Fighting for public education: It’s on us
UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl with UTLA members at Fairfax Senior High School.
The Promise of Teaching ....
One of the dependable pleasures of being an educator is running into former students. Over the holiday break, I ran into a former student of mine, Walther Perez, from my 10th-grade World History class at the Crenshaw High School Social Justice Academy, where I was lead teacher.
In that class we studied philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as those not in the standards but who were fundamental to developing ideas around social movements (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Simon Bolivar, Tecumseh). Walther was one of the quieter students, mostly low-key. But he told me during our conversation at a Starbucks on Pico that it was my class that sparked a curiosity that shaped his life and his choices.
Walther is now a student at Santa Monica College, where he is majoring in philosophy and political science and playing for the SMC soccer team while getting ready to transfer into the UC system. He is also the head of a student club that mentors high school students, and he is leading an effort to expand this mentoring program beyond Santa Monica and into South L.A. He is driven to give back to the community he came from. This gets to the heart of our profession: to inspire and instill curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, things that only a robust education can bring them. And, well, we love igniting that spark.
Everything Walther said crystallizes for me the purpose of teaching, the promise of teaching. It also drives home the responsibility we have on our shoulders as a teachers’ union. Everything Walther’s experience involves—educators having some autonomy over curriculum, making authentic connections to parents and community, teaching the value of community service and social justice activism—is under attack with the Broad-Walmart scheme and other like-minded market-driven reforms. Now more than ever, as educators, we must fight to preserve that spark.
Broad-Walmart’s shape-shifting
We have landed some blows in the battle against the billionaires, including the unanimous passage on January 12 of a School Board motion — sponsored by member Scott Schmerelson — that opposes the Broad-Walmart scheme (read more on page 4 of the January United Teacher).
Be prepared for a dirty fight. The Broad-Walmart plan is slick and will continue to morph because their beliefs are not rooted in genuine connections with students, but in undermining the promise of a public education system in Los Angeles. They are scrambling because, through our organizing and outreach, we have shaped the narrative by exposing the fundamental problems at the heart of their scheme, relating to lack of accountability, transparency, and equity.
The Broad-Walmart response to our organizing has been noticed — including by the L.A. Times, as reflected in their January 17 op-ed that says the plan has been “shape-shifting ever since an early draft was leaked” after the scheme was widely criticized by educators and the community.
Although the Broad-Walmart public message has changed, their goal to defund, deregulate, and dismantle public schools has not. You only have to look at the team they hired to lead the disingenuously named Great Public Schools Now.
If they were truly backing off their plan to push a massive expansion of unregulated charter schools across LAUSD, would they have put investment banker Bill Siart in charge? Siart is a founder of ExEd, a company that specializes in (and profits from) supporting new charters. Would they have hired Myrna Castrejon, a former lobbyist for California Charter Schools Association, as executive director? And if this effort was not truly about breaking the union, would they have hired Mercury Public Affairs? Mercury handles PR for Walmart and Alliance Charters—two entities with aggressively anti-union managements. Now Mercury Public Affairs has been hired by the Michigan government to do PR spin for the city of Flint, where institutional racism and a privatization-driven lack of funding for infrastructure and public services have led to a shameful health crisis.
New LAUSD superintendent Michelle King told the L.A. Times this month that she doesn’t “agree or support any initiative that says we’re going to take over or take part of L.A. Unified kids”—a positive sign, but as UTLA members we know that no matter who the superintendent is, it is up to us to build a strong union that can advocate for our students and our profession. During the search process, UTLA repeatedly called for three criteria in a new superintendent: That the person be a career educator who understands public schools, who does not have a connection to Eli Broad or the Broad superintendent training academy, and who has a history of collaboration with stakeholders. King unquestionably meets the first two criteria; as for the third criteria, while she has worked well with stakeholders in key instances in the past, time will tell if King continues to deepen that commitment to collaboration as LAUSD superintendent.
UTLA’s Roadmap for 2016
We should be encouraged by our early successes against the Broad-Walmart plan, but we know that the fight is far from over. UTLA has a roadmap for the year that will keep the fight going against privatization and the billionaire agenda while also taking action on issues deeply connected to our campaign for the Schools L.A. Students Deserve. The passage of the Build the Future, Fund the Fight campaign is central to future wins. Think of UTLA’s financial restructuring as the fuel we need to power our work. Without that fuel, we won’t get far down the road. Your support for a stronger UTLA will not count if you don’t mark your ballot and mail it in. If you haven’t already, make sure you mark your ballot and mail it in or vote online before the February 10 deadline.
