The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 80

SO Huston Sunday Globe September 25, 1983 view, is that nothing is as objective as seniority. They accept the legal rulings on affirmative action but beyond that are reluctant to yield. "We can't let them pick and choose," says Doherty. Besides, he argues, the School Committee has a tool for shedding poor teachers. It can fire them for incompetence.

In the past two years. Spillane has initiated dismissal proceedings against 12 tenured teachers. Of these, eight resigned before hearings were held and three were fired. Pay. The school board offered a 3 percent raise this year, with 5 percent hikes Teachers Continued from Page 77 1 The result is a tug of war between an administration convinced of its good intentions and a union wary of being abused.

The sides at each end of the rope are coming to believe the war will be won not in quick pulls but in slow wearying ones. On Friday, after an initial meeting with an outside mediator, both sides agreed to continue talks with the mediator, Oct. 3. In addition to the major unresolved issues, both sides agree that talks are snagged on many lesser items as well. The issues in Boston, say observers, are similar to those raised elsewhere, but the listis longer.

In a post-Proposition IVz era, when finances are tight and pupils scarce, teachers in about 125 systems across the state started the school year without contracts, according to spokesmen for the Mass. Federation of Teachers and the Mass. Teachers Assn. Paul Gorden, director of fhe Massachusetts Assn. of School Committees, says, "We are in an era now of retrieval bargaining where it is very common for school committees to try to retrieve some of the things the teachers were able to negotiate into contracts in the period where money may not have been a problem and there were teacher shortages.

Now things have ch.tnged." "This is happening everywhere," says Joan Buckley of the Mass. Federation of Teachers, "but it's happening to a greater degree in Boston." The major issues under negotiation in Boston inrhiJe: Sen y. How, Spillane asks, can he hold principals and administrators responsible for the performance of students in their buildings if they don't have control over staffing? To the union, seniority protects teachers from favoritism and arbitrary decisions. The union has offered limited compromise on the issue, but not enough to satisfy the School Committee. 1981-82 teacher layoffs In 1981 and 1982, the school system laid off 1200 teachers, its first layoffs after a decade of declining enrollment.

More than 200 teachers landed In subject areas they had never taught, because they had seniority and back-up certification in the new area, according to a School Dept. fact sheet. Some schools lost up to one third their staffs. Deputy Supt. Rosemarie V.

Rosen points to two high schools with math departments filled with teachers who did not major in mathematics. "It's not the teachers' fault, it's the fault of the contract." she says. These are the numbers and stories the School Dept. uses to back their claim that layoffs governed solely by seniority and court orders regarding affirmative action are bad for schools. In addition to wanting to be able to determine if teachers are qualified to teach new subjects or grade levels, the School Committee, in layoff years, wants the option of keeping the junior teacher they regard as excellent instead of the senior teacher they regard as adequate.

"We want to protect the superstars," says Allan Drachman, the board's chief negotiator. The problem, from the union's point of of $230 million is not met. the school board doesn't want to be locked into bankrolling pay raises at the expense of programs. "If we're forced to absorb that cost in programs, that means a loss of jobs. We don't want to do that." says McCluskey.

To the union, 3 percent is too low a tag In a year when the School Committee is demanding so many other concessions. In addition, the conditional funding of the second- and third-year raises would leave the union without leverage, Doherty says. Last contract cited The BTU went to court to get the raises negotiated in the last contract. "If we hadn't, we never would have seen that money," Doherty says. Benefits.

The School Committee -wants to limit benefits, including sick days, the accumulation of unused sick leave and severance pay. It wants to reduce the number of salary tracks and cut some pay differentials. In many cases, it has offered to "grandfather in" teachers currently receiving the benefits. The union regards these items as hard-" won benefits. It looks on any offer to grandfather teachers as an attempt to undermine the future strength of the union.

To the school board, these items are ex-pensive and inefficient. The average teacher Is absent 1 2 days in a school year, according to an administration fact sheet. The accumulated financial liability from unused sick days is $30.4 million. To a union trying to recover from past divisions between black and white members, the school board's offer to grandfather teachers currently receiving certain benefits tends to favor more senior, gener ally white, teachers. The BTU says newer, minority teachers would be disproportionately affected by a cap on the accumulation of sick leave or a decrease In salary tracks.

