Lessons Learned from the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike

As a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher for the past 26 years, I was hoping to complete my career without ever going on strike. Nevertheless, I joined the 98% of United Teachers Los Angeles members who voted late last year to authorize a strike because I wanted to force the district into serious, substantive negotiations. Unfortunately, the new LAUSD superintendent didn’t blink.

How a hedge fund billionaire, whose expertise is dismantling corporations and who has never been a classroom teacher, could become the head of the second largest school district in the country isn’t surprising given the credentials of our current U.S. Secretary of Education. Clearly, teachers have lost control of the education conversation in this country.

But we just may be getting our voices back and, in the process, winning back the hearts and minds of parents and the public.

After six days of picketing in the pouring rain (a big deal for Angelenos), a loss of seven days’ pay with the MLK holiday (which amounts to approximately 3.5% of a teachers’ annual salary—and, no, striking teachers don’t receive back pay; the cost comes directly out of their pockets or any raise they may get), the hit to each member’s retirement service credit (an often-overlooked but potentially costly loss), and daily rallies at City Hall that reached 65,000 protesters (the 30,000 striking educators enjoyed massive support), UTLA successfully bargained a contract that:

• included a 6% retroactive pay raise,
• placed a full-time nurse and librarian in every school,
• added counselors,
• reduced class sizes,
• protected special education programs,
• cut onerous district-mandated assessments by 50%,
• funded community schools that provide wraparound services,
• planned for more school green spaces, and
• helped stem the tide of new charter schools.

While these gains may look modest to some—and there were some exhausted yet energized teachers who viewed this settlement as too little for the sacrifices we all had just made—this was a big win for L.A. teachers and students and an even bigger win for the larger fight to preserve public education in this country.

What’s Really at Stake

Make no mistake: the end game for too many in power is to completely dismantle public education as we know it and to privatize and profit from the education of our children. These “school choice” advocates also want to break the power of the teachers’ unions.

According to The Washington Post, “Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, many by for-profit companies. Voucher and similar programs use public money to pay for private and religious school tuition… School choice is seen by critics as the centerpiece of the movement to privatize America’s public education system, arguably the country’s most important civic institution.”

If the education community isn’t vigilant and vocal, these powerful forces with deep pockets will destroy teachers’ unions and public schools from the inside out. Here’s how the privatizers are already succeeding and how the Los Angeles teachers’ strike moved the needle forward in saving public schools.

Privatizers’ Tactic: Disrupt the Very Unity of the Unions

1.) Through the 2018 Janus decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the payment of union dues is optional. This is a major blow to organized labor because if you continue to receive all the benefits a union provides without having to contribute your fair share, a union’s ability to lead, advocate, and mobilize is severely impeded.

Lessons Learned: Every union member must become an eager contributor, both with their money and time, precisely because there’s no question about the tangible ways the union protects and improves their teaching careers and the education of all children. Union leaders must become excellent communicators and rally their members’ ongoing passion and sense of purpose.

2.) School districts seek to impose tiered contracts that provide newer employees with fewer perks. This disincentivizes newer union members to later fight for contracts that don’t equally advantage them.

Lessons Learned: UTLA was successful in eliminating a district proposal to tie pay raises to reduced retirement health benefits for future employees. Convincing members to also fight for the rights of colleagues who’ve yet to be hired is a wise long game that keeps unity strong.

3.) School districts can play a game of chicken that attempts to break the union during a strike. They know that if a strike continues for too long, even loyal union members may choose to cross the line and return to work so they can begin receiving a desperately needed paycheck.

Once just enough teachers return and schools become functioning again, the district can then completely withdraw from negotiations, leaving striking teachers with no gains and huge losses, both to their finances and morale. The teachers left out on the line are rendered powerless as they essentially strike for nothing but to make a point. The resulting rift between the strikers and the scabs could linger for decades and leave the union divided and impotent.

Lessons Learned: Strikes are risky endeavors that hold no guarantee of success and could even backfire. Strikes should be considered carefully and used infrequently (the last UTLA strike was 30 years ago and lasted 9 days) in order to preserve both member and parental support. Unions must be certain of budgetary and funding facts, be aware of the power of their adversaries and what their ulterior motives are, and be sure they have the backing of influential friends.

