Honeymoon Over for L.A. Unified, Teachers : Education: After gains made in 1989, the 3% pay cut imposed by the school board has angered many. Some believe expectations had been raised too high.

When Los Angeles teachers ended their nine-day strike in 1989, they were riding high on the crest of a wave that they thought would usher in a new era of professionalism and cooperation.

They had won a salary increase that made them among the nation’s best paid teachers, better working conditions, and a groundbreaking guarantee that teachers would have more say in running their schools.

But two years later, the goodwill has evaporated, and teachers--outraged at the school board’s decision last week to head off bankruptcy by slashing 3% from their pay--find themselves locked in yet another bitter struggle that could send them back to the picket line as early as next month.

What went wrong? How did the teachers’ triumphal campaign to elevate their profession carry them to this point, which many are describing as the lowest in their careers?

Some say that the problem boils down to money. With the state mired in the worst recession in more than a decade, school spending has been drastically cut, while the district’s expenses have continued to grow.

Others say that the strike simply raised teachers’ expectations too high.

“The good feelings that existed were only on the part of the teachers,” said former union President Wayne Johnson. “And that was wishful thinking . . . that maybe we had hurdled an obstacle and now we could have peace and we could work together.”

The cornerstone of that peace was to be the creation of decision-making councils--dominated by teachers, but including parents and school principals--that would run each campus. For the first time, teachers would have some control over issues as mundane as who could use a copying machine and as significant as how lottery proceeds would be spent.

But almost immediately, the complaints began. School principals objected publicly to the new power-sharing plan. Teachers were accused of trivializing it by using it primarily to improve their working conditions. And parents griped that they were left out of the process, and little was changing in their children’s classrooms.

Meanwhile, the district was cutting the money allocated to individual schools--shifting it to the district’s general fund to help cover its growing deficit. As a result, local councils were left with little money to control.

“We got taken,” said teacher Mike Dreebin, who sat on the decision-making council at Hoover Avenue Elementary School. “We would spend hours arguing over how to spend our lottery money and finally agree (on a budget) . . . only to have the district pull the rug out and take the money away.

“We began to feel like we were being stabbed in the back,” he said.

Publicly, relations between the district and its teachers seemed to be improving. United Teachers-Los Angeles (UTLA) had a newly elected leader--reform-minded Helen Bernstein had replaced the firebrand Johnson--and the school board had bought out the contract of the union’s nemesis, former Supt. Leonard Britton.

Last spring, with the teachers’ contract winding down, union and district leaders began a round of comradely negotiations, pledging to avoid the rancor that had characterized their past bargaining efforts.

But those talks had barely gotten off the ground when word filtered out to teachers that the district would face a massive budget shortfall this year that could trigger unprecedented campus cutbacks.

The first blow was struck in March, when the school board threatened to lay off 2,000 teachers, librarians, nurses and others.

For more than a month, hundreds of angry teachers trekked daily to a legal hearing on the layoffs, where their emotional testimony helped persuade an administrative law judge to side with the union’s lawyers, who charged that the district’s personnel records were in such disarray that it could not be determined if the layoffs were fair. In the face of the judge’s ruling, the school board backed down and rescinded the layoff notices.

Even though the layoff threat was lifted, relations began deteriorating between the district and union. Bernstein said district officials were insensitive and heavy-handed in their management tactics, forcing her to adopt a more combative stance.

“They totally destroyed my ability to move this union on a reform agenda,” Bernstein said recently. “I wanted to sell my teachers on a lot of risky things.”

Instead, she found herself “resorting to old union tactics” to try to hold off a pay cut by the district and fend off agitators inside the union who worried that teachers had gone soft and would lose the gains they’d won through the strike.

Former UTLA President Johnson says that he probably would have taken a tougher stand against the district more quickly, and that he would not have extended the olive branch at all.

“But I don’t think it would have made any difference,” he said. “There really is a financial disaster in public schools in California and teachers have to understand that. I think Helen has been effective and I support her. It wouldn’t be any different if Wayne Johnson were there, because the dollars aren’t there.”

Bernstein acknowledges that some union members question her leadership. But she believes most union members stand firmly behind her and understand the economic realities they are battling. “The state was not in a major recession when we negotiated that contract two years ago,” she said. “This year there’s a $14-billion budget deficit and I resent it when people leave that out of the equation.”

In big city districts throughout the country, teachers are feeling the brunt of the recession as cash-strapped school systems hold the line on pay raises to cut costs.

About half of the nation’s urban school systems have frozen teachers’ wages, or implemented pay cuts or salary deferrals in the last year, said Jewell Gould, research director of the American Federation of Teachers.

And in Los Angeles, the problem is complicated by the push for costly reforms that escalated the district’s financial crisis, Gould said. “Here, you had the leadership of the district and the union moving toward a new vision” without corresponding cuts in spending to finance the education innovations, he said.

Eventually the district crashed into a wall of fiscal realities and had to make cutbacks that threatened many of the gains teachers had made in 1989--including the raises, class size limits and paid conference time.

Johnson and Bernstein contend it is no accident that those gains are under attack.

“I think the day the strike ended, (district officials) began making preparations to get even,” Johnson said. “I think they’ve been working on that all along and I think they think they’ve succeeded.”

But others blame the union for its own predicament, contending that teachers’ greedy demands for raises the district could not afford have come back to haunt them.

“I take no joy in saying ‘I told you so,’ ” said former school board member Rita Walters, who warned in 1989 that the raises would lead to future cuts and voted against the strike settlement package.

“As long as the union thought they could bully their way through, they were very happy,” she said. “But a commitment to working together with the district means working together when things are tough and aren’t going your way and that’s what they’re not willing to do.”

Even the union’s supporters agree that the district’s approval of the raises--which exceeded the amount recommended by a state fact-finding panel--led to a backlash in Sacramento that made the governor and legislators hold the line on school funding increases.

“I walked the (picket) line during the strike and I think it was a perfectly correct settlement,” said Jeff Horton, a former teacher who was elected to the school board last spring with UTLA backing.

But it did poison the well in the state Capitol, he said, as demonstrated by Gov. Pete Wilson’s refusal to sign a bill that would have given the district $88 million to mitigate its financial problems.

“Pete Wilson said specifically the district was irresponsible to give the (raises) and now we have to pay,” Horton said. “His veto was clearly a chance to give a comeuppance to L.A. Unified, both the union and the board.

“It’s a classic case of getting people who should be allies to squabble over crumbs. I just hope that we can join together again and return to that strategy of attacking the funding problems at the state level, rather than each other.”

But UTLA’s Johnson said he sees even darker days ahead for the union and the district.

“I think the anger teachers have toward (district) administration is worse today than it was during the strike,” Johnson said. “My fear is the anger and frustration they feel, because they can’t take it out on the district, they will take it out on (Bernstein) and the union. And that will cripple us for the fight next year.

“And there will be a fight next year,” he said.