Union Influence on Education
August 18, 2011

With Special Guest Larry Sand


Listen to the August 18, 2011 Episode of Topics In Education




Recent Articles by Larry Sand

  • August 9, 2011: Typical Teachers Union Tactics Kill Parent Trigger in Connecticut. Shows that the unions will do whatever it takes to kill education reform.
    • The educational establishment - school boards, teachers unions and other special interest groups, dubbed the "Government Education Complex" by Bruno Behrend, director of the Center for School Reform at The Heartland Institute, don't like the law since it allows a group of parents to trump their power.
    • AFT's "Parent Power Guide" which very honestly and cynically describes the process by which the union did its dirty work
    • NEA's 'Recommended Reading' list - Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
    • Training tape made for union negotiators who collectively bargain with school boards - how to best deal with someone running for school board: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

      'Investigate the background of each school board member, including religious affiliation, marital status, age, education, employment, family, politics, "what do his peers think of him?," "what is his relationship with his employer or employees?," and "does holding a public office help him advance in his job or produce business connections?" This should be investigated, the MEA states, so the negotiator will "know what sensitive chords and nerves to hit during negotiation to get the results you seek."'

  • August 3, 2011 Bad Signs at the SOS March (the march was supported by several socialist organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, Freedom Socialist Party, Radical Women and 56 labor unions):
    • Charter Schools Stole Your Kids Lunch Money
    • Students Before Bankers
    • Fund Education, Not Occupation
    • Stop Private Interest From Destroying Public Schools
    • Our Children Deserve The Same Education As Sacha And Malia
    • Socialism Is The Alternative
    • We Want An Education Not Test "Preperation"
    • Data Is A Four Letter Word

  • August 2, 2011 Opinion: Commission to police teachers has failed utterly in its duty. The Ca. Commission on Teacher Credentialing mission is to "ensure integrity and high quality in the preparation, conduct and professional growth of the educators who serve California's public schools." A State Auditor report revealed:
    • backlog of 12,600 unprocessed reports of arrest and prosecution of educators
    • after a report of misconduct was received, it took three months to open a case
    • after receiving court documents that a teacher was convicted of a crime requiring mandatory revocation of the credential, it sometimes took months to actually revoke it.

    See also: June 7, 2011 Do You Really Know Who is Teaching Your Child?
    • Hookers plying their trade while government turns a blind eye.
    • Consequences for sexual perverts? No, the state doesn't seem to care.
    • Whistle blower fired for exposing massive corruption.
    • Rampant nepotism in government jobs.
    • Private bureaucratic empire using public funds.

  • July 12th, 2011: AB 411 - A Gang Mugging of California's Schools and Taxpayers. The California Teachers Association and Democrats in the legislature join forces to victimize school districts, children and taxpayers.
    • there were no committee hearings and no chance for the public to scrutinize the bill, which became public less than an hour before it was approved for passage
    • it requires that each school district "assume the same level of funding as last year and maintain staffing and program levels
    • eliminates the option for districts to make staff adjustments
    • districts must certify that they can balance their budgets in the current year and one and two years into the future

  • June 7, 2011 - National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Teacher Quality Roadmap makes suggestions as to how to improve things in LAUSD - all subject to union approval. LAUSD has a 60% graduation rate and an 11% 4th grade proficiency level.

  • April 11th, 2011 When the Anti-Bulliers Become the Bullies. SB 48, a new law in CA, this bill would alter the way history is taught, could psychologically damage young children
    • SB 48 would"require instruction in social sciences to also include a study of the role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and other ethnic and cultural groups, to the development of California and the United States."
    • SB 48 - "The state board or and any governing board shall not adopt any textbooks or other instructional materials for use in the public schools that contain any matter reflecting adversely upon persons on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation...."
    • Sand - "teachers will be forced to ignore the fact that the Nazis were German, that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, that the 9-11 killers were Muslim and that Ku Klux Klansmen were Caucasian because it could adversely affect Germans, Japanese, Muslims or white people."
    • LA Times - "Fables don't make for solid instruction. History is the great story of people, groups and movements - their faults as well as their accomplishments - shaping the world up through the events of today. It is a story best told by historians, not by politicians."

  • Presentation from the 2010 "Where's The Outrage" National School Choice conference in San Fran. Teachers Union, Parry, Feint or Lunge - "And so, the bottom line is that a charter school, its teachers and students needs a union ... like a Caesar Salad needs hemlock."

Larry Sand Auto-Biographical Info - Updated July, 2011

Larry Sand began his teaching career in New York in 1971. Since 1984, he has taught elementary school as well as English, math, history and ESL in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where he also served as a Title 1 Coordinator. Retired in 2009, he is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network - a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues - information teachers will often not get from their school districts or unions.

CTEN was formed in 2006 because a wide range of information from the more global concerns of education policy, education leadership, and education reform, to information having a more personal application, such as professional liability insurance, options of relationships to teachers' unions, and the effect of unionism on teacher pay, comes to teachers from entities that have a specific agenda. Sand's comments and op-eds have appeared in City Journal, Associated Press, Newsweek, Townhall Magazine, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Los Angeles Daily News, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and other publications. This past May, after his weekly blog proved to be very popular, he began writing a monthly article for City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's policy publication. He has appeared on numerous broadcast news programs and talk radio shows in Southern California and nationally.

Sand has participated in panel discussions and events focusing on education reform efforts and the impact of teachers' unions on public education. In March 2010, Sand participated in a debate hosted by the non-profit Intelligence Squared, an organization that regularly hosts Oxford-style debates, which was nationally broadcast on Bloomberg TV and NPR, as well as covered by Newsweek. Sand and his teammates - Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution and former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, opposed the proposition - Don't Blame Teachers Unions For Our Failing Schools. The pro-union team included Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. In August 2010, he was on a panel at the Where's the Outrage? Conference in San Francisco, where he spoke about how charter school operators can best deal with teachers' unions. This past January he was on panels in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Mateo in support of National School Choice week. Additionally, CTEN has hosted two informational events this year - one addressing the secret agenda that is prevalent in many schools these days and the other concerning itself with California's new Parent Trigger law. The latter event was covered by both the English and Spanish language press.

Sand has also worked with other organizations to present accurate information about the relationship between teachers and their unions, most recently assisting in the production of a video for the Center for Union Facts in which a group of teachers speak truthfully about the teachers' unions. At this time, he is conferring with and being an advisor to education policy experts who are crafting major education reform legislation.

CTEN maintains an active and strong new media presence, reaching out to teachers and those interested in education reform across the USA, and around the world, with its popular Facebook page, whose members include teachers, writers, think tankers, and political activists. Since 2006, CTEN has experienced dramatic growth.