LAUSD teachers went on strike in 1989. But are the stakes higher in 2019?

Whether they were stuck in an auditorium or playing long-term hooky, many a school kid old enough to remember the 1989 Los Angeles teachers strike recalls the period as nine days of good old-fashioned lawlessness.

Quoted in a New York Times article at the time, LAPD Lieut. Frank Valdez expressed his concern about “little predators” roaming LA’s downtown streets. “The problem kids are not going to go to school and it’s going to create problems all over, not just on campus,” he said during the strike.

Jamie Todd Rubin, an 11th-grader at Cleveland High School at the time, wistfully remembers weekday ventures to the beach, Valley bowling alleys and movie theatres while his teachers fought for better pay as his personal “golden age.”

Triumphantly, he recalled that “teachers ended up getting what they were looking for too.” In many respects, they did.

By all accounts, teachers succeeded in gleaning higher wages, more administrative control and greater stature for their union from the Los Angeles Unified School District after thousands walked off the job in the spring of 1989.

It was the second teachers strike since the founding of United Teachers Los Angeles in 1970, ushering angst into the city and turmoil to the nation’s second largest school system.

In 1989, the major win for teachers after the walkout that lasted nine days was getting school-based management and shared decision-making into a contract. Around 80 percent of members participated in the strike, and half of LAUSD K-12 students stayed home.

Read full LA Unified School District coverage here

As an army of 30,000 teachers stand ready to form new picket lines on Monday, their demands ring markedly familiar: higher pay, relief from ballooning class sizes, and more nurses, librarians and counselors trained to address the medical and psychological needs of today’s students.

Has much really changed?

Former UTLA President John Perez, who was on the picket lines both as a teacher in 1970, said it this way:

“To be perfectly honest, very little has changed. In 1970 we felt disrespected. In 1989 we felt disrespected. And in 2018 teachers feel disrespected.”

Undercurrents of teacher empowerment were also at the crux of the 1970 strike, UTLA’s first, when around half of the young union’s members went off the job for nearly five weeks.

Then, as now, district officials threatened that acceding to their calls for salary increases would spell financial ruin.

Parallels between ’89 and today run as deep as rhetorical strategy, like the union’s relentless critiques of LA Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner.

“Oh yeah it was a big war in ’89 and the union made superintendent [Leonard] Britton the bad guy,” Perez said. Picketing teachers wore buttons with his face over a lemon, or with a slash over his face. “We called him Lenny the lemon.”

Some have argued all this recurrence is evidence that the lasting effects of earlier strikes have been mixed at best, and that securing lasting public funding for education has proven elusive over the decades.

Former LAUSD elementary school teacher Michael Romo lamented the lack of progress since 1989.

“Back in my day we had nurses, smaller class sizes and maybe even better stocked libraries,”  said Romo, director of the California Teachers Association in Burbank and Glendale.

He went on strike in 1989, his first year of bilingual teaching at Norwood Street Elementary School. “For 30 years to come back to the same issue, it’s like we’ve made no progress.”

Of course, things do change in 30 years. Along with overarching economic differences and a friendlier face in the governor’s mansion, a key factor in this looming walkout that appears to have been absent from previous strikes is competing visions for the future of public education.

UCLA Professor John Rogers, director of the university’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, interpreted the current impasse between the district and the union as a reflection of opposite reactions LAUSD’s current financial and enrollment woes.

“The district is thinking about how they can contain costs and deal with a growing charter school sector by devolving the district over time as a portfolio of schools,” he said. “While teachers think the way forward is to more broadly improve the quality of its own educational program, only sometimes acknowledging how much spending that requires.”

The emergence of charter schools in Los Angeles, which are privately managed but publicly funded, have been central to the standoff between district and union leadership.

Perez seems to think this is uncharted territory, particularly what he said was superintendent Beutner’s goals to break up and “privatize” the a time-honored and democratic institution like L.A. Unified.

“The existential threat to public education as we know it is real. That wasn’t there in 1989,” he said. The district’s financial woes this time around also have some experts worried about a state takeover.

“My understanding is after the strike it will appear to be a win for teachers and then the layoffs will come soon after,” said UCLA Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies Pedro Noguera.

Noting LA County’s recent appointment of a fiscal team to the district, he said “That’s my fear, that they’re at risk of being taken over.”

Carmen Romero, special education teacher at South Gate High School, remembers those long days in auditoriums, in the gym and on the football field as a 10th-grader at Bell High School during the 1989 strike.

“We didn’t feel valued as students,” she said about the nine days of boredom. More of a rule-follower, she was on campus every day of the strike.

“But it made me appreciate school more, and feel like I deserve things like desks and respect.” Now that she’s gearing up to get on the picket line as a teacher, “It’s the same feeling.”