Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein

<h1>LOS ANGELES — Carrying protest signs, thousands of teachers and their allies converged last month on the shimmering contemporary art museum in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Clad in red, they denounced “billionaire privatizers” and the museum’s patron, Eli Broad. The march was a preview of the attacks the union would unleash during the teachers’ strike, which ended last week.</h1>

As one of charter schools’ biggest backers, Broad helped make them a fashionable and potent cause in Los Angeles, drawing support from business leaders like Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix; Hollywood executives; and lawmakers to create a wide network of more than 220 schools.

Broad was so bullish about the future of charter schools just a few years ago that he even floated a plan to move roughly half of Los Angeles schoolchildren — more than 250,000 students — into such schools. In 2017, he funneled millions of dollars to successfully elect candidates for the Board of Education who would back charters, an alternative to traditional public schools that are publicly funded but privately run.

His prominence has also turned him into a villain in the eyes of the teachers union. Now Broad and supporters like him are back on their heels in Los Angeles and across the country. The strike is the latest setback for the charter school movement, which once drew the endorsement of prominent Democrats and Republicans alike. But partly in reaction to the Trump administration, vocal Democratic support for charters has waned as the party has shifted further to the left and is more likely to deplore such schools as a drain on traditional public schools.

When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a deal between the teachers union and the school district after the weeklong strike, it became immediately clear that the fate of charter schools was part of the bargain: The union extracted a promise that the pro-charter school Board of Education would vote on a call for the state to cap the number of charters.

It was the latest in a string of defeats for a movement, which for over a decade has pointed to Los Angeles and California as showcases for the large-scale growth of the charter school sector.

Backers of charter schools argue that they provide a much-needed choice for parents in poor neighborhoods, where low-performing schools are often the norm. Many supporters expressed frustration that student achievement had not been a focus of the debate around the Los Angeles strike. Overall, the city’s public school students tend to perform worse in reading and math than their counterparts in many other large urban school districts across the country, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The low performance of district schools, charter supporters say, has led to about a fifth of the district’s students being enrolled in charter schools.

“Why would they dive in to make this political statement?” said Myrna Castrejón, president of the California Charter Schools Association. Addressing the teachers union, she said: “Do you hate us that much that you would bargain away the future of poor children and Latino children for this?”

Charter schools, which are generally not unionized, were not officially on the bargaining table in the protracted negotiations between the union and the district. It is the state, not the school district, that crafts the laws governing charter schools and their growth. But it was always a central message of the union during the strike: Charter schools, they argued, were taking students and money away from traditional public schools.

Still, charter schools have proved popular among many parents in Los Angeles. Some schools have long waiting lists and the district already has more students enrolled in charters than any other public school system in the country.

It is still unclear how much practical effect the deal will have on charters. Charter school supporters are lobbying the school board, which has steadfastly supported charters for more than a decade, to vote down the resolution for a charter school cap this week. Even if it passes, advocates are certain to take the fight to Sacramento, where a bill calling for a moratorium seems likely. They will argue that charters have given poor students and students of color essential options for better schools.

But the defeat in the court of public opinion is clear: After years of support from powerful local and national allies — including many Democrats — charter schools are now facing a backlash and severe skepticism.

During the past two years, charter school supporters were dealt painful political defeats in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and other states.

As the push for alternatives to traditional public schools has come to be more associated with President Donald Trump and his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, the shift in Democratic Party politics has been especially pronounced. President Barack Obama supported expanding high-quality charter schools, and pushed teachers unions to let go of some of their traditional seniority protections and put more emphasis on raising student achievement.

But after a wave of mass teacher walkouts across the nation, and with a noticeable shift to the left in the party, ambitious national Democrats now seem more hesitant to criticize organized labor. Sens. Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among those who said they supported the striking teachers in Los Angeles. The city’s charter school leaders couldn’t help but notice that no equally prominent elected Democrat rose to the defense of Los Angeles charter schools as union leaders attacked them.

“The brand of charter schools is damaged right now,” said Ben Austin, a Democrat who helped craft a law that allows parents to turn traditional schools into charter schools. “It’s not a coincidence; it’s because the teachers union has done an effective job of demonizing them.”

