Who Gains if UTLA Alienates the Parents?

Twenty years ago when hundreds of Latino students walked out of Los Angeles high schools in protest demonstrations, I applauded them. But two weeks ago when students of all ethnic backgrounds joined in protests at local schools, I was troubled.

That’s because there are some big differences between the 1968 blowouts, as they were called by Chicano activists, and the 1989 protests. Back then, Latino students wanted the quality of education in barrio schools to be improved. This time, the protesting students were reacting to someone else’s fight--specifically the impasse between the city school board and the United Teachers of Los Angeles, a union representing some of the district’s 28,000 teachers.

UTLA has been engaged in tough contract negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District for several weeks. And as the talks go on they have become increasingly bitter. UTLA leaders are mumbling darkly about a teachers’ strike before the school year is out. But they’re not ready to go that far yet, for reasons that I’ll speculate on later, so they’re using other job actions in the meantime.

They started out by boycotting non-classroom duties--things like watching over children playing in schoolyards. That tactic had little effect.

Then, as the semester break neared, UTLA members began threatening to withhold student grades. That tactic worked. Especially on high-school campuses, students feared that their chances of graduating or being accepted into college might be hurt if they did not receive their official grades. They started protesting, and the news media started paying greater attention to the contract talks between the district and union. Score one for UTLA.

But there could be very negative ramifications to the grades stunt. When kids start walking out of schools, parents start paying attention, too. And all indications are that, especially in the minority communities whose kids make up the majority of students in Los Angeles public schools, parents are angry with the union.

The hostility has become so great, for example, that several hundred parents stalked out of a meeting last week at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights rather than listen to a UTLA representative defend the union’s position in the labor negotiations.

In fairness, there may be some merit in UTLA’s bargaining position. The union may be right when it claims that Los Angeles could cut its downtown school bureaucracy to put more money into teacher salaries. On the other hand, the board’s offer of a 20% pay increase over three years seems generous. In fact, state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who has done more than anyone else to drum up voter support for new spending on state schools, worries that it may be too generous. But what it actually costs to run a big school district is an issue that can be explored through the fact-finding process that state law requires before a teachers’ strike can be called. So can the other issues that have the two sides at an impasse. So why is the union prolonging this process to the point of dragging kids into it?

Let me speculate on one possible reason: The seven-member school board is now aligned 4 to 3 in support of the negotiating stance that district Supt. Leonard Britton is taking against UTLA. If just one of those four were defeated for reelection in April’s municipal election, the district might soften its position. And UTLA is gearing up to try to do just that. Could it be that it would just as soon see this standoff prolonged until after the election? It’s an interesting, if cynical, question. So cynical that I doubt that any UTLA members would be willing to bounce it off one of their high-school civics classes (“This is what local politicsis like in the real world, kids”).

I am not suggesting that angry Latino parents have come to the same conclusion. I suspect that they are just concerned that this labor dispute is interfering with the education that they so desperately want their children to get. But the longer UTLA prolongs this ordeal, the more parents’ concern will turn to anger and mistrust-a problem that teachers will have to deal with after the dust settles. That would be terrible, especially when most experts agree that one of the keys to better achievement by minority children is more parent involvement in the education process. Perhaps without realizing it, UTLA’s leaders may be alienating some of the most important allies that teachers need to do their jobs better.

I have many friends who work as teachers, and most of them are political liberals. Not so long ago, during the heyday of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, they bemoaned the “selfishness” of the political conservatism then at its height. And they would always cite the sorry state of public schools as proof that conservatives were shortsighted--hurting the nation’s future by cutting federal aid to education.

Well, Reagan is out of office now, and the public’s thinking about schools seems to have changed. Californians put more tax money into education by approving Proposition 98 last November. Even President Bush, in his first budget, called for more federal funds to aid education. So who looks selfish and shortsighted now?