After California Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto AB 2160 (discussed in the accompanying editorial by Michael Podgursky) if it included a provision expanding collective bargaining to cover curriculum and textbook decisions, the bill was amended by a legislative committee yesterday to prohibit any expansion of collective bargaining, but substituting a new process by which teachers and district representatives could negotiate academic matters. While Podgursky nicely lays out the reasons that expanding collective bargaining would be bad public policy, the Governor's veto threat seemed to be as much about politics as policy-the latest episode in the ongoing soap opera of a relationship between Davis and the 330,000 member California Teachers Association. Frustrated by Davis's education policy, the union has pushed its own ambitious policy agenda this year-including a bill to revamp the state's testing and school accountability programs-that has been backed by a $3 million ad campaign. The CTA gave $1.3 million to Davis' last campaign, but so far has only given $60,000 for his re-election bid, according to reporter John Simerman. In recent weeks, CTA President Wayne Johnson has bashed the governor for soliciting a $1 million donation from the union. "We're upset with people who come to us and say 'We want your support and we support union issues,' and then, when they don't support us, we're supposed to be ok with that?" Johnson said to a reporter. "We're not." Tim Hodson, the executive director of the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State University, commented, "When the histories are written for this, it will be a wonderful example of an organization becoming so infatuated with its own clout that it thought it could do anything at any cost." For more see "Governor's threat scuttles teacher textbook bargaining," by John Simerman, Contra Costa Times, May 22, 2002 and "Teachers' proposal amended," by Jim Sanders, Sacramento Bee, May 23, 2002.
