Austin Beitner, the former hedge fund manager-publisher picked by the school board as superintendent of the nation’s second-largest district despite his lack of any education experience, is at loggerheads with the UTLA.
UTLA released this statement last night (note the return of Cami Anderson):
We are responding to the letter you sent yesterday to UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl. We are writing this letter jointly because Arlene Inouye is UTLA’s bargaining chair and, with the UTLA Bargaining Team, has urged the district to stop refusing to meet with a state-appointed mediator in a timely fashion as required by law.
In response to the mediator proposing multiple dates for August and in contrast to UTLA’s willingness to meet for mediation immediately, LAUSD is refusing to participate within a reasonable time frame. This is unacceptable and indefensible.
Two UTLA officers met with you yesterday with one goal: to get you to abide by the bargaining process and schedule timely mediation dates. No outline of an agreement was discussed in that meeting. Nor did you offer a path to a contract settlement, as your letter suggests. Instead, you continued your steadfast unwillingness to send the LAUSD bargaining team, now that we are at impasse, to mediation. Therefore, your availability to “meet anytime” rings hollow.
You have claimed that you cannot schedule mediation for 56 days because you don’t want to interfere with the beginning of the school year. Yet yesterday, on the second day of school, you had plenty of time to discuss ways to cut educator healthcare, pensions, and other compensation with a “realignment” plan created by high-priced consultants tied to the privatization movement. One is the firm founded by former Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, who aggressively imposed failed charter and privatization schemes that ended in school closings and mass firings of teachers. After a community uprising against her disastrous leadership, she resigned in disgrace. Anderson now joins your new chief of staff, Rebecca Kockler, who is tightly connected to the privatization of New Orleans schools.
You continue to talk about salary as if it is the only issue we care about in bargaining. While a fair salary increase is essential for attracting educators in response to a growing shortage, our comprehensive bargaining package provides a vital pathway for drawing families into our schools and saving the civic institution of public education. This includes proposals to: eliminate the contract language (Article 18, Section 1.5) that allows the district to unilaterally increase class sizes every year; increase the number of nurses, counselors, school psychologists, and teacher librarians; expand accountability for charter schools and co-locations; reduce the drain on instructional time from overtesting; increase investments in bilingual education and ethnic studies; empower local school leadership councils to manage school budgets and create school climate and discipline plans; end the mistreatment of early education teachers, adult education teachers, and substitute teachers; and more.
Making vague comments about small salary increases and the need to cut healthcare, while showing no willingness to bargain over our package of proposals, is not a plan to respect educators but a plan to wind down the public school district, the way you wound down so many corporate entities as a private equity profiteer.
At this point in the bargaining process — when the parties are at a deadlock on roughly 23 different issues after more than 17 months and over 130 hours of bargaining — a state-appointed mediator is the best potential path toward reaching an agreement. The California Public Employment Relations Board agrees, by virtue of their certifying our impasse and appointing a mediator.
Enough is enough. You cannot put students first when you put educators last. Your letter suggests we are not looking out for the best interests of our students, which we take great exception to. Mr. Beutner, you have never taught in a classroom, but you should know that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
If you can’t or won’t do this, then educators, parents, and the broader community will question your ability to lead the second-largest school district in the country.
Great piece. Love this: “Enough is enough. You cannot put students first when you put educators last. Your letter suggests we are not looking out for the best interests of our students, which we take great exception to. Mr. Beutner, you have never taught in a classroom, but you should know that our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.”
TRUE.
You cannot put students first when you put educators last.
great line, and well beyond LA
I might not call what Beutner’s doing the result of his “inexperience.” He’s inexperienced in education matters for sure but that’s irrelevant because his goal is to bust the union and cause misery in his larger goal of privatization. But thank you for posting this!
yes
Will the school board intervene? Does the state have the ability to force the school district to come to the table? And, the elephant in the room – is the superintendent forcing a strike? All very disturbing ….
Yes, California can force admin to come to the table and can mediate between the two parties at the table. I think it’s likely that either the mediator will find the district being duplicitous and force it to capitulate or declare a continued impasse and lay the groundwork for a much needed strike.
