Peter Greene nails it again, in this brilliant article that appeared in Forbes, which is typically read by people in the business world.
He begins:
Teachers don’t want to strike.
Teacher strikes happen because teachers believe they are out of alternatives. There has never been a union meeting in which members said, “The board says they’re willing to talk, and we trust them to do so in good faith, but we think we should strike instead.” Teachers strike because they face issues that can’t be ignored and a board that won’t sit down to help solve those issues. Even then, teachers strike reluctantly. Strikes don’t happen because the most active, cranky members are ready to walk, and strikes don’t happen because local, state or national leaders convince the rest of the members to walk. Strikes happen when school district leadership convinces the most strike-averse teachers that they are out of options.
That’s what makes the L.A. strike, like the statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and Washington, so extraordinary. If you have not worked in union leadership, I’m not sure you can imagine just how difficult it is to push that many teachers to undergo the stress, uncertainty and trouble of a strike. No union leadership could do it without the assistance of the local school district’s board and administration, or the politicians overseeing education on the state level…
But in L.A. (and West Virginia and Oklahoma and the other #REDforED states) there is a new factor.
In my two strikes, and in virtually all strikes of the past, we could make one assumption safely–that as much as we disagreed about the means, everyone wanted, in their own way, to see the public school district remain healthy and whole.
This is no longer a safe assumption on the local, state or national level.
LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner came to the job with no background in education. This is no longer unusual in large districts, nor in state school leadership positions. Increasingly the agenda of many people taking positions of authority over public education is to dismantle public education and replace it with a network of private charter schools, a process often accelerated by starving public schools for funding in order to manufacture a crisis. And lest we forget, current secretary of education Betsy DeVos once declared that public schools are a “dead end.” Beutner’s comment to a reporter regarding the strike was “There are ways to educate kids that don’t rely on a physical body.” Teachers are not necessary.
L.A. schools particularly feel this privatization push. Eli Broad has long been a wealthy advocate of approaching education as business, and through Great Public Schools Now, announced in 2016 a bold plan to move half of Los Angeles students into charter schools. Currently charters have enrolled one in five of LA students. Last fall, charter school advocates poured millions of dollars into LAUSD board elections in order to install a charter-favoring majority on the board.
Teachers in many school districts and many states across the country find themselves in the unusual position of working in an institution led by people who want to see that institution fail. Back in the day, teacher strikes were about how best to keep a school district healthy, but these modern walkouts are about the very idea that public schools should be kept healthy at all. UTLA demands for smaller classes, more support staff, safer schools, community schools, and charter school oversight are not about making their working conditions a little better, but about keeping public education alive and healthy.
Teachers across the country are dealing with the problems created by systematic underfunding of public schools and a systematic devaluing of the teaching profession by leaders who believe that public education should be swept aside to make room for a system of private free market education. Of all the reactions to this, the #REDforEd movement and the wave of strikes are actually the good news, because these are the teachers who intend to stay and fight for the future of public education and the students it serves. When those walkouts are settled, the teachers will return to the classroom. The bad news? The oft-noted teacher “shortage,” is really a slow motion walkout of teachers who will never return to the profession at all.
The teachers of Los Angeles are striking for the survival of public education and for the teaching profession.
Which side are you on?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am thrilled that Peter Greene is able to write for a business audience. They need to understand the issues that teachers today are confronting. Going on strike is not a frivolous decision, and the issues are far greater than just wages. I agree that the teacher strikes are different from those in the past. In 1975 my district went on strike. Teachers went to jail and lost two days pay for every one day on strike under New York’s Taylor Law. Teachers lost tenure, and few were fired after the strike. Other districts went on strike as well. It was an era of labor unrest that eventually settled down by the mid-1980s. Today’s labor unrest is about the deliberate actions of wealthy individuals and corporations that want to dismantle public education and replace it with privatized charters. Many states are deliberately starving public schools to hasten their demise. The issues of today’s strikes are far more complex and significant. They are about trying to defend a legitimate democratic institution and students from corporate interests that seek to monetize them.
Very smart analysis by Peter Greene. Question: Did it take so long for teachers in some venues to finally strike because the teachers themselves are strike averse despite the continuing deep and ugly decimation of public schools and their jobs? Or, did it take so long for teachers in some major venues to finally strike b/c their teacher unions were led by insider cronies who themselves are intensely strike averse and rule their unions undemocratically? The damage to public schools in the last 20 years has been plain for everyone to see for every teacher to suffer through. Union leaders let it go on this long and have made it a much harder task to recover from two decades of bipartisan privatizing.
I am not well informed enough to judge the complicity of union officials in creating the crisis, but the names of union leaders do show up in “philanthropic” projects created to undermine and dismantle public education. Even so, Peter Greene’ brief is especially brilliant for the readers of Forbes. I wish that it could also be published in the Wall Street Journey which today heaped praise on privately managed Schools, including charters.
