Lawsuit seeking cash for schools

Governor broke his word, say teachers and schools chief

By Alexa H. Bluth, Sacramento Bee,August 10, 2005

California's largest teachers union and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell announced Tuesday that they have sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to seek $3 billion more for public schools. The California Teachers Association and O'Connell, a Democrat elected statewide to his nonpartisan post, say the Republican governor broke his word and violated state law by failing to give K-14 schools (K-12 schools and community colleges) more in his 2005-06 budget. Some California parents also joined as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

"We've exhausted all of our other remedies, and the judicial option is our last remaining option to adequately fund public education," O'Connell said.

Schwarzenegger's budget aides said Tuesday they are confident the lawsuit will not hold up in court and that the governor's budget was approved legally by the state Legislature and sufficiently funds schools. The lawsuit comes after a months-long battle between Schwarzenegger and education advocates over a deal they struck in January 2004.

Facing a massive budget shortfall, the new governor persuaded a powerful and vocal education coalition to accept a $2 billion cut to K-12 schools and the suspension of Proposition 98's minimum funding guarantees. In exchange, it was announced, the cut and any resulting lost money from the suspension would be restored in future years when the state's fiscal picture brightened.

"Just one year later, however, the governor changed his mind about the funding agreement," states the lawsuit filed late Monday in Sacramento Superior Court.

Schwarzenegger in January announced his second budget would not repay the $2 billion, despite growing revenues, because he said the state needed the money for other priorities such as transportation.

The governor's top finance officials at first acknowledged that he was breaking his word to school officials, saying that the state's fiscal situation simply would not allow him to keep it.

Schwarzenegger later changed his defense of the matter slightly, however, saying only that he had promised eventually to repay the $2 billion and that he did not think he had broken a commitment.

He defends his 2005-06 budget as one that boosts per-pupil spending over last year. His budget also used billions in new revenues to repay a loan to local governments early, fully fund the state's Proposition 42 transportation funding and avoid any significant new borrowing.

But schools advocates say some of that additional revenue should have gone to classrooms under the governor's deal and under state law.

They said they are owed more - about $3 billion for the last and current fiscal year - based on a state statute that was passed after the budget deal was made with the governor.

The statute, signed as part of the 2004-05 budget, says that schools should receive just $2 billion below the amount that Proposition 98 guaranteed them if it hadn't been suspended. But because revenues were better than expected, the lawsuit argues that schools should have been guaranteed $1.8 billion more for the 2004-05 fiscal year and $1.1 billion this year.

CTA's suit against Schwarzenegger just another hollow political act

By Dan Walters, Sacramento Bee Columnist ,August 12, 2005

Politics are saturated with gratuitous, disingenuous, symbolic and intellectually dishonest actions. The lawsuit that the California Teachers Association, state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell and others filed against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday embraces all of those dubious tendencies.

Specifically, O'Connell, et al., are alleging that in giving the schools $3.1 billion less in state aid than educators claim is their due, the governor is violating the law.

The legal basis for the suit is shaky at best. But even if it were rock-solid, the school folks aren't suing the Democrat-controlled Legislature, which didn't appropriate the disputed money because, by all accounts, the CTA and Democrats decided not to fight for it in the state budget for purely political reasons.

In brief, the educators are suing the Republican governor for something their own allies in the Legislature didn't do - which means, of course, that the lawsuit isn't really about getting the money, but about pumping up the months-long, CTA-financed media campaign to make Schwarzenegger appear to be the enemy of schools so as to undermine his special election ballot measures.

To begin at the beginning, when the state received a one-time windfall of income tax revenues from the dot-com industry in 2000, then-Gov. Gray Davis agreed to give the schools a $1.8 billion extra injection of state aid because the CTA had gathered signatures on a ballot measure that would have required the state to boost school aid by about $6 billion per year. The $1.8 billion was, to put it impolitely, a payoff for political extortion.

