What is at stake in the looming teachers’ strike in Los Angeles?
This article in Capital & Main provides a good summary.
A teacher walkout would cast the strike as a challenge to the creeping absorption of public schools by charter management organizations.
If Los Angeles’ public school teachers go on strike Monday, they will face off against a school district headed by superintendent Austin Beutner, a multimillionaire investment banker and former L.A. Times publisher with no experience in education policy. Perhaps more important, this strike will play out on an education landscape that has radically changed since 1989, when the United Teachers Los Angeles union last walked out. Foremost has been the national rise of charter schools — which, in California, are tax-supported, nonprofit schools that operate within public school districts, yet with far less oversight and transparency than traditional schools. Only a fraction of charter schools are unionized, a situation preferred by the charters’ most influential supporters, who include some of California’s wealthiest philanthropists.
Read More About the Potential ‘Meta-Strike’
For 21 months negotiations have ground on between UTLA and the second-largest district in the nation. (The Los Angeles Unified School District enrolls 640,000 students.) The more nuts-and-bolts issues on the table include union demands for a 6.5 percent pay raise, a limit to class sizes (that can now hover around 38 pupils per classroom), and a push for more support staff such as nurses and librarians.
Kent Wong, executive director of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Labor Center, notes that UTLA’s demands have moved away from larger raises and toward more funding to alleviate the deep education cuts that have been made over the years.
“It is important to understand the bigger forces at work here,” said Wong, who added that the pro-charter forces have invested millions of dollars to elect a pro-charter majority on the Los Angeles school board to shift resources from public schools to charters.
To be clear, the union is fighting for the survival of public education and against the forces of privatization.
Now is the time for all those involved to decide: Which side are you on? The plutocrats or the working teachers and other educators in public schools?
Which side are YOU on?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve walked in those shoes and on those picket lines. Teachers do not want to strike ever! They only do it after their backs are to the wall, and they have exhausted the alternatives. Teachers want to be seen as professionals, not blue collar workers. In a way they are both professional and part of organized labor. Teachers must answer to their communities and states. Their working conditions, salaries and benefits must be negotiated, and teachers do not have power over these issues. Although some members of the community and the press will vilify them, others will learn about the extreme problems facing public education and teachers in the Los Angeles schools. It is definitely a risk-reward scenario.
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There is no alternative but to strike if teachers want to stop the decimation of public schools. Elected politicians of either party will not defend public education and stop the looting of district budgets to finance privatized charters. A general strike of teachers in LA and elsewhere is long, long overdue given the horrendous damage already done to public education in the past 20 years.
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May it be a strong, serious strike with ALL demands made very, very public: too often the news will only give a brief mention of the strike and recognize ONLY the teachers’ demand for better pay.
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To be clear, the union is fighting for the survival of public education and against the forces of privatization.
Exactly, and this is not just an issue in LA or California.
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I’m on the side of public education and see the corporate charter movement using the misleading label “non-profit” as a fraud and a scam to mask their invasion of a democracy and its state and federal constitutions.
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AMEN, Lloyd.
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Excellent article! Must read. I especially liked the concluding paragraph, and the part about the Chicago strike was insightful. Thank you.
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Bravo to the teachers for standing up to the plutocrats who seek to strip them of their power and offer factory model schools that assume every child can succeed (i.e. score high on standardized tests) with grit and perseverance. Here’s hoping the press frames the debate the way Bobbi Murray did in her Capital and Main article and here’s hoping parents continue to stand with the union!
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Is Stanford University one of the combatants/promoters siding up next to tech tyrants and hedge funders against public education? Do the institution’s characteristics make them more a think tank with students than a university adhering to lofty ideals?
(1) Transparency
Why are there missing c.v.s from the the Ed. Department-linked faculty page for professors? When a c.v. of almost 40 pages is posted, why does it omit the grants received? Has Stanford abandoned the practice of transparent c.v.’s? In terms of alleged academic transgressions, NonPartisan Education Review makes a compelling case against one of Stanford’s professors.
(2) (a) Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the (b) Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Critics call SIEPR, the Stanford Institute for the Evisceration of People’s Retirement. The Institute employed a pension alarmist who testified in state capitols, after the paper he wrote at a different university received the most damning criticism I’ve ever seen leveled at an academic paper.
Stanford Social Innovation Review is the flagship publication of the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. SSIR published a pro-charter school paper written by an employee of a foundation funded by a single wealthy guy with a background in real estate. Is that any different than papers funded by John Arnold or Bill Gates’ employees that are published by the Koch’s State Budget Solutions or by private industry in trade publications? In December, SSIR posted an article promoting social impact bonds. By what criteria does Wall Street taking money intended for poor people qualify as “philanthropy”?
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The last paragraph of the article in Capitol and Main, (which I agree is a must-read), says that the UTLA Strike “could be the refunding of public education in California and the country. This kind of strike is a powerful impulse to tell the (Democratic) supermajorities in Sacramento to modify Proposition 13, to bring new sources of funds so that school districts are not starved.”
I would almost literally give my left arm to modify Prop 13, which, IMHO has completely decimated education in CA, from one of the best systems in the nation (before Prop 13’s passage in 1979) to one of the worst. I have seen it first hand, both from the perspective of a student to that of a career educator.
Diane (or anyone else):
Do you think that the UTLA Strike can be a catalyst to modify Prop 13? Really?
I can’t think of any current Legislator who would be willing to risk their seat to advocate for a modification of Prop 13, because it would mean raising taxes. Most Californians are just scraping by now, due to the high cost of living, except the wealthy. And Legislators won’t raise taxes on wealthy people or on corporations, because those are the people, and the “people” who fund their campaigns.
I would love to hear if anyone sees this differently!
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I disagree. I don’t want to see a return to pre-Prop 13 days when the property tax often cost more than the monthly mortgage payment.
I owned a home before Prop 13 and every year the property tax climbed. The Property tax cost more than the total annual house payments to the bank and kept growing.
Instead of gutting Prop 13, there has to be another income source. Instead, I’d rather see marijuana legalized for sale in California and tax the hell out of that to help fund the schools. If coffee, booze and tobacco are legal than pot should be legal too.
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If high taxes were so beneficial, California would have become the promised land, a long time ago.
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The Los Angeles schools are underfunded. California is at the National median in school funding and its one of the richest states in the nation.
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“On June 27, 2018, Governor Brown signed the 2018–19 Budget Act, which includes $201.4 billion in spending. General Fund appropriations total $138.7 billion, an $11.6 billion (or 9.2%) increase over the revised 2017–18 budget expenditures. General Fund revenues are estimated at $137.7 billion for 2018–19, which is $5.2 billion (3.9%) more than the revised 2017–18 revenues.”
How much of that $201.4 billion end up supporting K-12?
The answer is 17% or $34.239 billion
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/california_state_spending_pie_chart
How large is California’s K-12 public education system?
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp
Education Spending Per Student by State — California is not near the top. In fact, 21 states spend more per pupil.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html
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