When we think of the big special-interest groups that wield undue influence in Sacramento, we think of huge corporations — oil, gas, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. We think of corporate lawyers lobbying for tax breaks and loopholes; we think of fat cats calling legislators they have under their thumbs.

But the biggest special-interest group isn’t an oil company. It’s not a pharmaceutical giant. It’s not even a combination of all of the above.

The biggest special-interest group, by far, is the one that represents the teachers of California. Over the past 13 years, the California Teachers Association has spent $290 million on influencing state politics. In context, it spent enough money on politics in the past few years to pay the annual salaries of 7,200 new high school teachers.

In the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 13 percent of fourth-graders and 16 percent of eighth-graders scored “Proficient” or above. Our average scaled score on those tests, 213, was below the averages of renowned educational powerhouses such as Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana. In 2005, Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a number of initiatives aimed at addressing California’s education woes. These proposals would have reformed the public education system in California. Instead of working with Schwarzenegger on them, however, the CTA blatantly opposed any idea of reform.

One such reform was Proposition 74, which the CTA spent $8 million to defeat. This measure would have extended the probationary period for teachers from two to five years before they could receive tenure, giving school districts more time to consider whether a teacher deserves the special protection tenure affords. In San Bernardino County, one principal found it was almost impossible to let go of unfit teachers who were tenured. One 20-year veteran was quoted as a “textbook case of a lousy teacher” who answered questions incorrectly, told her students to “sit (their) asses down” and called two of her students “gay.” Even after the principal found out, he had to spend $100,000 on legal fees and pay her another $25,000 to resign.

Proposition 75, another Schwarzenegger-backed initiative, sought to prevent unions from using mandatory dues to fund a union’s political activities. The CTA spent $12 million to defeat it. Prop. 75 was designed to protect the minority of teachers with differing political beliefs. In 2005, the CTA assessed an annual surcharge of $60 per teacher over the course of three years in order to raise $50 million to defeat Schwarzenegger’s reforms. Some teachers didn’t support the same agenda their union leadership did. Amber Calabrese, a teacher in the Chino Valley School District, said she supported Prop. 74. She appreciated her probationary period because it allowed administrators to regularly observe her teaching and give her tips that would improve it. Her opinion didn’t matter.

A large percentage of the hundreds of dollars in dues she paid that year, along with the $60 surcharge, would have been used to oppose the very initiative Calabrese supported.

Because California locks away the majority of its budget in fixed “mandatory spending” requirements, there have been long-standing concerns about the state’s flexibility when facing a budget crisis. Schwarzenegger recognized this problem in 2005, and he proposed Proposition 76, which would have tied education funding more to the annual decisions of legislators and less to a constitutional guarantee. It would also have created a more stringent spending cap based on the previous year’s spending, and the Legislative Analyst’s office wrote in its Fiscal Impact Statement that Prop. 76 would likely “reduce expenditures relative to current law.” The CTA spent $14 million to quash Prop. 76.

The problems of education in California are more fundamental than teacher tenure or mandatory union dues. They are rooted in widespread poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics and the prevalence of violence in American society. And on that deeper level, it’s impossible to place the blame on teachers for the lack of educational success in California. They cannot control what goes on at home or feed the students who come to class hungry.

But the CTA has to recognize that reform and compromise are necessary steps to a better education system. And regardless of everything that teachers cannot control, we have to provide them with the best tools possible in order to ensure the best education possible. And that will require the CTA to own up to the responsibilities that come with the significant influence it wields and embrace necessary reforms.

Kevin Gu writes the Thursday column on politics. You can contact him at kgu@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @gukevin888.

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What in the world have we gotten ourselves into?

On Oct. 1, the government shut down, furloughing 800,000 federal employees and forcing tens of thousands of other workers, including prison guards, air traffic controllers and U.S. Border Patrol agents to work without pay.

And we aren’t too far from another crisis — this time of far greater magnitude. As early as Oct. 17, the federal government could hit its borrowing cap of $16.7 trillion, causing the government to default on 40 percent of its obligations. If it does come to that, the government will have to choose which services — Medicare, Social Security, interest on debt, education, courts, the FBI, food safety inspections — it will fund.

A government shutdown means the government will be unable to take on future obligations. Hitting the debt ceiling would make it unable to repay past obligations.

We’ve already got the former. Parks are being shut down. Most of NASA has closed. Workers are being held without pay. But if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, we’ll be in a much worse place. The government will owe money to creditors that it won’t be able to repay, likely causing a financial crisis on the order of billions of dollars. It certainly won’t be pretty.

There’s a long list of people that we can blame. Is it the Republicans, who are holding a government hostage over a single policy they dislike? Is it the Democrats, who seem to be unable to compromise on an unpopular policy they forced through Congress? Or  is it us, the voters, who elected them in the first place?

This time, it’s hard to blame anybody but the Republicans for the government shutdown. Instead of being another comprehensive policy bill, the spending bill that should have been passed before Oct. 1 would have just upheld the status quo. It would be like so many other boring bills that Congress passes on a daily basis to keep itself and the government running. But instead of passing the spending bill now and working with the president on Obamacare later, the Republicans decided to use the day-to-day operations of the government as leverage to try and force their own agenda onto the White House.

