The Los Angeles teachers strike is in its second day on Tuesday, with teachers on the picket lines despite rain, and just a third of the district’s students in schools where scab administrators and substitute teachers presided over classrooms. Teachers are striking over underfunded schools, overcrowded classrooms, salaries that have fallen behind the cost of living, and a charter school system—aggressively pushed by election-buying billionaires—that drains $600 million a year from public schools.
Miriam Pawel gives the background: massive spending produced a school board dominated by charter backers, who installed a superintendent, Austin Beutner, who has no education experience (that’s ZERO) but is a former investment banker, so he thinks he knows everything. Beutner has pushed a massive restructuring of the LA public schools, and:
“In my 17 years working with labor unions, I have been called on to help settle countless bargaining disputes in mediation,” wrote Vern Gates, the union-appointed member of the fact-finding panel called in to help mediate the Los Angeles stalemate last month. “I have never seen an employer that was intent on its own demise.”
It’s a vicious cycle: The more overcrowded and burdened the regular schools, the easier for charters to recruit students. The more students the district loses, the less money, and the worse its finances. The more the district gives charters space in traditional schools, the more overcrowded the regular classrooms.
So: Take a state that already underfunds education, add a student body in which “More than 80 percent are poor, about three-quarters are Latino, and about one-quarter are English-language learners,” then add a big-money push to defund public education and replace it with privatized, non-union, under-regulated charter schools with little oversight. Suddenly you can see why LA’s teachers have so much to fight—the deck is stacked against them, their students, their schools.