Blame Sacramento
In the L.A. teachers’ strike, the state is the real problem.
Undeterred by an afternoon rainstorm, a band of students, teachers, and parents crowded the streets outside Hollywood High School the other day to chant, whistle, and brandish protest signs in support of United Teachers Los Angeles, the city’s striking teachers’ union.
stop cheaping out on the children read one sign that pretty much summed up the union’s bargaining stance.
Similar scenes are playing out across L.A. in the city’s first teacher strike since a nine-day walkout in 1989. Rallies and protests on behalf of the 35,000 union members have scrambled the daily schedules of nearly 500,000 students and their parents and sparked a tweetstorm of support from boldfaced names in Hollywood and Congress.
The strike was all but inevitable. From his first day in office as union president in 2014, Alex Caputo-Pearl made clear that his vision of quality public education included more money for teachers, smaller class sizes, and expanded student support in the form of more nurses, counselors, and librarians—demands the district has addressed since then only modestly.
Caputo-Pearl’s first contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District expired almost two years ago, and tensions have been building ever since. Teachers simply aren’t buying the argument that there isn’t enough wiggle room to meet their needs in a $7.5 billion operating budget, plus the district’s roughly $2 billion reserve fund. The district’s unwillingness to spend the latter is a major point of contention with the union.
The state requires every district to set aside money for periods of economic uncertainty, for large and unanticipated expenditures, and to be eligible for a higher credit rating. While the union argues that the reserve should all go to teachers, the district says that it has already been earmarked for various costs over the next several years.
And that, says Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker and publisher of the Los Angeles Times with no prior experience in public education, could push the district into insolvency by 2021.
What if he’s right? What if the district really can’t afford the sort of investment CONTINUE READING: In L.A. Teachers' Strike, the State Is the Real Problem - The Atlantic