Pumping up members to strike is much easier than getting them to come back ….
What? Example?
Here’s another take on it: Did Meeting Between LAUSD & Teachers Union Leaders Make A Strike Less Likely? Depends On Who You Ask
http://www.laist.com/2018/0816lausds_superintendent_met_with_the_teachers_unions_leader_they_dont_agree_on_what_happened.php
Diane We can expect someone of that mindset (.e.g., capitalist greed as the ONLY horizon) to be involved in projecting their own low horizon out onto all others. “Everyone else must be doing the same thing and thinking the same way.” They are not only fools, they are self-fooling. CBK
Putting the unqualified Beitner in charge of schools is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Anyone that cares about public education and the young people of the city should be outraged. The only thing hedge fund managers know how to build is a mountain of cash for themselves and their investors. Their expertise is in chaos, destruction, laying waste to everything that has been built and firing people.
So call for a strike! Fight fire with fire. After all Al Shanker asked without strikes what power do unions really have? Endless negotiations are just that.
The strike authorization vote begins 8/23.
Right on! L.A. teachers must realize that Beutner is attempting to destroy public education, look beyond a paycheck or two, and vote to authorize a strike. It’s not about getting a raise. It’s about saving LAUSD from being systematically defunded, broken up into 25 to 30 pieces, and then obliterated. A great and onerous responsibility falls on us L.A. teachers today. Now is the time. Now is the time to stand up, time to walk, to walk out —else it will soon be time to run, to run away, crying and screaming in horror.
The Janus decision no longer requires teachers to pay dues if they do not join the union. In Oklahoma the teachers went on strike in opposition to the union leadership and won on all their demands. If unions refuse to fight for their teachers and merely collect what used to be automatic dues then teachers should quit the unions and form new responsive ones. I know, easier said than done but something must change.
There have been a number of red state wildcat strikes. They were important and inspiring. This one will be a blue state union strike, important and inspiring.
I met Cami Anderson several years ago at a Christmas party. When I told her I was against charter schools, her response was “I don’t really want to talk about it.” Neither was she pleased when I told her I followed Diane’s blog. lol However, she has no qualms taking money to promote policies which have already failed elsewhere. Worse yet, that was a party where there are usually many Democratic operatives present, which led me to believe she has the ear of some of them. You’d think that if students occupied your office, you might want to reassess what you are doing…
Let’s hear it for the Newark Students Union!
My husband was upset with me for “insulting her life’s work.” I’m not as conciliatory as he is. She presented herself and I had to speak my mind!
Remember the powerful backlash from parents and voters when the criminally (s)elected school board charter-supporter majority schemed to hire Beutner. Teachers have the support of the city of Los Angeles.
I heard today from a well informed outside LA source that Alrx Caputo Pearl has done a great job building community support, following the model of Karen Lewis in Chicago
I don’t doubt it. He is good.
This was sent to LAUSD teachers from UTLA today:
Beutner pushes austerity agenda
On Wednesday, Superintendent Austin Beutner threatened cuts to healthcare, pay, pensions, and student services at an offsite “retreat.” Here are quotes from that retreat on his austerity agenda:
HEALTHCARE CUTS
“The only type of cap that will solve the healthcare costs continuing to rise is a hard cap.”
—LAUSD CFO Scott Price
A hard cap would mean lower medical coverage and/or big monthly premium payments by employees. The push for a hard cap aligns with the Beutner report from June that says LAUSD employee healthcare costs 44% too much.
STAFF CUTS
“Every new employee we hire is adding to the problem.”
—School Board member Nick Melvoin
This is how you dismantle a school district—by cutting instead of investing in our students’ learning environment through lowering class size and hiring the nurses, counselors, teacher librarians, and psychologists students need to succeed.
PENSION CUTS
“At least not directly….”
—Melvoin in response to a comment by board member George McKenna
that pensions were not under the district’s control
Melvoin’s comments imply that decreasing pension cost is something the district should take on in Sacramento. Melvoin won’t advocate for charter regulations or school district power to deny charter growth at the state level, but he’s already talking about going after pensions. This aligns with the Beutner report that says employee pensions are a “burden” and could be phased out for a hybrid system with a “less-generous pension.”
