CTA | Inside CTA

Spelling out how "organizing for change" offers the best hope for California's teachers and students, CTA President Barbara E. Kerr inspired State Council delegates with her optimistic outlook for the
future.

"We need to have hope. With 335,000 members, with outstanding staff, together we can and we will organize to meet any challenge," Kerr said.

"Let's face it, the economy is still struggling, the state budget still needs balancing, the health care crisis continues, and so-called education reformers are coming up with new ideas every day to 'help' us do our jobs. Usually those ideas include some form of testing or a scripted lesson plan and less creative thinking and real teaching."

As she has for months now, Kerr urged all CTA members to vote for Sen. John Kerry, who vows to fix and fully fund the flawed No Child Left Behind Act, expand preschool opportunities and provide health care to all children so kids come to school ready to learn.

She spoke of CTA's fight to pass two statewide initiatives on the Nov. 2 ballot - Prop. 63, the Mental Health Services Act, and Prop. 72, the Health Care Insurance Act - as crucial for improving student health.

Kerr also stressed how CTA will organize for change by seizing the initiative for educational reform, and by coming up with a way to increase education funding.

"We need to have our own agenda," she said. "We are still working on a way to dramatically change - dramatically increase - school funding."

To involve all CTA members on establishing priorities for change, the union is holding focus groups with teachers around the state in a consensus-building effort.

Kerr vowed that CTA will take real action for change only after hearing from thousands of members and assessing their needs. "I am an action president," she said.

Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. moved State Council delegates with an emotional speech about how the Bush Administration has plundered the nation's natural resources with corporate-friendly policies over the past four years.

"The White House is trying to say you have to choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection," Kennedy said. "And I can tell you, that is a falsehood...Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy."

"If on the other hand we want to do what George Bush is urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we could generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride, and they're going to pay for it with denuded landscapes, and poor health, and huge clean-up costs that are going to amplify over time."

Kennedy has earned a national reputation for defending the environment, a record for which he was named one of Time magazine's "Heroes for the Planet." He is currently senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. His new book is "Crimes Against Nature," details the dangerous environmental record of the Bush administration.

"In a true free market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community," he said. "What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else."

CTA must change and adapt to meet the needs of the growing number of young teachers, Executive Director Carolyn Doggett told State Council.

With one out of every five teachers in California new to their job this year, and 60 percent of all new CTA members in the 20-40 age bracket, the union must be aware of how to serve its 335,000 members, she said.

"It is an old organizing truth that people don't change to fit organizations, so organizations must change to fit people. We must be willing to look at our organization through the eyes of these new teachers and give them as strong a reason to belong as we had."

The young educators want what all teachers desire - respect, freedom to be creative, a supportive school environment and the security of a good job with good pay and benefits, Doggett noted.

"But at the same time," she said, "most young teachers today do not view teaching as a career. It's their first job - the job they got out of college - not the job they'll have for the rest of their lives. They see teaching as an adventure that probably won't last."

She contrasted that with her generation of teachers. She taught high school English from 1969 to 1981 in Anchorage, Alaska. Her teaching career began in Willits, California, and she is a fourth-generation educator.

"When most of us entered teaching, we were on a mission to build a better world. For many of our new teachers, our profession is not a social mission, it is a personal quest."

Knowing that 40 percent of CTA members are over age 50, and another 40 percent are under age 40, CTA understands that "these new members are the key to the long-term survival of our organization."

As Election Day loomed, Doggett reminded Council delegates of the Bush Administration's dismal record of cutting or eliminating education programs with a proven track record. President Bush cut nearly $14 billion from special education, teacher training and after-school programs, and ending the federal plan to reduce class sizes.

She also praised CTA staff for their organizing skills in several swing states to help state teacher associations and local chapters work to elect Sen. John Kerry for president.

Council voted to have CTA contact the management of San Francisco and Los Angeles hotels and urge them to respect the rights of hotel workers in their struggles for fair contracts.

More than 4,000 union hotel workers in San Francisco were locked out of their jobs by 14 hotels. The unfair action came after the hotel workers’ union, UNITE HERE Local 2, struck four hotels on Sept. 29. Two days later, 10 other hotels responded by locking out their employees. After the two-week strike ended, all 14 hotels continued to lock out their workers until a new contract could be negotiated.

In Los Angeles, hotel workers have been without a contract for several months. Since July, employers at nine luxury hotels have forced 3,000 workers to pay a $40 monthly fee for health care.