Students Want a Chance to Excel : Career Concerns at Heart of 1980s Campus Protests

For three weeks, demonstrations have swept Los Angeles schools in a way that recalls the city’s campus unrest of the ‘60s. They have created an atmosphere of crisis and focused a hot media spotlight on what had been a mundane labor dispute.

But this is not your father’s sit-in.

The underlying themes of this wave of protests, the largest in 20 years on school campuses in this city, appear to be more reflective of the status-, degree- and money-conscious ‘80s. There is wide agreement from participants, school officials, and outside observers that personal economics, not social injustice, is what this is about.

“I’m not angry at the system at all,” Dempsey Lee Ward, a Washington High School senior, said Friday at a meeting organized by parents. “I’m angry because I’m caught in the middle.” Indeed, Ward very much wants into the system. He has his sights set on a state university electrical engineering program and then an income of “at least” $80,000 a year.

Today’s protesters, who were not even alive in the ‘60s, have their own demands. They do not want any interference along the planned trajectory into college and well-paying careers. And, conscious of how society, through paychecks, values different professions, they think teachers should get more.

La Niecia Henderson, a senior at Dorsey High School who last week joined a multi-school protest at school district headquarters, noted with eyebrow-raised, tell-me-it-ain’t-so disgust, “A lawyer is getting more than a teacher!”

Renate Winter, a Marshall High School student who also showed up for the protest at school board offices, said: “I’m doing this because I would like to become a teacher one day. But when I tell people that, they say, ‘What other job are you going to take?’ ”

Until students started showing their frustration, there was little out of the ordinary in the nearly yearlong labor dispute between the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers’ union. The principal issue is money, and in an effort to put some pressure on the administration, the teachers last fall began to boycott some of their non-teaching duties.

Threat by Teachers

The student demonstrations began a few weeks ago as it became clear that the teachers intended to make good on their threat to withhold from the school district the midyear grades that were due Friday, and instead give them directly to the students on unofficial union report cards.

The protests spread through junior and senior high schools, cutting across racial, ethnic and economic lines. The students’ theme was twofold: they wanted their official grades, and most thought the teachers should get the raise they were seeking.

UCLA’s Kenneth C. Green is not surprised by the students’ message. Green, associate director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, co-directs a major national survey each year on the attitudes of college freshmen. The 23-year-old survey has charted a steady, dramatic rise in student concerns about their financial security, the competition for good colleges and obtaining advanced degrees.

For example, in 1988 a record 72.6% of college freshman indicated “making more money” was a very important factor in their decision to attend college, up from just 49.9% 17 years ago.

“They are very focused on the whole issue of job and career,” said Green.

Green said the protesting Los Angeles students appear to be projecting their concerns about economics. “This is not a statement that the L.A. school system is lousy, that the quality of service is (poor), that there’s racism in the classroom,” he said. “They are saying, ‘Wait a second. I have a vested interest and you are messing with my future.’ ”

It is easy for some to view these fixations on jobs and money as “greedy . . . pre-Yuppie kinds of behavior,” Green said. But he sees it as an adaptation by children of the 1970s and ‘80s to the economic upheavals of runaway inflation followed by recession. Their ability to equal or surpass their parents financial status is in question, he said.

Payton Johnson, a Dorsey High School senior, does not want anyone messing with his dreams. Johnson led the chants of hundreds of students who walked out of classes and lined up row-by-row, class-photo style on the front steps of the school auditorium. “I will be the first one in my family to go to college. I myself want to become a teacher. I have worked 12 years to go to college. Now you are gonna tell me” that official district grades may not be available, he said. “I have not worked hard just to be pushed to the back of the line.”

The linkage between their economic aspirations and education--be it good grades or good, well-paid teachers--is not lost on students in a district and at a time that generated a hit movie about the rigors and rewards of taking advanced college-placement exams.

Students pressed around a reporter at a protest last week at Garfield High School, home of Jaime Escalante, the charismatic math teacher whose achievements were chronicled in “Stand and Deliver.” Asked what the protest was really about, the students all began yelling at once. But one finally seemed to capture the essence of it to the satisfaction of his schoolmates: “It’s ‘Stand and Deliver,’ man.”

