Bill Raden of California-based Capital & Main reports that the L.A.school district hasample reserves to meet teachers’s needs.
LAUSD is not infinancial distress, as superintendent Austin Beutner claims. It does not need to cram 40-47 students in a classroom.it can afford full-nurses, librarians, and counselors.
“Capital & Main’s own analysis of the LAUSD budget finds that funding exists that would more than cover UTLA’s core demands without touching the district’s surplus. Our research also raises questions over how much of LAUSD’s budget projections are more of a creative art than a hard-nosed science.
“There is a history of the district crying wolf over negative balances two years out that then never seem to arrive,” agreed former Board District 5 member David Tokofsky. “If the budget were a basketball game, LAUSD would see a 20 point, final quarter lead by the Clippers as too close to call…
“The unresolved issues include contract demands for lowered class sizes, additional nurses, librarians, counselors and social workers. The union also insists that the district commit a significant chunk of a contested, nearly $2 billion budget surplus to increases to bilingual and adult education, and to making major investments in community schooling. The union has also been advocating for curriculum reforms that include a teacher say in achievement testing (UTLA wants less testing) and ethnic studies at every school.
“Class-size reduction is a basic sticking point in the negotiations.
If there has been a single deal-breaker on the table, it is the district’s lack of movement on “Section 1.5” — a contractual holdover from the Great Recession unique to LAUSD and anathema to UTLA because it allows the district to unilaterally raise class sizes. The union wants it gone; the district wants it replace with “Section 1.8,” which would raise some class sizes beyond the current memorandum of understanding that Section 1.5 has nullified.
“Class size is the fundamental issue that we’ve got to deal with,” argued UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl at the January 11 news conference. “Their [insistence] of continuing to . . . be an outlier in the state of California is unacceptable.”
“LAUSD’s last known offer (both sides have agreed to a media blackout during the current round of bargaining) hadn’t budged from its position that the union’s demand for a 6.5 percent pay raise be contingent on cannibalizing the retirement security of future teachers to fund it. What was new on Friday, January 11, was the district’s modest offer to add 200 new hires — or 1,200 in all — for class-size reduction, nurses, librarians and counselors. But for the nation’s second-largest school district, this represented a $130 million drop in a 900-campus bucket — and the lowered levels would expire after one year.
“The offer was extraordinary both for its timing and its explanation of how LAUSD would fund the classroom reductions. The $25 million increase to the $105 million it had previously offered, a district press statement said, would include a recent $10 million pledge by Los Angeles County. It also kicked in $15 million from what LAUSD had estimated would be the $40 million in savings from $3 billion in pay-downs of rate increases and pension liability for CalSTRS, California’s giant teachers’ pension fund, that Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled January 10 in his first state budget.
“UTLA immediately challenged the district’s $40 million windfall estimate, claiming that its own call to the state Department of Finance turned up an additional $100 million in ongoing revenue. By Wednesday, LAUSD had clarified that the $40 million figure merely represented the district’s share from Newsom’s recalculation of this year’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) cost of living adjustment increase, which was revised upward from the November’s projected 2.57 percent to 3.46 percent. (The actual gain, which represents an additional $120 per student for L.A. Unified’s non-charter enrollment, should bring the district closer to $49.2 million).
“The school district didn’t allow Governor Newsom’s recent good financial news to dispel its fiscal gloom.
“The district estimated its takeaway from Newsom’s $700 million contribution rate buy-downs at $60 million over the next three years. But there will also be ongoing cash savings from lowered liability that should be dramatic. (Some have estimated that the buy-downs could be worth as much as $200 million to the district.)
“Newsom’s budget had other good news for LAUSD. It included an extra $576 million to school districts in special education funding, which would be worth roughly $75 million to LAUSD. The biggest windfall, earmarked for early education, should net Los Angeles roughly $180 million as its share of $1.8 billion for expanded kindergarten and preschool and childcare infrastructure (using a longstanding ballpark calculation that LAUSD claims roughly 10 percent of many statewide education appropriations).”
