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March 2008 - Postmortem of a Proposition |
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By Martin Goldstein
Proposition 92, the Community College Initiative, failed and failed miserably in the February 5 election, going down 58% opposed to 42% in favor. It did slightly better in Los Angeles County, going down 53/47, and even won in the Bay Area, but it still lost by over a million votes statewide. Given that this was a proposition that had been originally presented by its backers as one that only had to qualify in order to win, one with a 65% approval rating going in, there's clearly some explaining to do here.
Which is what I'm going to try to do. I want to explain what happened, to understand it fully and see what we can learn from it. I must note, then, that I was never an insider on any of the decisions made before and during the campaign, so there is only so much I can understand at this point. But I did keep my eyes open throughout, and I saw and heard --and did -- enough to have some considered opinions, and the right to them. So here they are.
My first judgment actually came before the proposition even qualified. It was that this proposition about community colleges was created and presented with absolutely no input from, and little relevance to, the part-time faculty community. It was written without them and nowhere referred to them; it was as if they and part-time faculty problems didn't exist.
Right off the bat this did not endear it to me (and to most other part-timers) and as a result it was largely ignored by the part-time teachers here at SMC and around the state. Then I discovered that virtually no one outside the few people running the campaign had any input into the process. The attitude towards this by those in charge was, as best I could tell, indifference.
In any case, I chose to work for the proposition anyway, with hopes that such work would get part-timers more recognized, and even in defeat I can say some of that has happened. But I can further say with certainty that any future work of this nature that proceeds without significant part-time input, proceeds without me and anyone else I can convince. Never again like that. Period.
As for the proposition itself, it came to us with an inexplicable poke-in-the-eye fiscal provision requiring an unheard-of 4/5 vote of the Legislature to override it. Given that some people were already concerned about “ballot box budgeting,” and others were troubled by the 2/3 majority already required to pass budget measures, this was simply a provision likely to inspire a lot of negativity in many quarters, and it did.
Added to that was the “lower student fees” mantra that immediately begged the question of how much would this proposition cost, a question answered in the ballot information as $300 million and counting. This made it a proposition with a cost penalty, when simply keeping student fees the same would not have. The student fee provision might have tested well at some point in the process, but it certainly didn't play well in the current economic climate. Maybe that's why nobody did any polling during the campaign.
The major problem for this proposition was, of course, the opposition to it by the powerful classroom teachers union, CTA. This open opposition, by the way, was a real surprise to me; its potential was easily foreseeable, and we'd been assured that this had been worked out. Apparently, it hadn't been.
I've learned since that a serious effort to coordinate with them had been made a few years ago, but no agreement was reached, and the proposition creators chose to proceed anyway, knowing CTA would come out against it. In retrospect, proceeding with CTA opposition was clearly a bad idea.
Further dooming our effort was the fact that about half the community college districts in the state did not contribute in any real way to funding or otherwise supporting Prop 92. If you are running a campaign to fix something, you expect those who will benefit from the fix to be fighting for it. If they don't care, then why should anyone else? Losing by a million votes gives you the answer to that one.
So we went into the battle with a flawed proposition, an openly opposed teachers union, and an apathetic set of supporters, and then, to add insult to injury, we had a pathetic advertising campaign. Essentially, the selling of the proposition was left up to a Sacramento ad agency that did virtually nothing but a small and poorly done television campaign during the last week before the election.
“They're the experts, they know what they're doing,” we were told. Well, they didn't. Or maybe we were simply too small a fish for them – they had the $100 million account for the “Yes” vote on the anti-social (and anti-union) Indian gaming initiatives, so perhaps they were too busy with those to pay attention to a small group of teachers with only a few million dollars on the table.
Or maybe, if we are really going to try to learn something here, maybe we have learned that you simply can't work for the extreme ends of the social spectrum at the same time, a pro-gambling initiative and a pro-education one, and do justice to both, especially when one is paying 50 times as much as the other. (The Indian gaming propositions won big, by the way, just in case you were wondering.)
Let me close with a ray of hope from the aftermath of this, which is that I sense that everyone is now realizing how necessary it is for us to have some kind of community college group that represents the interests of all teachers in the system, regardless of which union people are in. We've tried it the other way with divided unions, and it doesn't work.
Working together is now on the table. This time we lost. If we learn enough from it, and do enough as a result, next time we can win.
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