Will Stealth Candidate Destroy California Teachers Association?

The duties of the top officers of California Teachers Association are basically ceremonial, like those of the Queen of England, except that CTA officers attend carefully-scripted educational meetings instead of carefully-scripted hospital openings. Until now, CTA presidents have been chosen for their ability to follow orders and stick to the script.

But that may change.

There is a new stealth candidate for CTA secretary-treasurer. If she wins this position, our candidate will, according to CTA custom, rise automatically to vice-president in four years, and then to president four years after that. (The thinking seems to be that eight years is needed to learn the script and prove loyalty to Carolyn Doggett and Beverly Tucker.)

I can't tell who the stealth candidate is, or her rise to power would be immediately ended by Caro and Bev. She is planning to follow the script until she becomes president, then strike out on her own. Will this be a good thing for education in California? Not immediately, because this woman's goal is to destroy CTA from within, like George W. Bush's appointees to heath and welfare commissions. There will be a period of disruption in which teachers may start to think for themselves, and break out of their current cliques in order to focus on students. But in the end, human nature will prevail, and teachers will settle back into a new power structure. The truth is, humans don't like too much freedom, because it gives them too much responsibility. They have no one to think for them, no one to hide their mistakes from the press and from law enforcement. It's a scary world when a teacher has no one but her students to focus on.