Prop. 1A -- Frog Soup, Anyone?

You know the story of the frog who is thrown into a pot of water.  If the water is too hot at the beginning, the frog jumps right out.  But if the water is comfortable enough at the beginning, but then the temperature is slowly increased, the frog will stay in the water until it is boiled alive.  That's exactly what Californians will be doing if we vote for Proposition 1A -- slowly, but permanently destroying public education and public services in California.

Proposition 1A, and all of the little attachments, is bad for our schools and bad for the people of California.  Whatever short-term benefit we get from the state's budget-rescue package pales in comparison to the long-term disasters that await education and other important programs which are supported by the state.

I'm having a hard time getting the "spending cap" to make sense in my mind when I also realize that there's no "human-dignity floor," or a level of human-needs services that we also agree never to go below.  We've already cut many of our state programs so severely that the next step is to eliminate many vital programs altogether.  The state budget is already rigged so that it's impossible to get new revenues and new programs in place, so every cut is permanent.

The other dynamic is that the fastest growing part of the budget is prison funding, carrying with it a host of mandated funding increases.  With mandatory sentencing laws and 3-strikes laws on the books, along with federal court mandates to dramatically improve its abysmal prison health care program, the prison-funding part of the budget can only increase.  Which means that with a spending cap, the rest of the budget can only go down.

And, we're locking in the spending cap at a shockingly inadequate funding level.  Our schools are already the most poorly funded schools in the country.  Sure, the temporary pay-off in Prop. 1B will keep us at 48th or 49th out of 50 states for a few years, but that's as good as it will ever get!   Mental health programs have already been decimated, and Prop 1E will take more.  Prop. 1D is going to tap into children's services.  We're robbing our own kids, and this is the best we can do?

I'm also deeply dismayed that my own union, CTA, is endorsing this package.  Remember the good ole' days when CTA used to fight against Schwarzenegger's hare-brained ideas.  Thankfully, the California Federation of Teachers is opposing Prop. 1A, and so is the California Nurses Association, SEIU and an expanding group of other wiser labor unions.  

California needs a better deal.  Let's scrap California's budget process altogether, with its un-democratic two-thirds majority requirement for new funding, get rid of Prop. 13, and  write a new state constitution.

Please vote no on 1A.

Racial Impact of RIFs

Lost in the outcries over the state budget and the painful cuts to our schools is the racial impact of those cuts.  If the youngest teachers in California are given pink slips, who will the students see in their classrooms?

 

Teachers of color are more likely to lose their jobs than white teachers.  San Leandro is not unlike most districts in California. More than 70 percent of the students are people of color, but more than two-thirds of the teachers are white.  Yet, at a CTA-hosted meeting of San Leandro teachers receiving RIF (reduction in force) notices, 23 teachers showed up, more than half (12) were people of color and 21 were women.

 

Of course, the RIF lists are determined by a combination of factors, especially seniority and appropriate credentials for the teaching assignment.  But older teachers are more likely to be white, and teachers of color tend to be younger, with less tenure.  So after the cuts are finalized, our kids of color (the majority throughout California) are more likely to see teachers in the classroom who don’t look like them.

 

The bad news is magnified when you consider that the schools likely to see the greatest turnover are the schools with the least-tenured teachers.  Those schools tend to be more urban, more diverse, and more impoverished. The bigger the district, the bigger the impact. 

 

So in schools where talented young teachers of color have stepped into leadership roles, many of those students will now see older, whiter teachers fill those classrooms, teachers who haven’t established relationships with the students or their parents.

 

The truth is that students will be seeing less of whichever teacher they have, with the dramatic increases in class size that are coming from the budget cuts.  No surprise, that impact will also be greater in schools with more kids of color.

The New Debate on Merit Pay

It seems like everybody is crying out for this teacher merit-pay idea, if only it weren't for the big, bad teacher Unions who are in the way.  Apparently, the Unions' only real interest is in protecting a bunch of miserable older teachers who can't teach, and only show up because they're after the free money.

