https://socialistaction.org/2019/02/06/l-a-teachers-strike-gains-losses-and-perspectives/
L.A. teachers’ strike: Gains, losses, and perspectives
/ 23 hours ago
Feb. 2019 LA teachers (AFPGetty)By JEFF MACKLER
After seven solid days on the picket lines in drenching rains and in the
face of a poor-mouthing school district that swore they were dead broke,
34,000 Los Angeles teachers voted overwhelmingly to approve a three-year
contract. Most teachers saw the agreement as an important first step
toward stemming the decades-long tidal wave of disastrous cuts imposed
on teachers and students in the nation’s second largest school district.
The strike was led off with a city-wide mobilization of 50,000 teachers
and community supporters, a prime indication that the United Teachers of
Los Angeles (UTLA) had prepared well in advance to engage the broad Los
Angeles community—students, parents and working people in general—in a
united and sustained effort for improved schools and to advance teacher
and community interests.
UTLA, a long-ago merged union of CTA/NEA and CFT/AFT members, fully
anticipated a bitter fight against a reactionary locally elected,
corporate-oriented school board that had laid its own secret plans,
separate and apart from any union contract, for a massive
privatization/charter school project in Los Angeles. Its objective,
according to UTLA-released documents, was, and perhaps remains, to break
up the sprawling school district into 32 separate corporate-run
private-school entities.
The charter school challenge
Indeed, School Superintendent Austin Beutner, a billionaire former
investment banker, had made his fortune largely in the charter school
business, wherein public schools are converted to private for-profit
entities that are funded from public resources. Charters are largely
exempt from statewide educational regulations.
Los Angeles schools today, already replete with a significant number of
these largely non-union charters—22 percent, or almost 200, of the
city’s 900 schools to date—drain huge financial resources from the
public school system. With slick corporate advertising campaigns,
falsified achievement statistics, appeals to “school choice,” or
“vouchers” paid to parents to use at parochial schools, and with
across-the-board gutting of public education funds, they are touted as
superior, if not a vibrant alternative for young people and their
parents, who face a bleak future in capitalist America.
In truth, charters are part and parcel of the ruling class’s overall
strategic objective to boost declining profit rates by looting a myriad
of social services and transferring the booty to the corporate elite—in
the name, of course, of allowing the capitalist market to miraculously
arrive at the “best possible educational outcome!”
Here we note in passing a recent study by Stanford University’s Center
for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) that revealed that students’
test scores may prove that public schools are now outperforming charter
schools. For the purpose of this article, however, it is sufficient to
postulate that free, quality education for all—in the context of a
humanitarian and egalitarian society that offers everyone a full and
productive life with fundamental security and rewarding opportunities to
maximize the potential in all human beings—is far superior to any
private-for-profit institution based on measuring success on the always
exploitive and predatory capitalist market system.
Today, 75 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD)
students are Latino, 10 percent Black, and a similar percentage of Asian
origin; 80 percent are low income, a terrible example of the ongoing
racist process of school re-segregation wherein white students with
financial means flee deteriorating, underfunded public schools to
various forms of private enterprises, whether they be charters or
parochial schools.
Charters are allowed to “cherry pick” students—that is, mostly white
students—and exclude English as a Second Language (ESL) students, a
significant percentage of Spanish-speaking youth. In some schools,
within the confines of the same building, public and charters co-exist,
with Los Angeles teachers repeatedly scoring this now legalized striking
racial divide.
Tragically, the new UTLA contract makes no changes to this racist and
corporatist scenario other than to record in their contract an
“agreement” with the charterizing school board, whose members spent an
estimated $11 million to win a pro-charter majority, that the school
district would urge the state legislature to cap charters at 20 percent.
(This Democratic Party-dominated “blue state” legislature currently has
zero caps on charters.) For the corporate plunderers who run the state,
capping charters is an oxymoron akin to capping profits.
Charter schools are no newcomers in challenging public education. Fully
half of Detroit’s school-age children attend charters or related private
schools. The entire post-Katrina school system of New Orleans is today
privatized.
Thirty percent of Oakland schools today are charters, with more in the
works as well as an Oakland School District plan to close some 24 public
schools over the next five years, likely to make way for even
privateering schemes. Oakland teachers are currently in the final stages
of the negotiations/fact-finding process and are expected to call a late
February strike to challenge the district’s charter school proposals and
planned school closures.
