LA Times Editorial
September 7, 2009 -- Even with signs that the U.S. economy might be stirring, this is a strained Labor Day for the many Americans who are going without raises, and whose hours are being cut at the same time that they are asked to take heavier workloads -- and especially for those who are without employment.
Teachers find themselves in all these categories, across the nation and right here, where the dire financial condition of the Los Angeles Unified School District has led to layoffs or demotions from regular teaching to substitute, and where class sizes will be larger and other cutbacks will reduce salaries. On a bigger scale, the unions that brought teachers better pay, benefits and job security find themselves at a tipping point, their power under threat in ways that seemed barely possible a few years ago.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose 2005 proposal to modify teacher tenure was brought down by the full-on might of the California Teachers Assn., is now calling for a change in state law that would allow teachers' performance reviews to be linked to test scores. And there is barely a political peep to be heard about it; the Obama administration has demanded such changes if California is to receive a share of new education funding. Obama and his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, openly admire high-performing charter schools and reform-minded superintendents such as Michelle Rhee of Washington, who is working to revamp tenure rules there.
Then came the blow last month to United Teachers Los Angeles. The L.A. Unified school board passed a resolution that will allow outside groups to compete with current district staff for permission to run any of 50 soon-to-open schools and about 200 low-performing schools, with the operators to be held accountable for student achievement. UTLA is accustomed to being the single most powerful entity in L.A. Unified; trustees used to jump to do its bidding. Yet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former UTLA organizer known for his union ties, put his strong support behind the measure, criticizing the teachers union for failing to place children first.
To be fair, teachers unions exist to promote the status of teachers; it is no more their role to push for student-centered reforms than it is the job of the autoworkers union to fret about fuel economy. But when unions obstructed popular and necessary change, they ultimately did themselves and their members no favor. Parents and a public weary of lackluster schools rebelled and pulled politicians along with them. Labor now finds itself in a weakened situation on campus.
A new era of school reform will continue to take hold with or without union cooperation. Yet reformers should hesitate before agitating for the downfall of teachers unions, which have a rich history of improving both education and the welfare of educators. Our schools would be weaker without these labor organizations. The challenge on this Labor Day, as the traditional school year is starting, is to imagine a new flexibility among teachers unions in which they regain influence by promoting reform rather than by resisting it. We would welcome a resurgent and refocused local teachers union.
Those are curious words coming from this page, which has a long history of opposing and belittling organized labor.
"Director Bean declared that to pay all teachers exactly the same salaries, irrespective of merit and acquirements, smacks of the spirit of unionism, and he stood for rewarding those who made extra effort to improve themselves," The Times printed in 1912.
"There is not one school for the rich and another for the poor," a 1919 Times editorialist wrote, blissfully unaware of the coming achievement gaps of the 21st century. "All pass through the same grades and receive the same degrees. ... It is into this garden of democracy that the serpent of radicalism is gliding in the guise of the school-teachers' union."
In 1936, an editorial bristled: "There is no need and no room for a labor-union of teachers in this State. ... Any teacher who ties up with a radical organization should be subject to dismissal."
We are mindful of precedent on this page, and break from it reluctantly. But the editorial boards that went about their work in the aftermath of the 1910 bombing of The Times -- which killed 21 employees and was the work of union organizers -- saw labor far differently than today's board, which, among other things, endorsed Mayor Villaraigosa twice and has called for tougher sanctions against employers who violate labor rights. That extends to the unions that represent teachers. As much as we deplore rigid work rules that make it virtually impossible to fire unfit teachers or that fail to reward teachers who consistently get stellar results at the most challenging schools, we are aware that these restrictions have their roots in a century-old era during which teachers labored under deplorable conditions.
The first teachers organization in the United States formed in 1857, its main issue not contracts but how it could extend the reach and quality of schooling and have a progressive influence on public policy. That group was the forerunner of the National Education Assn., one of the two major teachers unions in the country.
By the early 20th century, teachers began agitating for concrete changes in their daily work. According to a Public Broadcasting System project on the history of teaching, which contains eerie echoes of some of today's complaints, "their deportment had always been closely watched; increasingly their work in the schoolroom was not only scrutinized but rigidly controlled. Teacher autonomy was on the decline, and teachers resented it."
