Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Must SEE! The Koch Brothers or My Cokehead Brother?


See the hilarious "No on Prop 32" video by the Courage Campaign, The Koch Brothers or My Cokehead Brother?


Please join us as we hit the streets from this Saturday, October 27, through Election Day, Nov. 6as we take the fight against Prop 32 door to door and turn out hundreds of thousands of voters in LA County.

If LA County votes big, Prop 32 loses.

The link, below, contains walk locations throughout LA County.
 
Schedule and Locations of Get Out The Vote precinct walks
.

For more information on precinct walking to defeat Prop 32, contact John Choi at (213)446-3732.

In solidarity,

Glen Arnodo
LA County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO

YES on 30: The Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012

YES on 30: The Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012Print
Ray_Gaer.President_ABC_Federation_of_Teachers.2
Ray Gaer, president of the ABC Federation of Teachers, helps launch the back-to-school portion of the Yes on Prop 30 campaign with Governor Jerry Brown in Hawthorne, at Ramona Elementary School. Cindy Ensworth photo
Visit cft2012.org for CFT member materials and resources.

Let’s begin to solve California’s school funding problems
Proposition 30, the Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act, is on the November 6 ballot.  Along with Proposition 32, it is the most important issue facing California voters among the many ballot measures.
State budget cuts to public education funding, totaling $20 billion over the past four years, have taken a terrible toll on our ability to deliver the education our students need and deserve.  Prop 30 will raise $9 billion in the first year, and $6 billion a year for six years after that, for public education and other services. It will also provide constitutional approval for the governor’s realignment of funding for local public safety services while protecting Proposition 98 school funding.
Prop 30 would increase income tax rates on individual incomes in excess of a quarter million dollars per year, and modestly increase the state sales tax by ¼ cent, to provide desperately needed revenues to rebuild our schools and services.

Monday, October 22, 2012

ABC State Testing Scores = Teachers Working Harder and Smarter





Last week at the ABCUSD School Board Meeting Assistant Supt. Valencia Mayfield presented the 2012 State and Federal Accountability Report to the school board and the community. As I watched the results unfold in her presentation it occurred to me that most teachers have very little direct information about how the entireABC District as a whole except for the quick glance before they move on to their school site scores. 

Most teachers in ABC are informed and instructed about their particular school site statistics and very little time is spent on the broader picture. Therefore, this year at the November at the union representative meeting we will discuss the Accountability Report with the site reps so that the have information that they can share with their staffs. Hopefully, this will give all teachers in ABC the opportunity to understand the current state of the District and over time they will see trends in the statistics.  The ABCFT will provide an abbreviated version of the Accountability report that will be posted on the ABCFT news bulletin so that teachers have more access to this information.

Below is a good description of how the state accountability systems are calculated.
Here you can see that ABC continues to be above the State Target and the State average. In fact, ABC test scores increased their test scores by an extra 5 points over the state average so that ABC is now sixty points over the state average. Congrats to ABC teachers, staff and administrators!
ABC students continue to raise their scores on the CAHSEE. Does the public know about how much more academically prepared our students are for the 21st Century than ever before. Just look at the increases across the board! Way to go Teachers and Students of ABC!

Here are some interesting charts. Remember, ABC is a school district that is functioning over sixty points over the state average in API but the catch is in the AYP. The AYP the "Adequate Yearly Progress" and it evaluates specific subjects and groups.  When you look at the chart you will notice how steep the increases are in the proficiency targets and that by 2013-214 (next year!) EVERY student will be 100% proficient in both language arts and math. 

Think of it in these terms, it's like saying that every driver in the state of California will obey every driving law with 100% compliance. How about Albert Pujols will hit the ball 100% of the time or that parents will help their sons and daughters homework 100% time. 

These Federal targets are unreasonable and just another way for POLITICIANS to fool the public into thinking that the public school system isn't doing a good job.  I challenge any Californian to take the 11th grade STAR Exam and see if they would get a score of proficient. Many would be scored as being proficient but I bet the adult population of California would fall far short of being 100% proficient in both reading and math.

Here is how ABC faired this year.....still over the State average.



Here's the same ludicrous targets for math. This is what happens when politicians make educational policy yet they can't get 2/3 of the congress to agree on anything. Ironic.




Here are the math scores for ABC.

Okay, so the short and skinny of it is that ABC is doing a hell of a job. Politicians have created a system of failure for there own propaganda needs and the STUDENTS of ABC are prepared for their future. Let's just hope for their sake that life is more than just a series of standardized questions.

