This just in. The inexperienced new chancellor of LAUSD Austin Beutner failed his first assignment. We r3cognize that he was chosen to favor the mostly non-union charter schools, but he should recognize his duty to all the children and teachers in the district.
UTLA STATEMENT ON DECLARATION OF IMPASSE
Our employer refuses to partner with us for a sustainable vision for the future. Why? Because our school district is currently dominated by pro-privatization ideologues who would rather starve our public schools than fight for their survival. Therefore, the UTLA bargaining team believes the bargaining process with our employer has been exhausted, and the two parties are at an impasse.
For more than one year, we have attempted to engage our employer in a thoughtful and progressive bargaining process that paves the way toward a better future for our students and the Los Angeles Unified School District, but it’s become increasingly clear that the charter lobby-backed school board majority, along with its handpicked superintendent, Austin Beutner, has a different goal.
That goal is to blame educators for a starved school system, providing a rationale for even deeper cuts, softening the ground to replace our school district with privatization schemes that have failed in other cities. And we cannot, in good conscience, allow it to happen without fighting back.
Recent LAUSD hires, school board actions and reports are building a case for a repudiation of public education in LA, including the report from Beutner’s task force called ‘Hard Choices,’ which pits students against their teachers, and manipulates data to justify a type of private equity “wind down” of LAUSD. Read UTLA’s full response to the ERS here.
Therefore, today, UTLA sent a letter to district officials, declaring contract negotiations are at a deadlock. Read the impasse letter here.
This school board majority and superintendent have no proactive plan to reinvest in our schools or ensure the survival of LAUSD as a civic institution in our city. Rather than advocate for increased state funding, or use the $1.7 billion in unrestricted reserves, they threaten layoffs, say educators get paid too much, recommend increases to overloaded class sizes and increases to special education teacher to student ratios.
Meanwhile, UTLA has a proactive vision that includes proposals to reduce class sizes, provide more health & human services staff, significantly reduce testing, increase parent and educator power over school site spending, require investment in community schools, ensure access to ethnic studies for all students, provide reasonable oversight at co-located schools and improve early education and adult education programs.
In light of the above actions that signal the willful demise of our own district, as evidenced in Beutner’s ‘Hard Choices’ report, we demand LAUSD bring in a state-appointed mediator to assist both parties in achieving a bargaining agreement that is acceptable to both parties.
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UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union local, represents more than 35,000 teachers and health & human services professionals in district and charter schools.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
One question is whether anyone in LA is listening to teachers whether union affiliated or not. Another is whether any union is LA has a collective voice that will be listened to, including UTLA, but not limited to that group.
We have only anti-union media in Los Angeles.
and it is spreading across the nation so quickly
Eli Broad and his pal Austin Beutner pride themselves on being unreasonable. They make unreasonable, “hard choices”. They do not use reason. Claiming that a $1.7 billion budget surplus warrants drastic cuts is an unreasonable whopper of a lie. (Add that to the charter majority on the School Board (Melvin conspiring with Beutner) recently spoiling an attempt to get a well-polling ballot measure for more funding on the next ballot.) His dishonesty during contract negotiations will make the decision by the arbiter to rule against Beutner very easy, very reasonable. I personally don’t want to win in arbitration, though. I want to strike, and show the public what’s going on. We need to give parents an opportunity to show which side they’re on. No amount of whining in the press will make people side with the billionaires. Beutner is an enemy of the people of Los Angeles. Don’t compromise with him. Strike.
Quote of the day: (for Austin Beutner)
“O Thou! whatever title suit thee–
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,
Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie,
Clos’d under hatches,
Spairges about the brustane cootie,
To scaud poor wretches!”
–Robert Burns
It’s time for UTLA’s teachers, and students supported by parents to walk out and refuse to teach or learn until public schools are properly supported and by “properly” I mean to the satisfaction of teachers, students and parents — and double “hell” to the greedy, disruptive psychopaths on the extreme right that want to destroy the United States and turn it into a profit-driven corporate state ruled by a handful of arrogant billionaire autocrats.
Unfortunately, this will be spun for the unwitting public as just a necessary step for the new Superintendent, and fodder for the storyline that says teachers are greedy, self interested and intractible.
If the Board and Superintendent find a way to thwart the appointing of an independent arbitrator, it sounds like it is time to organize a massive strike. I think I would be working on that contingency this summer with all involved parties–parents, students, and teachers. I cannot believe that an informed community would support the Board and Superintendent i destroying the public school system.
Actually, he performed rather well. It all depends who is defining success. I suspect his masters are very happy.