When I ran for CFT president 4 years ago, I claimed that I had the combination of experience, skills, and dedication necessary to lead CFT to become a more dynamic and effective agent of positive change.

Whether or not I had the skills and dedication necessary for the job is for others to decide.  But in the last four years we have become a more dynamic and effective organization. We did organize a successful march across California’s central valley and we did lead the effort to pass proposition 25—the majority vote initiative.  But sustained positive change has proven to be very difficult given the previous governor and the state budget deficits.

We have helped elect a new governor and state officers. So there is still hope for positive change despite the terrible budget situation.

CFT benefits from its broad scope of membership, from pre school to the iuniversity, including teachesr, classified employees, paraprofessionals and other educational employees, and now Los Angeles city employees.

In short, CFT has a unique opportunity to provide educational leadership in the state and in the nation.

We have been learning to support one another, independent of what level of education we are involved in, or what our particular job titles are.

 

We have been obeying the old adage that an injury to one is an injury to all.

The CFT is fortunate to have a very strong staff. Will FRU employees please stand? Will OPEIU employees please stand?

I must recognize Margaret Shelleda. I do not know how CFT would run without Margaret.  She is the glue that holds us together. Thank you Margaret for all the support you gave me. We can only dream that when she retires in June that we will find someone as competent as she is to replace her.

I also thank Fred Glass and Steve Hopcraft for helping me to present CFT positions to the world.  Their help in crafting our message and then seeing that it actually gets published somewhere was vital to putting CFT in the public eye.

And also a special thank you to Ken Burt for his work in directing our election strategies and putting them into effect. He certainly is one of the best in the state at putting together a campaign program.

I believe that we, in the union movement, must be a major force in the creation of a civilized society and I have attempted to lead CFT in that direction.

We know that the lives of our members and our students do not begin and end at our work sites.  The critical issues that affect our society are the same now as they were four years ago—and sadly they haven’t improved much with the election of President Obama.  The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continue; universal single payer health care is still a dream; poverty and the gap between the middle class and the very rich continues to grow; racism still is raising its ugly head as exemplified by the attacks on immigrants and the recent hearings on the perceived threat from Muslim Americans; the environment is still being destroyed at an ever increasing rate; the freedom to marry, independent of gender, is still not in effect in California; and even a woman’s right to choose is under attack.

All profoundly impact our members and their students. Unions are a crucial player for progressive policies and as a result, public sector unions are under attack.

The attack on public employee unions across the country is no more about fiscal responsibility or solving deficits than the invasion of Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction or the invasion of Afghanistan was about democracy and the rights of women.

We understand that the attack on public employees and their unions is an attack funded by billionaires and multi-national corporations that want unions out of the way so that nothing stands between them and their profits as they attempt to drive wages, benefits, and pensions down—in the public and the private sectors.

Their goals are to cut taxes for the wealthy, eliminate social security programs, privatize the public sector, deregulate the economy and bust unions.

Their interest is in promoting the “me.” Our interest is promoting the “we.”

We are not responsible for America’s and California’s deficit problem. We are not overpaid and we deserve the benefits and pensions that we bargained for.

There is plenty of money available without demanding concessions from public sector employees. The irony is that the bankers and Wall Street put us in this mess and then they got bailed out.

California is the state with the world's eighth largest economy, with a Gross National Product of $1.9 trillion; registered the highest economic output in the country in 2009; and twenty percent (80) of the United States' billionaires live in the state.  Moreover, the top one-percent of income earners have doubled their share of income over the past 20 years from 13 to 25 percent. The Legislature should be spending time on addressing how the wealth in California can be used for the common good instead of attacking public employees and their hard earned benefits.

And while the corporations continue to off-shore jobs in a drive to lower labor costs, we are portrayed as the villains.

Instead the United States must change its priorities. We demand that taxes be raised on the very rich, and that war dollars be redirected to meet human needs.

Instead of reducing the public sector, we should be expanding public services to meet the needs of Californians including a thriving public education program from pre-school through the university. We should be rebuilding our neglected and crumbling infrastructure, revitalizing mass transit, and promoting a sustainable economy.

With the hiring of a CFT organizer (Sandra Weese) and a political organizer (Jim Araby) we are in better position to be victorious.