One of the union’s more potent criticisms of charter schools is that they are supported by billionaire corporate philanthropists, who are often from outside the communities in which the schools exist. Supporters of the Los Angeles charter school sector have included donors such as Broad and Hastings; Michael Bloomberg; Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs; Donald Fisher, founder of the Gap; and members of the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune.

That assessment was evident on the picket lines all over Los Angeles during the strike, with signs railing against “privatizers” and the “greedy side” of the philanthropists. Most of the donors, particularly those with ties to the Democratic Party, declined or did not respond to interview requests. Aides to Broad said he was not available for comment.

During the strike, Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the union, said that the criticism had “clearly touched a nerve” among the public.

“The reason it’s touched a nerve is because our neighborhood public schools have been neglected,” he said. “Rather than fund them at an appropriate level, the agenda is to try and privatize them and turn more and more over to privately run charters.”

But supporters of charter schools dismiss that notion, pointing out that the district has many financial problems.

“I am supremely disappointed and almost angered at some of the funders of the charter movement, who have put hundreds of millions into charters and have not taken the time to explain what they are doing to the public,” said William Bloomfield, a donor who said he gave more than $8 million last year to EdVoice, a political action fund run by charter school advocates.

“For people to reach the most ridiculous conclusion that this is about profits is absurd,” he said. “This is about giving every kid a chance for a world-class education.”

But many see the competition for students as a downside of charter schools. Critics have said the district should study the effect on existing schools before allowing new charters to open.

“Competition can be healthy, but hypercompetition can be very damaging,” said David Rattray, executive vice president of the Center for Education Excellence and Talent Development for the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “We’ve turned education into a commodity — if that kid walks across the street, you’re chasing after him for the money attached to his seat. That’s ridiculous if you think about the long term. Nobody meant to do that.”

A 2014 Stanford study that compared traditional and charter schools in Los Angeles found that 48 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools in reading and 44 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools in math; the rest of the charter schools were either similar to public schools or lower performing. On the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, eighth-graders in the city’s charter schools scored better in reading and math than their peers in traditional schools.

Shavar Jeffries, president of Democrats for Education Reform, a national organization that supports alternatives to traditional public schools, said there were still prominent Democrats, like Booker, Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, whom he considered strong supporters of the charter school sector. And at the local level, he said, many Democratic mayors and state legislators continued to support charter schools, especially those offering additional options for low-income black and Latino students, like those in Los Angeles.

“Charters exist because the parents demand them and want them,” Jeffries said. “I do wish more leaders would step up and stand up and deliver that message.”

Ana Ponce began teaching in a Los Angeles charter school more than three decades ago, drawn by an idealistic desire to improve schools for Latino students who, like her, had come to the United States knowing little English. Now, Ponce is chief executive of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, a network of charter schools. She will soon take over Great Public Schools Now, an organization created by Broad to help charter schools in Los Angeles.

“We all want good schools,” Ponce said. “We’re all public schools. People like me are starting charter schools and people like me believe in these schools.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6dce7d2f-6dd8-4637-b2fe-6ef62fc71e1b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/us/charter-schools-los-angeles.html">The New York Times</a>.

Charter Schools Suffer Setback in Aftermath of Los Angeles Strike

As one of charter schools’ biggest backers, Broad helped make them a fashionable and potent cause in Los Angeles.

Charter schools suffer setback in aftermath of Los Angeles strike

<h1>LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles public school teachers reached a deal with officials Tuesday to end a weeklong strike that had affected more than a half-million students, winning an array of supplementary services after an era in education marked by attacks on traditional public schools and their teachers.</h1>

The deal showed the clout the teachers union has with Democrats in power in this city and this state. But union leaders said that what was perhaps more important to them was that the strike had provided an alternate narrative to the school choice movement that grew up around the idea that traditional public schools were factories of failure that needed to be broken up and rethought.

The deal includes caps on class sizes and hiring full-time nurses for every school, as well as a librarian for every middle and high school by the fall of 2020. The union also won a significant concession from the district on standardized tests: Next year a committee will develop a plan to reduce the number of assessments by half. The pro-charter school board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools. Teachers also won a 6 percent pay raise, but that was the same increase proposed by the district before the strike.

The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers in the nation’s second-largest public school system marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days, and after a round of marathon negotiating sessions over the holiday weekend.

