UNION MUSCLE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Gibbons, Russell W.
erages places in the senior college of their choice. In order to be considered for admission to a senior college, a s~.dent first had to attain an 85 average and be in the top 30 percent of his...
...Saying "No" is better than saying you are sorry, members of the school board group were advised...
...The tap at Health, Education and Welfare was turned half-way when Lyndon Johnson's Asian adventure took I | l l ii i II IllllllllllllI llllllllLIl llll NO FAMINE IN THE LAND Studies in honor of John L. McKenzie Photos, letters, biography . bibliography of John McKon?Jo AfricAns by RAYMOND BROWN, ROLAND MURPHY, BRUCE VAWTER, BERNARD COOKE, J. D. CROSSMAN, DAVID hi...
...This is disappointing too...
...Other ways to speed up the education of the black poor would be to create entirely new forms of education...
...The plan did not establish a coordinated remedial policy directed from the top but left such a policy to the discretion of the individual colleges...
...Neither did it devalue the university and cause a mass exodus from the urban public universities to the urban private universities as such Cassandras as New York University's James Hester gloomily predicted...
...Application of the "faithful children" concept of the immigrant church would seem to have little support when professionals in Catholic schools see their fellow teachers in public institutions thousands of dollar away in the income and benefits sectors...
...Joseph the Worker" ceremony and Labor Day Mass...
...Carrying this stick to its logical extension, if a teacher strike goes past an undetermined number of classroom days, the prospect of both ungraduated seniors missing college and unwanted summer sessions would result in an unbearable parents and community to "bring the Said the seminar spokesman: "Let the back to work after they are out for "The judge" in Pittsburgh occupied a unique role: as a member of the County Court of Common Pleas, (Continued on page 275) Union Muscle In Parochial Schoolm If big city school systems are experiencing the sharp edge of budget cuts and the rising discontent of professionals who are looking toward trade union solutions, then the long-neglected plight of lay teachers in the Catholic schools may provide additional evidence that the church cannot insulate its parochial institutioris from the conflicts of a secular society...
...THE OTHERS are the many thousands who have brought intellect and verve to our campus...
...And, it must be rememhered, the quarrel at City College initially centered on quotas...
...The Association of Catholic Teachers, an affiliate of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO American Federation of Teachers, called it a "ploy," observing that it had sought for over a year to meet with Cardinal Krol on the issue, without success...
...It went to a trickle when Nixon began to dismantle much of the e~ecrive HEW apparatus...
...It was the theme at a recent meeting of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association at a seminar conducted in an Allegheny foothills resort, and teachers in that state's two largest cities can provide currency to an evolving hard line in educational collective bargainins...
...They could be small decentralized units constituting an ambulatory higher education component serving a wide area...
...FREEMAN, G. E. MENDENHALL end ethers...
...Union professionals and clerical employees have been locked in a dispute with the Newark school board since Portrait o[ Saint Eh~aheth Ann Seton by arttst Joseph Dawley of Crall/ord, N,J...
...The first demand of the black students was for quotas...
...Obviously, a picket line is not professional, and articulation of vocal feelings on those lines have served to trigger the philosophy that the courts can best resolve classroom interruptions due to personnel problems...
...The severe economic retrenchment has halted the progress towards free universal higher education...
...shows her as a yotmg mother WOMEN have done much for Seton Hall University...
...O0 HUMPTY DUMPTY 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN In All the President's Men an anonymous source who is key to the Watergate investigation is always referred to as "Deep Throat," and the suggestion in this nickname that somehow journalism is like pornography seems an apt one...
...We have yet to realize this goal...
...The conflict situations were dramatized in Philadelphia three years ago and in Pittsburgh earlier this academic year, when union teachers were locked into bitter twomonthlong strikes which forced the political and economic power centers of both cities to appeal to the state for bail-ont funds...
...These tactics appear to be more in vogue than any frontal assault in a diocese which has long projected a "pro-labor" image, with an annual "St...
...Criminal charges again~ teachers involved in picketing brought the invocation from the bench which has become familiar to any teacher who has sought to enter into the meaningful collective bargaining sector: teachers and professionals must set "good examples" for students...
...Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,, Los Angeles, Gary, Indiana, and even Kailua, Hawaii, are expected to have NLRB elections which could result in unionization of faculties on the elementary and secondary level of Catholic schools...
...All protagonists accepted the proposition that admissions could not be truly universal, and proposed versions of quota plans...
...Moreover, the open admissions plan failed to offer strong remedial and recruitment programs...
...The rhetorical outpouring from the school systems of the larger cities and smaller communities alike has increasingly evolved into murky language of "optimal educational objectives" coupled with "budgetary criteria," which when translated into the realities of the marketplace mean simply that there will be higher costs, larger classes and an increasing incidence of confrontation between teachers and their employers...
...The Pittsburgh school administration proposed its own solution to the settlement cost: on March 1 it recommended to the board that a two-percent teaching staff and fourpercent non-professional reduction be effected...
...The alternatives for reducing inequality through education are few...
