Battling Broad's charter attack in LA
ON THE heels of a big contract campaign that won a 10 percent raise, unprecedented caps on class sizes and other gains for our schools, the 31,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) have another major battle on our hands over the future of public education in our city--a battle with national implications.
Last week, thousands of UTLA members walked picket lines in front of our schools, demanding that the school board for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) condemn a plan hatched by local billionaire Eli Broad to raise $500 million to double the number of LAUSD students attending charter schools. Broad's stated goal is for charter schools to reach 50 percent "market share" of LAUSD students. In response, UTLA members declared, "Billionaires can't run our schools!"
Eli Broad made his fortune in the real estate and insurance industries and has no experience working as an educator. Yet he has leveraged his vast wealth to become one of the most influential educational policymakers in the U.S.
In 1999, Broad started a "venture philanthropy" organization, which he humbly named the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Since then, the Broad Foundation has funneled over $600 million into education initiatives that conform to Broad's vision of "school reform": privatize and deregulate public education, run schools like businesses, and blame everything bad on teachers and our unions. Broad's plan for LA states that it will be a "proof point" for the privatization of schools nationwide.
Los Angeles already has over 150,000 children in charter schools, more than any other city in the nation. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are run by private management organizations, the largest of which see the schools they run as direct competitors to neighborhood public schools in the "education marketplace."
Almost all charter-school teachers and staff have no union representation, are at-will employees, and have no protection against excessive workload mandates. As a result, charter schools have significantly higher teacher turnover rates than even LAUSD schools, where classrooms are overcrowded, and teachers aren't given nearly adequate resources to serve the needs of students suffering extreme poverty.
UTLA's contract gives its members a wide range of benefits and protections, including lifetime health benefits with no premiums, due process rights against arbitrary or retaliatory termination, duty-free lunch breaks and the right to a voice at school via shared decision-making councils.
If Broad's plan comes to fruition, 10,000 UTLA jobs could be destroyed and more teachers would be pushed into the unlimited workloads, lack of job security and substandard health benefits that prevail in most charter schools.
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OF COURSE, Broad isn't selling his plan as a way to dismantle a crucial public service, destroy thousands of stable union jobs, and push teachers out of the public sector into the abyss of market-driven precarious employment. Broad calls his proposal "Great Public Schools Now" and says its goal is to "ensure that every student can access a great public school." What could be bad about a man all the newspapers call a "philanthropist" raising half a billion dollars for "great public schools" for low-income students?
But take a closer look at the Broad plan--which was only revealed to the public when Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume started writing about it in August and published the Broad Foundation's 44-page internal report on the plan in September--and you find ON THE heels of a big contract campaign that won a 10 percent raise, unprecedented caps on class sizes and other gains for our schools, the 31,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) have another major battle on our hands over the future of public education in our city--a battle with national implications.
Last week, thousands of UTLA members walked picket lines in front of our schools, demanding that the school board for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) condemn a plan hatched by local billionaire Eli Broad to raise $500 million to double the number of LAUSD students attending charter schools. Broad's stated goal is for charter schools to reach 50 percent "market share" of LAUSD students. In response, UTLA members declared, "Billionaires can't run our schools!"
Eli Broad made his fortune in the real estate and insurance industries and has no experience working as an educator. Yet he has leveraged his vast wealth to become one of the most influential educational policymakers in the U.S.
In 1999, Broad started a "venture philanthropy" organization, which he humbly named the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Since then, the Broad Foundation has funneled over $600 million into education initiatives that conform to Broad's vision of "school reform": privatize and deregulate public education, run schools like businesses, and blame everything bad on teachers and our unions. Broad's plan for LA states that it will be a "proof point" for the privatization of schools nationwide.
Los Angeles already has over 150,000 children in charter schools, more than any other city in the nation. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are run by private management organizations, the largest of which see the schools they run as direct competitors to neighborhood public schools in the "education marketplace."
Almost all charter-school teachers and staff have no union representation, are at-will employees, and have no protection against excessive workload mandates. As a result, charter schools have significantly higher teacher turnover rates than even LAUSD schools, where classrooms are overcrowded, and teachers aren't given nearly adequate resources to serve the needs of students suffering extreme poverty.
UTLA's contract gives its members a wide range of benefits and protections, including lifetime health benefits with no premiums, due process rights against arbitrary or retaliatory termination, duty-free lunch breaks and the right to a voice at school via shared decision-making councils.
If Broad's plan comes to fruition, 10,000 UTLA jobs could be destroyed and more teachers would be pushed into the unlimited workloads, lack of job security and substandard health benefits that prevail in most charter schools.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OF COURSE, Broad isn't selling his plan as a way to dismantle a crucial public service, destroy thousands of stable union jobs, and push teachers out of the public sector into the abyss of market-driven precarious employment. Broad calls his proposal "Great Public Schools Now" and says its goal is to "ensure that every student can access a great public school." What could be bad about a man all the newspapers call a "philanthropist" raising half a billion dollars for "great public schools" for low-income students?
But take a closer look at the Broad plan--which was only revealed to the public when Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume started writing about it in August and published the Broad Foundation's 44-page internal report on the plan in September--and you find Battling Broad's charter attack in LA | SocialistWorker.org:
