What Would End the LA Strike ?

My colleague Jennifer Medina talked to Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, just before Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that negotiations between the union and the district would resume today.  NY Times.

A meeting is scheduled for noon at City Hall, with the mayor’s staff serving as a mediator between the two groups.

Mr. Caputo-Pearl, said that neither he, Mr. Beutner nor the mayor would be at the table for the negotiations. “We’re going to let our teams dig into it and then we’ll be involved soon enough,” he said late last night. He did not make any predictions about when the strike would end.

“We’re going to continue to strengthen our picket lines, which have been growing with the support from our community and parents,” he added. “We’re going to pursue both tracks, both picketing and bargaining at the same time.”

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

Jennifer Medina: How long do you expect the strike to last? What would end it?

Alex Caputo-Pearl: In the bigger picture we need to see a real commitment to reinvesting in neighborhood public schools. We need to see that there is willingness to substantially invest in that, to use the $140 million from the governor. We need to see that there is really reinvestment in class size reduction, staffing issues, counselors. We want to see some regulation on the charter industry, so that it does not just keep growing without limits. We need to know they have some basic rules of engagement and accountability. Those are some of the key issues.

You’ve talked about making the picket lines even stronger to make the attention to Los Angeles public schools really make a difference. What do you want the wider public — particularly those without a connection to the schools here — to understand?

Will Los Angeles Teachers Strike Jan 10 ?

UTLA December Rally 

Bill Raden, Capital and Main

Fasten your seatbelts Los Angeles, it’s going to be a bumpy strike. That was the subtext to a tumultuous week that saw over 50,000 L.A. teachers, students and families take to the streets Saturday to support a union faced with budgetary saber-rattling by Los Angeles Unified, and that climaxed on Wednesday with United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl setting a January 10 walkout date — unless Los Angeles Unified negotiators meet key union demands for investments in the district’s highest-poverty students.

Caputo-Pearl’s announcement came a day after L.A. Unified superintendent Austin Beutner erroneously claimed that the union had accepted the district’s six percent pay raise offer, as recommended in Tuesday’s report by state-appointed fact-finders who also urged LAUSD to kick in the modest equivalent of a one to three percent salary increase for new hires to reduce class sizes, and for both sides to work together to lobby Sacramento for more state funding.

Fact-finding panel chairman David A. Weinberg mostly punted on 19 of 21 unresolved equity demands that form the heart of what UTLA has framed as a fight to save L.A.’s “civic institution of public education.” The union won some minor points, like the allowing of teacher input on charter co-locations, and on scrapping a district privilege to unilaterally lift class size caps during fiscal crunches. But by accepting at face value LAUSD’s latest claims of imminent bankruptcy, Weinberg left unanswered a critical question: How could LAUSD annually project catastrophic, three-year deficits and still have its unrestricted cash reserves balloon from $500 million to nearly $2 billion during the same five-year period?

 Read more

https://capitalandmain.com/learning-curves-will-los-angeles-teachers-strike-january-10-1221

Capital and Main