The tension has been on broad display in recent days as law enforcement unions and police chiefs react angrily to a new law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that is driven by the assumption that officers routinely act in racially biased ways:

For civil rights activists, Brown’s action was a big step toward protecting minorities from racial profiling.

 

For many in law enforcement, the measure creates a massive new bureaucratic headache that will do little to illuminate the question of whether police treat minority groups fairly.

 

“It’s a terrible piece of legislation,” said Lt. Steve James, president of the Long Beach Police Officers Assn. and the national trustee for the California Fraternal Order of Police.

 

Written by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, in response to fatal police shootings of unarmed black men and other people of color, the legislation will require officers to collect data on anyone they stop, including “perceived” race and ethnicity, the reason for the encounter and whether arrests were made.

That’s from the Los Angeles Times’ account of the uproar over the new law. It is certain to be contentious going forward, especially given the likelihood that some departments will simply ignore it and say they don’t have the resources to spare.

Vergara suit based on claims of poor treatment of minorities

A potential for an even bigger rupture lies with the Vergara v. California lawsuit. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled in 2014 that five state laws protecting veteran teachers’ rights were unconstitutional because they had the net effect of funneling the most troubled teachers to poor minority communities. Treu said this amounted to a de facto segregated school system but stayed his decision pending an appeal.

The deadline for filing “friend of the court” briefs in the appeal was Sept. 16, and the prominence of those who chose to do so reflects the high stakes in the case:

Parties filing in support of the two teacher unions, the California Association of Teachers and California Federation of Teachers, and the state, which are all co-defendants, were Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Equal Justice Society, Education Law Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Advancing Justice-LA, according to a press release from CTA. …

 

Joining a list of education chiefs from around the nation, student groups, business organizations and others who filed briefs supporting the student plaintiffs was [Arnold] Schwarzenegger and [Pete] Wilson, who wrote, “At stake in this case is not only the future of California’s students, but also the future of California,” said the former California governors, both Republicans. “As students who learn from grossly ineffective teachers face lifelong setbacks, by extension, California’s future economic and social success is similarly impacted.”

That’s from L.A. School Report. What’s noteworthy is the absence of Latino groups either supporting or opposing Treu’s ruling, even though its most sweeping findings were largely based on the treatment of Latino students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, has been an outspoken critic of how public education works in California. She has long asserted that Latino state lawmakers are scared of taking on the CTA and the CFT, especially if they hope to end up in leadership positions. Whether that’s true or not, few Latino politicians beyond Romero and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have taken on the unions.

Black lawmaker leading Democratic critic of teachers unions

Instead, the most prominent Democratic critic of teachers unions is the same African American lawmaker who wrote the police profiling bill. Weber introduced a measure this spring that would have required teacher evaluations to include student performance. It was quickly killed in committee, prompting Weber to sharply criticize her fellow Democrats and their union backers.

A Los Angeles Times poll earlier this year showed support for the sort of changes sought by Weber and other reforms, in particular having teacher layoffs be determined by classroom performance, not seniority.

Weber and the California Legislative Black Caucus have also expressed concerns about the implementation of 2013’s Local Control Funding Formula, a state law championed by Gov. Jerry Brown that was supposed to directly help struggling students by providing them with more resources and attention. A January Legislative Analyst’s Office report looked at 50 California school districts, including the 11 largest, and found none had adequate safeguards in place to prevent LCFF dollars from going to teacher compensation or other uses.

The appeals trial in the Vergara case is expected to begin later this year with oral arguments. Plaintiffs have said they expect the appellate ruling by January.

However, there are concerns that the funds are being diverted either to broad programs that don’t specifically benefit these struggling students or to teacher compensation.

In January, the Legislative Analyst’s Office released a study that found none of the 50 school districts it surveyed, including the state’s 11 largest, had adequate safeguards in place for LCFF dollars. Two of its main findings:

Districts Rarely Differentiate Between New and Ongoing Actions. In most LCAPs, we found that districts are not distinguishing between actions that are a continuation of efforts from the prior year and those that are new for the upcoming school year. Without such differentiation, we could not determine whether districts were using the new funding generated under LCFF to pursue new actions to improve performance or to continue or expand prior activities.

Districts Often Fail To Provide Sufficient Information on EL/LI Student Services. Often, districts’ descriptions of services for EL/LI students consist only of recapping the actions they will pursue on behalf of all students and indicating those actions also will benefit EL/LI students. In addition, few districts provide clear or compelling rationales for using their supplemental and concentration funds on a districtwide and schoolwide basis.

That same month, the California Legislative Black Caucus presented testimony to the State Board of Education on rules governing how the funds were spent. Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, expressed concern that vague guidelines would make it easy to divert the money meant expressly for struggling students. Her key point:

Any authority for the use of supplemental or concentration grants to schoolwide and districtwide expenditures must clearly link the services to demonstrated effectiveness in increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps, and demonstrate that the expenditures are proven effective for “concentrations” of unduplicated children in schools in the district where concentrations exist.