Indeed, the movie’s theme--self-sacrificing teacher pushes barrio kids up society’s ladder with strong education, hard work and high expectations--is wholly consistent with the messages of the current protests. “In part of the movie, which had a large showing in Los Angeles, it’s pretty clear that Escalante made some significant financial sacrifices to be a teacher, given the other opportunities available to him,” said UCLA’s Green.

Other observers say the students are simply showing society they have accepted the premises of the ‘80s’ much-publicized educational reform movement. Some of the central tenets of that movement have been that teachers need to be better-trained and better-paid and that students, if they hope to make it in a more competitive world, must work harder and go further in school.

Not Against System

“They’re not demonstrating against the system,” said California schools Supt. Bill Honig, a leader of the reform movement and a harsh critic of the current state of affairs in the Los Angeles district. “They’re demonstrating because they’re saying, ‘You told us the rules.’ What comes as a shock is all of a sudden they are caught and being used.”

Workplace economics and student aspirations may be unifying themes of the recent demonstrations, but they can be overstated. Many of the student organizers and better-informed campus leaders know why they are there, but, as in the ‘60s, a good number of students appear to be out for a good time. One girl told a television news crew she walked out of class so she could get on TV.

“The majority of people didn’t know what they were walking out for,” said Bird Tiano, a Taft High School senior, referring to a protest there. “It was something else to do. They were sick of the semester and it provided some excitement and turmoil.”

The dynamics of the protests are different than 20 years ago, but so is the reaction of school officials and police. In 1968, when thousands of Latino students walked out of classes in a movement that was a direct attack on inequities in the school system, organizers were charged with criminal conspiracy and police aggressively engaged the protesters.

“It’s a different ball game today,” said Sal Castro, one of the leaders of the so-called Eastside blowouts in 1968 and now a high school counselor. “In ‘68, the police were doing sweeps. . . . They were swinging billy clubs,” Castro said.

Now, civil disobedience is a common and acceptable form of protest. School officials, many of whom were students in the ‘60s, speak respectfully of the students’ rights of free expression and peaceful demonstration.

And police, even when they have been taunted and pelted with eggs and rocks, have responded with restraint. They monitor and contain the protests, making sure they do not get out of hand, but generally hold back and just let them run their course.

The protests mostly have been friendly, peaceful and remarkably responsible. Students often walk out of classes for a specified time, voice their concerns, then return. And the protests at the high schools fell off sharply last week because the grade- and portfolio-conscious students did not want to miss final exams.

Some Results

Despite their impromptu nature, the protests have brought some results. Goaded by the demonstrations, the teachers and the school district finally agreed Friday to accelerated bargaining and held an eight-hour session Sunday. But what was supposed to be an around-the-clock effort to reach agreement bogged down and broke up late Sunday after only slight progress was made on pay.

Some adults have tried to attach ‘60s-style slogans to the protests. A group called the International Committee Against Racism has passed out flyers at some walkouts linking student concerns over grades and teachers’ pay with class struggle and an end to “racist” police “terror.”

Castro said he believes the protests on the Eastside are about a lot of the same problems that existed in 1968 and have not been addressed. And one teacher from Manual Arts High School told a group of parents at a South Los Angeles meeting Friday night that the real issue is the “oppression” of young people.

For the most part, however, it does not seem to stick with the students.

Darlene Parris received one of the anti-racism group’s flyers at a protest at school board headquarters last week. A college-bound senior from Washington High School, she was standing on the fringe of the students milling about, voicing uneasiness about efforts to co-opt the students’ message. She was disturbed, she said, about a “lot of different issues” coming into the protests that were “deviating from the initial purpose.”

Not the ‘60s

It’s just not the ‘60s, said Kemo Lee, a protest organizer and student body president at Dorsey High School. “I don’t think you can compare it. . . . The Vietnam War was one of the great moral issues. A lot of people knew what they were protesting about. Their heart was really into it.”

In the recent campus protests, Lee said, “I think their heart is more into ‘Don’t interfere with our ability to excel.’ ”

And Lee, who hopes to enter a premedical program next year and later earn at least $100,000 a year, added, “And I think everybody agrees that teachers should be paid more.

“We are looking out for our economic welfare and that of our teachers.”