Teachers: The Union Label, Professional Qualifications and Respect

Unlike Kip Dellinger (1/27/94) I can lay no claim to being a California licensed professional for 2 1/2 decades.

But adding up many more decades than that, I am a graduate of L.A. Unified, mother of two fellow graduates, have a daughter, sister and sister-in-law who teach in L.A. Unified, Mill Valley and Tustin, respectively. You can well imagine how school talk, as professionals and as parents, has been a mainstay of family conversation about these three widely disparate, but quintessentially Californian, school districts for these many years. We’ve read many of the mentioned books, all the way back to “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”

Combine that with my own honorary life membership in PTA, and my delight as a Girl Scout leader in taking our troop to high school graduation, and I believe I can match school involvement hours with the best.

To disparage teachers, to label men and women who have chosen that career as being a subclass somehow unworthy of respect for their professional training, seems to bear a substratum of bias, against who, why, what and where artfully concealed.

I distinctly remember my first heated discussion of local achievement. I was in the fifth grade, at Sheridan Street Elementary, where a classmate, newly arrived from New York, loudly asserted all New York children were smarter than all California children. I had difficulty with those flat assertions and engaged in a most unseemly screaming match over her alleged statistics.

But let’s switch professions and see if the union label is the culprit for the put-downs.

No names, for privacy, but unimpeachable and Californian.

Picture a municipal employees’ strike. Hitting the bricks in solidarity with the garbage collectors, bus drivers, police officers, clerical staff, were the district attorneys, the public defenders and the medical staffs. Does their public employment render their professional training nil?

Retired volunteer M.D.s helped out, as did practitioners from neighboring cities; common decency makes minimum levels of health care a given.

But courts were hard pressed to replace those municipal lawyers. Law, and respect for justice, demand speedy trials or defendants walk. Trials go forward on schedule by hiring private-practice lawyers at going-rate billable hours; for litigators this is top of the line.

One advantage employers enjoy during a strike is their savings in wages. No employees at work, no salaries to pay. Even when strikers win, they have helped finance their own wage hike. In the 1989 L.A. Unified strike, that much-discussed 8% pay hike, minus the nine days of work stoppage, resulted in an actual cost to the district of 3 1/2%, well below the then-prevailing wage increase.

So, here is the city, furious at the cutback in services, challenging the workers’ demands, but at least saving tax dollars. The only man costing them those high-priced legal fees, standing in their way, is head of the public defenders’ group, which includes their investigators and support staffs. This man is Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and Legal Aid Society from Harvard Law School (that’s a top-10% ranking) and he’s carrying a picket sign, organizing car pools to enable office staff to participate without spending too much on gas, preparing his wage-scale comparison figures for negotiations as if he were a specialist in labor accounting. He yielded up his control of the situation at the moment he deemed fair to as many parties as possible. His supervisors never forgave him for his union activities.

Does that make him less a professional than when he was sworn to the Bar?

Perhaps the nature of the employers establishes when united activity is appropriate, rather than the academic degree. We have witnessed medical professionals in job actions at our county hospital and at Kaiser Permanente.

Do we respect only the non-union among us?

Surely I’m not the only person who feels lack of community support has become a teachers’ burden, as much as a pay scale which traditionally has been non-competitive.

Doesn’t a career focused on concern for children deserve attention in an aspiring social order? Was it John Gardner who remarked that a society which doesn’t pay as much attention to its plumbers as to its philosophers would find neither its pipes nor its theories would hold water? And if nurturing children is not a priority, how will a society continue viable?

Wonder what Dellinger would find an appropriate pay scale for philosophers these days.

MARTY RAUCH

Los Angeles