The new school money and about $6 billion in other spending and tax cuts, which the state also couldn't afford, led to monumental budget deficits and Davis' recall. As Schwarzenegger assumed the governorship and faced the deficits, he persuaded the CTA, in effect, to give back the extra money (actually $2 billion) for one year to help balance the budget. As part of the deal, he promised that when state revenues increased, schools would share in the bounty - but the precise details of the promise, which are still in dispute, were not written into law. The Proposition 98 school finance guarantees were suspended by the Legislature for the 2004-05 fiscal year and the $2 billion reduction was enacted.

The school groups and Democratic legislators contended that when revenues did rise in 2004-05, the schools should have gotten their full Proposition 98 allotment minus $2 billion, but Schwarzenegger said that would absorb all of the state's revenue gain and force cutbacks in other vital programs. He opted to finance enrollment growth and inflation - about $3 billion - but not give schools the additional $3.1 billion that educators claimed was owed. The Legislature's own budget analyst endorsed the approach as prudent under the circumstances.

Initially, Democratic lawmakers pledged to hold up passage of the 2005-06 budget until the full amount was included - which would have required either a tax increase or severe cuts in other areas - but then suddenly abandoned that strategy in June with, it was clear, the full approval of the CTA because they feared that Schwarzenegger would use a prolonged budget stalemate as ammunition in the forthcoming ballot measure war.

"We didn't want to be used as a whipping boy in this political season," Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez said. Democrats voted for a budget without the extra school money.

CTA Vice President David Sanchez insisted during a news conference with O'Connell at a Sacramento school that the union had not sanctioned the tactical pullback, which flies in the face of every published account and the simple political reality that the Democrats would not have bucked the powerful union.

If the CTA suit is just another vehicle to beat up on Schwarzenegger, a subsidiary motive may be to demonstrate to its own members that it's still plugging away after abandoning another ballot measure that would have boosted taxes on commercial property by about $3 billion a year and spent it on schools.

Whatever its motives, it's especially disheartening that those who purport to educate young minds should engage in a piece of cynical, intellectually dishonest political theater.

CSBA, ACSA join Prop. 98 lawsuit against Schwarzenegger

CSBA Website, January 27, 2006

The Education Legal Alliance of the California School Boards Association, in conjunction with the Association of California School Administrators, has filed to intervene in the legal battle to require Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to restore $3.1 billion owed to California’s public schools and community colleges under Proposition 98.

The California Teachers Association and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell sued Schwarzenegger last August, charging the governor and other officials with failing to provide the minimum education funding guaranteed under Proposition 98, which voters added to the state constitution in 1988.

Today’s filing seeks to make CSBA and ACSA parties to the suit and will give them a voice in any settlement negotiations.

“This lawsuit signifies that the education community will not stand for the governor’s unconstitutional denial of funds,” said CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin. “As interveners, CSBA and ACSA will be able to ensure that the interests of all school districts and county offices of education are protected in this important lawsuit.”

The suit arose from Schwarzenegger’s failure to honor the terms of a December 2003 agreement he made with the Education Coalition, composed of CSBA, ACSA, CTA and six other organizations representing parents and school employees, board members and administrators. The coalition agreed to suspend Proposition 98 in the 2004-05 budget year, temporarily reducing education funding by an agreed-upon $2 billion.

The Legislature formalized the agreement in law as Chapter 213 of the Statutes of 2004, spelling out the exact amount of funding to be subtracted from schools from what they would otherwise be entitled to in 2004-05.

As revenues surpassed expectations in 2004, schools became entitled to an additional $1.8 billion beyond that budgeted for 2004-05. But the governor withheld those funds, and he compounded the impact on schools this year by basing 2005-06 school funding on the lower amount budgeted for 2004-05. This denied schools an additional $1.3 billion, for a total of $3.1 billion.

“The lawsuit is necessary in order to ensure that the Proposition 98 guarantee is correctly calculated, thus guaranteeing that school districts and community colleges will receive the revenue to which they are entitled in 2004-05, 2005-06 and in future budget years,” Plotkin said.