CHANGES TO WORKDAY
The “8 hour day” teachers work should be used “more efficiently.”
—Beutner’s high-priced consultants
This links with the Beutner report that says 90 minutes should be added to the workday with no additional pay—which is essentially an hourly pay cut. Neither Beutner nor his consultants mentioned instructional time lost to testing, and there was no acknowledgment that high class sizes and workloads limit how much teachers can engage with their students and their colleagues.
At the retreat, CFO Scott Price reiterated LAUSD’s claim that there are only three big drivers to LAUSD’s so-called structural deficit, all of them caused by employees: healthcare, pensions, and other basic employee costs. The pro-privatization school board is ignoring special education underfunding ($1 billion each year), the unregulated growth of charter schools ($600 million each year), and California’s immoral lack of funding for schools (43rd in the nation in per-pupil funding) to serve their PR campaign that greedy teachers are to blame for the district’s financial problems.
In a letter that Beutner leaked to the media this week, he said that LAUSD was too busy with the new school year to meet with a mediator to try to reach a bargaining agreement—yet Beutner was able to spent eight hours at this retreat going after our healthcare and our pensions.
Here’s that obscene report that Beutner ordered up, and upon which he based his contract positions:
Reading this grotesque document makes listening to nails on chalkboard seem like Chopin by comparison:
However, when I woke up this morning it hit me of what it reminded me of:
the roller-coaster dynamics and light/dark duality that often goes with an abusive relationship.
Just as some (but not all) abusers will be effusive in their flattery of the abused person and in their proclamations of undying love for their victims — “You’re the most wonderful woman/man I’ve ever known! … I thank God that you came into my lifle! yadda-yadda-yadda.” — and then alternate this with the move vile, and soul-crushing mental, emotional, and physical abuse. (The latter, of course, is justified because it’s for the victim’s own good. The abuser is doing this to “help” the victim make desperately needed improvements to their life, personality, or whatever, and aren’t you lucky that you have me in your life to provide you with this treatment?), this report does the same with teachers.
At the beginning, the report heaps praise and appreciation on teachers’ importance to society and their gosh-darn special-ness … but that later on, it implicitly or even explicitly says … but right, now unfortunately, you’re all greedy, lazy trash who don’t work hard enough, are paid way to much, and deserve terrible salary, health benefits, pensions, and any attempts on your part to argue otherwise just proves and confirms what total scum you all are.
To even most apathetic-to-unions teacher, or to even an anti-union teacher, a reading of this will radicalize him or her lickety-split, and turn him or her into the most fist-pumping, red-T-shirt wearing radical.
EXAMPLE: (from page 19)
“Great teachers and school leaders make great schools. Research shows that teachers and classroom instruction have the greatest influence on student learning. While school leadership is second
only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on
student learning.
“Research also finds that what teachers do together outside of the
classroom can greatly affect student learning and their own
professional development.*
“Further, the impact of effective school leadership tends to be greatest in schools where the learning needs of students are most acute.
“More can and must be done at LA Unified to develop and support teachers and school leadership.”
But at the same time (the rest of the report) …
— your current salary is 17% higher than it should be, and it must be cut
— your health plan is 44% costlier than it should be, and that’s gotta be cut, too
— *your class sizes are too small ’cause you’re so lazy,, and look at how much THAT is costing
— your school day/hours and school year/total days are way shorter than it should be, you lazy scum, so that must be extended, and with no extra pay, of course, ’cause you should do it for free
— your pensions are unnecessarily lavish and thus, current and future teachers don’t deserve them, and never have
My fellow LAUSD teachers and I just finished our first week of the school year, and reading this garbage is a real s-word-y way to end the week / start the weekend.
Cami Anderson’s consulting firm is here:
https://www.thirdwaysolutionsgroup.com/
Why don’t they publish a list of the consultants who came up with the plan along with what they paid the consultants?