Success of Strike by L.A. Teachers Felt Across U.S.

The Los Angeles teachers strike is over, but the ripples from it are being felt across the country.

A plan for power-sharing between teachers and administrators and a pay increase that will bring top salaries to nearly $54,000 by next year have elicited keen interest among educators as far away as Vermont.

In districts closer to home, teachers’ union leaders are using Los Angeles as an example to encourage members to hold firm to their collective-bargaining demands.

“The (reaction) is beginning to astound me,” said United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson, who has received dozens of telegrams and telephone calls from teachers’ groups seeking tactical advice and information on the power-sharing proposal. “We may have raised the expectations of other districts.”

Nine-Day Strike

The 22,000-member Los Angeles teachers’ union went on strike for nine days in May, virtually shutting down education on most of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 600 campuses. The new agreement, the final wording of which is still being negotiated, calls for a three-year, 24% pay raise retroactive to June, 1988, and the creation of school decision-making councils, of which half the members will be teachers. In addition, the contract contains provisions to eliminate yard duty for elementary school teachers and give elementary instructors 40 minutes of paid preparation time a day.

Although some smaller districts already offer better teacher salaries than Los Angeles, and a few--notably Florida’s Dade County Public Schools--are years ahead in experimenting with power-sharing, analysts say that what happens in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, merits attention.

Receive Attention

“Anything done in Los Angeles . . . will automatically get attention nationwide, not only because Los Angeles is so large but because it is so troubled and the challenge is so great,” said Adam Urbanski, the president of the Rochester, N.Y., teachers’ association, who is widely respected for his role in crafting a landmark contract that boosted salaries for some teachers to $70,000 a year.

In particular, he added, “everyone will be watching very carefully to see if shared governance can work in Los Angeles.”

“The assumed understanding is, if it can work in Los Angeles, it can work anywhere,” Urbanski said.

In terms of pay, Los Angeles has the highest teacher salaries among the state’s big-city districts, including San Francisco and Oakland, and ranks in the top 5% of districts nationally, according to James Guthrie, a UC Berkeley education professor.

Guthrie said he is not surprised that some school superintendents and board members are worried that the Los Angeles salaries will lead to unrealistic demands from teachers in their districts.

“It will lead to what many people see as very high salaries,” he said.

Statewide, the average salary increase won in collective bargaining by teachers this year was about 5%, according to the California Teachers Assn. The Los Angeles agreement calls for an 8% retroactive raise in the current school year and 8% in 1989-90 and in 1990-91.

Eighteen of the state’s more than 1,000 school districts are still deadlocked in negotiations, mainly over monetary issues. Ray Tolcacher, president of the Assn. of California School Administrators, said the Los Angeles strike has made bargaining over salaries more difficult in those districts.

Bulletin Issued

For example, in San Jose, which has been mired in contract talks for more than a year, the teachers’ union last week issued a bulletin to its members trumpeting “The Los Angeles (UTLA) Success Story.” It gave details of the salary increase won in Los Angeles and urged San Jose union members to prepare for their own strike. The union is asking for a 7% raise, and the district has offered 4.3%.

“As a result of what happened down south,” said San Jose Teachers’ Assn. President Roger Evans, “we realized maybe the district does have money. And we realized that our proposal is an extremely modest proposal. Our members paid very close attention to what happened in Los Angeles, and they are holding firm.”

San Jose Schools Supt. Hilda Beck said the Los Angeles strike has had “a very detrimental effect, not only here but throughout the state.”

“All of the information put out by the (San Jose teachers’) union says if L.A. can do it, we can do it. It just makes the situation more difficult to handle,” she said.

Some education analysts say the call for decision-making councils in every district school is the most impressive aspect of the Los Angeles contract and a major breakthrough for a district that generally had been perceived as another big-city school system applying conventional solutions to huge problems of student dropouts, campus crime and disillusioned teachers.

First Time

“This part of the negotiations will be followed by teachers in the rest of the country for the rest of the century,” said Jewell Gould, research director of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington. “This marks the first time there has been a real strong resolution in a contract of parental and teacher involvement in school decision-making committees. We’re going to see things out of L.A. that will help the rest of the nation and help solve problems in places like Chicago and Detroit.”

Teacher unions in other large urban districts, such as New York, Chicago and Miami, have contractual agreements with their districts for power-sharing with administrators, but Gould said the Los Angeles plan is potentially more sweeping. It calls for establishing the councils at all district schools, instead of in a small pilot group, and principals will not have veto power.

District and union negotiators were hoping to finish fine-tuning the wording of the contract provisions on the power-sharing councils by today. So far, both sides have agreed on several key points that give the new councils broader powers than other school committees have had.

Most existing school committees, such as the bilingual education councils on many campuses, act in an advisory role only. Currently, the only committee with decision-making authority is the “school site council,” which operates on about half of the district’s campuses and has the power to decide how to spend special state money alloted for school improvement projects.

Union Members

The new councils will have authority over decisions affecting student discipline, some budget matters, scheduling and access to certain equipment, such as photocopying machines. All teachers, regardless of whether they are union members, will be eligible to vote and serve on the councils, and decisions will be made by majority vote. Half the members must be teachers, while parents, community members and staff, including the principal, will occupy the remaining seats.

Although control over the photocopying machine may strike some as a trivial concern, teachers say it represents an important symbol of their lack of authority to exert influence over the most basic aspects of their jobs. With shortages of books and other lesson materials, teachers say the machines are crucial but are often broken and their use restricted by some administrators.

“It is symbolic of the intensity of the problem,” UC Berkeley’s Guthrie said.