How the teachers unions turned the Golden State to lead

Steven Malanga's examination of California's public-employee union-dominated political landscape is essential reading at City Journal's website this week. If you want an excellent primer on how to usurp representative government through legal bribery, coercion, blackmail, and sundry strong-arm tactics, this is it.

Public-employee unions are particularly corrosive of the commonweal because they have outsize influence in electing the politicians who negotiate and ultimately sign off upon their salaries, benefits and pensions. Central to the story, of course, is the California Teachers Association. "The rise of the white-collar CTA provides a good example of a fundamental political shift that took place everywhere in the labor movement," Malanga writes. It's no accident that California's public school teachers are the highest-paid in the United States. The CTA rose to prominence in the 1970s, after voters passed Proposition 13, which limited the growth of property taxes and fundamentally altered the way schools are financed.

"Soon after Proposition 13 became law, the union launched a coordinated statewide effort to support friendly candidates in school-board races, in which turnout is frequently low and special interests can have a disproportionate influence," Malanga writes. "In often bitter campaigns, union-backed candidates began sweeping out independent board members. By 1987, even conservative-leaning Orange County saw 83 percent of board seats up for grabs going to union-backed candidates. The resulting change in school-board composition made the boards close allies of the CTA."

"But with union dues somewhere north of $1,000 per member and 340,000 members, the CTA can afford to be a player not just in local elections but in Sacramento, too (and in Washington, for that matter, where it’s the National Education Association’s most powerful affiliate)," he continues. "The CTA entered the big time in 1988, when it almost single-handedly led a statewide push to pass Proposition 98, an initiative -- opposed by taxpayer groups and Governor George Deukmejian -- that required 40 percent of the state’s budget to fund local education.

Malanga explains how the union became adept at shamelessly exploiting kids, using students as political human shields.

"To drum up sympathy, the CTA ran controversial ads featuring students; in one, a first-grader stares somberly into the camera and says, 'Pay attention -- today’s lesson is about the school funding initiative.' Victory brought local schools some $450 million a year in new funding, much of it discretionary."

The result? School boards -- which by then were almost all wholly-owned subsidiaries of the unions -- pumped up teacher salaries and pensions. Malanga points out that even though California teachers are the best paid in the country, the state's per-pupil spending is "only slightly higher than the national average."

So the teachers union has a lot invested in the status quo. It was the unions' millions that effectively derailed private school choice in California.

Here's how Malanga tells it:

The CTA reached new heights of thuggishness (in 1993) after a business-backed group began a petition to place a school-choice initiative on the state ballot. In a union-backed effort, teachers shadowed signature gatherers in shopping malls and aggressively dissuaded people from signing up. The tactic led to more than 40 confrontations and protests of harassment by signature gatherers. “They get in between the signer and the petition,” the head of the initiative said. “They scream at people. They threaten people.” CTA’s top official later justified the bullying: some ideas “are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters,” he said.

Union politicking also led to a move to reduce class sizes in the Golden State... with a predictable outcome:

In 1996... the union—casting covetous eyes on surplus tax revenues from the state’s economic boom—spent $1 million on an ad campaign advocating smaller classes. Californians began seeing the state’s classrooms as overcrowded, according to polls. So Governor Pete Wilson earmarked some three-quarters of a billion dollars annually to cut class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. The move produced no discernible improvements in student performance, but it did require a hiring spree that inflated CTA rolls and produced a teacher shortage. (The union drew the line, however, when it faced the threat of increased accountability. Two years later, when Wilson offered funds to reduce class sizes even more but attached the money to new oversight mechanisms, the CTA spent $6 million to defeat the measure, living up to Wilson’s assessment of it as a “relentless political machine.”)

The CTA and its allies often portray criticism of union thuggery as an attack on teachers or even on education in general. This is one of the biggest Big Lies in American political discourse today. As my colleague Bruno Behrend put it earlier, "After bankrupting nations and states, why are we even allowing these organization to exist? Let's be clear: Public employee unions don't provide ANY public services. They merely make public services more expensive."

They not only make public services more expensive; they also corrupt the democratic process and undermine republican government. Public-employee unions no longer serve the public in any meaningful sense of the word -- if they ever did.