of The
Teacher
Strike
of The
Teacher
Strike
These labor actions sparked debate about public schools and broadened the conversation on PreK-12 education. They also raised the question of whether 2019’s hostilities were an aberration, or a sign of things to come. The likely answer, absent a change in the underlying fundamentals, is that a higher level of labor-management discord is here to stay.
“The foundation of the conflict between teachers and school districts, which has culminated in strikes in different cities across California, stems from decades of underinvestment in public education by the state,” said Los Angeles Unified School District trustee and CSBA Director Kelly Gonez. “In the last 40 years, California has gone from a leader in public education investment to near the bottom. And we know that has resulted in more pressure on our teachers to do more with less — all while not getting compensated like the professionals they are.”
Unions are responding to member demands for improved compensation, better classroom conditions, more support staff, greater autonomy and help in addressing student needs related to growing issues outside the classroom. Teachers are not alone in feeling the stress from an overburdened education system. School districts are trying to meet higher academic standards, prepare students for a rapidly changing society, comply with ever-growing mandates, cope with rapidly rising costs and close achievement gaps with insufficient resources.
The inherent tension between what labor and management groups want to achieve and the reality of California’s public schools frustrates initiatives on both sides. That sets the stage for continuous conflict and has encouraged the deployment of new tactics to accomplish elusive goals.
“The average teacher feels squeezed, has less security and feels like they’ve had a ton of responsibility heaped on them,” explained Jon Shelton, associate professor of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New Political Order. “In response to that, unions are crafting a more systematic response to what’s happening that looks at the bigger political picture and trying to bring into bargaining negotiations things that hadn’t been part of bargaining.”
These labor actions sparked debate about public schools and broadened the conversation on PreK-12 education. They also raised the question of whether 2019’s hostilities were an aberration, or a sign of things to come. The likely answer, absent a change in the underlying fundamentals, is that a higher level of labor-management discord is here to stay.
“The foundation of the conflict between teachers and school districts, which has culminated in strikes in different cities across California, stems from decades of underinvestment in public education by the state,” said Los Angeles Unified School District trustee and CSBA Director Kelly Gonez. “In the last 40 years, California has gone from a leader in public education investment to near the bottom. And we know that has resulted in more pressure on our teachers to do more with less — all while not getting compensated like the professionals they are.”
Unions are responding to member demands for improved compensation, better classroom conditions, more support staff, greater autonomy and help in addressing student needs related to growing issues outside the classroom. Teachers are not alone in feeling the stress from an overburdened education system. School districts are trying to meet higher academic standards, prepare students for a rapidly changing society, comply with ever-growing mandates, cope with rapidly rising costs and close achievement gaps with insufficient resources.
The inherent tension between what labor and management groups want to achieve and the reality of California’s public schools frustrates initiatives on both sides. That sets the stage for continuous conflict and has encouraged the deployment of new tactics to accomplish elusive goals.
“The average teacher feels squeezed, has less security and feels like they’ve had a ton of responsibility heaped on them,” explained Jon Shelton, associate professor of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New Political Order. “In response to that, unions are crafting a more systematic response to what’s happening that looks at the bigger political picture and trying to bring into bargaining negotiations things that hadn’t been part of bargaining.”
That broader political approach was on display during the 2019 strike in Los Angeles USD. The work stoppage was marked by six days of protests, coast to-coast media coverage and lengthy negotiations that finally produced a settlement on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. In the end, LAUSD agreed to implement a retroactive 6 percent pay raise (the union had asked for 6.5 percent); reduce class sizes for high school math and science courses; stop overriding class size caps; and hire additional nurses, teachers, librarians and counselors by the 2020–21 school year. The district also agreed to convert 30 campuses into “community schools,” which use partnerships to provide wraparound services and an integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth development and community engagement.
