Strikes are schools for activism–extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!

The first United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) strike in 30 years will be historic in a number of ways. The sheer size of the strike in the nation’s second largest school system with 30,000 teachers and an over 90% participation rate is astounding. UTLA’s demands resonated with the times. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will never again be quite the same.

According to a National Public Radio poll, 80% of parents supported the strike despite incessant teacher-bashing for years by the LA Times. Parents and students walked the picket lines with their teachers, in a profound alliance for improved

Of course, wages were an issue, but UTLA’s proposals cut to the very core of California’s K-12 educational neglect since the late 1970s.

UTLA’s call for more nurses, counselors, librarians, reduced class sizes, and caps on charter schools demonstrated most emphatically that teachers know best what’s needed for their students. And they understand how to go about getting it!

A wave of strikes nationally has shown teachers standing up for their rights, for education, and for their students. Strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Nevada, the so-called red states have challenged years of educational neglect and cutbacks. Most recently, teachers in Denver and Oakland have joined the movement for educational reform.

So, what did the LA teachers achieve? The short answer: respect! In the long term, the strikes must be followed by persistent vigilance. Modest gains were achieved, but the strikes must be the beginning of protracted struggles.

Why indeed, have California’s schools, once the gold standard of the country and in fact the world, become so neglected? California, the 5th richest economy in the world, has consistently been near the bottom nationally in per/student funding. Recent rankings place California 43rd out of the 50 states. Thus $11,000 spent per student in California compares to half what the state of New York allocates at $22,000.

At the most fundamental level, students and teachers have common interests. What are the interests of Administration? Individually they can be genuinely honest and fair, but their job is fundamentally to extract the most labor for the least cost–the corporate model. Many teachers view themselves as trained professionals, as they should, but they err if they believe their value will be compensated according to their merit. It simply isn’t true. You don’t get what you deserve; you get what you fight for.

LA teachers carefully and methodically built toward their strike over many months, and were constantly told by the LA district the old saw, that there “wasn’t enough money” to meet the teachers’ demands.

District administrations for decades had skewed their budgets, overestimating costs and underestimating revenues. Predictably, LAUSD leadership claimed a budget crisis when there were extensive revenues.

UTLA is attempting to pressure state political leaders, including governor Newsom, towards a more equitable funding formula. The new UTLA contract includes an agreement with LAUSD that both teachers and LA Unified will lobby Sacramento politicians for a 2020 ballot proposition that would modify Prop 13.