Conversely, short, successful strikes can have a galvanizing effect on the union as a whole. The camaraderie and commitment built amongst the UTLA membership during our strike was inspiring and sustaining. L.A. teachers were also very fortunate to have a mayor, State Superintendent of Education, and governor who are all Democrats and who worked quickly and tirelessly to end our strike in our favor before teachers were pushed to the breaking point.

Union leaders also must be proactive and transparent with their membership. Convincing each member to save ahead of time for the financial impact of a strike is crucial to its success. Stress and sacrifice are all inevitable factors during a strike, and members must enter into a strike with clear expectations of what they can reasonably gain, balanced by how much time and pain it may very well take to win.

A strike will likely entail arriving to school early and leaving late for daily picketing, as well as participating in rallies away from one’s school site. A strike is far from an unpaid vacation. It’s often a draining, uncomfortable, uncertain, rumor-filled affair—and at the same time it just may be one of the most satisfying and invigorating bonding experiences of your career.

Privatizers’ Tactic: Portray Charters and Vouchers as the Only Viable Options

1.) Class sizes matter. They matter to teachers, to students, and to parents. Progressively raising class sizes may ostensibly be a way for school boards to deal with dwindling school funding, but it’s also a way of sabotaging public education.

Larger class sizes mean fewer teachers hired, which impacts union membership. This also means fewer classrooms are needed, providing the chance to close or combine public schools or to make them available for charter colocation.

Teachers aren’t as effective when class sizes are increased, and students don’t learn or perform as well with an unconscionable teacher-to-pupil ratio. In addition to the resulting lower test scores that portray public schools as failing, a lack of individual attention is yet another major reason why parents pull their children out of public schools and send them to charters and to private or parochial institutions.

Lessons Learned: Smaller class sizes benefit all aspects of public education and teachers’ unions. We should be training and hiring more teachers, not less. We should be working with state legislatures and the federal government to drastically increase education funding. Nothing short of a New Deal-like program for reinvesting in and revitalizing public schools should be acceptable, and the country must finally accept that a vibrant public school system is the best way of ensuring a prosperous future for all.

This won’t be easy or cheap. In California alone, the Getting Down to Facts II study estimates it’ll take a 38% increase in funding ($26.5 billion) to ensure an “adequate education” for all its state’s students.

After three days of around-the clock negotiating, UTLA was ready to walk out of talks because LAUSD wouldn’t budge on eliminating a clause in the contract allowing the district to unilaterally and substantially raise class sizes any time it cried poor (something LAUSD has been doing for years, despite annual budget surpluses reaching billions). At the eleventh hour, Mayor Garcetti intervened and convinced the district to relent. The strike could’ve easily continued for several more days or weeks had we not had this influential ally.

In the end, many teachers were disappointed that class sizes would only be lowered by a single student for each of the next three school years, but the larger battle over out-of- control class size increases was won.

2.) New Orleans now has no public schools. 1 in 5 California students attend charters, though charters here were supposed to be isolated incubators of innovation whose successes were to be replicated in the public schools, not to serve as perpetual replacements for public schools.

The questions become: How are we going to prevent more charters schools from opening and more parents from pulling their kids from their local public schools? How are we going woo the parents who’ve already left back to the public schools? Community schools may be one answer, especially in the poorest neighborhoods.

Lessons Learned: UTLA did a fantastic job of leafletting parents about a possible strike and holding community meetings to inform parents of the reasons for the strike, to explain how they could support their children and teachers, and to answer any questions. Galvanizing such strong parental support resulted in 80% of LAUSD students staying home during the strike that cost the district upwards of $125 million in lost state funding and forced the district to finally bargain in good faith.

The largest lesson of the L.A. teachers’ strike is that these issues are far bigger than any one local bargaining unit or even one state. If we truly want American public schools to survive the attacks on their very existence, we’ll need a much more united front. It may take coordinated, simultaneous national teachers’ job actions to get our collective message across and to force our country to face this crisis head on.

According to The New York Times, “making teachers’ strikes illegal won’t stop them,” and it’s important to read up on the differing state and local laws that can affect teachers’ unions in the bargaining process. Also, administrators have just as much to lose as teachers when it comes to the dismantling of public schools, and it’s high time teachers and administrators join ranks in this fight.

Photo sources (in order): CNN, ClickOrlando.com, Between the Lines, Vermont State Employees’ Assoc., AZcentral.com

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