The front of this UNITED TEACHER lays out our 2016 roadmap, and I want to cover some of the key actions on our timeline.
February 17 National Walk-In: I am truly excited about the February 17 National Walk-In to Reclaim Public Education. Look at the numbers: More than 30 cities across the U.S. participating, and more than 120 schools in Los Angeles (and counting) taking part. This is how we build a national movement against the privatization of public education and for greater investment in neighborhood schools.
UTLA held a productive all-day planning session on January 14, where representatives from more than 70 schools worked together in small groups to develop a vision for the day (read more on page 5 — there’s also still time for your school to sign up). With the session’s focus on parents and community and positive messaging, Harry Bridges Span School teacher Michael Gearin told me it was one of the most exciting meetings he’s ever been involved in at UTLA.
Out of that meeting came some key tenets for February 17: We believe in working with parents, students, and the community to build Sustainable Neighborhood Community Schools, and we call for the investment and resources to do it. We believe in fully funded public schools, and we reject Broad-Walmart’s plan to undermine LAUSD. Billionaires like Eli Broad shouldn’t be trying to undermine public education — instead, they should be paying their fair share through progressive taxation.
Contract bargaining: On February 9, UTLA formally will initiate “reopener” bargaining with LAUSD on the vitally important issues of class size, student services staffing, and educator development and support. As with the past contract cycle, the key to making progress in bargaining rests in the member organizing and the parent-community outreach we do to support our demands. Read more on contract reopeners on page 8.
Taking on standardized testing: It’s been a slow process, but the national dialogue about overtesting is moving in a positive direction. A growing number of parents and community members are taking a stand against the abuse of standardized testing and the way it distorts classroom learning. As confirmed by UTLA testing survey results, the vast majority of our members who give standardized tests have concerns about lost instructional time and the impact on students’ learning experiences. A majority of members also reported that most of the tests provide little or no useful data. We submitted a demand to consult with the District on educational objectives — our right under state bargaining law. UTLA, through our Testing Task Force, also made extensive document requests in an attempt to create an inventory of local, state, and national assessments being used in LAUSD. Our first meetings with the District are January 27 and February 12. Read more about our testing fight and a free screening on February 11 of a great movie on the issue on page 5.
Charter educator representation and organizing: This month, UTLA members at Birmingham Community Charter School and El Camino Charter High School scored strong contract agreements (read about Birmingham’s agreement on page 8). Their agreements underscore the power in collective bargaining and in united action to support that bargaining. Educators at the Accelerated School are still in the middle of tough negotiations. I met early this month with the Accelerated educators (thanks to Juliana Xochimitl for setting it up) and was inspired by their commitment to escalate their actions to get a fair agreement. These campaigns are critical to raising standards around salary, health benefits, and working and learning conditions across all schools, LAUSD and charter. Raising standards is why the educators at Alliance College-Ready Schools are organizing and keeping up the fight to unionize. They are still waiting, by the way, for Alliance CEO Dan Katzir — who is under a court injunction — to meet with his own educators and UTLA officers to create a labor neutrality agreement.
Organizing for school and social services funding: Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed state budget provides us with some decent news on school funding, including a 5.4% increase in Local Control Funding Formula money and $1.2 billion in one-time discretionary funds (equating to roughly $200 per student for every district). The picture might get even better after tax revenue is updated and after public education advocates have a chance to press for more investment in schools and social services. But this still puts us nowhere near where we need to be for fully funded schools. UTLA will be pushing for the absolutely crucial extension of the Prop. 30 funding measures (scheduled to sunset in 2018-2019) and exploring additional means to raise revenue.
Our roadmap is an ambitious plan, but we know this work needs to be done. Weaving through our work together in the coming year will be the important discussions we had during the Build the Future, Fund the Fight campaign. Our national affiliates are using our deep, months-long dialogue on our financial restructuring drive as a model for member engagement, a model for helping folks understand the importance of the union in fighting for educational justice and against the billionaires and their anti-public education schemes and their anti-union court cases, like Friedrichs v. CTA.
During phone banking for the Build the Future campaign, amidst having great conversations with hundreds of our members, I talked to a few teachers who work at Westwood Charter with Kelly Oschack, whose son played baseball with my son. One of those teachers was a student in Kelly’s class many years ago, and she has returned to Westwood Charter to teach alongside her as a colleague. That is more evidence of the impact of teaching — what we know in our bones about the importance of what we do. That’s why we harness the power of our union — our collective voice — to stand up for public education. Our fight is righteous, and we are ready.
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