L.A.’s Teachers Got What They Wanted—For Their Students
The strike showcased unions' strategy of advocating not just for their members but also for better resources for schools.
Teachers across Los Angeles fought hard and, after just over a week of striking, got more or less what they had hoped for: more librarians and nurses for their schools, smaller class sizes, and nicer campuses. Not on that list? Higher pay—the teachers had already successfully negotiated a 6 percent raise before the strike.
This is the most significant part of the L.A. teachers’ strike story, and the key to understanding the broader dynamics of today’s teachers’ movement. Salaries were never a major sticking point in the negotiations: The final figure for the raise is 6 percent, identical to the numbers that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had outlined in its most recent set of offers—and, in fact, pretty much the same as the number negotiated even before the strike began.
“Our salary demands have pretty much been met, so we’re clearly not striking for that issue per se,” Martha Infante Thorpe, a veteran social-studies teacher and Eastside L.A. native, told me on the eve of the walkout. Instead, she—like the handful of other educators I interviewed—stressed that she and her fellow LAUSD teachers were striking as a last-ditch effort to improve the educations of the nearly 500,000 children they serve.
Topping the union’s list of priorities were demands around class sizes, which in many schools often exceeded the limits stipulated in the teachers’ previous contract—and in some cases were well upwards of 40 kids. While research on the benefits of class-size reduction is mixed, a number of compelling studiessuggest that smaller class sizes can be a significant predictor of student success. Another concern: the paucity of school staff tasked with supporting students’ extracurricular needs and well-being. Many campuses, for example, have for CONTINUE READING: The L.A. Teachers’ Strike Settlement Is a Victory for Students - The Atlantic