The contract was ratified by an “overwhelming supermajority” of the roughly 30,000 members of the union, officials said Tuesday evening. Teachers are expected to be back in their classrooms Wednesday morning.

“Today is a day full of good news,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he stood alongside Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. “This is a good agreement; it is a historic agreement; it gets to lower class sizes; it gets to proper support staff.”

“The strike is painful and had a cost,” the mayor added. “But there is no question to get here, the strike helped.”

The Los Angeles strike was the eighth major teacher walkout over the past year. A movement that calls itself Red For Ed spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond. But the strike in Los Angeles was a union-led one against Democratic leaders who are usually on their side. It also was one of the first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools by competing with them for students and funding. Most charter schools are not unionized.

The agreement includes a pledge that the elected school board for the district will vote on a resolution asking the state to “establish a charter school cap” and create a governor’s committee on charter schools, according to a statement released by the union.

It was unclear how much practical effect the change would have, because there are already more than 1,100 charters in the state. Roughly 20 percent of all students in Los Angeles are enrolled in charter schools, according to state figures. California law allows 100 new charter schools to open each year, which is considered relatively liberal nationally.

Beutner and his allies on the Los Angeles school board have been vocal supporters of charter schools, which they say offer parents more choices. Charter schools have also been championed by prominent business leaders and philanthropists in Los Angeles, including Eli Broad, who backed Beutner’s selection as superintendent last year.

Some of the moves bolster traditional public schools after a long period that put heavy emphasis on creating alternatives to them, and on using students’ standardized test scores to hold schools and teachers accountable.

“I see this as a paradigm shift,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who traveled to picket with Los Angeles teachers twice during the strike. “The elite types who use charters as a force for competition will see this as a big blow. We’re now seeing a mainstream shift toward neighborhood public schools with the goal being: Let’s make them work for all kids.”

The strike’s outcome pointed to a new direction on education for the Democratic Party, away from President Barack Obama’s agenda — which sought to expand high-quality charter schools and, at times, pushed back against teachers unions — and toward a more open embrace of the influence of organized labor on public education. Prominent Democrats who are running, or are considering running, for president, including Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, all issued statements in support for the striking teachers.

Supporters of charter schools pushed back on the idea of a cap Tuesday. “Placing a cap on the growth of charter schools puts the agenda of the education bureaucracy before the needs of public school students, and we cannot stand for that,” said Nina Rees, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Caputo-Pearl said Tuesday that the past week had showed an “absolute groundswell” of support for Los Angeles’ public schools.

“We have seen over the last week something amazing happened,” Caputo-Pearl said. “We took on the idea of bargaining for the common good. Public education desperately needs attention.”

The strike drew attention to how California, one of the wealthiest and most liberal states in the country, spends relatively little on its public schools. As they announced the outlines of the deal, Garcetti, Beutner and Caputo-Pearl declined to give specific details on how the district would pay for the changes, but school officials said they would need more money from local voters and the state.

“We’re spending every nickel we have,” Beutner said. “It’s all in for schools. This is the start, not the end.”

Many of the changes — including class-size caps and full-time nurses at every school — would be phased in over time, officials said. Because those changes would occur over the next three years, the deal essentially punted on the question of how the district would come up with the $403 million needed to pay for the additional staff members. District officials said on Tuesday that they expect to propose a local parcel tax in 2020. Such a tax which would require the approval of two-thirds of voters in the sprawling district. Beutner also made it clear that he expected the attention to now turn to Sacramento for increased funding.

The state’s chronically constrained school spending is largely attributed to its property tax laws, and especially to Proposition 13, a ballot initiative passed in 1978 that drastically limits tax rates and makes increases difficult to enact. Affluent, fast-growing suburban communities have suffered less under the law than large urban systems like the Los Angeles Unified School District, where declining enrollment and rising costs for pensions and health care have created budget problems year after year.

While many educators and local leaders have called the strike a watershed moment for California public schools, it is far from clear whether there is a political willingness to change the statewide property tax laws. The union and district officials are both backing a ballot measure that would increase taxes on commercial, though not residential, properties in 2020.