In a statement, Caputo-Pearl assessed the contract as a victory for the union; most outside observers agreed. What was less clear is how LAUSD would pay for the terms of the deal or how it would find the additional resources needed to close opportunity and achievement gaps in the nation’s second-largest school district. Encouraged by the groundswell of support for public education during the strike, the LAUSD school board, the district’s unions, local charter schools and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti backed a parcel tax of 16 cents per square foot on the June 2019 ballot. The measure, which would have generated about $500 million annually for Los Angeles schools, was met with significant opposition from area business interests. It also faced an uphill battle in the kind of low-profile, low-turnout election that typically features an older, more tax-averse voter. Enthusiasm from the strike failed to manifest at the ballot box, as Measure EE captured just 45 percent of the vote, far short of the two-thirds threshold needed for passage.
“We have reached an inflection point when it comes to school funding,” Gonez said. “While some districts, including L.A. Unified, have benefited from the Local Control Funding Formula, those increases have been nearly wiped out entirely by rising costs for pensions and special education, among other areas. And even with the LCFF dollars, we are nowhere near adequate spending for our schools. Spurred by a national conversation about the devaluing of our public schools (including by the Trump administration), those funding issues have reached a boiling point.”
“The union caucus that came to power in in Los Angeles is part of a national movement of insurgents interested in union democracy, engaging their members and making a bigger political argument in terms of what needs to change in public education,” Shelton said. “The leadership in Los Angeles saw the charter school alternative as an existential threat to the future of public education. Depending on the union, they may not prioritize those things. In L.A., it was definitely a priority but within a bigger set of ideas.”
The actual impact of charter schools on school district finances is hotly debated, but UTLA successfully tapped into the growing scrutiny of charters fueled by shifts in national politics, particularly on the Democratic side, where charter schools have become a divisive issue. At the time of the LAUSD strike, California’s charter school law was worded so that individual districts had relatively little ability to manage charter school growth (Nevertheless, UTLA made anti-charter messaging a prominent plank of its campaign, demanding a moratorium on new charter schools. That idea was ultimately reflected in a resolution calling on Gov. Newsom to authorize a on new charter schools within the boundaries of the district and to conduct a study that will consider policy recommendations impacting charter co-locations, fiscal implications and facility management. The LAUSD school board passed the resolution in late January on a 5-1 vote.
A little more than a month later, Gov. Newsom signed a CSBA-supported charter school transparency and accountability bill that was ushered through the Legislature at a rapid pace. Then, in September, the Governor’s office and legislators agreed on a new version of Assembly Bill 1505 — a contentious charter reform bill supported by the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and CSBA, among others — and Gov. Newsom signed the bill on Oct. 3. Overall, charter school reform was an issue where labor and management were able to find common ground and work together to achieve shared objectives at the state level. It was also an outlier as battles over how to best allocate limited resources strained already frayed relationships.
The call for higher salaries and smaller class sizes highlights one of the quandaries education leaders face as they try to meet teachers’ demands, serve students and meet their responsibilities as fiscal stewards. Smaller class sizes are popular with teachers and parents alike but fewer students in classroom means more classes, which requires more teachers, increased school site and districtwide expenditures on salary, and amplifies the impact of any salary increase. At the same time, rapidly increasing health care costs, skyrocketing pension obligations, burgeoning costs for special education and a constant barrage of unfunded mandates created by new legislation eat away at limited revenue. To add to these difficulties, for the first time in California’s history, the number of school-age children is declining, reducing enrollment and associated revenue in a manner that is felt acutely in places like Oakland.
The total cost of the new hires and raises in Oakland USD resulting from the strike was estimated at $38 million. That’s a substantial sum for a district that is confronting a $56 million deficit over the next two years and has nearly twice as many schools as most districts its size. Yet, even after the raises, a School Services of California survey determined that Oakland USD teachers rank 12th out of 20 peer districts in starting teacher salary and the board’s Committee on Fiscal Vitality named teacher compensation as a top concern for the 2019–20 budget. In hopes of improving its 18.5 percent annual attrition rate for teachers, Oakland USD is piloting several efforts to support and mentor current teachers, encourage classified staff to become teachers and to encourage more Oakland residents to enter the teaching profession.