GO ABC!!!!                          

Ray Gaer
President of the ABC Federation of Teachers


Don't Demonize Teachers because of Pension System's Faults

Here is another excellent article by Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times. He stresses how so few Californians realize the serious cuts that could happen to education and he points out that if Proposition 30 passes it would only add 10 cents on a $40 purchase in sales tax. I don't know about you but I lose dimes in my car at the drive-through window all the time.
Food for thought.

Vote for public education. Vote yes for Proposition 30.
Ray



Don't demonize teachers because of pension system's faults

Yes, public pensions got out of hand. But teachers aren't the biggest culprits, nor are they why California has some of the nation's most shamefully underfunded schools.

Just as I was preparing to defend public school teachers and their retirement benefits, I got a form letter last week from my employer's vice president for human resources.
Apparently he felt it was important to inform me that I had earned additional shares in the company's stock ownership plan in 2011. Good news? Not really. The value of each share was "$0," and my shares will be "extinguished" upon reorganization and "receive no return."
This means I'm out there with all the other slugs who work in private enterprise, where pensions have all but disappeared and 401(k)s are a roll of the dice. As a group, we're torn between envy and anger, faced with uncertain financial futures while we pay for the comfy retirements of government retirees.
I get an earful from readers who tell me they won't vote for either of the school-funding initiatives on the November ballot because all they see is bloated pensions and legislators acting as wholly owned subsidiaries of teacher unions, intent on resisting reform while protecting burned-out teachers.
And they're not entirely misguided.
Yes, public employee pensions got out of hand and legislators were all too obliging. And yes, the result was that too many people retired in their 50s with two-thirds or more of their final salary for life, even as public services were eliminated to pay for all those comfy retirements. I've railed against the current public pension system more than once, and it seems to me that Gov. Brown's reform bill was a good start toward later retirement and fewer tricks for padding retirement pay.
But here's the deal:
Teachers aren't the biggest culprits, nor are they the reason we've got some of the most shamefully underfunded schools in the nation.
The average retirement age for California public school teachers is about 62, according to the California State Teachers' Retirement System. They retire with an average of 27 years on the job, at just above $48,000 a year before taxes and other deductions.
That's not peanuts, but it isn't filet mignon, either. And keep in mind that California teachers currently contribute 8% of each paycheck to their own retirement fund. Also, unlike most of the rest of us, they don't get Social Security.
As California's public employee pensions go, the deal for teachers is one of the least generous. So says Marcia Fritz, a pension reform advocate and crusader against outrageous spiking, gaming and other tricks that have made obscenely high retirement pensions possible in California for a minority of shameless belly-scratchers.
Fritz added that while California teachers are among the highest paid in the nation, they also have among the largest class sizes. And there aren't many states with higher real estate prices, either.
That doesn't mean, Fritz said, that the teacher retirement system doesn't need reform. Like many other plans, the system is grossly underfunded, which means a possible gigantic shortfall is waiting just down the road, especially if pension investments tank.
John Marinelli, who retired from the Montebello Unified School District three years ago at age 61, gets more than the average retirement check because he put in 39 years and had master's and law degrees. He said he's not opposed to pension reform if it helps save the system, meaning teachers might have to consider contributing more, waiting until an older age to begin collecting, or switching to a less generous formula to determine retirement pay or healthcare costs.
Like a lot of other teachers, he chose his work because he felt he had something to give, trading what might have been a higher salary in another line of work for a job he loved and the promise of a comfortable, if not lavish, retirement.
Bonnie Cohn, who worked for 20 years as a teacher and 20 more as an administrator in Redondo, said she senses resentment from friends who chose other careers many years ago and now find themselves in trouble financially.
"Teaching didn't pay enough for them, and the work was hard and not very glamorous," she said. "But most of the time I loved my chosen career and took heart in the fact that although I would never get rich, I was building toward a secure retirement."
Like Marinelli, Cohn also worked outside education for several years, contributing to the Social Security system but not earning enough credits to receive any retirement pay. Because of her own retirement plan, she is ineligible to receive the Social Security benefits earned by her deceased husband.
Public education is far from perfect, with too many instances of administrative sloth, union shenanigans, petty politics and resistance to change. Yes, there are teachers out there who should have been expelled long ago.
But as the parent of a public school student, I've had the privilege of knowing truly great teachers who are able to push aside all the distractions — including moms and dads who are tuned out or leave teachers to make up for their parenting failures — and do their jobs with passion and commitment to what remains a noble cause.
It's hard to believe we've lost more than 30,000 teachers in California in the last few years without a public outcry, and that we may soon add to the sacrifice, stuffing more students into classrooms that are already jammed well beyond the national average. California is in the basement of national rankings for students per teacher, per counselor and per librarian, and despite all that, teacher bashing has become popular sport.
Recent polls suggest Prop. 38 may sink, and Prop. 30 — which would slow the bleeding in K-12 schools and community colleges — is a tossup, despite the fact that the only cost to 98% of Californians would be an extra dime in sales tax on a $40 purchase.
"I will never understand why people vote against their own economic self-interests just to satisfy their warped view of the world," Marinelli wrote to me in reference to 30 and 38. "People who vote against these propositions have no clue how damaging it will be for our future."

