Teachers’ Strike Left Consumers Feeling Helpless

The teachers of Los Angeles’ Unified School District went on strike May 15 for more money and, 11 days later, got it. The dispute was the ultimate consumer issue. Taxpayers pay for the school system, taxpayers (or their children) consume the schooling, and consumers (parents and children) were inconvenienced by the strike--the very intention of the strikers, who wanted parents to force the district to grant their demands.

Except for manipulating their customers, management and workers treated their problems as a labor dispute, a periodic squabble at the plant. The resultant settlement is therefore good for teachers, at least temporarily, but not promising for education, perpetuating untouched a school system not organized for consumer benefit.

In sum, the 32,000 union teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians et al in the 600,000-student district--second largest in the nation--wanted more money, less non-classroom duty and some voice in their school’s management. They wanted a 21% salary increase over two years; they were offered 17.4%, 20%, 21.5% and then 24% over three years--the first 8% retroactive.

For a year, statistics and rhetoric filled the air, as the school administration tried to prove its offer the best ever and the teachers greedy and uncaring, and the teachers tried to prove themselves unusually ill paid and the whole system mismanaged by exorbitantly paid administrators.

Everything was relative: Compared to teachers elsewhere, a salary range of $23,000 to $43,000 in L.A. might look good, but not compared to the $91,000 earned by the superintendent’s chauffeur.

Confused by Accounting

Meantime, parents tried to support teachers informally, believing in the right to strike, in good teaching and in the profession’s need to attract and retain good people. They also studied the rhetoric, trying to decide who was right, as if it made any difference. The situation allowed them none of the usual consumer statements--boycotting product, shifting business, demanding money back.

Worse, consumers could barely follow, never mind judge, the variable accounting. The district, for example, provided a pie chart showing 55.9% of its $3.5-billion budget going to “classroom personnel,” including the teacher, plus aides and other special or substitute teachers who may or may not be there.

The union preferred to describe an average classroom, with 30 students and an allotment of $120,000 (about $4,000 per student). This is spent, said the union, on an average teacher salary of $32,000 plus $3,000 in benefits and $5,000 for textbooks and supplies, leaving $80,000, or almost 70%, spent outside the classroom.

Bad enough that each side populated a classroom differently. What to do with the union’s more direct hit, calling the district figure simply untrue, because the total “collective salary” in dispute--for teachers, counselors, librarians, nurses and others--was only $1.15 billion, hardly 55.9% of $3.5 billion.

There’s data to buttress any point. The district said the first 8% raise in its wage offer would make Los Angeles No. 1 for both beginning and maximum salaries among the 10 largest U.S. school districts.

The union preferred a Los Angeles County Office of Education ranking of the region’s 43 unified school districts, many considerably smaller than Los Angeles. In the ranking, the Los Angeles district’s current minimum salary was sixth and would move to fourth with the raise, its maximum salary 11th, moving to fifth.

Some further considerations: Comparison with other big U.S. school districts is persuasive if one is competing with them for teachers--apparently the district’s belief. Comparison to other nearby districts is equally appropriate “because housing is the predominant cost in everyone’s world, and in Houston, $40,000 to $45,000 is a good salary, while in the Los Angeles area, it’s barely livable,” says union spokesman Don Schrack.

Similarly, the union pointed out that Los Angeles’ top administrative salaries (including the superintendent’s $141,000) are the highest in the area--a comparison perhaps more appropriate with other big cities. “When you talk of teachers, the size of the district doesn’t matter,” says Michael Rosenberg, a compensation analyst at the county Office of Education. “When you talk of administrators, it does,” particularly if they’re administering an area 10 times larger than the next largest district, Long Beach.

Even the $91,000 chauffeur needed analysis. The district said he’s not a chauffeur, but a bodyguard, necessary because school superintendents have been killed. Only one, say critics--Oakland’s Marcus Foster, shot by the Symbionese Liberation Army back in 1973--and even Los Angeles County’s district attorney, a criminal prosecutor subject to many more threats, only pays his bodyguard/driver $79,000.

A further issue was working conditions--only touched on by the union demands but seemingly inextricable from money. The question, says former teacher and Los Angeles school parent Dorothy Clark, “is whether the money makes it worth putting up with the conditions--the volatile student situations, the lack of respect, the bureaucratic insanity.”

Certainly administrative salaries encourage teachers to leave the classroom and, if possible, the school. Central and regional administrative jobs guarantee a salary range of $37,000 to the superintendent’s $141,000, including some 43 district employees with salaries over $90,000--a roster that made many taxpayers think that the city needed not a strike but a revolution.

Enter Other Fields

To consumers, such administrative compensation made cross-country comparisons of teacher salaries almost irrelevant, if they weren’t already. Most simply supported “getting salaries up to attract people,” says Pacific Palisades resident Pam Bruns, “and we won’t be satisfied until top teachers are paid $70,000.”

Teaching as a consumer service may need more than repricing. Outside conditions have also diminished its attraction. Many potential teachers, like potential nurses, have been siphoned off by the women’s movement into new opportunities in law, business and computer work, and no 8%--or even 24%--raise is guaranteed to bring them back.

Nor does paying top dollar for the service guarantee more good or dedicated people in teaching. Dedication in any field never depended wholly on money, and “dedication is rare now,” sighs one Los Angeles parent. “With teachers, too, you’re dealing with the Me Generation.”

The money settled the labor dispute but left untouched many dissatisfactions that swirled around it. “The bottom line is how are the schools working,” says Pam Bruns. “The answer is not well, and wages are only part of it.”

The immediate settlement doesn’t change the basic configuration of the system, a huge bureaucracy, with labor and management unequal and basically antagonistic. Indeed, far from narrowing the financial gap between them, the strike may exacerbate it, if the administration, as usual, gets the same percentage raise as the teachers.

What lingers is a consumer feeling that strike and settlement are part of the problem with schools, not the solution. Once again, consumers saw two sides, both service providers, fight it out, while the service consumer, oddly without influence or power, was only a bystander.

“How can there be good schools without harmony,” asks Dorothy Clark, “when the people providing the service aren’t working together? The whole system needs to be revamped.”