California — With the landslide election of Gray Davis as governor, California now has something it didn't have even in the hey-day of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown: a state government in which Democrats hold all the levers of power. But for the California Teachers Association, the news is even better.

• With a 48-32 edge in the Assembly, and a 25-15 edge in the state Senate, Democrats will not only be able to pass anything they want, but will need to swing only six Assembly Republicans and two Senate Republicans to pass the budget, or any "urgency measure" (these bills go into effect immediately upon passage, rather than on the 1st of January of the next year).
• Republican Senator Rob Hurtt lost his seat. Hurtt has used his influence and wallet to oppose many CTA plans.
• Assembly Republicans elected Rod Pacheco as the leader of their caucus. Pacheco is one of a small minority of state GOP candidates who have received significant campaign backing from CTA in the past.
• Despite all the press reports of Davis' moderate politics, he won thegovernorship on the back of union support. The Assembly and Senate leaders are big government liberals. Davis' role will be simply to not veto anything.
• A $9.2 billion school construction and maintenance bond initiativepassed. With construction and class-size reduction fully funded, any new education spending will naturally go to salaries and benefits. Most interested observers already know what's coming. Today's Los Angeles Times leads with an editorial entitled "Don't Rush to Raise Teacher Pay." One of the first moves to come down the pike will be to raise per-pupil spending to the national average (roughly $6,300). That will cost the state an additional $7 billion annually.
• In the last five years, in defeating a voucher initiative, a paycheckprotection initiative, Gov. Wilson's education initiative, and GOPgubernatorial and state-level candidates, CTA has been forced to put its own agenda on the back burner. We may see the union revive its 1995 "education reform" measure, which would add one-cent to the state sales tax and use the money for public schools. With no campaign opponents left standing, CTA could bring its entire political weight to bear.

Wisconsin — Today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that found the Milwaukee school voucher program to be constitutional. Eventually a voucher case will reach the Supreme Court, but today's decision effectively ends the legal battle in Wisconsin. What will happen there? Will the Milwaukee program be expanded? Will legislation be introduced to make Wisconsin a voucher state? Or is the political battle more intractable than the legal one?

NEA Executive Committee member and former Utah Education Association President Lily Eskelsen was defeated in her bid for Utah's 2nd Congressional District seat by incumbent Republican Merrill Cook. Though expected by both parties to be in jeopardy, Cook outdistanced Eskelsen by a 10-point margin.

Donald and Maureen Sengpiehl have raised their 15-year-old daughter, Jennifer, to share their Mennonite beliefs. The Loudoun County, Virginia, couple home school their children. Jennifer struck up friendships with some neighborhood teenagers and decided the Mennonite life wasn't for her. She ran away from home several times. "She started finding out about lockers and proms... and decided she was missing things," said Mrs. Sengpiehl. One day, Jennifer vandalized her own room and pulled a knife on her father. The Sengpiehls phoned police to calm her down.

The case ended up in juvenile court where Jennifer was placed in the custody of a guardian and ordered to attend public school. "We called the police hoping they'd give her a spanking and send her home," Mrs. Sengpiehl told The Washington Post. "If I knew it would come to this, we never would have done it." The judge ruled the social experience of public school would improve Jennifer's behavior. The Sengpiehls are fighting the decision, saying that their parental rights have been violated and the judge's inferred connection between Jennifer's behavior and home schooling is without basis.

The Massachusetts Federation of Teachers made headlines today by calling for the elimination of undergraduate degrees in education and, in effect, limiting classroom instruction to those who have completed a masters degree and a one-year internship. State law currently requires a masters degree within five years of accepting a teacher position, but some legislators planned to extend that requirement to 10 years. The union wants teachers to spend their undergraduate time studying the subjects which they will teach. "Certainly you need teachers who are skilled, but you also need people who really know what their content area is," said MFT President Kathleen Kelley. "We need to make
sure teachers are prepared for a particular subject." The union's emphasis on content knowledge is picking up significant, across-the- board support, but its alternative plan is receiving criticism, much of it (naturally) from officials associated with undergraduate schools of education.

Baltimore School Superintendent Robert Booker unveiled his new "zero-tolerance" standard for student behavior. The rules, he told a communityforum, will be simple:
                — Start a fire, and you're out.
                — Assault a teacher or another student, and you're out.
                — Destroy school property, and you're out.
Are we to assume that these actions were tolerated before?

Education Minnesota will ask the 1999 NEA Representative Assembly to waive the promissory note that is saving Minnesota members from paying full dues to both NEA and AFT. But talk of "loans" and "promissory notes" tends to confuse the issue. The 1999 NEA RA will be asked, in effect, to recognize the EM merger as a fait accompli, and allow the new organization to send 35% of its dues to AFT (rather than to NEA) retroactive to September 1, 1998. EM has determined that "under no circumstances will any member be asked to pay a
special assessment or increased dues to cover the commitment of the nationals to this process." It is expected that NEA delegates will approve the resolution, but if they don't, EM's "no state dues increase" pledge will place the organization in a serious bind (again).

Last week's item on the Ritalin forum prompted an unidentified reader to send an Associated Press article about a new study from Peter Jensen of the National Institute of Mental Health. Jensen claims students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) responded two to three times better to Ritalin and therapy than to therapy alone. Three to nine percent of all children are believed to have ADHD, accounting for nearly half of all referrals for mental health services for children.

Many thanks to those of you who have responded to the EIA mini-survey. I already have a huge stack of thought-provoking comments, and I encourage the rest of you to send even more to EIASurvey@aol.com.

Quote of the Week: "We continue to believe funding religious schools with public dollars is unwise.... It forces people to support religions they may not believe in." — Greg Doyle, spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. No word on whether Doyle would support a "paycheck protection" initiative for taxpayers who don't like vouchers.