Of course the union has been complicit in this. Thousands of teachers were fired as the union looked the other way. For over a decade Perdaily.com has been chronicling the LAUSD disaster….jsut a few…www.perdaily.com/2014/07/former-ctc-attorney-kathleen-carroll-lays-out-unholy-alliance-between-union-and-public-education-pri.html
and colludes to end collective bargaining rights, http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-and-utla-collude-to-end-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-teachers-part-2.html
That’s a funny slip.
There has been a noticeable difference in teacher union action in our large city: the inner city district struggles to find leadership willing to bring complaints to light while the suburbs, once they’ve see the damage being done, have done an inspiring job of organizing teachers, parents and kids to fight back publicly. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but perhaps we need to look at the poverty and cultural diversity of the inner city vs. the largely White privilege attached to the suburbs: Who has voice, who has power, who can unite and be seen.
Posted at OEN “https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Is-The-Los-Angeles-Teacher-in-General_News-Education-Costs_Education-Funding_Education-Laws_Educational-Crisis-190114-981.html#comment722172
with this comment, which has embedded links at the above address. (taken from Diane’s recent posts)
COMMENT 1 Submitted on Monday, Jan 14, 2019 at 3:39:43 PM
Click here: https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-end-of-education-policy
” it isfair to say that for a decade or two the world did achieve some sort of homeostasis, perhaps a break from history instead of its end. Democracy was on the move, global trade boomed, and the world became a freer, more prosperous place.
So what does this have to do with education?
We are now at theEnd of Education Policy, in the same way that we were at the End of History back in 1989.Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.
Namely: We are not going back to a time when urban school districts had the “exclusive franchise” to operate schools within their geographic boundaries. Public charter schools now serve over three million students, many of them in our large cities, cities where 20, 30, 40, and even 50 percentof the students are now in charter schools. These charter schools are not going away. Another half a million students are in private schoolsthanks to the support of taxpayer funding or tax credit scholarships. Those scholarships are not going away either. At the same time, the meteoric growth of these initiatives has slowed. Numbers are no longer leaping forward but are merely ticking up.
Meanwhile, alternative certification programs now produce at least a fifth of all new teachers . We are not going back to a time when traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs had the exclusive right to train teachers.
And even testingthat hated policy with no natural constituencyis now entrenched, at least until the Every Student Succeeds Act comes up for reauthorization. It appears, knock on wood, that the testing backlash is starting to recede , thanks, I would argue, to policymakers addressing many of the concerns of the testing critics. The underlying academic standards are stronger and clearer; the tests are more sophisticated and rigorous , and encourage better teaching; and the state accountability systems that turn test results into school ratings are fairer and easier to understand ; and teacher evaluation systems have been mostly defanged . And truth be told, school accountability systems no longer have much to do with “accountability,” but are really about “transparency”telling parents and taxpayers and educators the truth of how their schools and students are performing, but mostly leaving it to local communities to decide what to do about underperformance, if anything. All of this has made testing and accountability, if not popular, at least less unpopular.
COMMENT 2 Submitted BY Susan Lee Schwartz on Monday, Jan 14, 2019 at 3:41:15 PM
The war on public schools is exacerbated when the federal government trims the budget by removing funds for public education… starving the states, which then starve the schools.
Look at how it plays out In Texas: 2011, the Texas government cut $5.4 billion from the budget for public schools; thousands of teachers were laid off. Governor Greg Abbott, not known for his educational credentials, tweeted insults at the school board of the Houston Independent School District. The privatization buzzards are circling. The governor wants to take over the entire district, even though no one at the state government or the Texas Education Agency knows how to turn around a district or even a school.
Look at Oklahoma:
The Hechinger Report’s Caroline Preston describes a state-authorized charter school in Seminole, Ok. as a test case as to “whether these privately operated, publicly funded schools can open in small communities without eroding public education.” The article’s title, “A rural Charter School Splits an Oklahoma Town.” The subtitle is: A businessman makes an end run around community opponents. Now, he wants to expand others like it,” should serve as a warning.
Even though it seems inexplicable, especially in a state that has too many rural school systems, Oklahoma allows charters in small towns like Seminole that only has around 1,600 students. If the charter school could meet its goal of serving as many as 700 students, the public school system would be wrecked.
Even more illogical is a law that allows the state Board of Education to override local decisions on granting charters. And due to one of the “reforms” in the full corporate reform agenda which was adopted at the beginning of the decade, the board is dominated in true believers by choice and the edu-politics of destruction for blowing up the “status quo.” It’s unlikely that the board will ever meet a charter application that it doesn’t love. Even if the charter isn’t capable of helping kids, it hurts the privatizers’ opponents.air to say that for a decade or two the world did achieve some sort of homeostasis, perhaps a break from history instead of its end. Democracy was on the move, global trade boomed, and the world became a freer, more prosperous place.
So what does this have to do with education?
We are now at theEnd of Education Policy, in the same way that we were at the End of History back in 1989.Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.
Namely: We are not going back to a time when urban school districts had the “exclusive franchise” to operate schools within their geographic boundaries. Public charter schools now serve over three million students, many of them in our large cities, cities where 20, 30, 40, and even 50 percentof the students are now in charter schools. These charter schools are not going away. Another half a million students are in private schoolsthanks to the support of taxpayer funding or tax credit scholarships. Those scholarships are not going away either. At the same time, the meteoric growth of these initiatives has slowed. Numbers are no longer leaping forward but are merely ticking up.