The strike settlement is also a significant achievement for Garcetti, who has no formal authority over the school system. Although he publicly supported the teachers, he acted as a mediator of sorts and helped broker the deal during days of negotiations at City Hall. Before the strike, Garcetti had largely shied away from involvement with the public schools, but with the national spotlight on the strike and the mayor considering a presidential bid in 2020, he appeared eager to get involved during the past week.

Teachers in several other states, including Oklahoma and West Virginia, have won raises through statewide strikes that attracted wide public and political support.

Other major U.S. cities and states are now facing a possible school walkout, even as Los Angeles reached a settlement. Teachers in Denver began voting over the weekend on whether to strike after negotiations with the city’s school system failed to produce an agreement Friday, local news outlets reported. In Virginia, teachers are planning a statewide demonstration later in January. And teachers in Oakland, California, said they had drawn lessons from Los Angeles teachers and were preparing to vote on a strike.

With fewer than half the district’s students attending school during the Los Angeles strike, officials said the walkout had cost the district roughly $125 million in state financing that is distributed based on attendance.

A poll released by Loyola Marymount University on Tuesday showed that the overwhelming majority of Los Angeles residents continued to support the strike.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c61ee6e7-d9b7-4883-a9e7-dbcb416502ff" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/us/lausd-teacher-strike-deal.html">The New York Times</a>.

Los Angeles Teachers' Strike to End as Deal Is Reached

The deal showed the clout the teachers union has with Democrats in power in this city and this state.

Los Angeles teachers' strike to end as deal is reached

The deal includes caps on class sizes, and hiring full-time nurses for every school, as well as a librarian for every middle and high school in the district by the fall of 2020. The union also won a significant concession from the district on standardized tests: Next year a committee will develop a plan to reduce the number of assessments by half. The pro-charter school board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools. Teachers also won a 6 percent pay raise, but that was the same increase proposed by the district before the strike.

The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers in the nation’s second-largest public school system marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days, and after a round of negotiating sessions over the holiday weekend.

The contract still needs to be ratified by the roughly 30,000 members of the union, but that approval is widely expected. Teachers are expected to be back in their classrooms Wednesday morning.

“Today is a day full of good news,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he stood alongside Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles strike was the eighth major teacher walkout over the past year. A movement that calls itself Red For Ed spread like wildfire from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond. But the strike in Los Angeles was a union-led one against Democratic leaders who are usually on their side. It also was one of the first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools by competing with them for students and funding.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/us/lausd-teacher-strike-deal.html" id="023405f8-296d-3533-a634-4c3aa8752e6b">The New York Times</a>.

Teachers in Los Angeles Reach Tentative Deal to End Their Weeklong Strike

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles public schoolteachers reached a tentative deal with officials Tuesday to end a weeklong strike that had affected more than a half-million students, winning an array of supplementary services after an era in education marked by attacks on traditional public schools and their teachers.

The teachers won a 6 percent pay raise and caps on class sizes, which had become one of the most contentious issues between the union and district officials. The city and county will also spend money to expand services in schools, including hiring more nurses, counselors and psychologists.

The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days, and after a round of marathon negotiating sessions over the holiday weekend.

The Los Angeles strike was the eighth major teacher walkout over the past year, as a movement that calls itself Red For Ed spread like wildfire from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Arizona, Chicago and beyond. But the strike in Los Angeles was a union-led one against Democratic leaders who are usually on their side. It also was one of the first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools.

Many of the changes — including class-size caps and full-time nurses at every school — would be phased in over time, officials said. Caputo-Pearl said the deal ending the strike would include new regulations on the charter sector, which already educates roughly 20 percent of public school students in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Teachers' Strike to End With Tentative Deal for More Pay

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles public-school teachers reached a tentative deal with school officials Tuesday to end a weeklong strike that had upended learning for more than a half-million students in the nation’s second-largest public school system.

“Today is a day full of good news,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he stood alongside Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. “This is a good agreement; it is a historic agreement; it gets to lower class sizes; it gets to support services.”

The victory for the teachers’ union goes far beyond the new two-year contract. In recent years, teachers in Los Angeles and all over the country have often found themselves on the defensive, as politicians and educational leaders have demanded that more be done to weed out ineffective teachers.

Caputo-Pearl said Tuesday that the last week had showed an “absolute groundswell” of support for Los Angeles’ public schools. And many political leaders rallied to the side of the Los Angeles teachers.