Weber, a former San Diego school board president and San Diego State University professor, has already taken on the California Teachers Association and the education establishment this year over tenure reform. Her proposal was rejected by the Assembly Education Committee last month, but only after she had stern words for defenders of the tenure status quo.

But there are a few problems with this narrative in the Golden State. For starters, the high cost of housing is at least as responsible as stagnant wages for California having the nation’s highest poverty rate. The federal minimum wage could double from the present $7.25, and poverty would still be sky-high here so long as mediocre one-bedroom apartments rent for $1,200 a month or more in urban areas.

What would bring down the cost of housing? Adding more housing stock by limiting regulations blocking new construction and incentivizing developers to build mixes of middle-income and lower-income housing.

Will CA Dems ever do that? Of course not. Growth is evil, yunno. Even if opposing it hurts poor people. Gaia must be honored.

The best way to create middle-class jobs

But where the Democrats’ posturing on income inequality is most unhelpful is with public education. If we wanted to create middle-class opportunities galore for kids in poor communities, we would mandate that they take computer science in high school. I wrote about this angle in March:

Even if minimum-wage hikes don’t kill jobs, the idea that this policy is a promising solution to income inequality makes little sense. In the big picture, what we need are many more people with in-demand job skills that lead to middle-income careers. And what we badly need from our elected leaders is an acknowledgment that California’s approach isn’t working in creating these job skills.

Income inequality isn’t just growing in the U.S. It’s growing in all advanced nations as technological advances wipe out middle-class jobs by the millions. It’s growing everywhere as the job marketplace increasingly values — and strongly rewards — a narrower range of skills than it did previously.

The best way to minimize the disruption this inexorable change creates is by maximizing the number of people with job skills not diminished by “creative destruction.” For starters, we need a focus on computer science and technological expertise in middle school and high school — not curriculums based on the educational values of the 1950s. We also need to make it much easier for displaced workers of any age to go back to the classroom to get practical job training.

Pursuing this ambitious agenda would be far more daunting than raising the minimum wage. But it has promise to significantly reduce income inequality — not nibble at the margins.

Will Biden make this point? Or just posture with Occupy-style rhetoric about the 1 percent?

You know the answer. President Obama may have a good record of calling for incompetent teachers to get the boot, but he has had little to say about the urgent need to revamp high-school graduation requirements for the 21st century.

Why? It’s tough not to think that it’s because it would cost 10 percent or more of high-school teachers their jobs. Never forget that the main opposition in New York state in the late 1990s to ending or scaling back failed bilingual education policies came from teacher union leaders who were upset it would mean pink slips for many “Spanish immersion” teachers.

Get ready for traffic hell, Los Angeles

Meanwhile, Angelenos once again will face a traffic nightmare today because of Biden’s visit and the Obama administration’s latest Socal money-grubbing. Joe Mathews had an enjoyably tart take on this last week:

Bad news: President Obama is coming to California again.

Mr. President, I realize such a statement may seem jarring. After all, our state voted for you twice. When you were first running for president, Maria Shriver said, “If Barack Obama were a state, he’d be California.” But these days, I bet I could rally a majority of Californians behind a proposition asking that you never visit again. And I wouldn’t even have to talk about your record-low job approval ratings among Californians.

No, our fundamental problem with you is more personal than political. You, sir, have developed a reputation as a very poor houseguest.

You often show up with little warning about your itinerary or schedule. (Your excuse? That the Secret Service can’t disclose your movements for security reasons.) Your massive security cordon routinely causes hours-long traffic jams in a state that already has too many of them. I was once two hours late picking up a child from day care because you just had to stop for takeout in Los Angeles during the evening rush hour.

Mathews makes this case that this might be more palatable if the president actually seemed familiar with and eager to address California issues. But Obama doesn’t and isn’t.

Your trips here have come to feel like those political fundraising emails that keep arriving this time of year. You’re spamming us, Mr. President. If you can’t do better by California on these trips, then maybe you should stop visiting.

This isn’t the first time Joe Mathews has griped about such inconveniences. Here he also takes a shot at George Clooney. Now he’s really getting too big for his britches.

The judge in Vergara vs. California today released his final review of the case, affirming his preliminary decision in June, that five state statures governing teacher employment rules violate the California constitution by denying students access to a quality public education.

In his final ruling, filed yesterday, Judge Rolf Treu, said, “plaintiffs have met their burden of proof on all issues presented.”

The decision effectively starts the clock for the defendants — the state and its two largest teachers unions, which joined the case — on whether to appeal. They have 60 days to decide.

Implications many for governor, state Dems

Cal Watchdog has had extensive coverage of the Vergara decision and its educational and political implications.