Read it all.
Bottom line: LAUSD can fund all the teachers need and demand.
The district leadership is trying to starve the district of needed resources.
Democrat presidential candidates need to be pushed hard to make education a major issue…..it is so intertwined with racial issues, that there are so called pragmatic reasons to kind of finesse public education into general support, and take it for granted that DeVos will be the gift to allow that to happen. Reminder……Arne Duncan was no bargain…worse than DeVos, because he was taken more seriously with Bill Gates riding along. Yes, DeVos is a sick joke, but that is not an excuse to not separate the party from the one thing about Obama that republicans never criticize…..Duncan and Gates. I copied Bernie’s piece into the St. Louis Post current affairs Thursday under this title……”Wonder if the PD will bother with what Bernie said about LA” …so far, zero on Friday and Saturday. The hostility of the media is out of proportion to the support the public feels for teachers. They will refuse to treat public education as a major issue……with a necessity to sort issues out.
Media shouldn’t be allowed to label quotes from the Center for American Progress (funded by corporations and Bill Gates) as liberal.
OurRevolution is THE liberal voice.
Last March, CAP asked for states to authorize charter schools and recommended activities to generate revenue for schools from sources like selling advertising on buses. One of CAP’s education staff was formerly with Jeb Bush’s ed privatizing organization and CAP’s Ed. V.P. was formerly with TFA . CAP self-appointed to, IMO, implement disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico. CAP selected a former Aspira executive to head its program in P.R.
Andrew Perez on 12-11-2018 posted a paper that he alleges shows a sizable CAP donation to right wing AEI.
Frederick Hess (AEI) and a Gates-funded organization employee wrote a paper posted at Philanthropy Roundtable. In the paper, Hess told the public that ed reformers wanted to “… blow up the ed schools.” He and his co-author recommended that, instead, the donor class use money to get what they wanted in universities. (“Don’t Surrender the Academy).”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just re-tweeted this dance video of LAUSD striking teachers and students boycotting school (student participation is key here), dancing as one, doing a flashmob line dance in front of their school (Venice High, I think).
Each dance move communicates a different contract negotiation talking point:
FIRST STEP: “Reach up and lower those class sizes.” — reach and pull down motion
…
THIRD STEP: “Scoop into that billion-dollar reserve.” — two-hand scooping motion
Then Aretha Franklin music kicks in. Watch it. It’ll give ya chills:
The apoplectic right-wing response tweets below this video give you an idea of its effectiveness.
Last night Bill Maher showed his support for the LA teachers. He had the president of the union in the audience which gave him a standing ovation, and Maher announced that his sister is a teacher in New Jersey. Then, he had John Kasich, who was making a pitch for why he is the most “moderate” of any candidate in both parties in case Trump bites the dust before 2020. Maher could have nailed Kasich on his education policy and the ECOT scandal, but, as per usual, education was not a question on his list.
Another HBO host did a take-down of Kasich.
In his foundational take-down of charter schools — 10.2 million views to date — HBO’s John Oliver included a clip of Kasich’s imbecilic “pizza shop” analogy accompanying Kasich’s call for the expansion of charter schools.
This was followed by Oliver’s withering and hilarious analysis of this.
Oliver said something like, (not an exact quote … SEE video BELOW for that):
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
JOHN, OLIVER:
“As with schools, the idea that the quality of pizza increases as you increase the number of pizzerias that are opened has been definitively refuted by the two words, ‘Papa John’s.’ ”
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
The relevant portion starts at about 9:16, with a lead-in about Ohoi’s lax charter oversight:
The relevant portion starts at about 9:16, with a lead-in about Ohoi’s lax charter oversight.
Kasch also got a big payout from Lehman Bros. before it went belly up.
State public pensioners who had invested money in Lehman lost it all.