Meanwhile, alternative certification programs now produce at least a fifth of all new teachers . We are not going back to a time when traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs had the exclusive right to train teachers.
And even testingthat hated policy with no natural constituencyis now entrenched, at least until the Every Student Succeeds Act comes up for reauthorization. It appears, knock on wood, that the testing backlash is starting to recede , thanks, I would argue, to policymakers addressing many of the concerns of the testing critics. The underlying academic standards are stronger and clearer; the tests are more sophisticated and rigorous , and encourage better teaching; and the state accountability systems that turn test results into school ratings are fairer and easier to understand ; and teacher evaluation systems have been mostly defanged . And truth be told, school accountability systems no longer have much to do with “accountability,” but are really about “transparency”telling parents and taxpayers and educators the truth of how their schools and students are performing, but mostly leaving it to local communities to decide what to do about underperformance, if anything. All of this has made testing and accountability, if not popular, at least less unpopular.
See: Beginning Walkout, Los Angeles Teachers Find Support From Sanders—But Not Corporate Democrats
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/14/beginning-walkout-los-angeles-teachers-find-support-sanders-not-corporate-democrats
The Pelosi-Schumer Corporate Democrats (who also include the Clintons and the Obamas) will NEVER change the corrupt political-economic system which has brought us down to where we now are.
I don’t think that most schools are truly underfunded, they are mis-funded. The money is spent on computers, that are used for testing, which are priced per test. The money is spent on iPads to report “now we have one iPad per student!” but what improvement does this bring? Students don’t need to handwrite anymore, and type on a virtual keyboard – not even a real one – this is progress? Worksheets either purchased or printed, then thrown away – money and paper is wasted. All the pencils and pens that students steal, break, throw away. All the food that the students throw away. The fences and peace officers, that make schools look like prisons. Too long to list, the point is, if the money were spent where it needed to, that is, on working curricula (not on Whole Language or any NCTM-branded junk), on good textbooks, on notebooks, on good old paper-based testing and grading, on school furniture (have you seen those tiny desks that the kids have to squeeze behind?), on teachers themselves after all, then the results would be different. Compared to most other countries, the U.S. spends a LOT per student.
It depends on where you’re talking about. Utah spends only about $6600 per student per year. That’s not a lot by many other countries’ standards.
You are so right that the US spends much per student. Each provider who sells to the school districts wants to keep on selling. Now the private sector wishes to take over the schools because they see how the taxpayers’ money can be used to their expansion.
The teachers in the LA strike speak of the class size, one of the most troubling challenges facing the teacher in many states. There are other issues one of which is autonomy. Perhaps the LA teachers’ strike will permit widened discussion of the issues which teachers face, one of which you mention: ‘that the schools are ‘misfunded.’ So, while I fully support the LA teachers’ strike, it is my wish that it will be accompanied by a discussion which allows all to see the multiple factors which determine school performance, and find a way to optimize on spending, so our teachers can work in the best conditions with the money we have.
One of the biggest problems for public schools is the same problem that plagued union factories that closed in rust belt cities: legacy costs that are built into existing contracts. Public school budgets need to include money to fund pension benefits; health and life insurance benefits for current teachers; and reimbursement for college and graduate school tuitions. In addition, they must budget for contributions to State retirement systems.
Those of us who want to see teaching remain an attractive career that provides middle class wages and benefits do not see these costs as unnecessary. The vulture capitalist reformers who want to be free from “burdensome regulations”, however, want to compensate their employees as little as possible. They want to avoid paying their current employees for benefits and do not want to promise their current employees ANYTHING for retirement. Unions who want to provide living wages and benefits for current employees and security for retirees are an anathema to reformers.
Welcome to the gig economy that most workers live in… an economy that currently fosters resentment toward unions. Maybe when the temp employees with variable schedules and at-will employees who staff most workplaces see that they are being played by the plutocracy sentiments will change. Here’s hoping it changes in 2020.
Excellent point but you make it seem like it’s the employees fact and it’s not. To get employment where and how is a survival mode. The problem is privatization throughout society thinking that they can do things better than public can. This has proven wron in so many ways because private interests don’t care about public concerns. Private interest want all the benefit for themselves. No sharing, equity, societal uplifting. Do we want a better quality of life for the greatest number of people or do we want privateers doing their own thing? Something to think about huh.
While I always believed teacher believe in public ed, the unions motivation as far as that is a little more suspect. This battle between public and private schools has been going on a while and in many instances, the union has acquiesced to charter increases even to the extent of representing some charters and being on governing boards of them. In addition, allowing lausd to push a large percentage of its experienced teaching staff out on false,
Charges of child abuse without benefit of due process is suspect. I guest what i’m Saying is this charterization could have been fought against more sincerely years ago if there were a will in utla. But, since it wasn’t, hence the mushrooming of the problem. It’s so entrenched state and locally in California, there has to be an all out effort on every level to stop it, is there a will now to do it?