MAKING A BAD BARGAIN PROPOSAL WOULD TAKE VITAL EDUCATION ISSUES OUT OF PUBLIC'S CONTROL.

Byline: Roy Romer Local View

THE heat has been turned up on an Assembly bill being promoted by the California Teachers Association that would expand the number of issues captured by collective bargaining.

You may have heard ads running on the radio promoting this as a way to encourage grass-roots (i.e., teacher) involvement in our children's education.

In fact, this bill would remove some of the most important issues affecting education from the public policy process and place them into the adversarial collective bargaining process.

Gov. Gray Davis took a courageous stance Wednesday when he said he could not sign Assembly Bill 2160 in its present form because he did not want to see the selection of textbooks held hostage to a process that has at its heart two issues: pay and benefits.

Davis has dedicated himself to improving education in California and has been strongly supported by the CTA during his governorship.

There already are procedures - in fact laws - in place to include teachers in important decisions such as textbook selection. It would be foolish not to include those people who are closest to what works best in teaching our children.

In our contract with United Teachers Los Angeles we have stipulated that every teacher must have the textbooks required for the prescribed course work. There is a mechanism in place to assure this is working and an appeal system, if needed, at the school level and with the union.

But this bill takes our most important educational issues out of the sunlight and puts them into the back room.

In fact, AB 2160 encompasses more than textbooks. It covers such areas as curriculum and professional development as a part of the collective bargaining process and could decelerate or even reverse our progress.

Los Angeles Unified is a district on the move. Professional development programs such as the Governor's Reading Institutes, developed by Davis, have bolstered our instructional capacity by training teachers in the use of the Open Court reading program, a structured reading program that has brought tremendous results.

Reading and spelling scores soared in the first grade, bringing us above the national level for the first time in 20 years.

We need to acknowledge the tremendous efforts of the teachers of these young people in improving student performance so dramatically, but also point out that many teachers were skeptical about using a structured reading program. Had the choice been theirs, as is contemplated in this bill, we simply would not have been able to implement such a program and achieve this victory.

This bill would bring far too many issues to union negotiations.

It not only would disenfranchise parties holding a very high stake in education, but also would add time and expense to an already cumbersome negotiating process that too often involves adult agendas, not the needs of our primary constituents: the students.

Gov. Davis is right to make the distinction between welcoming teacher input in the process of adopting textbooks and other educational issues versus turning it into an issue to be included in bargaining talks. We hope the public can clearly make this distinction.

Let's remain partners in education and voice our collective ``No!'' to this bill. We must not let our children's futures be bargained away.