We’re talking about 30,000* teachers in 900 ^ schools…..
The politics is about the future of the area’s schools, charter school’s in particular….
Los Angeles teachers are set to strike on Monday, a plan that will impact about a half million students in the nation’s second-largest school district.
The move, which follows 20 months of failed negotiations, will involve more than 30,000 teachers at 900 schools.
The strike comes after a “red state teacher revolt” that rolled through places like Arizona, Kansas and West Virginia last spring. But this time, the teachers are fighting against Democratic leaders in a deeply blue state with union-friendly policies.
On the union side, United Teachers Los Angeles is fighting for pay raises, smaller class sizes and additional support staff. On the opposing side is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which says it simply doesn’t have the funds for such changes. On Friday, the union rejected the district’s latest offer, which involved pay raises, smaller class sizes and increased support staff, but did not meet all the union’s specific requests.
In the background is tension over the expansion of charter schools and questions over who gets to control the direction of the district. Its 2017 school board election was the most expensive in U.S. history, with outside groups ― including unions ― spending nearly $15 million.
Nearly every leader in this fight is a Democrat, with the two sides representing larger fissures within the Democratic Party about the future of public education. What happens with this teachers strike could set the stage for how these issues play out in the 2020 election and beyond.
“This conflict is forcing the issue of school privatization and charter schools in the Democratic Party,” said Lois Weiner, an independent researcher and consultant who has studied teachers unions…..
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At the heart of the strike is the issue of resource distribution. The state of California spends comparatively little on education per pupil. While United Teachers Los Angeles points to $2 billion that the school district keeps in a reserve fund as a way to pay for changes, Beutner contends that the district needs to maintain that cushion.
“A strike will worsen the culture and climate in our schools. What it won’t do is provide more money to reduce class sizes and hire more nurses, counselors and librarians,” wrote Beutner in a Los Angeles Times op-ed this week.
Los Angeles teachers complain of class sizes of up to more than 40 people, inadequate “wraparound” services for needy students and a severe shortage of school nurses. Many elementary schools only have a nurse for one day a week…
…
To the dismay of some progressive groups and politicians, President Barack Obama’s two secretaries of education, Arne Duncan and John King, championed the growth of charter schools. In 2017, the NAACP called for a moratorium on these schools ― a stance that complicated the idea that so-called school choice is a civil rights issue, as education reform groups often argue.
Note…
Orignal numbers corrected…
image…latimes
Not 300,000 teachers in 300 schools, as you wrote above, James (which would mean at least some thousand-teacher schools) but:
“The move, which follows 20 months of failed negotiations, will involve more than 30,000 teachers at 900 schools.”
[or an average of very roughly 30-35 striking teachers per school struck.]
Thirty thousand teachers is still a huge number. I don’t know how many teachers (and ancillary professionals) have been involved in the New York and Chicago strikes.
Correction made
Thanks
And yes
Those are BIG darn numbers!