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Saturday, February 2, 2019

BARBARA MADELONI: LA Teachers Didn’t Just Win Their Strike—They Beat Back School Privatizers

LA Teachers Didn’t Just Win Their Strike—They Beat Back School Privatizers

LA Teachers Didn’t Just Win Their Strike—They Beat Back School Privatizers



In a joyful, rain-drenched strike, 34,000 Los Angeles teachers won things no union has ever won.
They forced Superintendent Austin Beutner, a former investment banker, to accept concessions even on topics he had previously refused even to bargain over.
L.A. will reinstate limits on class size—and for most classes, reduce those limits by four students by 2022.
Despite a pro-charter school board majority, the nation’s second-largest school district agreed to move a board resolution to support a statewide moratorium on new charter schools
It will hire more nurses, librarians, and counselors; reduce standardized testing and random police searches of students; create an immigrant defense fund; and hand budget control of 30 schools over to local communities.
It’s a very different vision from what Beutner had in mind. In November the L.A. Times and Capital & Main had leaked his plan to carve up the district into clusters of schools run like competing stock portfolios. Any school judged to be an underperformer would be sold off like a weak stock.
Teachers were weeping at the mass rally outside City Hall January 22 as United Teachers Los Angeles Secretary and Bargaining Chair Arlene Inouye reviewed the high points of the tentative agreement.
President Alex Caputo-Pearl told the crowd that this strike was "one of the most magnificent demonstrations of collective action that the United States has seen in decades.
"We did not win because of a single leader," he said. "We did not win because of a CONTINUE READING: LA Teachers Didn’t Just Win Their Strike—They Beat Back School Privatizers