Monday, October 15, 2012

Will the Munger Kids Kill California's Schools?

Here is an excellent piece by  Harold Meyerson with the American Prospect called "Will the Munger Kids Kill California's Schools?" Proposition 38 campaign tactics put both 30/38 in jeopardy. 
Ray


Will the Munger Kids Kill California's Schools?
(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
Proposition 38 supporters from left: Marco Regil, television host for MundoFox, Molly Munger, civil rights attorney and the primary advocate behind Prop 38, Melissa Revuelta, bilingual high school teacher, and actor James Olmos, during a news conference in Los Angeles on September 26, 2012. Proposition 38, a State Income Tax Increase to Support Public Education, is on the November 6, 2012 ballot in California.
This is the second in a Prospect series on the 174 initiatives and referendums up for a vote this November.
America has the Koch brothers, and now California has the Munger kids. Unlike the right-wing Kochs, Molly Munger and her brother Charles Jr. entered politics from opposite directions—she’s a liberal Democrat and a champion of inner-city schools; he’s an economic conservative, a social moderate, and a Republican activist. But thanks to the vicissitudes of California politics and the self-absorption that wealth can bring (their father is Charles Munger, a Pasadena attorney and investor who is the longtime vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment consortium), they’ve come together in the past couple of days to attack the most important measure on the California ballot: Governor Jerry Brown’s initiative to raise taxes on the rich so that the state’s schools and colleges won’t take a massive fiscal hit immediately following the election.
Once widely thought to have the best public education system in the nation, California has seen a steady decline in per-pupil spending and student performance since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, which cut off the schools’ main source of funding—local property taxes—and made the schools reliant on state government for their funds. But with the collapse in the early ‘90s of the Southern California aerospace industry at the end of the Cold War, the dot-com bust of 2000, and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, state government has been an inconstant and inadequate source of school funding for the past 20 years. Faced with chronic budget shortfalls for the past half-decade, K-12 schools have laid off teachers and closed libraries, while state colleges and the University of California have repeatedly raised tuition.
Though Democrats have majorities in both houses of the state legislature, state law requires a two-thirds supermajority to raise any taxes. Republicans, who have just over one-third representation in both the Senate and Assembly, have preferred to see education and other programs decimated rather than provide any votes for tax hikes. So Brown turned to the state’s initiative process to raise the funds to keep schools open. So did the California Federation of Teachers (CFT). And so did Molly Munger, who for years had headed up and funded the Advancement Project, an advocacy group for inner-city schools that waged successful legal battles to ensure those schools received their fair share of state funding.
Munger proposed an initiative that would increase school funding by $10 billion annually by raising income taxes on all but the poorest Californians. The more politically savvy Brown and the CFT believed that confronting voters with an across-the-board tax hike amid an intractable recession (California unemployment still exceeds 10 percent) would be a non-starter. Brown proposed to raise $7 billion yearly through an income-tax hike on the wealthy and a half-cent increase to the sales tax, while the CFT proposed to raise $6 billion entirely through higher taxes on the rich.
What was clear from the start—to all but Munger, anyway—was that if voters were confronted with multiple versions of similar proposals, they were likely to vote them all down. That’s been the pattern in California elections for the past hundred years (the state adopted initiatives and referendums in 1911). In 1996, for instance, two rival unions, the California Nurses Association and the Service Employees International Union, championed separate initiatives to reform HMOs, though the SEIU's measure was chiefly intended to defeat the CNA's. Each ran ads attacking the other's initiative, and though popular support for reining in HMO abuses was high, both measures went down to defeat. 