Speculating, Lehman hired Kasich because he was expected to get the state’s pension fund managers to invest in Lehman.
The Koch’s bogus pension alarmism resulted in the elimination of all COLA increases for Ohio’s teachers. (BTW, Ohio state employees are not allowed to accrue any Social Security and Medicare benefits and only qualify for Medicare if a spouse has the benefit.
Kasich led the Koch’s anti-union agenda in Ohio and he called a police officer a moron for doing his job. Kasich was involved in the Koch’s ALEC at its earliest stages. He’s a spoiled, petulant child who married money.
Maher should have known that Kasichpassed a law banning collective bargaining and the voters overturned it
If DFER”s politician, Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calf.), doesn’t issue a statement in support of the teachers, when are the rank and file of AFT going to ask for their campaign donation to her, to be returned?
So grateful that L.A. is home to a publication that is willing and able to do the hard work of investigative reporting. Our major media, including newspapers, radio and TV are reluctant to do this kind of work and instead just report the news of the day. This leaves the public with one-sided news that feeds the misinformation that has been forced upon us by LAUSD. It’s down right discouraging to listen to LAUSD’s superintendent Buetner’s press conferences when reporters could, but don’t, ask the toughest questions. When Kyle Stokes of KPCC asked him about the 2 billion dollar reserve, his answer was that he “wasn’t part of the district when the reserve built up”. But, that was end of it. No follow up questions were asked.
AOC and OurRevolution is THE liberal voice for the people.
CAP, DFER, Bill Gates, Corey Booker, Clinton and Obama are the voice for billionaires.
A big problem that teachers’ unions locals have is that they are managed by teachers who lack a background in accounting, and especially in forensic accounting. After a career in business that included being a CEO, I joined my wife in the teaching profession. I was soon elected to the union board and eventually became president and led a strike and a school board recall that resulted in four trustees being recalled. I did it with accounting. I knew forensic accounting from my business career, and a quickly learned about the accounting methods and laws that applied to the school districts. It was easy to find where and how the district I was in had stashed money, often illegally, and I published a 60-page analysis of what was going on and distributed it to the media and to parents and went on a district-wide public-speaking campaign at social clubs and churches where I also distributed the analysis. The local media were hostile to teachers unions, so they ignored the analysis — but the parents, especially the professional accountants among them, were outraged at how the district trustees were lying to them and were withholding money from educating their children. The recall was historic and left the city and county political power structure stunned. Teachers unions at the local level critically need to acquire the accounting know-how and an thorough understanding of applicable state law so that they can competently challenge district budget claims and can educate parents and the general public about the games that school boards play with the money that should be spent on educating children.
Any hints on where to get that type of expertise, or at least some guides as to how to go about analyzing a district’s books?
I’ve been thinking of doing something similar with my district but don’t have much of a clue where to begin.
Any help would be appreciated!
What state and county are you in?
” that include a teacher say in achievement testing (UTLA wants less testing)”
And that is part of the problem. The UTLA should be demanding that no “achievement” (whatever the hell that means) testing be done at all. NONE!
Why have so many bought into the deficit diagnosis dementia that has overwhelmed the teaching and learning process with supposed standards and the accompanying testing, allowing offsite/not teacher in the classroom made tests to be the end all be all of assessment?
Any assessment, test, quiz, evaluation should have the main foundational concept of helping students in their learning process. Anything else is unethical, invalid and only serves to sidetrack the teaching and learning process into an abomination of malpractices.
Well said and is the absolute truth
So you are not against all testing after all?
No, I’ve never said or even hinted that I’m against all assessments. But the assessments should have the fundamental purpose of helping the student learn the subject matter. I consider any other usage of assessments to be unethical, unjust and quite frankly immoral since our fundamental purpose/job of teaching is to help the individual in their own coming to be, in their own being in the fashion that the student wishes/wants/desires.
Almost all have bastardized the assessment process into unethical malpractices.
So confusing with the district continuously lying.