The CA Teachers Association’s Ongoing Jihad on Charter Schools continues with AB 84

The powerful public employee union once again puts its interests against those of students.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) has been waging a war against charter schools for years, and Assembly Bill 84 is their latest weapon. The CTA spends millions of dollars on direct contributions to candidates for statewide and legislative offices and independent expenditures and contributions to the California Democratic Party. Why do they do this?

The answer is straightforward – that their Sacramento pawns do the bidding of their masters. Their target? Charter schools bring competition, innovation, and accountability, threatening the CTA's monopoly on public schools. AB 84 is a heavy-handed assault on such schools, particularly non-classroom-based charters. It's time everyone recognized it as what it is: a power grab organized by the unions and motivated by the three things that inspire all public employee unions – increasing salaries and benefits for their members, bargaining for better working conditions for their members (in this case, it would be fighting against teacher accountability), and growing the number of union members. That’s it.

The CTA's political machine is a juggernaut. In a 2010 report, the CTA was California's most expensive politician, silencing other education policymakers. In recent years, they've spent millions of dollars in school board elections and legislative elections, leveraging their 310,000 members to elect vassels like Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, sponsor of AB 84. These politicians thank the CTA for advancing bills like AB 84, which hides their union interests behind the euphemism of "accountability." The actual purpose of the bill is to choke charter schools—especially the union-free kind—because they expose the deficiencies of government-run public schools and empower parents through choice.

AB 84 is a master lesson in bureaucratic intrusion. It slashes per-student funding for non-classroom-based charters up to 30% based on arbitrary criteria like face-to-face instructional time. It punishes creative models like homeschooling, online learning, and independent study that teach students poorly served by standard classrooms. The bill also increases the oversight fees on charter authorizers to 3% from 1% of school revenues, diverting money out of classrooms and into bureaucrats. It bans enrichment funds for homeschooling parents, something the CTA derides as "vouchers" but which allows individualized education—like music classes or computer classes—without unionized instructors. AB 84 even mandates competitive bidding for charter contracts, a blanket mandate that ignores charters' need for flexibility to innovate. It clobbers enrollment by authorizing district size, a step that turns off successful charters like those involved in the A3 scandal of about six years ago, which AB 84 cynically invokes as a pretext for its blanket attack.

The CTA claims this is all about stopping fraud, but that's a smoke screen. The A3 scandal, although it did happen, and there are laws in place now that address such abuses. Senate Bill 414, the more specific reform, demonstrates that fraud can be addressed without eviscerating charters.

Still, the CTA lobbies AB 84 because charters, many with no public employee unions, upset their stranglehold. Unlike traditional public schools, where negotiated contracts for public teachers protect a system that is failing many students, charters continually show that innovation and freedom from the entanglements of the unions lead to a better education for children. The CTA can't abide it.

Californians must take a stand. The CTA's millions buy influence, yet parents and taxpayers deserve schools prioritizing kids over lax working conditions for public employee union members. We must urge lawmakers to reject this bill and protect charter schools for parents otherwise trapped in failing public schools. AB 84 is not about accountability—it's about control.

To help stop this bad legislation, I recommend you head to my friends at the California Policy Center. Click on their ‘take action’ link and engage!