Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher in Los Angeles, reports that the neutral fact-finders validated most of UTLA’s criticisms of LAUSD.
He says that the time to strike grows near, unless LAUSD changes its positions on critical issues affecting students and classrooms.
He writes:
In the last step before United Teachers of Los Angeles could legally strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District, the California Public Employment Relations Board heard both parties and issued its recommendations for a settlement. While one wouldn’t know it from LAUSD’s statements, taken as a whole the report largely amounts to a lawyers’ brief in favor of UTLA’s positions.
LAUSD triumphantly announced that the report “is consistent with” its September offer to UTLA. Yet the only major area of factfinder agreement LAUSD cites is its offer of a 6 percent raise over a three-year contract. The district only made this offer after 17 months of negotiations–originally teachers were not offered any raise at all.
By contrast, on issue after issue, Arbitrator David A. Weinberg, the Neutral Chair of the fact-finding panel, came down on the side of UTLA.
One of LAUSD’s most egregious practices is its repeated scrapping of contractually-agreed to class size limits. Section 1.5 of the contract allows the district to set aside these limits during a financial crisis. The district abuses this provision by claiming a dubious crisis to invoke 1.5 on an almost annual basis. This wounds children by ripping away dedicated teachers with whom they’ve built important bonds. It also raises class sizes.
UTLA prioritized eliminating this harmful clause, and Weinberg endorsed this. He added, “I agree with the Union argument that lower class sizes are one of the best predictors of successful teaching and student success.”
LAUSD’s salary offer mandates that teachers do an additional 12 hours of professional development. Weinberg agreed with UTLA that this requirement should be dropped.
While LAUSD often claims its teachers receive generous pay and benefits, Weinberg wrote “I agree with the Union’s argument that the bargaining unit deserves to be higher ranked in comparison to other jurisdictions given the combination of a higher cost of living in the LA metro area, and the difficulty in teaching a population of students with so many needs and challenges.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Speaking for myself only, I don’t want a settlement until Article XIII Section 1.5 of the contract is stricken. The class size caps are too high, but at the very least, they need to be firm caps. To be honest, at this point in time, if Section 1.5 had already been removed, I wouldn’t know why I’d be walking out. Class size is the most important issue. And on the fact that class size matters, I believe I’m speaking not just for myself, but for my students and their families, present and future. And I know I have their support on that. That much is clear as the L.A. sky today, with only Beutner’s propaganda serving as smog.
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I completely respect your reasons for striking, LCT. We all have our own [mental reminder to head down to the hardware store tomorrow, so I can start constructing my signs.]
I believe the 2%/2%/2% pay increases are fair and reasonable. I also believe [although it is an unpopular stance] that credentialed staff should seek to narrow down the healthcare options, making it cheaper and more sustainable over the long run (that’s just the reality of our 21st century world.)
Like you, I’m very interested in lowering class sizes across the board, even though I am personally in a situation where I am fine teaching up to 45 kids in a few, very specific Honors-level secondary courses [my own case is unique, and it serves our students best if a few of my classes are at that level, but I would not want any other teachers in my school…or any other school…teaching anywhere near that number.] Art classes should never be up in the 50 student range, for example, and it’s ridiculous that 3rd grade classes are 30+.
Having a son who is classified as having a moderate-to-severe autism I am hyper-sensitive to the plight of disabled children. I fully understand the horrendous barriers that must be broken through for such kids to receive the appropriate levels of services, having gone through that gauntlet for him. Thus, I am also keen on seeing the new Spec Ed language put into the contract.
I also want counselor/nurse/librarian/etc. levels restored to something similar to what they once were.
But, and this is a big but, I see this mainly as a political act…as a show of force meant to rein in charter expansion and embarass Beutner, Melvoin and Garcia [Gonez is a patsy, whereas Melvoin and Garcia are self-serving scumbags.] I’m willing to to strike for several weeks to accomplish that, even though its sure to have a severe, negative impact upon my AP classes.
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LAUSD has proven itself a bad faith bargainer. Austin Beutner, hired only because they had the necessary vote from since resigned Ref Rodriguez, seems to have had one goal in mind – the destruction of LAUSD and its unions, opening it all up to a takeover by privatizers and charter chains. After months of stalling, LAUSD agreed to a long overdue raise, but the work conditions for the teachers AND students continue to be inadequate. The teachers are fighting for services FOR THE KIDS. If they did not care about their students, they’d just shrug over every extra desk shoved into their room to accommodate more students. I worked with teachers who had to get rid of their own desks to make room for all the kids. And even worse, that crowding means little opportunity to attend to individual needs. Support services are thin, problems go unresolved. Other districts manage to pay more and provide more services. Teachers are only asking that LAUSD provide at least the level of service other area districts manage.
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He’s absolutely right, in the past the district has agreed to class size reduction only to disregard it when they saw fit. I agree the waiver of class size during crisis times should be deleted. The union has legitimate reasons to strike but the district is like trump. It agrees to something then takes it back. Their word is not reliable.
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Class size is a vital element of any education system; probably anywhere. Grading papers become nearly impossible, and teachers’ lives becomes taken up with grading. Seeing individual students and their parents is important and cannot be done if there are too many students to attend to.
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Bring. Back. Unions.
BTW:
I would like to see people start putting the term “Conservative” in quotation marks whenever they use it. Or, alternately, people could take to using the editorial mark [sic] after the word wherever it occurs. The mark means that the term was so used in the original but is erroneous. Example:
Conservative [sic] Senator Mitch McConnell has pledged to roll back social security.
Clearly, people who are willing to run through resources as though they were infinite, who don’t care about the welfare of children and families, who want to waste trillions of dollars and untold lives on counterproductive wars, and who want to trash every public good, who don’t care at all about public health, and who couldn’t care less about preserving civil liberties are not in any rational sense “conservative.” Conservation and destruction are ANTONYMS.
So, “Conservative”–always in scare quotes or followed by [sic].
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it gets harder and harder hearing acquaintances or relatives argue that they MUST stick with the Repub party because they consider themselves to be “fiscally conservative…” TELLING anyone that they have it backwards, even going so far as to show them charts and graphs, never changes this hard-wired dogma.
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Teachers can be the ones who revitalize the union movement in this country. They can teach the whole country, again, what real unions look like.
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The right-wing trogs know this, and that’s why they hate teachers’ unions as much as they do.
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Yes! Mr. Shepherd, your grasp of the issues, especially of ELA, is always infallible.
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