"I don't want to see the younger teachers lose," says Betty Royston, a black member of the BTU executive board. Class size. The School Committee wants limits on class size to be flexible, not rigid. It does not want to be obligated to create a new class when an elementary classroom gets its 34th youngster or a high school class gets its 37th. Next year, it would drop the limit in primary grades to 28.

The BTU wants rigid and loer ceilings: 24 in primary grades, 28 in fourth and fifth grades. 30 in upper grades. To the school board, the union's proposal would cost $6.3 this year, according to a departmental fact sheet. Splitting a class of 34 into two classes of 17 after the school year has started could be more disruptive than using other strategies, such as more teacher aides, says Rosen. Besides, she says, the average class size in Boston is 22.

Both sides agree that children learn best in small classes. But the union is afraid that if the ceilings aren't lower and rigid they will have no protection against unwieldy classes. At a time when national and local attention focuses on the quality of education, the danger in protracted contract talks goes beyond falling morale or job action. Most observers agree that if educational reform is to succeed, teachers and administrators must work together. Says Carol Doherty of the Mass.

Teachers "The longer you sit at the table. more you develop an adversarial relationship that makes it difficult to deal with other Issues like school reform." I i 't, 'The longer you sit at the says one teacher, 'the more you develop an adversarial relationship that makes it difficult to deal with other issues like school in each of the next two years if funding is available. The BTU formally asked for 8 percent each year, but Doherty says the union would accept 6 or 7 percent, with second and third year raises guaranteed. To the School Committee, there isn't enough money to pay for what the union wants. The city has other contracts to negotiate and will be looking to the dollar sign on a teachers settlement as a "trendsetter." says Rosen.

Next year, according to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, the city faces a $40 to $60 million deficit. If its base budget jSP T( a long career of public service. "Secretary of State Cordell Hull was clearly not anti-semitic. His wife was ish. But when he turned to his legal adviser, the, aide told him nothing could be done to relax the German quota." Immigration laws at that time came under the Labor Department, not Justice as is now the case, and Mrs.

Perkins asked Wyzanski to try to find a solution. He found a long-unused provision involving the taking of a bond from a would-be Immigrant to make certain that he would not become a public charge. Wyzanski then wrote an opinion that the Secretary of Labor could take from any alien or anyone else a bond or affidavit guaranteeing that the prospective grant would not become a public charge. The attorney general's office ratified Wyzanski's opinion, and as a result countless Jews found refuge in this country through the sponsorship of American Jews including Wyzanski's wife, Gisela, who came here from Hamburg in 1938. They were married on July 23.

1943. and on Sept. 7 with special permission of President Roosevelt Judge Wyzanski naturalized her in his federal courtroom. As a federal judge for more than 40 years, he has handled some of the most celebrated and varied cases of this century, ranging from anti-trust to conscientious objection to military service during the Vietnam War, But the case that earned him the greatest celebrity in the public eye occurred more than 20 years ago, when he sounded a clarion call to clean up a "network of corruption" in Massachusetts. Now.

he says, the conditions In the commonwealth seem unimproved by one measure, at least. "US Atty. Bill Weld has caused the indictment of more people than his predecessor of 20 years ago," Wyzanski said last week, "and if that is an index I would say things are no better." In 1960-61, Wyzanski presided over the hearings involving Thomas Worcester, the head of a Boston engineering firm found guilty of Income tax evasion who was offered probation if he testified against the "dishonorable public officials" who may have benefited from his evasion. In concluding the hearings on June 5, 1961, Wyzanski gave one of the most searing opinions ever delivered in a courtroom, saying that he believed Worcester's account of payoffs to the Hicn Massachusetts 1 J' I 1 tZ if Judge Continued from Page 77 graduate of Harvard College in 1927 and the Harvard Law School in 1930. Wyzanski was a "junior, junior" member of the Boston law firm of Ropes, Gray, Boy-den and Perkins (now Ropes and Gray), wlien he was recommended by Harvard Law Prof, (later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter for the post of solicitor in the US Labor Department in 1933.

Within a few days of his arrival in Washington, he recalls, he was invited to meet with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. An hour or so later, Perkins and he were on the second floor of the White House at a top-level session with President Roosevelt and other top Cabinet officials, including Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior. sat there for three hours and listened," the judge said, "at the end of which FDR said to me: 'Charlie, you've heard the discussion. I would like to have on my desk tomorrow a bill incorporating the gist of what we've agreed that point in his career, Wyzanski' had never drafted anything more complicated than a will disposing of a $10,000 estate. He could not sleep that night and finally telephoned a couple of people, among them Thomas Corcoran, a top FDR adviser.

