New Chief Rallies Teachers, Outlines Goals

Emerging from the shadow of his effervescent predecessor, the new president of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teachers union pledged Saturday to help cure what ails public education during his first major speech to field lieutenants at their annual desert confab.

Day Higuchi addressed a gathering of 700 campus leaders from the nation’s second-largest educators’ local, just weeks after a sharp attack by Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole. In his San Diego acceptance speech, Dole accused teachers unions of defending the status quo and promised to disregard their political power “for the sake of children.”

“Bob Dole was absolutely wrong,” Higuchi said, speaking in the ballroom of a hotel near Palm Springs where Clinton/Gore campaign posters and buttons were in abundant supply.

Higuchi cited public opinion polls and the union’s own recent voter surveys showing that respect for teachers persists despite declining confidence in public education and teachers unions in general and in the Los Angeles Unified School District specifically.

“Nobody believes the district can fix itself,” Higuchi said. “We’re going to save this sucker, and they’ve finally realized that no one but the teachers can do it.”

Higuchi said that during his three-year term at the helm of the 29,000-member United Teachers-Los Angeles he would dedicate himself to lobbying for a $2.4-billion school repair and construction bond headed for the November ballot and to developing teacher peer-review systems to weed out poor educators. When he asked audience members to raise their hands if they knew of an unqualified colleague, hundreds of hands went up throughout the room.

In addition, Higuchi said he wants to make the academic standards recently established by the district binding, so that students will not be promoted to the next grade until they have reached a specified level of learning.

“There will be no more social promotions,” he said to loud applause. “If a kid doesn’t know it, and there’s nothing wrong with that kid’s brain, he will not move on.”

Higuchi, 54, was elected to the union presidency last spring after six years as vice president under the tenacious Helen Bernstein. He sought the post, he has said, because he believes his expertise in curriculum--what teachers actually teach--will be key in the next phase of education reform.

During previous speeches, Higuchi tended to be more rambling than rallying, more pedantic than inspiring--a shortcoming some teachers feared could mute his effectiveness as a union leader.

But practice with a voice coach has markedly improved his delivery. Even when he discovered he had lost part of his speech halfway through Saturday’s address, Higuchi managed to recoup and ad lib, to a standing ovation.

“Before, he has always come across as a not very dynamic person,” said Stephanie Schwartz, a teacher at Granada Hills High School. “But today he showed some oomph. . . . Even when he lost it, he didn’t lose it.”

Educators’ conferences are peculiar slices of society, where speakers’ grammatical errors are quickly noted and the most popular vendor freebies are red apple key rings, metallic pencils and neon rulers.

That Democrats would be the candidates of choice at such gatherings is hardly a surprise, even for the candidates themselves: President Clinton sent the UTLA a letter of encouragement; Dole did not.

But many participants admitted that they were taken aback by the level of Dole’s animosity toward teachers unions.

Bonnie Tompkins, a third-grade teacher at Burton Elementary School in Panorama City, said that never in her 26 years of teaching had she felt so professionally insulted.

“I was startled by it,” she said. “I think there are some problems, but considering what we’re dealing with . . . I think we’re doing remarkably well.”

Challenges ahead for the 26-year-old union are legion. Beyond responding to conservative political attacks from afar, UTLA must address divisions within its ranks over the wisdom of breaking up the 660,000-student public school system as well as accusations from some minority parents that teachers have thwarted reforms in inner-city schools.

And, as if that were not enough, Higuchi must find ways to reach out to an increasingly younger membership more concerned about such basic needs as on-the-job training than carving out roles as union activists.

More than half of UTLA’s 27,000 members have been hired in the past seven years, thanks to retirements, resignations and enrollment growth. The new state initiative to reduce primary class size to 20 students is escalating the swing toward youth by dramatically increasing the need for new teachers, with up to 2,600 extra teachers to be hired this year in Los Angeles Unified.

Higuchi hopes to lure some of the newcomers into the union fold by providing training programs at the larger mid-Wilshire headquarters UTLA wants to buy.

LEARN--or the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now--is at a crucial crossroads three years into its effort to shift school governance from the central office to the campus. More than a third of the district’s schools have signed up, but few of those have been from the city’s poorer areas.

Additionally, many of the schools that have joined the plan are approaching the key moment when those reforms should be moving from administrative adjustments to classroom approaches.

Many teachers unions have fought reforms, seeing them as threats to their hard-fought workplace rights. But Bernstein toiled to counter that reputation in Los Angeles by becoming one of LEARN’s architects.

That legacy may be UTLA’s--and other unions’--best defense against anti-union sentiments. At Saturday’s conference, Bernstein chaired a session on the union’s changing role in reform, a process she is now advocating nationally as head of an effort called the Teacher Union Reform Network.