The three men declined to give specific details, but said that the county and city would pay for some services and that class sizes would be reduced incrementally in every school starting next year.

Asked whether there would be a moratorium on new charter schools, Caputo-Pearl told reporters to “stay tuned.” And though he declined to give details, he also said that the district had met some of the union’s demands on limiting standardized tests.

Many of the changes — including class-size caps and full-time nurses at every school — would be phased in over time, officials said. Caputo-Pearl said that the deal ending the strike would include new regulations on the charter sector, which already educates roughly 20 percent of public school students in Los Angeles.

The strike also drew attention to how California, one of the wealthiest and most liberal states in the country, spends relatively little on its public schools.

While many educators and local leaders have called the strike a watershed moment for public schools in the state, it is far from clear whether there is a political willingness to change the statewide property tax laws or to try to persuade Los Angeles voters to approve a local bond issue to raise the money the schools need.

The strike settlement is also a significant achievement for Garcetti, who has no formal authority over the school system. Though he publicly supported the teachers, he managed to act as a mediator of sorts and helped to broker the deal during days of negotiations at City Hall. Before the strike, Garcetti had largely shied away from involvement with the public schools, but with the national spotlight on the strike and the mayor considering a presidential bid in 2020, he appeared eager to get involved during the last week.

Teachers in several other states, including Oklahoma and West Virginia, have managed to win raises and increases in school spending through statewide strikes that attracted wide public and political support.

Other major U.S. cities and states are now facing a possible school walkout, even as Los Angeles reached a settlement. Teachers in Denver began voting over the weekend on whether to strike, after negotiations with the city’s school system failed to produce an agreement Friday, local news outlets reported. In Virginia, teachers are planning a statewide demonstration later in January. And teachers in Oakland, California, have said they’ve drawn lessons from Los Angeles teachers and are now preparing to vote on a strike.

With fewer than half the Los Angeles district’s students attending school during the strike, officials said the walkout had cost the district roughly $125 million in state financing that is distributed based on attendance.

The strike affects roughly 500,000 students at 900 schools in the district, the second-largest in the nation. The schools will remain open, staffed by substitutes hired by the city, but many parents have said they will not send their children across picket lines.

The impact of the walkout is likely to ripple across California and the rest of the country. Teachers mounted large-scale strikes in six other states last year to protest low pay and demand more money for public education.

The decision to walk off the job came after months of negotiations between the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although educators on all sides agree that California should spend more money on education, the union and the district are locked in a bitter feud about how Los Angeles should use the money it already gets.

— Why Are Teachers Striking?

Union leaders have complained about large classes, which have grown to more than 40 students in some of the district’s middle and high schools, and have said the system needs many more nurses, counselors, librarians and other support staff as well as teachers.

Although district officials have agreed to come closer to meeting some of the union’s demands, they say fulfilling all of them would bankrupt the system, which is already strained by rising health care and pension costs.

District officials have tried for weeks to avert the strike, putting political and legal pressure on the union to stop teachers from walking off the job. Instead of encouraging a walkout, district officials argued, the union should direct its energy and its frustrations at the state government in Sacramento, which determines the district’s annual budget.

— On the Picket Line in Koreatown

At Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, a large campus in Koreatown, hundreds of teachers and supporters held signs declaring “We demand respect” and “Striking for our students.” The picket line was a sea of umbrellas, with many covering their signs in plastic wrap to protect them from rain.

The teachers’ union has urged parents to walk the picket line in support of the strike, and it was unclear how many of the 500,000 students would show up at schools, which will have only a skeletal staff on campuses.

By 8 a.m., dozens of students and parents had gathered along the sidewalk to support the teachers, but there was also a steady stream of students entering RFK, which houses several small schools on its campus.

Once the students entered, they were shuffled inside to the campus library, cafeteria or another large gathering area. It was unclear whether any instruction would be given.

Sophie Chiang, a 10th-grade student, arrived well before the 8:20 a.m. first bell.

“Oh God, it’s really happening,” she said as she approached the line of teachers in red ponchos shouting “Whose schools? Our schools!” She was momentarily worried that she would be stopped from entering, but nobody on the picket line stopped her. And the campus security guard who is usually at the entrance was not as his post.