Late last year, likewise, a poll showed two-to-one voter support for a tax hike to fund schools. But Brown knew that the appearance of two, much less three, such measures on the ballot would likely doom them all. He negotiated a deal with the CFT: He’d change his measure so that the rich would pay a greater share of the tax hike (rates will be raised on income over $250,000) and the sales tax increase would go down, from half-a-cent to a quarter-cent, so long as the CFT dropped its plan to go to the ballot. The CFT happily agreed.
Brown also tried on multiple occasions to strike a deal with Munger. She wouldn’t go for it.
Munger won the backing of the state PTA for her proposal, while Brown won the backing of every sentient group that supports public education and is willing to have the rich pay for it. Money being no object for Munger, she spent $26.8 million on her measure in the first nine months of this year, while Brown spent just $3.5 million on his. But voters wouldn’t go for her proposal. Though it had come under no attack, it trailed all year long in the polls, winning just 34 percent support in the September USC/Dornsife Poll and 44 percent in theSeptember Field Poll.
A general rule of California politics is that once a ballot measure falls behind in the polls, it’s cooked. Just dipping beneath 50-percent support, even if it has a plurality in the polls, usually means the measure is doomed. But far from being deterred, Munger has increased her spending, in the best tradition of the state’s mega-rich political novices. In 1998, Al Checci, the former owner of Northwest Airlines, spent more than $100 million in a failed attempt to win the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. (Gray Davis beat him). In the closing weeks of the campaign—which was Checci’s first—it was clear Checci wasn’t going to win, but his consultants, whom he was paying a small fortune, convinced him he still had a shot. Munger has either fallen prey to similar misleading counsel from self-interested consultants, or has encased herself in a bubble of her own devising. “When you’re in a campaign,” she recently told one reporter, “you’re feeling very buoyed by it all.”
The problem isn’t just that she’s still throwing money at her initiative,Proposition 38—the total has now reached $34 million. It’s that she’s begun to attack Brown’s initiative, which still has a fair-to-middling chance of passing. His measure, Proposition 30, has been leading all summer, but it’s begun falling in the polls in recent weeks as the Munger forces have moved to attack it. One poll has Brown’s initiative at 55 percent, down from 59 percent the month previous; another has it at 51 percent, down from 54 percent one month earlier.
In the past two days, Munger has begun running animated television ads in which a little girl says that Brown’s measure won’t send the money directly to schools but rather—O, the horror—to Sacramento politicians. Which is true: Under Proposition 30, the money goes to the state and then is apportioned chiefly to the schools and to some other strapped programs as well, while under Proposition 38, the money goes directly to the school districts. Indeed, one problem with Munger’s measure is that it gives government no flexibility to use the money for any other emergency purposes. It also kicks in next year, too late to avert the $6 billion cut to K-12 schools and to colleges (which it doesn’t fund at all) this year.
Many education leaders in the state backed both measures. But Munger’s decision to go after Brown’s initiative, which is clearly the only one that stands a chance of passing, has panicked California educators. The non-partisan state Superintendent of Public Instruction asked Munger to withdraw her ads, as did Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. With K-12 district superintendents saying that the failure to pass Proposition 30 will require cutting three weeks from the school year, and with University of California administrators saying its failure would mean a further 20 percent (that’s $2,400) hike in tuition, Munger’s decision to attack Proposition 30 has transformed her from a valued ally to a mortal threat in the eyes of state educators.
And lo and behold, her conservative brother is funding a separate campaign against Brown’s measure.

