Start at 15 minutes.
Today we all have more spring in our step because the members of the United Teachers Los Angeles ended their strike yesterday and ratified their new contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
It’s a good day for public education—a paradigm shift, thanks to UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl, the other UTLA officers, the bargaining committee and UTLA members.
One contract can’t change decades of disinvestment, but this agreement reorders priorities. It makes a clear commitment to invest in L.A.’s neighborhood public schools and to provide the resources and conditions necessary for teachers to teach and for kids to learn.
The agreement provides:
- Lower class sizes—immediately in 2019-20, with more improvements every year after.
- A nurse in every school five days a week, and a teacher librarian in every secondary school five days a week.
- Investment in community schools.
- A pathway to charter moratoriums and/or caps.
- A 6 percent pay raise with no contingencies.
- Hard caps on special education caseloads and release time for testing.
I am so proud of the hard work, dedication and courage of UTLA members and their leaders. They made this victory possible. And their commitment to Los Angeles’ parents and students resulted in unprecedented support from the broader L.A. community. More than 80 percent of people in Los Angeles supported the strike.
At its heart, the L.A. strike — like those last year in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere — was about confronting years of disinvestment and scarcity in education, and prioritizing public education as an opportunity agent for all children.
The strike, and the support it received from the community, flipped the debate over public education on its head. And the result is nothing short of a sea change for public schools and educators—in Los Angeles and across the country.
With the support of parents, students, clergy and the entire union community, L.A.’s teachers helped inspire a reordering of the city’s priorities to finally put public schools first. And it took a strike to make the establishment see how much the public is really behind public schools and public school teachers.
Every child has hopes, dreams and aspirations. But those aspirations aren’t just fulfilled simply because we wish for them to be—we need to secure the investments required to fulfill them.
This was a fight for the soul of public education. It was a fight to invest in public schools after decades of neglect. And while one contract can’t fix everything, this is a starting point.
Teachers want what kids need. In Los Angeles, because teachers took a stand, they got a big step closer to ensuring those needs will be met.
In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
Randi Weingarten
AFT President
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