The new UTLA contract leaves all the current charters in place, perhaps
with UTLA leaders invoking the rationale that negotiations on this key
issue are “out of scope,” or perhaps “illegal” with regard to
California’s teacher collective bargaining laws.
Example of “red state” strikes
UTLA members, as with teachers across the country, were no doubt
inspired by last year’s “red state” strikes, especially by West Virginia
teachers—who defied threats of mass arrest and injunctions and closed
down the state’s entire school system to demand, and then win, major
gains for teachers, students, public school funding and, amazingly,
equal salary increases for all state public employees. The red state
victories were powered by statewide strikes, often of wildcat origin, to
demand that the same billions of dollars gifted to the corporate elite
over the past decade be returned to state budgets, post haste, to
finance public education and related social services.
No doubt West Virginia teachers, along with their sisters and brothers,
to one degree or another, in Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, and
other “red states”—that is, Republican-dominated states—paved the way,
for the first time in a half century, to bringing to heel capitalism’s
one percenters who dominate all state and national legislative bodies.
But notwithstanding West Virginia’s shining example, the UTLA strike was
a loner—a single and almost totally isolated fightback, however
impressive, in a state with 1100 school districts. A handful of
districts, Oakland in particular, saw its teachers engage in partial
one-day “sickouts” and other solidarity actions aimed at lending a
statewide air to the UTLA action. Yet, few would dispute that all of the
state’s districts are suffering the same major cutbacks and related
financial gutting of public education.
Indeed, UTLA strikers repeatedly pointed out that California would be
ranked fifth in GDP in the world if it were designated as a nation, yet
it ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in school expenditures, class
size, and other key indices of the quality of public education. At
$11,000 annual expenditures per pupil (based on inflated and manipulated
figures used by all school districts to demonstrate their “fealty” to
public education), California’s school funding compares pathetically to
New York State’s $22,000 per pupil.
But even here, the statistics cover a bitter truth. Fifty years ago,
when this writer was a New York City school teacher, a full 53 percent
of all city high school students, after “completing” 12 years of public
education, “graduated” as officially designated “functional
illiterates”! Fifty years later, I would guess that the figures remain
close to the same.
Class size Section 1.5
Contract gains were registered, albeit modest in the extreme with regard
to class size. Here the major victory resided in the elimination of the
heinous Section 1.5 provision in UTLA’s last contract, wherein whatever
class size maximums were negotiated could be unilaterally ignored
whenever the school district decreed a financial emergency—which it did
almost every year of the contract.
The class size provisions in the new contract, according to the UTLA,
were as follows: “2019-2020: [class size] reduction of 1 student per
grade level, and an immediate reduction in secondary [schools] from an
unenforceable 46 to a now enforceable 39 for English Language Arts and
Math.” In the following two years of the three-year contract, additional
class size reductions will be implemented via one less and then two less
students per year, for a total reduction of four over the course of the
contract.
While undoubtedly a gain, it must be said that even with these
reductions, Los Angeles class-size figures will remain far above most
California school districts, including the already overcrowded districts
in Oakland and San Francisco.
The fact that UTLA’s previous contract contained a provision for “an
unenforceable class size ‘maximum’ of 46”—that is, even more than 46
students could be crammed into classrooms—was obnoxious in the extreme.
UTLA’s strike, its first in 30 years, ended this atrocity, but the union
has a long way to go in fighting for qualitatively greater class size
reductions that are among the key factors related to student success,
not to mention teachers’ capacity to educate.
Strike gains
An UTLA Bulletin #9 stated, “In waging a strike not for money for
ourselves but for money for our students, teachers reclaimed the moral
authority they’ve always merited.” True enough, for without this moral
authority, that is, without the broad support of Los Angeles’
working-class communities, the strike would have been doomed from the
start. UTLA listed other important contract gains as follows:
• Nurses: LAUSD will hire 150 full-time nurses for 2019-2020 and at
least 150 for 2020-2021, to provide a full-time nurse at every school
every day of the week.
• Librarians: LAUSD will hire 41 full-time teacher librarians for
2019-2020 and at least 41 more for 2020-2021, to provide a full-time
teacher librarian at every secondary school every day of the week.
