Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/189657
CALIFORNIA TEACHERS ASSOCIATION I 150th Anniversary Left: State Sen. Albert S. Rodda (far right) and CTA officials worked together to pass the collective bargaining bill known as the Rodda Act of 1975. landmark report at a meeting in Berkeley in December 1905. The report recommended that the association: • e incorporated as the California Teachers Association; b • employ a paid executive secretary; and • unction and speak as a single statewide organization, composed f of four closely coordinated regional units. These regional units, under a later reorganization, would become known as Sections, and would elect representatives to CTA's largest governing body, the State Council of Education, which would meet periodically to set organizational policy, collect dues, adopt a budget, recommend expenditures, and elect officers. The Advisory Council accepted these proposed articles of incorporation and filed them with the state in January of 1907. Under the organization's new democratic structure, California's classroom teachers – now speaking with one increasingly powerful voice – began assuming leadership roles, as more were elected to the State Council on Education. In 1910, CTA held its last big convention on the University of California's Berkeley campus, marking an historic turning point: From then on, the organizational preeminence of university professors and school superintendents would decline. Within a year, the Association had established a state headquarters in San Francisco. From the start, CTA maintained close ties to the National Education Association (NEA), whose 1888 convention in San Francisco had been its first national meeting west of Chicago. In 1911, to emphasize this solidarity, Ella Flagg Young, NEA's first president, again led its national convention in CTA's newly designated headquarters city. The Modern CTA The Association, through its State Council, immediately began to exercise its collective power, lobbying to establish a statewide system of community colleges in 1911 and persuading the legislature to print free school textbooks for all students in grades 1-8. The following year, CTA finally succeeded in doing away with the practice, so abhorrent to Swett, of annual recertification; the state's first "continuing contract" law provided for teachers to be automatically re-employed unless notified otherwise. And in 1913, 58 Educator 10 Oct 2013 v2.1 int.indd 58 John Swett FATHER OF CTA? "Association in some form is the soul of modern progress. We constitute the advance guard on the shores of the Pacific, cut off from the main body of American teachers. Let us organize and work together. Let us make our influence felt in leading public opinion in school affairs." – John Swett T oday, there isn't much argument when John Swett, California's fourth Superintendent of Public Instruction, is referred to as "the father of California's Public Schools." The state tax, funding public schools for all the state's children, was clearly Swett's chief cause from O C T O B E R 2013 10/7/13 9:39 PM