That said, the CFT has two other major responsibilities—helping locals function at full capacity and creating the state environment that makes it possible to improve working and learning conditions in our educational institutions. We have focused on these core responsibilities.

Thanks to the outstanding work by Julien Minard and others we have increased our training of local leaders.

We have influenced state policies both in the legislative and the political arenas.

We need to continue to educate the legislature, the public and those we negotiate with that our working conditions are the learning conditions of our students.  We must repeat that again and again.

The CFT continues to be a leader in the fight for quality education in California.  Much of that work in the last few years have been aimed at debunking what some have claimed are positive reform ideas for public schools.

We know that 50 percent of the people who enter teaching leave within five years.  They don’t get respect, they don’t get mentoring, they don’t get great pay, they don’t teach in safe schools, and they have lousy working conditions. The solution to improving our schools is not firing “bad teachers.”  It is creating the environment to grow great teachers.

And they want to take away our pensions as well??

The ill conceived No Child Left Behind program was founded on the false premise that most teachers and other educational employees are not doing the best jobs that they can, under the conditions in which they work. And sadly, the Obama administration has continued this attack on education with its Race to the Top competitive market-based approach.

We need to continue to attack the entire “testing as education” hoax that has been foisted on the public.  Sadly the so-called “outcomes based” accountability ideology has even begun to appear at the college level.

This false brand of “accountability” has even been supported by some of our closest allies. Much education must continue to be done to educate those that should be our friends.

We must be stronger in our opposition to policies that force educators to “teach to the test” rather than “teach to the student.”

The “one size fits all” designs of these initiatives do not serve the best interests of the diverse population of students that we serve in California—at whatever level of education they are enrolled in.

We have a pretty good idea of what it will take to improve education, and it isn’t more testing in the guise of accountability.  It isn’t one standardized test that determines whether 13 years of educational work will end in a diploma or not. It isn’t firing all the teachers and other employees of a school and beginning again as a charter school.  It is not so-called “value-added” ratings of teachers and schools. It is not eliminating seniority protections.

We will, I am sure, continue to agitate for those things that we know will make a positive difference, including smaller class size, more professional development opportunities for all educational employees,research based quality curriculum and pedagogy, quality mentoring and support for new employees, adequate facilities, safe working and learning conditions, adequate compensation, and employee control of our institutions.

We have been organizing and agitating for adequate funding of public education from pre-school to the university.

We will continue to demand on the job respect toward our classified members. Respect is something that all workers deserve, without regard to job classification.

We must continue to press for pay equity, benefits, rights to continuance of employment, and respect for part-time and non-permanent educational employees.

We need to continue to demand pre-school for all.

We must defend academic freedom so that we can be free to seek the truth.

We must press for diversity in enrollment in our colleges and universities and for diversity in employment at all levels of education.

And we must continue to defend our pensions plans. We won the first round of that battle, but our opponents continue to demonize us because we want a guaranteed dignified and comfortable retirement.

Thankfully our new governor agrees with us. He understands that creativity matters in education. That educators must be freed to do the best job they can in moving their students toward intellectual maturity.

The CFT has been more active in developing strong supportive relationships with other unions and with our communities. Some of our locals have developed on-going relationships with local community groups.  We need to learn from their experiences, so the process of outreach can be accelerated.

We continue to develop increased day-to-day working relationships with other unions including AFSCME, CTA, CSEA, CNA, and SEIU.  Our march from Bakersfield to Sacramento and our leadership on Proposition 25 have brought us new respect and solidarity. We continue our efforts to enact the California dream.

And we have strengthened the CFT—both organizationally and financially over the last four years.

CFT has a very talented and experienced staff and we continue to count on them for their best efforts.

I leave the CFT at a time that it has become a major voice of educators in the state of California and in the nation in support of quality education.  I am proud of what we have done over the last four years.

The clouds may be dark today but I know that together we will assure a better day.

We are living up to our mission:

“The aims of this organization shall be to organize the educational and health care employees of California into locals chartered by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); to bring them into relations of mutual assistance and cooperation; to obtain for them all the rights and benefits to which they are entitled; to raise the standards of their professions and to secure the conditions essential to the best professional service; to promote such democratization of the educational institutions as will enable them better to equip their students to take their places in the economic, social and political life of the community; to strive for equal educational opportunities for all; to initiate and support state legislation to benefit the students, and educational and health care employees of the state of California.”

Persevere.