...recently wrote the Association of Catholic Teachers that "(Canon Law and theology) experts all agree that a union such as you propose is contrary to the teachings of the church and in direct violation of Canon Law...
...A concerted effort by the school administration to open seleered schools, coupled with veiled threats about the consequences to seniors who sought college admissions all came at a time when hundreds of teachers joined picket lines in January's sub-zero temperatures...
...R.W.G...
...aussnLL w. OlSBONS observed Pittsburgh's teacher strikers in and out o] the cold through December and January...
...WE'VE NOTICED...
...The district, with more than 61,000 students crowded into 150 schools, had also presented long-simmering issues of classroom size and building discipline, which were part of the strike momentum--and factors which kept the walkout over 90 percent effective...
...In Philadelphia in January, several pastors in the archdiocese announced legal action to enjoin the NLRB from setting up an election for the 2,000 lay teachers in the archdiocesan elementary schools, dedaring that the Board's presence would "plunge the ]1 Ilil I ill I II I government deeply into the affairs of parish schools...
...Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose name we bear and whose spirit we have followed since 1856...
...J. W. Fianagan and A. W. Robinson...
...And with the sentiment growing against free tuition and open admissions in these hard times there is less likelihood that the Truman recommendations may come to pass...
...This spring the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency which supervises the collective bargaining process for the Department of Labor, is seriding staff into half a dozen cities where teachers and .(excluding clerical and religious) other employees, have petitioned for elections to determine if unions should represent them in Catholic school systems...
...John's University reported a 30 percent drop in enrollment the first year of open admissions...
...Among others, the union refused to agree in advance to layoffs and the lengthening of the school day without an increase in pay...
...Milton Shapp at the time seeking delegation control even if he was the only one taking his candidacy with seriousness...
...In fact, the reverse happened: prospective middie-class students left the urban private universities to attend CUNY...
...Not one was black, although the inner-city black population in Pittsburgh schools is greater than forty percent...
...The layoffs have been planned all along," says one union otficer, "and the strike became a rationalLTation for,the cutbacks...
...Founded 1856 $ETON 4tALL IINIVERSITY South Orange, New Jersey 07079 CommonweaL" 275 the first of the year and, as of this writing, have been out since early February...
...What was expected of open admissions did not come to pass...
...The unionization of Catholic high schools and elementary schools offers only destruction," declared the parish bullletin of a northside church recently, warning the congregation that the leaders of the Pittsburgh AFT and the Pittsburgh Diocesan Teachers were acting "in the style of Hitler and Mussolini...
...It's as if the porno movie were focused on the man all the time instead of the woman...
...And at the same time, the embattled Pittsburgh Board of Education declared that untenured teachers and paraprofessionals would become victims in a personnel cut which they said was triggered by the teacher's wage package...
...A quota system, although politically improbable, presents one method...
...judge put them a month...
...S C H O O L S...
...The first was St...
...Observers of the meteoric rise of the American Federation of Teachers in membership growth in the past decade recall that its two titular leaders, Dave Selden and A1 Shanker~ both became brokers in the educational picture after they "did time" for refusing to obey injunctions in New York and New Jersey...
...We find ourselves trying to peer around them, wishing they would get out of the way and being 23 Aoril 1976:276...
...Whatever the current state of the investigation is, it doesn't satisfy us...
...And according to an unpublished study of open admissions at Queens College by Susan Levine, many guidance counselors did not encourage black students---a rise from 8.7 percent black and Puerto Rican students in 1969 to between 9 and 13 percent in 1971-72, approximately 1.5 times less than the average for all senior colleges...
...In a sense Woodward and Bernstein, and filmmaker Alan J. Pakula, are defeated by their own material...
...Local leaders of the Teachers Union had predicted a "long" strike, and the 58-day walkout approximated the time which the board had also conceded would he necessary to "pay" for the union package...
...In Pittsburgh, in the wake of the bitter two-monthlong strike of the city's public school teachers, an NLRB election has been authorized for the diocesan elementary schools for this month...
...The other conflict is so obvious as to be almost embarrassing: "The same bishops who back the United Farm Workers and their right to representation and representative elections seem selectively ignorant of the principles of social justice when their own employees are involved," the Association of Catholic Teachers recently wrote to Cardinal Krol...
...Under Ford the prospect is for more of an economic blackboard jungle for the schools and those who occupy the classrooms...
...Its implicit promise is always to go further and shock us more, so we quickly become jaded...
...Edit'ors Order: Scholars Press University of Montana MJssoula, Montana 5980I Price: $7.00 priorities away from the Great Society...
...Many teachers saw the "long strike" calculation as a concerted and deliberate gang-up by school administrators, the appointive board and the judiciary to eventually emasculate the union as an effective bargaining agent in the Pittsburgh schools...
...UNION...
...the Brooklyn Center of Long Island University revealed that freshman enrollments were down 40 percent for the first two years of open enrollment...
...The "bailout" money which eventually came from Harrisburg must be seen within the realities of a presidential election year--with Pennsylvania Gov...