Well, I'm not buying it, mostly because I don't know any teachers who are like that.  The truth is that most miserable teachers who hate kids and hate teaching get out of the profession.  It's not exactly a low-stress job.  I think the life span on a bad teacher tops out at about one year.

Too Little, Too Late?

CTA President David Sanchez called me last night.  He wanted to make sure I got his invitation to one of the "Pink Friday" events being coordinated throughout California, a series of vigils to mourn the loss of public education in the Golden State.

I didn't get to speak with him because I hadn't arrived home yet, so he just left a message on the answering machine.  All right, I know it wasn't actually the real David Sanchez, but I appreciated the robo-call reminder.  It was the second big reminder.  CTA had sent me a pretty pink sticker advertising the event a few days earlier.  They must have spent a lot of time and money putting this series of events together.

I guess CTA has the money to spend now because they saved up so much during the actual budget fight, when the Union basically didn't show up while legislators were taking the wrecking ball to our schools.  Okay, I'm being a little harsh and bitter.  There were those nice holiday cards I dutifully sent off to assembly people and senators when our CTA staffer came to one of our local meetings.  CTA paid for the cards and the postage.  Then there were those radio ads.  And I noticed the TWO pages of the "California Educator" magazine dedicated to saving Prop. 98.  That must have taken hours for a CTA organizer to write and edit.

But the truth is that I heard more about the fight to save our schools from the school administrators association.  They at least coordinated a series of legislator visits during the last months of the budget fight.  I mean, where were the teachers?  Where was the largest, strongest political organization in California when the impact on its own members would be so devastating?

CTA should have been targeting the districts of those Republican assholes who were leading the "no-new-taxes" fight.  They should have been running ads in all the local newspapers about what the cuts would mean to public education -- with the intent being that we would never let the cuts happen.  They could have created an ad campaign so that voters in every Republican's Senatorial district would see what 50 kids in a classroom might look like with no books and supplies.  They could have led a series of "work-to-rule" days throughout the state to demonstrate what it looks like when our schools lose all that funding.

I guess CTA was too busy to do all of that because they were planning the "Pink Friday" vigil.  I love a good funeral.

My only hope is that it's not too late to get started on our fight to ward off the next round of budget cuts.

Deep-Fried Schools

Last night, the good people at the  San Leandro school board meeting pledged allegiance to fried chicken strips.  Most of us didn't even notice.  It was the most rational thing that happened.

Mike Katz, the school board president, called the meeting to order and people stood for the pledge.  Only, the meeting place had changed at the last moment.  The location ended up being the high school cafeteria.  So we dutifully rose for the pledge, turned to face the spot where everyone assumed a flag would be if there were a flag, and said the pledge of allegiance.  To a cafeteria advertisement for "Sunset Strips."  From the picture, they were delicious, crispy, golden brown, deep-fried chicken strips.

Deep-Fried, like the future of California.  I guess when music programs, physical education, librarians, counselors, days of school, and even lawyers and consultants (the most important people in the school community) are on the list, no absurdity seems all that unusual.

These meetings have taken place all over California.  In many places, the potential cuts will be far deeper.  Even the schools in the wealthier communities will have to dig into their reserves.  The Senate Republicans have just fired their leader, Dave Cogdill, because he is seen as most likely to "give in" on a tax increase.  That's right, they want deeper cuts.  This budget won't smash enough dreams and kill enough people for them yet.

They must have pledged allegiance to deep-fried chicken strips a long time ago.

The 8th Amendment doesn't cover this!

Let me see if I have this straight.  $8.5 trillion dollars.  How can they possibly dream up that much money?  That's 16 Iraqi Wars.  That will double the national debt.  That's $28,333 per American, or $113,000 for a family of four.  I had to do the math by hand because my on-screen calculator won't let me have enough zeroes. 

 

All of the bailout packages, loan guarantees and stimulus packages are adding up to $8.5 Trillion so far. And the worst part -- where's it going?  The banks happily took their first $300 billion, and didn't do anything with it.  It was supposed to get passed into the economy to ease everybody's way as a solution to the credit crunch.  But our modern day robber-barons, the same banking executives that drew up all of those junk loans, took the money and gave bonuses to their executives.

