Five years ago, when I first heard about C.A.C.S, California Alliance for Community Schools, I was very excited. The brainchild of three California Teachers Association (C.T.A) union presidents, it was initially proposed to fight charter schools. It soon grew into a coalition of eight of the largest of California’s educator unions (Oakland, S.F, Richmond, San Bernardino, San Jose, Anaheim, San Diego, L.A.). It also developed much broader aims. The group soon hammered out a platform that included 5 planks: more resources for schools, charter school accountability, smaller class size and more community control and Safe and secure schools. I was disappointed that a stronger opposition to charters was not included.

Over the last five years C.A.C.S has grown to 11 locals. The Alliance meets at least 4 times a year right before C.T.A’s State Council meeting in Los Angeles. They have received financial support for meetings and trainings from C.T.A and the National Educators Association(N.E.A).

A core belief is that in order to save our public schools and make them into the schools our children deserve, it will be necessary to fundamentally change how we negotiate. As long as each local educator’s union bargains individually with its own underfunded district, we will be lucky to maintain the status quo. With charter schools and other privatizing schemes allowed to eat away funding, public schools will lose ground. Ultimately, we need to organize and coordinate across California’s union locals. We need to broaden our demands and direct them at our state capital.

C.A.C.S put a lot of effort into coordinating the bargaining schedule for our union locals so that we would all be at the table at the same time. This was largely successful with most of the C.A.C.S locals’ contracts ending this year. Together we could go into bargaining with bold demands and have our strongest weapon, our ability to strike, available to us all at the same time. We would use innovative negotiation techniques like Open Bargaining and Bargaining for the Common Good. Our demands would be broadened to include social justice and to serve the community.

As of the writing of this article, I am not seeing evidence that this is happening. My local is a C.A.C.S local. We are entering bargaining. Once again, it feels like the usual story, our district threatening insolvency and layoffs, our union trying to get the best deal for our members. What’s going on in your local? It could be that the governor’s promise of more funding has taken the wind out of our collective sails. It would appear that we don’t have the cohesion across California that we need yet. Perhaps we need to wait for another cycle of bargaining.  I can’t blame any one union for not wanting to go it alone. Still, a lot of progress has been made. Time will tell. A lot can happen in a year.  

Eric Swabeck

     Speaking as an individual member of the 

United Teachers of Richmond