Get-out-the-vote effort was historic

Educators and their alliance partners made a Herculean effort to educate voters and get them to the polls.

Believing that the governor was counting on low voter turnout to get his way, teachers, many of whom had never been "politicized" before, took to the streets in record numbers, picketing, walking precincts and working phone banks. New teachers, threatened with a five-year probation period, joined veteran teachers in record numbers, as did retirees, support personnel and staff. Their numbers were bolstered by coalition members — firefighters, nurses, police officers — along with politicians and concerned citizens.

A constant barrage of television and radio ads and mailers, paid for with pooled resources, backed them up.

In the final days of the election alone, CTA tallies show that members and staff working phone banks made more than 1.3 million one-on-one contacts with voters.

"In Hayward, they were still calling voters at 6:30 p.m." on Election Day, says CTA Board member Dayton Crummey. "I have never seen anything like it."

The weekend before the election, nearly 15,000 teachers, firefighters, nurses and other volunteers took to the streets, walking precincts and talking to voters in person.

Alliance members reached out to ethnic communities, holding press conferences with African American, Latino and Asian leaders to alert them to the threat. Mayors, city councils, elected officials and religious leaders also lent their names to the effort, as did celebrities like actor Warren Beatty and his wife, actress Annette Bening, producer Rob Reiner and the cast of television's "That '70s Show."

There was also plenty of drama employed in the effort to keep the campaign in the news.

When the governor held private fundraisers with his "special interest" supporters throughout the state, CTA and alliance members turned out en masse to protest. When the governor staged a bus tour of Southern California on the final Saturday before the election, alliance representatives put together a Truth Squad to shadow him and set the record straight.

Alliance members also got creative at the local level:

• In Lancaster and Santa Rosa, they took Halloween as an opportunity to "unmask" the governor's initiatives at news conferences.
• In Escondido (North San Diego County), they convoyed through downtown streets in a variety of vehicles, including an antique fire truck, for a "rolling rally."
• In San Bernardino, they held a mock funeral procession outside the county administration building, symbolically burying their confidence in the governor and his blatant attempt to seize more power.
• In the Bay Area, they rode the rails between San Francisco and San Jose handing out fliers to commuters and displaying picket signs when the conductor wasn't watching.

Working on the campaign has been "a blast," says Pittsburg Education Association member Eric Heins. Even though he represented the alliance in several debates, one of his favorite memories will be riding the train and almost getting kicked off because the campaigners didn't have permission to hand out fliers. "The conductor threatened to call the police."

Years ago, when Gov. Pete Wilson lost in another election on paycheck protection, he called CTA a "relentless political machine." CTA members took it as a compliment. This election showed that teachers have become even more relentless in their pursuit of what's right for the students and schools of California.