L.A. Teachers’ Pent-Up Rage Mainly Directed at Bureaucracy

Tucked in the rear of the graffiti-marred, red brick cafeteria building at Stephen M. White Junior High School in Carson is the faculty lounge, where teachers come to vent the pent-up rage that could erupt into a strike Monday.

As the nation’s second-largest school system moves closer to its first strike in 19 years, the heavy action is 15 miles up the Harbor Freeway from Carson in the downtown conference rooms where union leaders and school officials are grappling for common ground on a host of divisive issues.

But it is out in faculty lounges like White’s that the anger and frustration felt by classroom instructors is best seen, emotions that are fueled by a bitter accumulation of grievances, big and small.

Only partly is this a dispute about money. Other issues are also at stake, including paid preparation time for elementary teachers and increased teacher say in how their schools will be run.

Some educators, including state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, have suggested that the district’s offer and the demands made by teachers are so close that a strike makes little sense.

But to hear teachers like those at White Junior High tell it, it goes much farther.

As they filtered through the faculty lounge during free periods and nutrition breaks Thursday morning, the instructors were aboil over what they say is the insensitivity and inefficiency of a huge bureaucracy that has trivialized their jobs and trampled their self-respect.

Some were so eager to spill out their grievances that they talked all at once. Like a relationship turned sour, almost everything about the district seems to irritate them: the dingy classrooms, the edicts from downtown, the superintendent’s $141,000-a-year salary, the delays in getting building repairs, the inability to choose their own textbooks and the rules restricting who can use the office copying machine.

“They don’t care about anybody,” wood shop instructor Peter DesRochers said of the downtown administrators. “They just want a body in the classroom.”

Some of the bitterness and the teachers’ willingness to strike seem to come from long-held and personal grievances. Jinny Morelock, a 20-year veteran, said her husband was forced out of the district after 15 years because he was denied a transfer out of an inner-city school.

Shop teacher DesRochers has respiratory problems but has been stymied by red tape from getting an exhaust fan that would remove dust from his shop. Confirming the problem, the principal was sympathetic.

District officials admit that the anger exists. But they insist that the frustrations have been fanned by inflammatory union publications and divisive union leaders, most notably Wayne Johnson, the charismatic president of United Teachers-Los Angeles.

“The emotions reflect what they have heard and what’s been instilled in them over the entire year. . . . It’s been extremely negative,” Associate Supt. Gabe Cortina said.

But James Guthrie, a UC Berkeley professor who studies educational issues, said the rage behind the labor dispute is real, serious and typical of large urban school systems.

“I think one can attribute most of it to the overwhelming size and bureaucratic nature of these large city school systems,” Guthrie said. “They are not treated as professionals by the system.

“They don’t know what mission they are to accomplish. . . . Their textbooks are picked for them. They are given no budget discretion, and they are told what to teach.”

What is needed, Guthrie said, is to break up the district into smaller pieces or to give teachers, parents and principals more authority.

At White Junior High, as at many district schools, the teachers’ anger is directed beyond the campus. By almost all accounts, Principal Carolyn Baum is respected for being caring and helpful.

“I think the anger lies with the administration downtown basically,” Baum acknowledged.

Teachers, Baum added, simply do not believe most of what management tells them.

“Once that (trust) is destroyed, it’s very difficult to repair,” she said.