Teachers in Los Angeles Delay Strike Till Next Week; District Faces Long and Catastrophic Fiscal Crisis
After months of failed negotiations, the United Teachers of Los Angeles had scheduled a strike beginning today. They have now postponed the strike until Monday, January 14th. The problems in the district that have driven teachers to strike are complex; their situation is impossibly simple. Their pay has not risen adequately and the conditions in the city’s schools for children and for teachers are deplorable. For the NY Times, Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein report: “Some classes have as many as 45 students… and school nurses, art and music teachers must serve thousands of students by traveling to multiple schools.”
We are told that, with its huge economy, California is unlike the other states where teachers walked out last spring. They were Red states for the most part—exemplars of supply-side, tax cutting and promoters of marketplace choice through charter schools. Instead, we are told, California is a Blue state.
A long, long time ago, California had Blue-state education funding, but that was from 1959 to 1967, under Jerry Brown’s father, Governor Pat Brown. For forty years, however, California has, in reality, been the primary exemplar of Red-state school funding and school privatization. In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, the state law that began the state-by-state, anti-tax slide which has undermined public school funding across the country. In 2012, with Proposition 30, California Governor Jerry Brown pushed through new taxes for education, but they have not been enough to undo the impact of Proposition 13.
In a profound 1998 book, Paradise Lost, about what happened in California, Peter Schrag, the long-time editorial page director of the Sacramento Bee, defines the principles that have dominated California school funding since 1978: “Proposition 13 and the initiatives that followed in its wake—the tax and spending cuts, the growing constraints on both state and CONTINUE READING: Teachers in Los Angeles Delay Strike Till Next Week; District Faces Long and Catastrophic Fiscal Crisis | janresseger
