Why Deny Teachers Professional Benefits?

As a teacher for 16 years and a regular reader of The Times, the only time I hear teaching called a “profession” is when they want to cut my pay or require some sacrifice usually reserved for the clergy. Your Dec. 18 editorial, “High Stakes for the Schools,” did not disappoint. In what other profession could a person work for 10 years and still not afford a “starter house” in the neighborhood in which they live? If you insist on calling teaching a profession, advocate paying teachers at a “professional” rate.

Teachers are people too. We, like nearly everyone else, should have the right to choose where we work. If my union agreed to let some administrator transfer me, without my permission, to another school in order to fulfill the need of the latest educational fad to sweep through the district, I would immediately quit the union. The L.A. Unified School District is a very big place. Being forced to work hours away from home is just not a sacrifice that teachers, and most people, should be required to make. Teachers should not be called upon to make more sacrifices than anyone else. I prefer my union to be a nuts-and-bolts union.

Robert Crosby

Northridge

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I see you have trotted out your “transfer teachers around the city” editorial again. I wonder if you would reciprocate. Assemble your staff and apportion out transfers to newspapers in Pocatello and Barstow and Akron and Tallahassee and Altoona and Bismarck and Dubuque and Missoula and Hattiesburg. These towns need your expertise and experience. It’s only fair. Seniority be damned. Spread the wealth. Are you willing? Or will you admit that your suggestion is as absurd as mine?

Ann Bourman

Los Angeles