High Stakes for the Schools

Talks are underway between the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union, and it’s hard to recall a time when the educational stakes were so high while the fiscal constraints were so severe. The school system is boosting its still-too-low test scores and building needed campuses, but the budget crunch could upend that progress if the contract negotiations become power plays.

With months of discussion ahead, the two sides have already resolved a difficult element. The school board -- against the more fiscally prudent advice of the superintendent -- has agreed to continue paying for benefits that provide teachers and their families with fully paid health-care coverage for life.

Considering the gold-plated value of free health care in today’s market, teachers should find the prospect of little or no pay raise much easier to swallow. That ought to shift the focus of negotiations from financial issues to the philosophical and practical changes that need to occur for educational progress to be sustained.

The district plans to ask the union to loosen its insistence that seniority dictate how and where teachers are assigned. District leaders want the flexibility to assign the best teachers to the schools and classes that need them the most, particularly in middle and high schools, where achievement stubbornly lags.

That’s considered heresy in United Teachers-Los Angeles, where perennial distrust of administrators tends to throttle cooperative reform.

The union is already girding for battle, contending that principals would use that freedom to reward their friends and punish agitators and that teachers -- unwilling to have their lives disturbed by transfers -- would desert the district in droves.

A push for mandatory transfers is a prescription for contentious negotiations, says UTLA President John Perez. That’s a risk the school board may be reluctant to take, given that most of its members won office with campaigns bankrolled by UTLA. It would take uncommon political courage for them to pick a fight with their benefactors over a tenet the union considers sacrosanct. But courage, not currying favor, is exactly what’s needed now.

Both sides would do well to remember that the recent gains in student achievement resulted from the hard work of classroom teachers and the hard choices of district leaders.

Teachers, in their union’s contract proposal, are asking for relief from the burdens of top-down instructional edicts, more say in their own professional development and a less grueling schedule of student assessment. They want to be treated like partners in the push for instructional change, and the district ought to honor that. By the same token, it’s time for UTLA to release its grip on a labor union model better suited for factory workers assembling widgets than college-educated teachers shaping young lives.

If those things come about, the union and district can craft a contract that both respects the contributions of teachers and requires them to act like the professionals they are.