“Teachers and all staff know the district cannot do everything, but they should also feel their voices are being heard, their needs are being met, and that all resources are being used to ensure they are successful,” said Oakland USD Superintendent Kyla Johnson Trammell. “We are building structures to improve our listening, and then we need to clearly respond with evidence that we are aligning our resources toward staff success. The good news is that school districts, school boards, administrators, teachers, students and families are all now raising the issue of inadequate funding. The numerous strikes that happened across the country this past school year obviously raised the profile of the issue, and have a lot of people, even those who were not directly affected by the strikes talking.”
Chicago’s experience provided a model that spread across the country. In February 2018, when teachers in 55 West Virginia counties walked off the job, the media started to take notice. Mass strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona quickly followed West Virginia’s example. Then, organizing efforts gained additional urgency with the June 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME. The court held that compelling nonconsenting employees to pay agency fees, also known as fair share fees, to unions is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The ruling meant that public employees no longer had to pay union fees to cover the costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and matters affecting wages, hours and conditions of employment.
“In a post-Janus world, one thing that happened with public unions, especially teachers’ unions, were fears of what would happen after the loss of agency fees,” Shelton said. “They were worried not about their existence but about how that would diminish their power, so one of the ways that unions show their members that they have value, particularly when agency fees are no longer possible, is through taking more militant stances.”
That more assertive posture has resulted in pushback against a culture that many teachers feel undervalues their contributions and fails to treat them as professionals. The list of grievances is long and varies from district to district and state to state, but includes school closures, charter expansion, standardized testing, inflexible curriculum, efforts to reform teacher tenure and implement merit pay, evaluation practices and limitations on collective bargaining.
Acrimony between SCTA and the district is longstanding, but it reached new lows in 2018–19 when Sacramento teachers walked out for the first time in three decades. The strike came as the district was in danger of state takeover and struggling to receive budget approval from the Sacramento County Office of Education. It was a rapid fall from just 18 months earlier, when it looked like the district would avoid a work stoppage. In November 2017, the parties narrowly averted a strike when Mayor Darrell Steinberg brokered an agreement. The three-year deal gave teachers a raise of up to 11 percent and included language for smaller class sizes and additional arts teachers and counselors, among other items.
“The contract accomplished a lot of things,” Fisher said. “Two major elements were a restructuring of salary schedule — we were losing teachers mid-career because teachers made so much less than surrounding districts. So, there was an increase for everybody, and we put the lion’s share of resources to mid-career teachers.”
The understanding was short-lived. Less than a year after the agreement, the Sacramento County Office of Education rejected the district’s proposed budget because of projected deficits, which it partially attributed to the impact of the contract. That left Sac City USD scrambling to cut its budget and kicked off months of accusations and recriminations about the severity of the district’s financial problems and their relationship to employee salaries and health benefits. In the end, the district avoided state receivership, but only after enduring its first strike since 1989 and entering arbitration over a salary schedule dispute that was decided in favor of the union. The underlying challenges — particularly the issue of health care and whether savings from cheaper plans should be diverted toward higher staffing levels and lower-class size or put toward the structural deficit — remain unresolved.
“Tension with our fifth labor partner — Sacramento City Teachers Association — has existed for decades,” said Sacramento City USD Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, who has served in that role since July 2017. “This tension started long before many of our current board members or administrators worked in the district and appear to be rooted in decades of mistrust in the district’s administration. Full funding of education would go a long way in helping to ensure school districts have the resources necessary to fairly compensate teachers and all employees in the school system, as well as pay for critical student achievement initiatives. Sac City Unified, for example, spends more per pupil to provide employee health benefits than most other school districts in California. Sac City could save millions if the district is able to offer plans at amounts similar to surrounding school districts, and 91 cents of every dollar of the district’s unrestricted general fund goes to employee salaries and benefits.”
