The Strike Must Be Settled

By letting the current dispute reach a strike point, the Los Angeles school board has forced the teachers’ union to stand firm on its demands, not only for higher pay but also for a greater role in school decisions. By striking, the United Teachers-Los Angeles union has forced some members of a divided school board to dig in their heels against increasing a pay offer that they already think is too high. All the participants are truly at an impasse that not even the independent fact-finder’s report, due out today, may resolve. A major part of the answer, at least that part of it that involves money, must once again come from Sacramento.

This has indeed gone too far, as one first-grader said Monday. The strike must be resolved soon so that the regular school year does not end in an even more uncertain way than it began. Union members have been teaching without a contract all year. They deserve higher pay. They deserve to be treated as professionals, to have more say, for example, in the textbooks they use and the curricula they follow.

To register their anger, they have now withheld the grades that the superintendent said had to be turned in by Monday. And so tens of thousands of students feel free to go to the beach, to the video arcades, to the shopping malls. Those who are in school throw paper at each other in auditoriums or learn little from substitutes who must concentrate more on keeping order than on teaching lessons.

The fact-finder’s report should indicate whether the school board has the money to meet the teachers’ pay demands. But the real answer on money probably won’t come until later in the week when the state’s revised income figures are released. Then Los Angeles will know how much of the anticipated surplus it can expect to help pay what the proposed contract would cost. The schools always depend on Sacramento’s largess, of course, but by waiting for state help to solve their internal problem, they risk closer state control as well. The intangible non-economic issues may be harder to resolve. How much has the necessary reservoir of trust between administrator and teacher already been depleted?

The students have fundamental questions as well. Will they have graduation ceremonies? Who will have to go to summer school? What happens to the year-round school program? Will the work they have done this spring be fairly evaluated? And most important, what do the union and the school board care about most, themselves or the students?