An Education in the Payment of Teachers

Re “Teachers Union’s Excess,” editorial, Jan. 31: It must be nice to sit in judgment of a school district plagued by budget cuts and increased costs. The last two years have been a nightmare for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Between the governor’s cuts and the superintendent’s priorities, the classroom has felt the brunt of the dollar shortages.

Health benefits were given years ago in lieu of a salary increase. If one were to see the demands of our superintendent when he was negotiating his contract, one would see lifetime benefits for him and his. Looking at the tremendous turnover of new teachers, one might ask: Why do they not stay in teaching?

The answer is simple. Why should they stay when the classroom rates such a low spot on the educational totem pole? We worry about everyone but those who give us the gift of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.

Ira Kaplan

Woodland Hills

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Your editorial explicitly promotes the interests of “fat cats” over those of professionally trained workers who teach children in our public schools. We live in a society where corporate leaders earn 400 to 500 times a common worker’s pay; where corporations can accumulate billions of dollars for cash buyouts; where oil companies earn unconscionable profits from oil shortages resulting from flawed government policies, policies promoted and supported, if not actually organized, by these companies.

We see the destruction of American industry, sold abroad for profit; citizens’ pay continually reduced; health and retirement benefits headed toward speculative “privatization.” I submit that it is in the national interest, and that of The Times and even the fat cats themselves, to reduce fat-cat power. The alternative is the fall of American democracy to the level of a plutocratic banana republic.

David Dart

Los Angeles