Aguilar lamented the trauma the strike created for all involved and noted the district is implementing professional development to help school leaders build relational capacity with students, staff and families. This focus on social and emotional learning is designed to encourage healing and stronger communication that may help future disputes be less antagonistic. He also pointed to a consortium consisting of four of Sac City USD’s five unions as a source of potential optimism and creative solutions to labor-management challenges. SCTA does not participate in the consortium and the gulf between the union and district leaders is as wide as ever.
“Focusing resources toward classrooms and having transparent and open dialogue where the district has integrity and is held accountable — that goes a long way in building trust,” Fisher said. “In our situation, the lack of trust is well-founded.”
In November 2017, the union and management agreed to negotiate changes that could lower health care costs, such as potentially moving teachers to a less expensive plan. Those savings would then pay for additional nurses and counselors and fund class size reductions. Because school districts often pay a higher share of premiums (85 percent of total costs on average) than private sector employers, they are especially sensitive to rising health care costs.
Like many California school districts, Sacramento City USD offers health care benefits that are products of a time when health care was dramatically cheaper. Lifetime health care was an attractive benefit districts used to offset modest teacher salaries in an era when local taxes could fund much of the expense. That changed beginning in 1978, when Proposition 13 reduced the amount of local revenue available for schools, a development compounded by skyrocketing health care costs in subsequent years.
In the 1970s, California ranked among the top five states in school funding and boasted a K-12 school system that was the envy of the nation. Forty years of underinvestment have transformed the state from a leader to a laggard. California now spends $2,475 per student below the national average and $7,153 per student less than the average of the top 10 states —and student performance largely reflects that. Despite steady improvements over the last 20 years, California students still perform below the national average on the National Assessment of Education Progress, both overall and across every student group. In A Portrait of Educational Outcomes in California, Stanford University professor Sean Reardon and RAND Corporation policy researcher Chris Dodd found that most of the difference between California’s student performance and that of students in other schools is concentrated in middle and low-income schools where students perform almost a full grade level below similarly situated students in other states. Conversely, students in affluent schools perform roughly the same as their peers nationwide.
Education is increasingly seen as the primary public policy that can change these outcomes and conquer a range of social issues like systemic poverty and a chronic lack of opportunity. “This has really been one of the few things that, since about 1990s, has been a bipartisan kind of consensus — that education is the public policy that can do all those things,” Shelton said.
But this philosophy doesn’t address the structural problems that hinder student achievement, antagonize educators and lead to strikes nationwide. Until there is transformational change in the way the state and the nation support public education, schools will be forced to operate on the margins and their stakeholders will be thrust into conflict.
“Really since about the 1970s, but increasingly since the 1990s and the accountability movement in public education, educators — and certainly school districts and administrators are very much a part of this as well — have been asked to do really kind of impossible things with the education system,” Shelton said. “Prop. 13 limited the kind of funding that districts can spend on education. Of course, that’s happening nationally as well, although probably not as profoundly as in California. It’s not necessarily evil school districts trying to limit costs, it’s fiscal realities that prevented teacher salaries from going up.”
Teachers, administrators and school board members are all chafing against higher expectations for schools, students and staff that come without the resources, conditions and policies needed to make those goals attainable. Frustration with the status quo — and desire for change — manifested in May’s Day of Action Rally for Education, sponsored by the California Teachers Association. Speaking at the event at the State Capitol in Sacramento, CSBA President Dr. Emma Turner called for a unified front among educators working to secure the resources needed for student success and stronger public schools.
“The real fight is not between labor and management,” Turned told thousands of protestors gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. “The real fight is not between teachers and administrators. Guess where the real fight is? It’s between us who really care about and are committed to our children and the Legislature. That’s the real fight.”
Troy Flint is CSBA’s Senior Director of Communications