L.A. Teachers’ Strike Is Ending, but Economic and Racial Inequity Remain Along with State Funding Problems
Los Angeles teachers reached a tentative deal to end their strike yesterday morning. Teachers began voting on the agreement later in the day, and it was expected that teachers would return to their classrooms today. At noon yesterday, the Los Angeles Times‘ Howard Blume reported that the agreement includes a 6 percent raise, smaller classes, and a promise to create 30 Community Schools with wraparound medical and social services for students and their families. Even as the teachers won some of the protections they demanded for their students, however, years of serious school funding inequity, compounded by racial and economic segregation of students across the district’s schools will continue as major challenges for the school district.
Addressing the Los Angeles teachers’ strike for The Guardian, last week Andrew Gumbel untangled the impact on the state’s public schools of California’s taxing constraints wound together with racial segregation and explosive inequality: “California once had one of the best funded, most envied public education systems in the United States. Now schoolteachers in Los Angeles, who went on strike… to vent years of frustration, say they struggle with overcrowded classrooms and children whose need for academic support, psychological services and English-language coaching outstrips anything they can provide. Many schools do not have a full-time nurse or counselor. In many of the poorer neighborhoods—in south L.A., or the north-eastern San Fernando Valley—the library opens rarely. Janitorial service has become so spotty that some teachers have resorted to buying their own cleaning supplies and going over their own classrooms with rags and a mop at the end of a long day. It’s a grim picture.”
Gumbel described the power of money in a state and a public school district with explosive economic inequality: “California has a greater concentration of billionaires and holders of university doctorates than any place on earth. Yet it is also a state of vast inequalities and pervasive poverty, particularly in rural areas and in the blighted neighborhoods of its biggest CONTINUE READING: L.A. Teachers’ Strike Is Ending, but Economic and Racial Inequity Remain Along with State Funding Problems | janresseger