There is justice under heaven! Fox News reports (thanks, Gateway Pundit!) that the California Teachers’ Association has spent itself broke fighting state ballot initiatives sponsored by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that would allow tenured but incomptent teachers to be–horrors!–fired and would restrict the use of union dues to fight political battles, which is what the Teachers’ Association is apparently doing right now.
Fox reports:
“The group has already spent the $50 million it raised to fight the initiatives [known collectively as Proposition 74] — which would make it easier to fire teachers with tenure and increase restrictions on unions using members’ dues for political campaigns.
“Now, the CTA is asking for an extra $40 million in credit to keep up the fight — on top of $34 million in loans the union is already paying down.”
Furthermore, Schwarzenegger’s office says the union’s organization’s ads are false. As Fox reports:
“Each ad claims that Schwarzenegger has broken his promise to restore full education funding this year. It’s a disputable assertion, but a fair one. Then the ads say Proposition 74 ‘allows one principal to fire a teacher without giving a reason — or even a hearing.’
“The teachers union offers a tortured defense of that statement, but its obvious intention is to leave the impression that teachers will be fired without recourse.”
All this comes in the wake of this story last week from the Los Angeles Times (hat tip to my favorite edu-blogger Kimberly Swygert):
“Nearly 100,000 California 12th graders — or about 20% of this year’s senior class – have failed the state’s graduation exam, potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning diplomas, according to the most definitive report on the mandatory test released today.”
As might be expected, the California education establishment categorically opposes the graduation exam, even though it requires graduating high school seniors to read only at the 8th-grade level and to do 9th- and 10th-grade math. The educrats want to substitute “portfolios”–those ed-school-fad collections of doodles that can be graded subjectively to pat little Johnny on the head for his progress from spelling it “katt” to spelling it “kat.”
Meanwhile, the Landmark Legal Foundation is asking “the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to investigate the California Teachers Association (CTA) for the union’s use of nonmember teachers’ fees to illegally finance a multimillion dollar effort to defeat ballot initiatives in the statewide November 5 special election.”
I approve.