Teacher Integration, Labor, and Civil Rights in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 1962-1982

• In Event: Exploring the Tensions Between Teacher Professionalism and Students’ Rights During the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

Objectives
This paper will examine tensions between teachers’ professionalism and students' civil rights through a study of the mandatory teacher integration program in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In 1976 the LAUSD was ordered to implement a mandatory teacher integration program (LAUSD School Board Archives, 1976). Whereas in the early 1960s the American Federation of Teachers Local 1021 had partnered with the NAACP and the ACLU to propose a teacher integration policy, they greeted the mandatory program unenthusiastically. This paper will trace the dissolution of this civil rights/labor coalition. It will also highlight conflicting federal policies and the union’s focus on seniority that created different integration experiences for White, Black, and Latino teachers.
Literature/Theoretical framework
Daniel Perlstein (2004) has shown how the establishment of community-controlled schools in New York led to divisions between community advocates attempting to advance the rights of students, and the teachers union attempting to secure the professional prerogatives of teachers. Perlstein argues that teachers’ increasing racial, economic, and physical distance from their students heightened this division. Throughout the 1960s and 70s Los Angeles’ racial geography changed and the city and school district became increasingly segregated, creating a similar distance between White Los Angeles teachers and their students.
Adam Nelson (2001) has shown in his study of Boston that discordant definitions of “equal educational opportunity” led to the creation of regulations and programs that conflicted with each other. In Los Angeles, integration policies demanded by the Office of Civil Rights and bilingual policies established by Lau v Nichols contradicted each other, causing Black teachers to bear the burden of integration more heavily than teachers of other races.

Methods and data sources
This is a historical study based on school district, union, and court-appointed monitor archives, court cases, and local newspapers.
Results/conclusion
The study finds that Los Angeles’ changing racial geography, the growth of the suburbs, and the merging of the AFT with other teachers organizations contributed to the change in union attitudes towards teacher integration. The mandatory teacher integration policy challenged the long-established professional prerogative to choose the school in which a teacher taught. Additionally, the union’s focus on seniority combined with bilingual demands meant that Black teachers were transferred at higher rates than teachers of other races.

Significance
These findings illustration the tension between differing conceptions of students’ civil rights and teachers’ professional prerogatives. They may point to one element in the inception of urban schools’ difficulty in maintaining a stable and experienced teaching force (Ingersoll, 2001).

Author

• Teresa Frizell, University of Washington