Public Sector Unions Gain Power, Lose Popularity, says Economist By Nancy Thorner, January 26, 2015, Heartlander Magazine While becoming more and more powerful, public sector unions are losing favor with taxpayers, Daniel DiSalvo, author of “Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences,” said during a forum hosted by The Illinois Policy Institute Tuesday...

In January 2010 the California’s legislature passed into law, perhaps uncharacteristically, an excellent new law. Entitled “Public schools: Race to the Top,” SB 54 created two mechanisms for parents to exert greater control over the education of their children. There are two components: (1) The Open Enrollment Act mandates that the California Department of Education to...

My encounters with tenure, aka permanence, aka undue process for teachers. In an article posted recently, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of Education Next Paul Peterson asks, “Do Teachers Support the Vergara Decision?” More specifically, he discusses tenure, which is on hold in California due to Judge Rolf Treu’s ruling. The tenure statute is the part...

Times have changed, but the SEIU’s motives, and the means and tactics used to accomplish these motives — as documented in The Devil at Our Doorstep — remain the same. The SEIU’s ultimate goal is to achieve its agenda of destroying America’s Free Enterprise system and replacing it with statism. As seen in recent actions across the...

INTRODUCTION While financial conditions in California cities have improved markedly since 2012, many of the state’s 78 healthcare districts are struggling. Last April, Palm Drive Healthcare District in Sebastopol filed for protection under Chapter 9 of the federal bankruptcy law.  In December, the West Contra Costa Healthcare District, which operates San Pablo-based Doctors Medical Center...

Out of nowhere comes a new, well-funded champion of Mother Earth. A group called “Monterey County Residents for Responsible Development” has submitted two sets of letters and exhibits to Monterey County alleging serious deficiencies in its environmental review for the county’s first large solar photovoltaic power plant, the 280 megawatt California Flats. Obviously the Monterey...

State of the (Labor) Union: movement still counts on the White House By Jana Kasperkevic, January 20, 2015, The Guardian   In his state of the union address tonight, President Obama is likely to talk about working families and their financial struggles. That means he is sure to give a nod to the nation’s labor unions, whose...