Legislature has blocked measures to make it easier to fire classroom sexual predators such as Berndt. Instead, a fake reform passed this year actually would have made it tougher to fire pervert teachers. Thankfully, Brown vetoed it. He'll kowtow to teacher unions on a lot of fronts, but he draws the line at the Pervert Protection Act of 2013.

Now comes an example from the state's second largest school district. San Diego Unified has been pleading poverty for years. Now it turns out the allegedly fiscally bereft district is actually bereft of transparency and common sense. This is from the U-T San Diego:

“Teachers are [classified as] excessed when their positions are eliminated — usually due to an enrollment drop, increase in class size or — in the case of middle and high school — the discontinuation of a course or program. …

“San Diego Unified’s 2013-14 budget counts on some 300 teachers having retired or resigned last school year to save $27 million. …

“This week, excessed teachers will gather at a district forum to bid for vacant jobs, positions that will be awarded based on seniority and credentials.

“At the end of the forum, if there are more teachers than jobs, the district must create new positions since excess teachers are tenured employees who are guaranteed employment. …

“San Diego Unified employs more than 6,000 teachers. The number excessed each year varies — from 658 last year to 696 in 2011-12, 560 in 2010-11, and 347 in 2009-10, district records show.”

San Diego's version of “rubber rooms”

If anything confirms the fact that California's K-12 school system is more about providing union jobs than it is about providing students with an education, this is it. A school district that is allegedly so hard up for cash that it uses 30-year borrowing to pay for graffiti removal keeps hundreds of teachers on the payroll who don't teach.

This isn't as outrageous as the “rubber rooms” of New York City where hundreds of violent or deranged teachers sit around all day and collect pay to do crosswords and listen to their iPods. But it's just as revoltingly stupid.

The starkest evidence that the union-first status quo remained entrenched in the Legislature came with the ramming through of the wish list of the most powerful forces in the state. I have an editorial in Sunday’s U-T San Diego laying out the sick picture and pointing to the CTA’s and the CFT’s key collaborator:

Protecting perverted teachers  …

“The top priority for California’s public schools in California should be helping students. Instead, priority No. 1 is protecting teachers from accountability … .

“This was on display with an alleged teacher discipline measure prompted by the horrifying case of Mark Berndt, a veteran Los Angeles Unified elementary-school teacher who delighted in feeding semen to his students. The school district paid Berndt $40,000 to resign in 2011 after determining that job protections demanded and won by United Teachers Los Angeles were so imposing that he couldn’t simply be fired.

“In 2012, an Assembly committee blocked a bill that would have streamlined the discipline process and allowed for decisive action in cases like Berndt’s. This triggered considerable political fallout that led to one Assembly member’s defeat. And so in 2013, the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers ordered their puppets to adopt AB 375 — a fake reform that in some cases actually gives teachers even more job protections. The measure is on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, where it should die.

“But don’t count on that. The allegedly independent, tough-minded Brown is the closest ally the CTA and CFT have ever had in the governor’s office.”

… and incompetent teachers, too

“Which brings us to AB 484, which should get at least as much attention as AB 375. This bill, also on Brown’s desk, would broadly suspend much federally mandated testing of students for at least a year and also block the release of test scores in some other circumstances. This has prompted sharp criticism from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, including a threat to withhold federal education funds, because test scores are essential to evaluating student progress.

“The nominal reason for this extraordinary legislation? State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson says it would help schools to focus on a new testing regimen with different learning goals, called the Common Core standards.

“The real reason, however, is much more basic. On June 12, 2012, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant held that Los Angeles Unified — and, by implication, every California school district — could no longer ignore a 1971 state law that required that student performance be part of teacher evaluations.

“How do you keep the Chalfant ruling from inconveniencing teachers? You block student testing. If you can’t measure student performance, you can’t ding teachers.”

The CA cold war over education

But the unions aren’t the only parties to blame. There’s also our alleged genius leader, Msgr. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

“And what is the governor’s idea of school ‘reform”’? Returning more authority to the local level. Our allegedly worldly, brilliant governor somehow is ignorant of the fact that local control used to be the status quo — and it was an enormous failure. ‘If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,’ declared the 1983 ‘Nation at Risk’ federal report that triggered the education reform movement.

“Thirty years later, at least in California, a cold war over education persists. But as AB 375 and AB 484 show, it’s not much of a war. The teachers unions are winning in a rout — and their arrogance has hit such extremes that they’re even willing to use their clout to protect classroom sexual predators.

“Congratulations, CTA. Congra-tulations, CFT.

“And congratulations, governor. Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

At least Katrina came and went. The CTA and CFT are like a perma-storm hanging over the Golden State’s classrooms. That their enabler is a guy who’s routinely billed as the sharpest guy in the room? What an indictment of CA’s media.

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

Has Gov. Jerry Brown simply not been reading the newspaper for 40 years? Does he not see all the wars that the CTA and CFT fight on behalf of their members? Is he unaware of ACLU lawsuits targeting school districts for policies that help unions but hurt minority students?

For a veteran politician, he is either remarkably obtuse about K-12 education issues or good at faking it.

On Tuesday, in a telephone interview with opinion writers about his budget, Brown once again showed a shallow, uninformed grasp of public education. This is from a U-T San Diego editorial I wrote:

“He said more money and ‘subsidiarity’ — essentially, smart and thoughtful local control — are the keys to improving schools. The governor was asked why he thought local control would work better than it did before the reforms triggered by the ‘Nation at Risk’ report in the 1980s and No Child Left Behind in the 2000s, given that a key factor driving those reforms was that local control often led to a focus on adult employees instead of on students.

“Brown responded by ridiculing ‘top down’ policies that presumed people in Washington or Sacramento are wiser than ‘the teacher, the principal, the superintendent and the school board.’”

Jerry Brown channels Norman Rockwell: It’s still the 1950s! Trust your local institutions!

Feel free to groan.  Jerry waxing philosophical — Jerry in Norman Rockwell mode. Oy. Back to the editorial, specifically to Brown’s spiel:

“This is a talking point, not a policy. It reflects a painful naiveté about how schools work in California. We live in a state in which teacher unions are so powerful that a 1971 law requiring that student performance be a factor in teacher evaluations has been ignored by most districts for decades — a state in which most teacher tenure evaluations are cursory and teacher job protections are so formidable that Los Angeles Unified believed it had no choice but to pay classroom sex predator Mark Berndt $40,000 to get him off the payroll.

“Instead of touting ‘subsidiarity,’ Brown should face reality. When unions run school districts, ‘top down’ education policies are often the only way to protect the interests of students.”

But for whatever reason, the governor has ensconced himself in “Leave It To Beaver” thinking.

Yo, Jerry, in 1955, maybe “the teacher, the principal, the superintendent and the school board” did know best. But in 2013, in a typical California school district,  “the teacher” — through his or her union — has vast sway over “the superintendent and the school bird.” And they know what’s best — for teachers.