The next morning, FDR had on his desk Title 2 of the public works section of the National Industrial Recovery the section establishing the WPA and the PWA "a bill that was enacted virtually verbatim." The creation of the Public Works Administration called for an appropriation of $3.3 billion at a time when the total national budget was $6 billion, Wyzanski notes. Self-doubts to be overcome Lest anyone get the mistaken idea that Wyzanski, then 26, eased into his New Deal responsibilities without any self-doubt or trepidation, he describes his feelings and the atmosphere of the early days of the New Deal. "You cannot possibly imagine the want of confidence among men involved In world affairs, nor their readiness to abdicate power to any young men who would move in any direction," Wyzanski said. "I found myself visited in my office by the heads of large corporations, the heads of the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce and, of course, all the labor leaders.

"I picked up the telephone, and I said to Felix Frankfurter, 'I'm going to resign. This job is much too big for me. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and all these people are coming to me and thinking I'm going to solve the nation's problems. Felix said, "You An hour later. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' messenger telephoned Wyzanski and invited him to the jurist's home in Washington at 3 p.m.

on a Saturday. There, Brandeis talked to him at length in parable style about a famous court case, concluding the session by giving Wyzanski the same advice he had once given to Walter Fisher grandfather of Harvard Law Prof. Roger Fisher soon after Fisher was named Secretary of the Interior: "Don't sign anything until you've read it." Puzzled by that enigmatic counsel, Wyzanski said, he left and walked down Connecticut avenue, pondering his ability to handle his job. "On the way home, I passed a stationer's store that used to stand on 27th street, opposite the old Court of Claims. I went inside, wrote out my signature for a clerk and asked him to make four rubber stamps." On the following Monday, Wyzanski called in his four assistants, all younger than himself, told them of his conversation with Brandeis and then presented each of them with a signature stamp.

Henceforth, he (old them, the work would be divided into five parts, and he authorized each to use his signature stamjp, placing their ini- Israel Continued from Page 77 Yitzhak Shamir, turned to terrorism in the struggle with the British and Arabs for Palestine, and though they were critical to Israel's founding, they were in a political wilderness under the Labor Party until Be-gin's political revolution in 1978. In an epilogue to a book about Zionism's varied theoreticians. Prof. Shlomo Avinerl suggests that recent Israeli history can be read as a counterrevolution, a return to some older patterns of Jewish life. He cites, for instance, the increasing use of Arab labor in primary industries like agriculture, construction and services; the heavy concentrations of Israelis today in white-collar occupations; and the drift away from socialism toward economic laissez-faire, hard to square "with the ethos of social responsibility necessary for nation-building in Israel." In this, again, there is an ongoing mixture of East, Mideast and West, a transition toward something new in the world, perhaps forever unfinished.

That is particularly visible in the pessimism that now runs through Israeli life and commentary after Begin's abdication and the unhappy results of his war in Lebanon. He rode the militant nationalism he championed into Lebanon, but stumbled through arrogance and over-confidence, many Israelis now feel, and Israel is unlikely for some time to swing its weight and its army through neighboring countries with quite the same abandon as a year ago last June. Some Israelis, like Arie (Lova) Eliav. a respected dove, argue that this new pessimism leads to an unhappy fatalism about relations with the Arabs generally, and especially about realistic negotiations to solve the Palestinian problem by giving up a share of the West Bank. "Thirty, 40 percent of the country think like me.

but still more than 50 percent say, 'That's it. there's no solution, we must hold what we have; if there's going to be another war. well, that's our They're pessimistic hawks, unhappy." And Zionism, Eliav says, was above all a revolution against fatalism, that things must always be the way they are. But the point, again. Israelis caution, is not meant to be a crude one about "imperialism" the experience in Lebanon will be factored in to the fluid comprehension of what Zionism (and Israel) will finally come to mean.