 

And so much for the auto bailout helping workers.  Even though the auto kings got some of their cash, they’re still laying off workers and closing dealerships.  How exactly does that help working people?

 

Let’s send the bankers, the insurance executives, the auto czars and our Congresspeople to greed-aholics anonymous.  Step one, admit you have a problem.  Our economy doesn't work. Our economy has become history’s greatest ponzi scheme.  Bigger than Madoff, bigger than AMWAY.   It starts with bad debt, and adds on more debt.  And the victim of a ponzi scheme is always the person who buys in last.  That’s where those junk loans came in.  You could almost hear the echoes of the bankers from not-too-distant radio ads, “oh, please, buy in!  Keep it all afloat!  5-year APR at 1.5%, and we’ll schedule your foreclosure for 2008.”

 

It hasn't been working for years.  The people who’ve been making the billions don’t actually produce anything.  They’ve been presenting pictures of the good life with smoke and mirrors while we’ve been sending manufacturing jobs out of the country.  We’ve been using the federal credit card to finance the whole scheme, and asking the military to kick in and keep global markets open for exploitation.  Two-thirds of American corporations don't pay taxes.  We’re going to bail them out?

 

I don't mind the idea of taking action to "fix" the economy, and I imagine that it would have to be substantial.  But they're bailing out the wrong half of the economy.  I pretty much don't give a rat's ass about the bankers or the auto executives.  But I do care that people are losing their homes, that schools are eliminating services to kids, and that people can't afford to see a doctor when they're sick.  What if we had a plan that started with the concept of protecting peoples’ needs.  No matter what, let’s make a commitment to securing housing, health care, schooling and food for everyone.  How much would that cost?  It won’t take $8.5 Trillion, that’s for sure.

 

And then, any part of our economy that’s not working might just wither away (isn’t that what Marx said?).  If it was never working in the first place, why waste money trying to fix it?  When the next business collapses, sure there will be an impact, but if we focus on the needs of the people who are affected, housing, food, health care and education, then at least those people will have the ability to get through it. 

 

The parts of the economy that are solid get the boost of not having to carry the dead weight around, and new economies can develop which are based on the fact that we are emphasizing peoples’ needs.

 

Do I look powerful to you?

I've always thought of CTA as one of those big competition body builders -- always interested in looking powerful, but often fearful of using its power in a substantial way.

While California's state legislature meets in emergency session to solve California's budget woes, I'm still wondering when CTA is going to step up to the plate.  In the governor's "good" scenario, the mid-year budget cuts are going to amount to about 3%.  Because districts have already spent half of the year's money, that will feel like a 6% program cut; which will fall most directly on the services that support the students which need the most support.  The good scenario is tragic.  The bad scenario --  if the state legislature can't come up with some new revenue, we're looking at trimming more than 10% of the educational program -- is impossible to imagine.

Unfortunately, the state legislature is also broken.  A 60% majority of both houses is held hostage by the legislature's minority.  And despite the political shellacking that conservatives received in the election, they still "own" the state's budget process.  It's virtually impossible to raise revenue.

So I've been dreaming up some hard-ball tactics that my Union could take:

• Imagine a coordinated work action, like a work to rule, a sick-in or a strike aimed just at those legislative districts where the legislature refuses to raise revenue.  How will the people of those communities feel about their no-new-taxes-promising legislators when their whole communities are shut down.

• Imagine a statewide one-day strike.  It's kind of difficult to find 300,000 scabs  on the same day.

• Imagine a statewide extended strike.  Daycare options would be a little challenging for families who would normally bring their kids to school.  The state would functionally shut down.  How quickly would the legislature react in those circumstances?

• Imagine if CTA uses its relationships with the other state Unions whose workers are in the crossfires of the budget mess.  Time to start demanding that new state constitution.

Sure, there are more marginal responses.  I really only believe in using the amount of force that's necessary to allow our schools to serve our kids.  If writing letters works, I'm good with that.  It just hasn't worked with this legislature yet.

And what's the point of having all of those muscles if you're not going to use them?