Charles Munger Jr. is a physicist at Stanford and the largest single Republican donor in the state. Indeed, California Watch calls him the third largest political donor from either party for the decade of 2001-2011. During that time, Munger made contributions totaling $14,093,588 to 20 Republican candidates and 25 ballot measures, as well as to the state GOP. His most favored causes have been campaigns to build the center-right in a state where the Republican Party is dominated by far-right primary voters and where Democrats tend to be liberal. To that end, he was the largest funder of two successful 2010 ballot measures that are changing the state’s politics this year: One created a non-partisan redistricting process, while the other mandated that the two top finishers in primaries, regardless of party affiliation, will be the ones whose names appear on the November ballot. The theory behind these measures that was that non-partisan district carving would create more competitive districts, and November run-offs pitting a moderate Republican against a far-right Republican in a heavily Republican district would advantage the moderate, who could claim the votes of otherwise disfranchised Democrats. This fall, Charles Munger has been funding several moderate Republicans running against right-wingers for legislative seats.
But that’s not all he’s been funding. In the past two weeks, Munger has donated $30 million to a committee created to oppose Brown’s Proposition 30 and to support Proposition 32, an anti-union measure that would greatly diminish labor’s capacity to play a major role in state politics. (This makes him much the largest contributor to both campaigns.) Proposition 32 is the third in a line of basically identical anti-union measures that are put before California voters every six years and then go down to defeat. Like its two predecessors, Proposition 32 would ban unions from using members’ dues to support the unions’ political activities. Unlike its two predecessors, it also claims to restrict corporate funding of politics as well—it bans corporations from collecting funds from employees for political purposes, just as it bans unions. Of course, corporations don’t collect dues from employees at all, so this is the most spurious of symmetries. The measure’s authors have nonetheless been claiming it’s a balanced proposal to loosen the grip of special interests on state government.
But state voters have already figured out that Proposition 32 is no more balanced than Fox News. It trails in the polls by large margins. Voters have been aided in their decision-making process by the state’s unions which, fighting for their lives, have spent more than $40 million to convince Californians that the measure is an anti-labor sham. Indeed, it’s reasonable to infer that one reason the same measure is placed on the California ballot every few years is to keep unions from spending more on other priorities, like the presidential race—or, this year, Brown’s Proposition 30, to which unions are the largest donors, but nowhere as large as if they didn’t have to fight Proposition 32 as well.
Like his sister, Charles Jr. has been undaunted by the fact that his pet initiative is trailing by a wide margin. He has designated roughly $23 million of his $30 million donation to promote 32, leaving just $7 million—for now—targeted to bring Brown’s measure down. His campaign's ads claim, preposterously, that the money raised by Proposition 30 won't go to schools at all.
Charles Munger may be late to the game this year, but he is nothing if not strategic. His donations show a man determined to remake California in his own image: economically conservative, socially moderate. He seeks a state that won’t tax the rich or cut deals with unions, but whose Republican Party elects pro-choice candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pete Wilson, California’s last two Republican governors.
Molly Munger, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have a strategic bone in her body. After a life devoted to helping schools win adequate funding, she has now, however inadvertently, teamed up with her brother to oppose the one ballot measure that could spare the state’s schools from decimation. Her transformation into California education’s Mr. Hyde has been abetted by highly paid political consultants who, like Al Checci’s 14 years ago, are apparently making too much money to tell her that the game is up. Ironically, two of her leading consultants are Dean Tipps and John Hein, who both recently retired as the longtime (and brilliant) political directors of California’s largest unions—respectively, the Service Employees International Union and the California Teachers Association, which are both major funders of Brown’s Proposition 30. One can only hope that Tipps and Hein are being compensated at a level that justifies their betrayal of all they’ve worked for over the past half-century. 
Charles Jr. may be focused and Molly feckless, but together, they dominate California politics this year. (Well, they share that distinction with Jerry Brown, but as governor, he should dominate the state’s politics.) The battles over Propositions 30, 32, and 38 are the major contests to be decided in California this November. (The other two significant statewide races—the presidential contest and the race between Feinstein and her utterly obscure Republican opponent—are faits accomplis.) The Mungers’ ability to shape the state’s politics isn’t the result of Citizens United—indeed, it’s more an artifact ofBuckley vs. Valeo. Donations to California ballot measures weren’t capped by the state in the pre-Buckley days, and since then, no cap would ever pass muster with the Supreme Court.
Like the tale of the Brothers Koch, the Munger chronicles is entirely a story of how big money has come to dominate our democracy. Charles the Focused and Molly the Twit come to politics with radically different goals, but blessed with inheritances from the same billion-dollar fortune, they have joined forces in a bid to destroy California’s schools. That would be an ironic and disgraceful legacy for two disparate siblings who share little but a love of learning.
CORRECTION: An earlier version mischaracterized 1996's dueling HMO reform initiatives as universal health care initiatives. 

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Phone Banking Results for ABC for Monday


I wanted to give credit where credit is due...a special high five and thanks to all those from ABCFT and AFSCME who participated in our joint phone banking operation.
THANK YOU ALL!!!!

A special thank you to AFSCME for providing the phones and the research!



In partnership with AFSCME we had 15 volunteers on our first night! Here are the results for our first night of phone banking:

15 Volunteers
670 calls
145 contacts
94 YES on 30
0 NO on 30
17 Undecided on 30
97 NO on 32
0 YES on 32
15 Undecided on 32

YAY!
In Unity,
Tanya
ABCFT 2317