Commentary : Voters Elect Teachers on Trust

It’s shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Day as the returns begin to trickle in. The trickle becomes a torrent, and by 10 o’clock it’s done, water over the dam, so to speak. The two teacher-backed candidates for school board have swamped their opponents.

The next morning, The Times reports that 83% of the teacher-backed candidates for school board seats in Orange County won. Statewide, the picture is also impressive. A total of 75% of all candidates with California Teacher Assn. support won.

Nothing unusual so far, just another exercise in good old American democracy, right? It depends on whom you talk to about the issue.

Some people see the advent of teacher influence on school board politics as the best prescription for education and children since the invention of penicillin; others interpret it in apocalyptic terms, viewing it as a modern plague, the end of democracy on the local educational scene.

Barnet Resnick, who once sat on a school board, told the press after the recent elections that teacher-dominated boards of education lead to “the fox taking charge of the henhouse.” That may summarize the attitudes of surprise and chagrin of those who feel that teacher involvement in school board elections is an unwarranted intrusion into an area formerly the stamping ground, in all too many cases, of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Ironically, it may also be the reason why he and like-minded board members are being turned out of office up and down the state.

Teachers endorse candidates for elections not because teachers want to dominate the board or bankrupt the community kitty, but because they want to get people on the board who care about kids and education, and who see education as the best investment in America’s future.

In 1986, the new Board of Trustees of the Huntington Beach Union High School District (endorsed by teachers) reduced English class size from 33 to 28. This clearly benefited students and education. The same board, however, commissioned a blue-ribbon committee to take a no-nonsense look at the financial health of the district and to make recommendations for the future. Concern for education’s dreams does not have to mean contempt for fiscal realities.

Yes, teachers want a hand in shaping educational policy because they are tired of seeing education become the stepchild of board and district politics and misplaced priorities. They are tired of seeing boards in lock step with management; they are distressed when they see board members who have little knowledge of education and little respect for teachers. This, they feel, is not in the best interest of America’s children.

Teachers want the primary focus of every step of the educational hierarchy to be the classroom. They realize that the further away projects and people drift from the classroom, the more remote and irrelevant they become. To suggest otherwise is to attribute to teachers a kind of kamikaze attitude that would bring about their ruin. Clearly, this is irrational.

After years of neglect by boards and districts alike, teachers are finally having some clout and are getting the public’s ear. But there is a long road yet to travel. For those in authority to persist in ignoring the input and advice of teachers, who are on the front lines of education, is akin to the early American settlers ignoring the advice and expertise of frontiersmen like Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone. The settlers would have done so at their peril. What of us?

To insinuate that teachers are “the foxes in the henhouse” is to claim that teachers, whose charges are the youth of the nation, are a hostile, threatening force, enemies of children and the saboteurs of education. They become predators; their classrooms become lairs. This is absurd, and it is this unenlightened, anti-intellectual attitude, in part, that has brought California to the unenviable position of being last in the nation in class size and 48th in the nation in spending for public schools as a percentage of personal income.

Fortunately, as recent surveys show, the people of this state do not subscribe to this medieval point of view.

And Nov. 3’s joust at the ballot box demonstrated, even more dramatically, that teacher endorsements are worth their weight in votes. Somebody out there is listening to teachers and believing them--finally.

Why? Teachers are bringing to the political scene a political commodity more precious than gold--credibility. People believe teacher-backed candidates because they believe teachers. They believe that teacher concerns are, and always have been, the children.

Board hopefuls and incumbents alike who subscribe to the fox-in-the-henhouse theory may have to rethink their strategy. It’s not working. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker have every right to run for board office. But in order to win, they may have to demonstrate clearly that the real concerns of education are uppermost on their agenda.

How will they know what these concerns are? They may have to ask a teacher.