• Counselors: The district will hire additional full-time counselors by
Oct. 1, 2019, to achieve a counseling service ratio of 500-1 per
secondary school. The union honestly stated their victory with regard to
counselors was far from perfect. The same bulletin reported, “Students’
limited access to their overscheduled counselors is made worse by
counselors’ obligation to do yard duty during nutrition and lunch. One
gain from UTLA’s victorious 1989 strike was the elimination of yard duty
for teachers. We sought but did not get the same for counselors”
(emphasis added).
• Salary: On salary gains the union won a retroactive 3 percent increase
for last school year plus an additional 3 percent for the current year,
for a total of just over 6 percent, a modest and more than justified
average gain of $2250 for this year and the following two. But the
seven-day strike cost the teachers close to $3000 on average in lost pay
for the year, fully justifying their claim that salary was not their
central objective but rather improvements in the overall quality of
education.
While the 6 percent was essentially the same proposal that was offered
before the strike, a salary-related provision pressed by the district to
make it harder for new teachers to have health-care retirement benefits
was dropped at UTLA insistence, a positive signal to new teachers that
they would not be sacrificed to the advantage of older teachers—a
phenomenon that has become all too common in trade union contracts.
There is zero doubt, however, that Los Angeles’ salaries and, indeed,
all teachers and working people more generally, have been hostage to a
virtual ruling-class-backed freeze on all wages for the past several
decades. Los Angeles teachers are fully justified in seeking to win
salary improvements as well as to be champions of broader working class
interests, as was the case with their just-concluded strike.
Other modest contract wins
The UTLA contract included a provision beginning next year for a “joint
UTLA/LAUSD committee tasked with identifying all district required
assessments [standardized tests]. The committee will develop a plan to
reduce the amount of assessments by 50%” But an UTLA statement made
clear that “we have not made an issue of the tests mandated by the state
and federal governments—that’s a battle for another time and place.”
Thus, UTLA negotiators again acceded to the “law of the land,” wherein
massive and reactionary standardized tests are mandated on school
districts and teachers as a condition for federal and state funding.
Teachers are compelled to spend countless days and hours devoted
endless, if not worthless, testing of students, not to mention the
inevitable byproduct of “teaching to the test.”
The truth is that standardized testing is aimed qualitatively more at
providing school officials with so-called empirical data that they can
use to “measure” teacher competence than it is to improve the quality of
education. In time, punishing, firing, and otherwise scapegoating
“incompetent teachers” is but another means to blame the “failure” of
public education on teachers as opposed to the overarching massive
broadside attacks on every aspect of the public education system, not to
mention the demoralizing effects on students that are daily subjected to
conditions of poverty and repression (the school-to-prison pipeline)
that combine to undermine their efforts in the class room.
It is true that ending such mandated state and national testing is,
among a myriad of other critical factors, deemed “out of scope” with
regard to what is “negotiable” at the bargaining table. By the same
token in decades past, if not today, unions themselves have been decreed
by the state power to be “illegal,” as has free speech during the
McCarthy era and increasingly today, or school desegregation, women’s
and LGBTQI rights, the right to assemble, the right to breathe clean air
and to drink clean water, to name a few of the items banned or regulated
by capitalist legislatures or the courts or by presidential decree. In
all these matters, however, the “law” in all its “grandeur” has been
proven to be subordinate to the mobilized challenges of its victims.
Defiance, as with the West Virginia teachers, as opposed to compliance
with reactionary legislation, is central to teacher unionism and to the
future of public education.
Los Angeles teachers registered modest gains, and some losses in a broad
range of negotiable items. They won a guaranteed daily preparation
period for Regional Occupation Center teachers and the right of teachers
to vote whether to convert their schools to Magnet schools. They
established a LAUSD-provided “Immigrant Defense Fund” that includes a
dedicated hotline and some attorney consultation for immigrant families.
“As teachers our loyalty is to our students. If it’s a problem for them
in their community, then it’s a problem for us,” said a union
spokesperson. Similar modest gains listed by union officials include
limited funding allocations for Community Schools—that is, schools in
the poorest areas—and funds for Special Education. Modest, usually
non-monetary advances were registered with regard to “Local School
Leadership Councils, limiting the racist practice of ‘random’ student
searches, Green Space, Substitute Educator, Adult Education, Workspace
for Itinerant Employees, UTLA Rights, protection of health care for
striking adult education and substitutes and Protection for striking
substitute teachers.”