— Three Ways This Strike Is Different

At first glance, Monday’s massive strike in Los Angeles looks like a continuation of the teacher protests held across the country in 2018. While some of the issues — stagnant salaries and low classroom funding — are similar, this urban strike is far different from the recent statewide walkouts in conservative and swing states. Here’s why:

1.These teachers are picketing their bosses, not politicians. The six state walkouts in 2018 featured teachers traveling to state capitols to lobby legislators and governors for higher taxes and more school funding. In contrast, the Los Angeles action is a traditional strike in which teachers are protesting against their bosses: the district’s superintendent and Board of Education.

2.The Los Angeles union is strong. In the six walkout states, teachers’ unions were weak and the majority of teachers in many districts were not members. That’s not the case in California, a strong labor state where public employee strikes are legal. The president of United Teachers Los Angeles, Alex Caputo-Pearl, is part of a group of more strident local union leaders who have, for years, been critiquing school-reform priorities such as the expansion of the charter school sector — a major issue in Los Angeles — and the growth of standardized testing. These issues were simmering in the nation’s second-largest city for years before the West Virginia walkout that began in February 2018.

3. Los Angeles is trying to keep schools open. It is unusual for a district to keep all schools open during a strike in which all teachers are expected to participate, but that is what Los Angeles Unified is trying. This allows the district to continue serving meals and providing child care to its high-needs student population, 82 percent of whom come from low-income families. But with far fewer adults than usual, there probably won’t be much traditional instruction going on. Students may be grouped together in cafeterias and auditoriums, perhaps watching movies or playing games.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/teachers-strike-lausd.html" id="7173dc71-8511-38ce-a11b-6e372df7476b">The New York Times</a>.

Los Angeles Teachers  Strike for More Pay and More Help

LOS ANGELES — More than 30,000 Los Angeles public-school teachers began a long-planned strike Monday, pressing demands for higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff in the schools.

<h1>LOS ANGELES — There are 900 schools, 30,000 teachers and more than 600,000 students in the Los Angeles public school system. By the end of the week, a teacher strike could throw them all into crisis.</h1>

After months of failed negotiations, teachers are expected to walk off the job Thursday, in a show of frustration over what they say are untenable conditions in the second-largest school system in the country.

Teachers and other employees in the Los Angeles Unified School District are demanding higher pay, smaller class sizes and more support staff like counselors and librarians. But district officials say they do not have the money to meet all the demands and the strike would do more damage to schools than good.

A strike in Los Angeles would offer a new stage for the national teacher protest movement, which in the last year has driven walkouts against stagnant pay and low education funding in six states. A walkout in staunchly liberal Los Angeles would also signal a major shift in a movement that has spread mostly in conservative or swing states with weaker unions.

Teachers in those states thronged state capitals to picket legislators and governors last year. Educators in Los Angeles, by contrast, are led by a strong union and are planning a more conventional strike against the superintendent and members of the Board of Education, who they say favor charter schools over traditional ones. Their protests could ripple across the state, with frustrated teachers in other cities considering their own labor actions.

Although officials from the teachers’ union and the school district have another negotiating meeting set for Monday, analysts say a last-minute agreement seems unlikely.

The impending strike highlights the fact that despite California’s reputation as a center of liberal policy, it spends relatively little on public education. School spending levels, about $11,000 per student in 2016, are far below those in other blue bastions; for example, California spends about half as much as New York on the average child.

Education advocates on all sides of the labor impasse in Los Angeles say it is the neediest students who are hurt most by funding constraints. More than a fifth of public school students in California are still learning English, the highest percentage in the country.

“California has been underfunding its schools for many, many years,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked closely with Los Angeles and New York public schools.

The state has only recently begun to restore deep cuts made during the last recession, when California was hit particularly hard. “It’s not even close to where we should be,” Noguera said. “I would not say that the state has deliberately starved the schools, but there has been no leadership from the state.”

Underlying the debate between the two sides is a situation they agree is a major problem: that high-needs school districts like Los Angeles, where 82 percent of students are low-income, bear the brunt of the burden from the state’s low education spending.

With many wealthy and white families opting to choose charter or private schools, or move to other surrounding school districts, the Los Angeles school district is disproportionately African-American and Latino. A study from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found that Latino students in Los Angeles are more segregated than anywhere else in the country.

