Los Angeles Teachers Prepare for a Strike

Alex Caputo-Pearl, the union president, center, at a rally in December. Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press Los Angeles public school teachers are preparing to strike on Thursday — the culmination of months of failed negotiations and what educators say is years of disinvestment in the nation’s second-largest school system.  District officials have said that the money simply isn’t there and that the frustration should be directed at the state.  My colleagues Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein reported in this piece that the strike will affect 900 schools, 30,000 teachers and more than 600,000 students. That’s where you come in.  The impending strike highlights the fact that despite California’s reputation as a center of liberal policy, it spends relatively little on public education. School spending levels, about $11,000 per student in 2016, are far below those in other blue bastions; for example, California spends about half as much as New York on the average child. Education advocates on all sides of the labor impasse in Los Angeles say that it is the neediest students who are hurt most by funding constraints. More than a fifth of public school students in California are still learning English, the highest percentage in the country. ADVERTISEMENT “California has been underfunding its schools for many, many years,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked closely with Los Angeles and New York public schools. The state has only recently begun to restore deep cuts made during the last recession, when California was hit particularly hard. “It’s not even close to where we should be,” Professor Noguera said. “I would not say that the state has deliberately starved the schools, but there has been no leadership from the state.” Underlying the debate between the two sides is a situation they agree is a major problem: that high-needs school districts like Los Angeles, where 82 percent of students are low-income, bear the brunt of the burden from the state’s low education spending. With many wealthy and white families opting to choose charter or private schools, or move to other surrounding school districts, the Los Angeles school district is disproportionately African-American and Latino. A study from U.C.L.A.’s Civil Rights Project found that Latino students in Los Angeles are more segregated than anywhere else in the country. In other districts in California — Oakland, in particular — as well as in Virginia and Indiana, teachers angry over pay and limited resources have raised the possibility of protests. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.