Statesmanship: Will it be a new course for CTA?

By Peter Schrag , Sacramento Bee Columnits, January January 3, 2007

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger got no end of attention last year for the radical change of course and tone that followed the mauling his bash-em agenda got in the special election of 2005.

But the California Teachers Association, the governor's biggest "special interest" bashee, which spent some $100 million to administer that mauling, changed course as well. And that change could be as significant as the governor's for both the schools and the state's political climate.

Along with CTA President Barbara Kerr, a key figure in that change was CTA government representative Joe Nuñez, who's also been a member of the state Board of Education for the past five years and who's up for reconfirmation by the state Senate tomorrow. Because of Nuñez's board votes against some liberal attempts to water down the state's academic standards, and because of some Republicans' itch to take a shot at the governor's reviving centrism, the outcome is uncertain.

Schwarzenegger, who lost big in 2005, had good reason to change course last year. His new good-guy role paid off big in his re-election in November. For the CTA, which won but had to raise all that money to do it, the change, although likewise a case of enlightened self-interest, was stunning.

Among conservatives -- and for many others as well -- the teacher unions have long been high on the list of roadblocks to school reform. It's a reputation that's often been richly deserved, particularly by the powerful National Education Association and by many of its state and local affiliates.

At the core of that intransigence lay the vestiges of an industrial unionism that was never a comfortable fit for organizations whose members wanted to be regarded as professionals, not as blue-collar assembly line workers.

In some instances, the American Federation of Teachers, the smaller of the two big unions, got beyond that 20 years ago. The slow-footed NEA, including the CTA, continued to resist efforts to implement differential pay or conditions based on need and performance.

Every member was supposed to work the same number of hours and get the same pay as everyone else with the same job seniority. The only deviation was not for performance but for formal training, which often means nothing.

But last May, as more money became available for schools, and as the school lobby negotiated a settlement of the lawsuit that grew out of what it regarded as the governor's failure to fully fund education in 2005, the CTA, much to the consternation of some of its education coalition partners, broke from the pattern.

Instead of demanding that the money be spread evenly as unrestricted funds to all schools -- which meant most would go on the bargaining table -- the union promoted a deal to direct the funds to the state's lowest performing schools, nearly all with high concentrations of poor and minority students. "We're putting our money," said Kerr, "where our heart is." Given the challenges in low achieving schools, "same is not equal."

The plan is hardly perfect. Much of the money will go to yet another class size reduction formula (of 25-to-1 or less) in grades 4-12 that was pulled out of a hat. (In grades K-3, the established 20-to-1 formula will remain in place.)

The money that's allocated, moreover, a total of roughly $3 billion spread over seven years beginning in 2007-2008, will only be enough for 40 percent of the estimated 1,600 low performing schools -- those in the bottom 20 percent on state scores -- that will be eligible for the additional money. In grades K-3, schools will get an additional $500 per student; in grades 4-8, they'll get $900; for grades 9-12, $1,000.

The state superintendent of schools and the governor's secretary of education will pick the schools from those that apply for approval by the state board. That, as the legislative analyst said, raises equity questions, especially since there are no specific criteria for picking the favored schools.

And yet the very fact that the CTA leadership pushed for greater focus on low performing schools and (at least temporarily) abandoned its industrial union fixation is a huge change. Among the elements of that change, all part of SB 1133, a bill passed last summer, is a dramatic increase in the number of counselors in those high poverty schools, a crucial service in which California has been at the bottom of the national heap for nearly 30 years.

The law also requires districts that get the grants to show within three years that the proportion of experienced teachers in the affected schools is at least as high as it is in the district as a whole; to mandate professional development; and to increase attendance and graduation rates even as they raise student test scores.

There are lots of devils in those details. But in this case the whole is easily greater than the sum of its parts. Which brings us back to Nuñez. If anyone deserves reconfirmation, he does.