In other districts in California — Oakland, in particular — as well as in Virginia and Indiana, teachers angry over pay and limited resources have raised the possibility of protests.

“We’ve had a systemic process over the past many years of disinvesting in neighborhood public schools,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the main union for the district. Instead of funding neighborhood schools, cities and states had chosen to “dismantle them and privatize them,” he said.

Critics of the Los Angeles union say that by targeting the school district and not the state, the union is misdirecting its ire.

“Ninety percent of our funding comes from Sacramento, and if they were marching there, I would be marching with teachers,” said Nick Melvoin, vice president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Melvoin is a major supporter of the city’s charter schools but concedes that some of the union’s complaints are valid. When traditional schools lose students to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, they are sometimes left with students who have more demanding needs. Some may be homeless or live in foster care, or have parents who are less involved in their educations.

“I think that’s fair,” he said of the critique. The solution for traditional schools, he argued, was not to vilify the charter sector, but to adopt some of the strategies of charters to compete with them. Policymakers should better regulate charter schools to make sure they do not “cherry pick” the easiest-to-teach students, he added.

The vast majority of charter-school teachers are not unionized (although hundreds of them in Chicago last month staged the nation’s first strike against a charter network). All charter schools in Los Angeles are expected to stay open during the strike.

Just before school began last fall, public schoolteachers in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly in favor of a strike. For months public officials hoped for an agreement, especially after the district offered a 6 percent raise. Teachers in the statewide walkouts last year were largely successful in securing raises, though results were mixed on demands for more school funding and resources.

The Los Angeles union has insisted that it wants more than a raise. Some classes have as many as 45 students, the union complained, and school nurses, art and music teachers must serve thousands of students by traveling to multiple schools.

The union has accused the district of withholding nearly $2 billion in reserve money, but the district has repeatedly said it is operating at a deficit. Austin Beutner, the district superintendent, says that meeting the union’s demands would immediately bankrupt the district and that the district is already in danger of insolvency.

“We all say we want what’s better for students,” Beutner said. “We all want lower class sizes and more nurses. There’s no issue between what they want and what we want.”

The union has fought bitterly with Beutner, a former investment banker who was selected to lead the district last year. “We need to be working ourselves out of a hole,” he added. “I have yet to understand how a strike is going to get us there.”

Because the state allocates money to schools based on daily attendance, the strike could cost the district millions of dollars in lost funding if students stay home while teachers are on strike. The last teacher strike in Los Angeles was in 1989, when schools closed for nine days. At the time, some teachers crossed the picket lines, but there is little sign that any will do so this time. Unlike other states, public employee strikes are legal in California, where unions hold considerable sway.

Many observers say the state’s property tax law is the major culprit for chronic funding shortages in large urban school districts. In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property taxes and drastically limited what the state could bring in for public schools. The law means that smaller affluent suburban communities can raise money for their schools with local bonds or parcel taxes much more easily than poorer urban districts, including Los Angeles.

Both union and district leaders in Los Angeles support an effort to place a measure on the 2020 ballot that would amend the law to allow increased taxes on commercial, but not residential, property.

Many education advocates are placing their hope in Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco who will be inaugurated as California’s governor Monday. But Newsom has made it clear that he plans to spend billions on early childhood education and community college, so it is unclear how much new funding he will allocate to K-12 schools.

In the meantime, teachers like Amy Owen are preparing to greet students Monday after three weeks of winter vacation and then strike three days later. Owen, who has been teaching in Los Angeles public schools for more than a decade, said it has grown increasingly difficult to live near her school in central Los Angeles on her salary of about $72,000.

“Pretty much everyone at my age owns things, a home or a condo or something, and for me to get that I’d have to commute an hour and a half every day,” said Owen, 44. “If you looked at my salary just as a number I would be doing well in many places. But in LA I am just barely middle class. I understand that teaching is not a profession where you are going to make a lot of money, but we deserve some basic respect.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="de8e449a-3b6a-415a-8596-0c4d1b379a45" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/teacher-strike-lausd-utla.html">The New York Times</a>.

Los Angeles braces for major teachers' strike

A strike in Los Angeles would offer a new stage for the national teacher protest movement, which in the last year has driven walkouts against stagnant pay and low education funding in six states.

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Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein

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