Teaching was by and large considered a short-term profession for single women, one that they were expected -- often forced -- to leave when they married, and certainly when they became pregnant. Jobs were conferred through political patronage and yanked away for any deviation from rigid codes of behavior. Pay was low and benefits virtually unheard of. Classes were often crammed with up to 60 students. Schools were underfunded and often decrepit.
Credit the unions with turning much of this around. By linking pay to educational status, unions professionalized teaching. By providing better wages and benefits, ensuring that these would increase with seniority, and adding the security of tenure, the unions' hard-won contracts gave teachers an incentive to make education a long-term career. Unions used their political influence to lobby for better school funding.
Teachers vs. students
All to the good. But over the last several decades, some of these contract provisions have ossified. Tenure protections do more than protect teachers from capricious administrators; they keep principals from effectively prodding ineffective teachers to improve. The teachers cannot be fired, and their pay is predetermined by a schedule based mostly on experience, not performance. Seniority bumping rights have deprived students in impoverished schools of experienced teachers. Free rein for teachers in classrooms without accountability for student success has allowed far too many students to fail; that is felt most acutely among disadvantaged and minority students.
Their political clout and near-monopoly gave unions little reason to acknowledge that this scenario was overdue for a change. Charter schools -- publicly funded schools that were free to innovate with fewer regulations -- provided the first real competition both to organized labor and to inefficient bureaucracies like L.A. Unified. Unions fought the trend, but the new schools were tremendously popular with parents.
We, like President Obama, support well-run charter schools, which often give teachers greater autonomy in exchange for more accountability. But most charter schools have no unions (an exception being Green Dot Public Schools, which operates with a different union under a more moderate contract than UTLA's). Charter teachers tend to be young and inexperienced; in high-stress teaching situations with no job protections or incentives for professional longevity, turnover is distressingly high.
No one should wish for a return to the schools of 100 years ago, with their short-timer teaching forces of young people who could be dismissed for no good reason. Experienced teachers represent a substantial public investment in training, and they contribute skills and educational wisdom. Society owes them too much to treat them like a dispensable commodity.
Unions should be carving out a new future for their members, and there is encouraging movement in this direction. After unsuccessfully opposing L.A. Unified's promising new reform, UTLA proposed a startling tactic that brings a touch of optimism to even this less-than-cheery Labor Day. The union announced it would sponsor a wave of teacher and union applications to run many of the schools, including "collaborations with partners such as UCLA to develop our own research-based innovative proposals."
By vowing to empower teachers and hold them accountable, UTLA reclaims the progressive principles that once defined teachers unions. This page would not always have cheered such a development on Labor Day.
Today, we do.
●●smf’s 2¢: 4LAKids welcomes this editorial from The Times.
Sometimes the paper, like all stogy and old fashioned (or established and well rooted) institutions and individuals (mea culpa) becomes transfixed in their own history. I hearken back to the golden age of California Education; while hardly golden I was there and a beneficiary of a system that worked.
Round about Labor Day, The Times, like clockwork, hearkens back to the 1910 bombing of The Times Building by anarchists and/or union organizers.
The Times Building, bombed, Oct 1, 1910 PD; from Wikipedia
The Times was notoriously anti-union at the time; its editorial board (aka the Otises and the Chandlers) took ‘notoriously’ up a few notches to ‘rabid’. From our observation point in the first decade of the 21st century anarchy and organized labor seem antithetical …but I’m not going there. The strangeness of bedfellows a century removed is best left between the sheets. Let’s just say that whatever was biting whomever spread the contagion equitably and Mad Publishers begat Mad Bombers.
My point here is that today’s Times Editorial Board seems to need to pay homage to that earlier one – and and to take a poke at organized labor on labor day, – if only for old Times sake.The truth is that nobody is here today from those storied times of The Times Triumph Over Labor. We are not reenactors of the Times Bombing or the Pullman Strike or the Haymarket Riots or the Palmer Raids. Sometimes the teachable moment becomes the lesson learned becomes the ho-hum.
History, meet today. The Times is a newspaper – a union newspaper – and all-in-all a pretty good one. And it is the union contracts and collective bargaining and the union printers and the union writers that stand between whatever The Times is and it becoming the west coast edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Happy Labor Day.
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