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Barbara E. Kerr
CTA President
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I think most of us are glad to see December arrive. The hustle and bustle of the holidays will be a welcome relief to the intensity of the last 11 months, as 2005 was certainly a year for the CTA record books.
I again want to thank all of you for your hard work during the year, which led to the successful defeat of the governor's destructive initiatives. Our success in this campaign will be an important part of CTA's history as we move forward. But it isn't the margin of victory, the number of votes cast or even the number of phone calls made — although CTA members and staff making more than 1.3 million phone calls is certainly significant — that stands out in the end. The relationships we built and the state and local coalitions that we developed with other unions and community groups may be our most important achievement. It's through these coalitions that we can now come together to support an agenda that truly helps our schools and communities.
CTA is committed to continuing the work and partnerships of the Alliance for a Better California. We all want quality schools, affordable health care and safe communities. As part of that continued relationship, Mike Jimenez, the president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, joined me for a tour of a middle school in Sacramento. We came together to draw attention to the importance of having counselors and social workers in our schools. Mike feels very strongly that the best way to keep kids out of prison is to provide them with a quality education and to ensure that those students who need a little extra help also get the resources they need to stay in school and off the streets. This is a new relationship for CTA, and it's one that I hope will continue long into the future.
We found new friends in California Professional Firefighters, another group that we had not worked with much in the past, but which will be joining CTA this year as a sponsor of Read Across America. And we strengthened our relationship with the Service Employees International Union. At a state level, we have worked with SEIU for a number of years, but this election brought us even closer. Often SEIU and CTA members found themselves walking precincts and making phone calls together.
A past criticism of CTA has been that we reach out to groups only during a crisis. That's why I'm so excited when I hear that many of the local labor, education and community coalitions that were built during this campaign are continuing. They're continuing in places like Los Angeles, Glendale, Orange County, San Diego, Fresno, San Jose and Merced, just to name a few.
We will need all of these relationships as we move into 2006, because defeating the governor's initiatives didn't make all of the challenges that our schools face disappear. California still ranks 44th in perpupil funding — more than a thousand dollars below the national average. California still has the second largest class sizes in the country. And California continues to rank dead last in the number of librarians and counselors in our schools.
We now have an opportunity to pursue our own agenda to help improve public education and student learning. It won't be easy, because there are no easy answers. We must be willing to provide all our schools with the resources our students need, and we must be willing to take a serious look at our role in the classroom and how we can strengthen our profession.
For the past year, CTA's Educational Change Workgroup has been studying various ideas to help improve our schools. You can read more about those proposals in this issue. The recommendations will go to State Council in January. It's time that we look seriously at how much it takes to educate a child in California. How much does it take to help all students reach the state standards? And how do we attract and keep quality teachers in every classroom? One key idea that emerged from the recommendations is that we need to make student learning the focus of our efforts. This is an important step for CTA and responds to the concerns of our members and the communities we serve.
I wish you the happiest of holidays and look forward to continuing our efforts together in the New Year.