...23 Aoril 1976:270 he and other members also approve nominees to the board of education--which under the state constitution are appointive and not elective...
...Once Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have exposed the political mess, they can sense that the public is still listless, still looking for new Watergate kicks...
...Yet when they came in out of the cold on January 26, the teachers had won the biggest money package in their history...
...For the name of the educational game is still money---and budget retrenching, personnel cutbacks and moving the resolution of teacher disputes to the courtroom from the negoriating room are but ominous signs that saying "No" will become a popular Neanderthal tactic in an increasing sector of academia...
...Some thirty years ago President Truman had appointed a special commission to study the problem of higher education and it came up with the recommendation that every youngster be guaranteed an education up until the 14th yearmtwo years of college...
...Yet free higher education should still remain our goal...
...When it appeared that even this unlikely panel had recommended in favor of the strikers, the judge suggested that he would bum the fact-finding study...
...A diocesan attorney in Gary, Ind...
...While the torch was not set to the report, rifle blasts did shatter the door and inner hall of the local PFT headquarters, and sheriffs' deputies padlocked the union headquarters and froze their bank account...
...But in the interim, in order to string us along and stretch out the material, they even try giving us their own story...
...In Orchard Park, an affluent bedroom community of Buffalo, one of the longest strikes in any suburban school system in upstate New York last year resulted in bitter divisiveness in the community and a virtual sacking of the tenure system by judicial degree...
...The bad news is that they have already begun to pay "blood money," as one returning striker-put it, for their 5S-day walkout: a local judge who had sought to force them back to work through an injunction and lines subsequently ruled that the board could withhold union dues from checkoff until the $105,000 in contempt fines he assessed were paid...
...In time, free college will be taken for granted as has public schooling at the elementary and secondary level...
...A scandal such as Watergate titillates and leads us on...
...In the end they therefore give us the human side of the news--how Nixon drank heavily, grove!ed on the floor, made for the window, etc...
...It is essentially the background of their story we are focused on...
...and Hester's NYU was so badly affected in enrollment that the university, caught i~ a financial squeeze had to go as far as to sell its uptown undergraduate campus to the state university...
...Padlocking of offices, injunctions and individual and union fines assessed for every day strikers refuse to return to work have not been uncommon in other teacher disputes since the beginning of the 1975-76 school year...
...President Ford's new Secretary of Labor, W. J. Usery, told school management personnel in Miami--at the same time that Pittsburgh teachers were being fined $10,000 a day by the coup---that "fines and jail sentences often do more to hinder the chances of settlement than to enhance them, . . there can be no doubt that future relationships are severely ruptured by such harsh reaction...
...In order to be considered for admission to a senior college, a s~.dent first had to attain an 85 average and be in the top 30 percent of his or her class...
...We owe it to ourselves to make higher education accessible to the poor as well as to the more well-o6 in terms of manpower resources and social justice...
...sel for those official s who must deal with blackboard professionals is based on some tortuous applications of the law: in Pennsylvania and most other states, 180 days of school is required for state aid...
...The good news for Pittsburgh teachers was an average 24 percent salary increase for some 4,500 members of the AFL-CIO Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, the 23 April 1976:268 first part of a 30-month package which is expected to exceed $19.3-million through the middle of 1978...
...Its very strength is their failure, for Watergate is of such interest to us that it overwhelms any interest we might have taken in Woodward and Bernstcin...
...There must be some other version of the scandal, we always feel, that will really tell it all-that will expose the whole, sordid, horrible, delicious story we are not now getting...
...It was not the egalitarian program one hoped...
...These might consist of experimental colleges geared to existing high-paying jobs and not bound by traditional credentialing involved in our present undergraduate and graduate schools...
...This counpressure among teachers back...
...More than the usual bread-andbutter money package was involved in both strikes, however, and there is evidence that the pattern of the extended confrontation is surfacing by design in other parts of the country...
...MUSCLEIN PUBLIC RUSSELL W. GIBBONS A hard line in educational collective bcrg g If traditionalism is crumbling everywhere and young girls no longer heed moral injunctions to say "No," then the banner apparently has been taken up in the public sector by many of the nation's elected school boards...
...This particular judge also initiated a series of back-to-work injunctions and fines against the union, and in the Catch-22 atmosphere of the final days of the strike named a five-person "citizens committee" to give him a report, only two of whom resided within the city school district...
...Despite its rifle, the men whom All the President3 Men is about are Woodward and Bernstein themselves...
...The reaction from some quarters has not reflected the "progressive, social encyclical" posture which has generally found expression among the Catholic bishops in the past 40 years, artd while the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has so far stepped around eggs on the issue, some of its members have come down with a heavy hand...
...We begin to feel cheated, as we would in a grind house, when we figure out that the plot here isn't just a pretext for showing us what we really came to see...
...As a result of these feelings, no number of revelations and resignations is ever enough...
...The W. Paul Stillman School of Business Administration u The College of Arts and Sciences s The School of Education n The College of Nursing m School of Law Co-educational and PROUD of it...
Vol. 103 • April 1976 • No. 9
