L.A. Schools’ Problems Deeper Than State Pockets

The governor is calling it the “largest and most ambitious teacher incentive package in America.” And there is much for teachers to feel good about in the $2.4-billion collection of education initiatives Gov. Gray Davis signed into law last week.

The measures aim to attract new teachers and reward veterans by raising teachers’ salaries, cutting their taxes, improving their retirement benefits and providing bonuses for advanced training and certification.

“Now it can truly be said that California values teachers,” Davis pronounced at a news conference last week, flanked by a group of Sacramento-area teachers.

But forgive teachers in the giant Los Angeles Unified District if they don’t yet feel the love.

“The money is nice,” said Steve Blazak, spokesman for United Teachers-Los Angeles, the union that represents the city’s 36,000 teachers.

“But people don’t go into teaching to get rich. And for a lot of them, the fun has gone out of teaching. The problems of trying to teach in a large urban district are wearing them out.

“We hear everybody--the politicians, the administrators, the supposed education gurus--saying that everything hinges on the teachers,” he said. “But at the same time, teachers feel they’re being held accountable for a lot of things that are simply out of their control.

“And it’s a very uncomfortable feeling.”

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Teachers feel on the hot seat for good reason.

A statewide survey last year by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Californians fault teachers--more than campus overcrowding, inadequate funding or the extraordinary needs of poor and immigrant students--for the poor performance of our state’s schools.

“Our teachers feel like they’re under siege,” Blazak said. “They’ve become the unfair target of people who point fingers at them and say, ‘That’s why our schools are failing.’ ”

Even the best teachers are not miracle workers.

“Are children having trouble learning to read because the teachers aren’t teaching? You have to look at what their homes are like, what happens in these kids’ lives after school. . . .”

Teachers support the campaign to raise professional standards, he said. Almost 350 California teachers--167 in Los Angeles Unified--have met the stringent standards for certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and another 800 are now preparing for the exams.

There are fewer than 5,000 certified teachers in the country. Many candidates are deterred by the $2,000 application fee and the rigorous, yearlong preparation required. Fewer than half the teachers evaluated receive certification.

The certification process was created several years ago, not only to improve classroom instruction, but also to raise the status of teachers by providing the same type of professional review that doctors and lawyers undergo. National certification earns California teachers a $10,000 bonus, and Davis’ new state budget adds another $20,000 for certified teachers who spend four years teaching at low-performing schools.

Teachers “appreciate what the governor is doing for them,” Blazak said. “You know, we’ve got teachers who’ve been teaching for 10, 15 years, who can’t even afford to own a home. The money certainly helps. “But they’re still working in run-down, overcrowded schools, with no textbooks, no libraries, all this high-stakes testing. . . . It’s an uphill battle, and teachers are giving 110%. And it hurts when they’re considered the problem.”

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It wasn’t money that drew Semeen Issa into teaching 15 years ago. And it wasn’t money that led her to leave giant Hobart Elementary in Los Angeles Unified. She’ll bring home a smaller paycheck this fall, when she begins her new job in Arcadia.

“I loved Hobart, loved the kids,” Issa said. “But I began to feel so impotent . . . like I was just a number, my students were just numbers.”

The focus on test scores has transformed the classroom experience in schools like Hobart, one of the nation’s largest elementary schools, with 2,300 students on a year-round campus in a gritty, low-income neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles.

Hobart did well in statewide rankings, scoring at the highest level among schools with similar demographics. But the achievement comes at a cost, Issa said.

“These kids come in with language barriers, and we have to teach them test-taking skills. My whole curriculum the past few years is working on test-taking skills. Forget teaching them the joy of scientific inquiry, the experience of learning that social studies can be fun. It’s teach-to-the-test . . . and that’s taking the joy out for teachers and students.”

Issa has tried to keep up with the kinds of things the experts prescribe for good teachers. She earned her master’s degree in curriculum and is close to earning a second. She applied for national certification but fell just short of achieving a passing score.

And she can’t help but think that it was hard for the panel of experts evaluating her to relate to the problems faced by teachers in big urban schools like Hobart, in districts like LAUSD.

“We can talk all we want about national standards . . . I think that’s a positive thing. But I was teaching fifth-graders how to tell time. I’m sure that’s not very impressive [to the certification committee]. But that is our reality.”

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Sandy Banks can be reached at sandy.banks@latimes.com.