It’s a strategy that has been used before, 17 years ago, by Newt Gingrich and the then-Republican-controlled Congress. Just like the Republicans today, the Republicans in 1995 thought that the government was spending too much money and that its size needed to be reduced. And, just like the Republican leadership today, Newt Gingrich decided the best way to force Clinton to cut down on programs was to use the debt ceiling and the spending bill as leverage. It didn’t work out very well.

Clinton’s approval ratings rose to 53 percent after the first shutdown of the government — the highest those ratings had been for two years. The public largely blamed the Republicans for the shutdown, and they lost the ensuing 1996 presidential election by an electoral college margin of 159-379, a landslide victory for Clinton.

In the same way, the current Republican strategy of using the government shutdown as a political tactic is nothing short of pointless. Obama has already said he would not sign anything but a clean spending bill without any amendments that would delay the implementation of Obamacare. At the same time, House Republican leaders seem unwilling to pass a spending bill with anything but amendments regarding Obamacare. It may seem like a classic case of partisanship, but in this case, Obama stands firmly in the right.

On “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart compares the Republicans to a losing football team that says, “If you don’t give us 25 points on Monday, we will shut down the NFL.” And Stewart is correct. The spending bill is part of the everyday running of our government. Like the regular raising of the debt ceiling, it’s something that we expect to be passed each and every year in order to keep our government functioning. And yet the Republicans seem to be willing to put everything in jeopardy in order to thumb their noses at Obama’s policies.

Regardless of the eventual outcome of the government shutdown, the temper tantrum the Republicans are throwing over Obamacare needs to come to a stop. The Republican leadership will need to learn that negotiations take place when both parties come to a level playing field, not when one party is holding the government hostage over a piece of legislation. And the Republicans will need to learn their lesson fast — before the country hits its debt ceiling — or there will be an entire new set of problems.

It’s the Republicans’ call now. The ball is in their court.

Contact Kevin Gu at kgu@dailycal.org.

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A simple ratio of gun ownership to gun homicide shows an average American person is three times more likely to be killed by gun homicide than an average Swiss person is. Americans not only have more guns, but they’re also more likely to use those guns to commit homicide. But it’s not just guns. More people in America are killed by knives, body parts or blunt weapons than by rifles every year. It’s not just a culture of guns that’s killing Americans — it’s a culture of violence.

The argument for increased gun control often goes something like this: “More powerful guns can kill more people more quickly, so we should restrict access to more powerful guns in order to limit deaths.” This was the thinking that led Bill Clinton to pass the Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, a ban that restricted access to semi-automatic rifles in the United States. And yet, 225,000 fully automatic rifles — weapons much more potent than their semi-automatic counterparts — have caused two deaths in the past 80 years. It’s not about the kind of guns or even about the number of guns allowed — it’s about the kind of people we let purchase those guns. A gun is just a tool. The key to gun control isn’t about changing the tool; it’s about changing the kinds of people that own those tools.

America has a prolific gun culture — one that’s almost unique in its ubiquitousness. We have the most guns — not only per person but also in the country as a whole. China, which has four times as many people, has eight times fewer guns. But one country has a gun culture that almost mimics that of the United States: Switzerland.

In Switzerland, shooting for sport starts from as early an age as 10. Shooting ranges are found in every community, and owning a gun is easier than owning a dog or a car. And yet the pervading culture is not violent. Street crime is almost nonexistent. Gunshots do not ring through the night as opposing gangs duke it out in the streets of Zurich. And that represents the biggest difference between Switzerland and the United States: not the kind of gun being used but how the gun is being used.

For the most part, the Swiss use their guns for fun and sport. The Swiss Shooting Sports Association boasts 150,000 members and 3,000 clubs, including a youth section with children as young as 12. Furthermore, 75 million rounds of ammunition are fired every year in target practice and gun shows. Americans, on the other hand, use their weapons for violence.

In 2011, there were 414,000 incidents of firearm-related crimes and 467,000 victims of those crimes in the United States — and 95 percent of all gang-related homicides involved guns. So the problem is much more institutionalized than simply being a matter of access to guns. People in Switzerland see guns as fun. We see them as instruments of murder.

And so, when President Obama was calling for more gun control this week in response to the Navy Yard shooting, he had the wrong idea entirely. The real question shouldn’t be about what weapon the shooter was using — coincidentally, it was a shotgun, which Obama has never talked about banning — but rather about what could have been done to prevent the shooting altogether. Aaron Alexis suffered from PTSD after helping out in the 9/11 rescue mission, but our stigma around mental illness and the lack of proper medical care prevented him from getting the treatment he needed.

James Holmes — the shooter in the Aurora, Colo., massacre — was suspected to be suffering from a mental illness and entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial.

Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook shooting, was thought by his brother to have a personality disorder and mild autism. He never received proper care for those illnesses.

So when President Obama asks Congress to pass new gun control laws, he’s only asking for a bandage to cover the wound. Gun control helps cover up the effects, but it won’t help fix the cause. To fix the solution once and for all, we’ll need something much more difficult: a complete reversal of America’s infatuation with violence and prejudice.

It will require better treatment for mentally ill patients, yes, but we will also have to change our stigma around mental illness, our use of guns as tools of murder and, above all, our fascination with violence as a society.

There are not overnight fixes, nor are there one-size-fits-all policy solutions to address these problems. That said, until we figure out how to deal with the thorny issues behind gun violence, Switzerland will remain a reminder of what we could be — and what we are not.

Kevin Gu writes the Thursday column on politics. You can contact him at kgu@dailycal.org.

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