European roots eroding With the Sephardim now a majority in a state still largely run by an elite of Western-born Jews, the Ashkenazim, there is incessant and often tedious debate about the "Orientalization" of Israel, its shift from Western attitudes and modes of behavior to Mideastern ones. The Labor Party unfairly, and not surprisingly, blames Begin's incitement of Sephardic grudges against the old elite for Labor's own political haplessness. Some Begin supporters even suggest that it is the Middle Eastern-ness of the Palestinian majority on the West Bank and Gaza Strip that causes the Labor Party to oppose their incorporation. But the Ashkenazim-Sephardim argument, like so many about the nature of Israel, is overdrawn. The Labor Party is full of extraordinary soldier-scholars, born in Western Eurooe.

who sneak vih. dish, English, French, German and even some Arabic but their children tend to speak Hebrew, period. They are nearly as iiKeiy io Know some Arabic as some Eng- lish, but the European roots are fast riisan- pearing. Not that they aren't at home with Western" technoloev. whether it American F15s or Japanese video recorders, but their actions, conversations and modes of thought are Israeli not Western.

They have as much in common now with American Jews as with Frenrh Italian Jews less than they have in com mon witn Moroccan or Tunisian Jews, particularly the ones who've come to Israei to stay. i I I i i i Pn GLOBE PHOTO BY JOSEPH DENNEHY Turnpike Authority Chairman William F. Callahan. The judge went on to attack civic indifference, indicting the press, the banks, the bar and government officials for not doing more to expose corruption. From Wyzanski's call for action came a state crime commission to investigate corruption in high places, a change in the makeup of the Legislature and what some considered an improvement in public ethics.

Dealings with the Kennedys The judge also recounted last week an irony in his career involving the Kennedy family. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy brought his influence to bear to help win Senate confirmation for Wyzanski's first New Deal appointment to the US Labor Dept. "That was my first connection with the Kennedys." Many years later, Wyzanski said, he was struck by a delayed backlash stemming from his role In the Worcester case that involved Callahan's friendship with the Kennedy family: "When Eugene Black, the first chairman of the Kennedy Library, asked me why I had not appeared at the first trustees meeting, that he had put me on the board, I told him that I was not aware that I had been named to the board. Black then went into another room and called Ted Kennedy, who told him that Jack President Kennedy had promised Callahan that Wyzanski would never get any job." In assessing the ethical climate in the state today, Wyzanski says that starting with public officials at the top level in Massachusetts the governor and the two US senators "they're pretty good better than pretty good, they're excellent." But he concedes that now, as a senior district court judge, he sits in cities outside this area, "does not come in contact with people down the line" and consequently cannot judge their performances.

Today. Wyzanski says he considers himself a lucky man. The goddess For-tuna. he wrote in his 50th Harvard anniversary report, has kept him, against his "vaulting ambition, in the upper middle class in station, in reputation, in wealth and in health. Had I reached the peak.

and surely my family, would have had diminished joy." Judge Charles Wyzanski: looking back on tials below to identify who actually had taken the action. "We were never called on the question of legality," Wyzanski recalled, "and I do not remember any major mistakes. It was the only way you could handle it. Tom Eliot Massachusetts congressman, later president of Washington University In St. Louis drew up the Social Security bill under that system." Views of Roosevelt changed Wyzanski says of his relationship with Frances Perkins that she "trusted me greatly and she asked the President to name me acting Secretary of Labor when she was away, which he did." He occasionally attended Cabinet meetings with FDR, he said, and as one who had served as law clerk to the eminent Judges Augustus Hand and Learned Hand he determined that the President "was a second-rater." "I didn't understand him then," Wyzanski admits.

"At first, he appeared to be a man who acted too quickly, too superficially, and he seemed to lack the necessary capacity to think through anything. But he was the master juggler of all time. He did, in fact, have the quality of mind of recognizing the essential, and nobody gets this by being a good student or working hard. You are born with it, or you don't have it." Roosevelt was a profoundly religious man, "although few people knew it," Wyzanski said, and so was Mrs. Perkins.

"The close tie between FDR and Mrs. Perkins was not unrelated to the fact that both were aware of how deeply religious the other was. I don't mean religious in the formal sense, but in having a belief in the ultimate." Wyzanski says he considers the most important contribution of his New Deal career was finding a loophole to circumvent the immigration laws that had resulted in severely restricting the entry into this country of Jews from Hitler's Germany. The informal laws were imposed during the Hoover Administration to keep down immigration because of heavy unemployment during the Depression. After a meeting with five prominent Jewish judges, Roosevelt called in the Secretaries of State and Labor and the Attorney General to try to find an answer..