Here’s part of a piece from Monday — “Vergara appeal decision: Nixon goes to China for Jerry Brown?”:

He is on cruise control for re-election, so if he backed an appeal — especially on narrow grounds — he wouldn’t face the blowback that [state Superintendent of Public Instruction] Torlakson would.

But at this point in his life, Brown isn’t necessarily thinking about the short term. He may be thinking about history and his lasting legacies.

 Here’s part of a piece from June 12 — “The left-wing theory driving Vergara ruling.”

A point that hasn’t been made nearly enough by the MSM is that the Vergara vs. California ruling rejecting the state’s lax teacher tenure practices depends on a legal doctrine associated with lefty causes. That doctrine deals with “disparate impact” and holds that if a seemingly neutral law has the real-world effect of hurting discrete groups, that law can be seen as de facto discriminatory under constitutional equal protection provisions.

It is most associated with employment discrimination lawsuits challenging standardized tests in government employment. In public education — at least until this week — the doctrine had mostly been invoked in litigation targeting the sharp differences in student discipline by race.

Here’s part of the piece about the Vergara ruling’s potential to dynamite the California Democratic Party coalition from June 24 — “Vergara’s grim implications for CA Dems ignored”:

[The] landmark court ruling [portends a highly] … consequential rift between California Democratic factions. The Vergara vs. California decision posits that state policies which protect mostly white veteran teachers and funnel the worst teachers to schools in poor minority neighborhoods are an unconstitutional affront to equal protection laws. The judge explicitly likened his ruling to Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “seperate but equal” public school systems were unconstitutional.

This puts the Democratic coalition at great risk. Its most powerful members — the CTA and the CFT — are accused of orchestrating an assault on the interests of the children of blacks and Latinos — its most loyal voters.

Some expect it even more than others. Which brings us to the media’s conventional theories as to why Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie was defeated in the Democratic primary on Saturday in a landslide by state Sen. David Ige. Yes, Abercrombie angered many Democrats when he refused the request of dying, beloved Sen. Daniel Inouye to appoint Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa as his successor. Yes, Abercrombie wasn’t particularly skilled in selling a positive image.

But if he hadn’t taken on the powerful Hawaii State Teachers Association (HSTA) in 2011 and forced teachers to take a 5 percent pay cut to make the state budget balance, he probably wouldn’t have faced Ige or a serious challenger in the primary. A Honolulu Star-Advertiser analysis from July 31, 2011, notes that Abercrombie only wanted teachers to share the same pain as other public employees:

Abercrombie imposed a “last, best and final offer” that roughly matches the pay cuts taken by the state’s largest public employee union, the Hawaii Government Employees Association.

This led the HSTA to seek out Ige to run for governor. In February, the union formalized its support, giving a huge boost to the obscure lawmaker.

And now Abercrombie is only the second Hawaii governor to ever lose a re-election bid.

CA teachers spared the pension pain facing other public employees

The contrast with Jerry Brown could not be more instructive.

In 2011, the California governor unveiled a pension reform proposal that was unusually ambitious. In an approach similar to Abercrombie’s on the 2011 Hawaii state budget, Brown’s plan held that there should be shared pain to address  a fiscal problem — in this case, the long-term underfunding of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and some local government pension funds. That translated into legislation under which affected employees eventually will have to roughly split the total cost of their pensions with taxpayers.

But this year’s law to shore up the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ignores that framework. Instead, taxpayers will foot 90 percent of the cost of new CalSTRS funding and teachers only 10 percent.

More $ meant for struggling students heads to CA teachers

In California, some public employees are more equal than others. Jerry Brown figured that out long ago.

In Hawaii, the governor only figured that out Saturday.

Meanwhile, there’s more evidence that the Local Control Funding Formula education reform approved last year was a ruse cooked up by Brown, the CTA and CFT to free up more funds for teacher compensation — not primarily a way to help target funds for struggling students. This is from the Sac Bee:

Sacramento-area school districts have begun giving teachers pay raises and bonuses, often retroactively, as they receive more funding from the state.

Twin Rivers Unified, Elk Grove Unified and El Dorado Union High are among the many local school districts that have negotiated raises with their unions that reach back to last year or beyond. The pay hikes are on top of the “step-and-column” increases traditionally given to educators annually based on their years of service and level of education.

The raises come after a 2012 voter-approve tax hike and a multiyear state plan to increase school funding through a new formula intended to direct money to low-income students and English-language learners.

As Cal Watchdog noted last week, this same scenario is unfolding in Los Angeles Unified.

It is not what voters were promised when they backed tax hikes in 2012. It is not what the media were told would happen when the Local Control Funding Formula was enacted in 2013.

But it’s par for the course. In California, as in Hawaii, unions dominate government — especially teacher unions. Mess with their compensation, and you’ll pay a price. And if that means other unions play the role of second-class citizens in Democratic Party politics, so be it.