With the news that California's energy crisis is threatening the state's budget surplus, CTA once again faces a fight in Sacramento for education funding.
Despite the dwindling funds, however, CTA is moving forward with its budget proposals and priorities.
As CTA President Wayne Johnson told delegates at the March meeting of CTA's State Council of Education, "We would like to redirect $500 to $600 million from the performance awards and from the six-week middle school extension proposals and spend it on class size reduction and low-performing schools."
Johnson and fellow CTA officers had a chance to relay the message to the governor's education advisor, Kerry Mazzoni, during a recent meeting in Sacramento.
"We told her in very blunt language that we opposed the governor's proposed legislation to extend middle school by six weeks," said Johnson. The idea did not get a warm reception.
"It was pretty obvious that the governor does not want to direct funds to schools that have high concentrations of English language learners, poverty level children, and overcrowded conditions."
The impression the officers got was that these schools already get more money than other schools, and giving them any more would be tantamount to "rewarding failure."
Nevertheless, CTA will persevere, he said, because it is the right thing to do. To back up its legislative efforts, CTA commissioned an analysis of the schools ranking in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent on California's Academic Performance Index (API). Among the findings were that elementary schools in the lowest 10 percent served students who were 95 percent minority, 94 percent poor, and 62 percent English learners; 25 percent of the teachers in those schools were working on emergency credentials.
"We were astounded at the extreme difference in poverty between the top and bottom 10 percent of our students," Johnson said.
Despite the challenges facing schools, Americans and Californians remain supportive of public education, according to a recent Harris poll cited by Johnson.
"We have to fight to make education legislation coming out of Sacramento as positive and effective as we can! The data and the public are on our side, but time isn't," said Johnson. "We have only a short amount of time to fix our schools of greatest need. We can't let bad laws get in our way and slow us down."
Dale Martin