The bottom line
The UTLA leadership published on its website both a summary of the new
contract provisions as well as the entire contract. Its concluding
“bottom line” public statement read: “We fought for this agreement for
21 months, worked without a contract for 18 months, and finally, forced
to the wall, we struck for seven days. What we ended up with was vastly
better than what was originally offered, and significantly better than
what we were offered on the eve of the strike. There are certainly
things lacking in this agreement, but it is a major step forward.”
The battle over school funding
The LAUSD had taken to the airwaves with ceaseless claims that it was
broke, in spite of the fact that it had assigned some 25 percent of its
annual budget to the category of “reserves,” that is, unbudgeted funds
to the tune of nearly $2 billion to be held for unknown future
contingencies. State law requires a contingency fund of only 1 percent!
Needless to say, the district’s reserves were set aside for all
contingencies other than meeting the just demands and needs of Los
Angeles teachers and parents. The same can be said of the California
State Legislature’s budget, geared to advancing corporate interests at
the expense of all others.
Today, the great portion of California’s education funding derives from
local property taxes, or to be more accurate, the taxes imposed on
homeowners. Commercial property is essentially excluded from the state’s
overall taxation system, the result of the infamous Proposition 13 or
Jarvis-Gann ballot initiative of 1978 that reduced property taxes by
some 57 percent and thus posed a major threat to public education funding.
Today, more than 40 years later, California homeowner property taxes
have escalated in direct proportion to the incredible rise in property
valuations. The 1 percent Proposition 13 cap on property taxes of four
decades ago was levied on homes that then had an average market price of
some $40,000. Today, given the fact the average homeowner sells their
property every five years, the same house has a market value of more
than 10 times that amount. A Proposition tax of 1 percent in 1978 would
have amounted to roughly $400; the same house today, valued on average
at $570,000, would be taxed at $5700 annually, plus the allowed addition
of 0.5 percent for local or city homeowner taxes, bringing the total
annual property tax to an incredible $8550—a 21-fold increase!
No to regressive tax measures
In this context, the UTLA contract includes an agreement with the LAUSD
to jointly lobby the state legislature to support a 2020 state ballot
initiative that would modify Proposition 13 to include taxing commercial
property only, a measure that could be expected to add additional tens
of billions of dollars to the state, a portion of which would be set
aside for public education. But this gain, to be achieved by taxing
commercial property, still leaves the highly regressive Proposition 13
homeowners’ tax intact, leaving an ever-increasing portion of the
working-class population totally incapable of ever buying a house and
paying for property taxes, not to mention the multi-thousand-dollar
costs of paying off impossibly high mortgages.
Tragically, teacher unions have largely accepted this regressive tax
system, wherein the corporate elite and their trillion-dollar corporate
entities are provided with endless tax exemptions, or “loopholes,” to
avoid taxation entirely coupled with outright grants for corporate
services, while working people are always subjected to an endless
variety of regressive tax measures.
West Virginia and other red state teachers faced this dilemma directly
when they demanded that state legislatures tax the rich heavily and
return the funds stolen from public education to their rightful place.
The support of the NEA and AFT to continued and ever-deepening
regressive tax measures can only serve to alienate their working-class base.
Unfortunately, taking the road of taxing the rich is the furthest thing
from the minds of these top union misleaders. The AFT’s president, Randi
Weingarten, a member of the Democratic Party National Committee, as well
as the top leaders of the NEA, have long subordinated the issue of
school funding to mobilizing teachers in every state to fund and support
Democratic Party politicians at every level, regardless of their
anti-union policies. In blue state California, where Democrats hold
perhaps the largest majority anywhere, school funding stands near the
bottom of all states, while the corporate policies of the state’s
billionaires, among the largest in the nation, are prioritized to the hilt.
The future of teacher unionism, and indeed, of public education more
generally, rests in the capacity of teachers to match and exceed the
fighting example set by their red state sisters and brothers and in
their collective capacity to help initiate their own working-class party
based on renewed militant fighting unions and their allies among the
nation’s oppressed and exploited.
Photo: AFP/Getty
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February 6, 2019 in Labor. Tags: teachers
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Carl Sagan
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind
and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says
everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the
fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
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