LA Teachers Strike: What Anti-Union Critics Don’t Understand
For years California teachers unions have sought to coordinate the expirations of our contracts and unite to strengthen our bargaining position. California teachers unions’ “We Can’t Wait” campaign has united 32 California union locals comprising 80,000 educators to fight for shared demands, including fully-staffed schools, smaller class sizes, and better wages and benefits. Conservative media are harshly condemning us for this–proof alone that our strategy is the correct one.
In “Teachers Hold California Children Hostage…Punishing Children”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls California teachers unions “among the most destructive actors in American political life,” citing unions’ unjust “collective bargaining haul”. The editorial board of the California Post, West coast counterpart to the New York Post–both owned by News Corp–denounces teacher union “abuse” because “teachers unions across the state, from Los Angeles to Sacramento, have authorized strike actions against their school districts”.
In the New York Post, teacher union opponent Corey DeAngelis accuses United Educators of San Francisco of “hold[ing] everyone hostage”. The San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board generously allows that “the educators who instruct San Francisco’s children should not have to commute from three counties away to do so” but nonetheless accuses USEF–which until this year had not struck in 47 years, of “forgo[ing] long-term stability for a short-term win” and of striking “in defiance” of budget “truth[s]”.
Writing for the conservative Southern California News Group publications, union critic Larry Sand is unhappy that “currently, new teachers in Los Angeles earn $68,896 a year”. He criticizes United Teachers Los Angeles–which has set a strike date of April 14–for its “warped agenda”.
The subtext of this vilification is critics’ belief that California teachers do a poor job and thus don’t deserve a raise.
Sand lectures, “Are children in Los Angeles being properly educated? Hardly.” The Chronicle uses “student outcomes in the San Francisco school district” as an argument against the teachers unions, while the California Post asks “Given terrible education results, have the teachers actually earned a raise?”
Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at the anti-union Reason Foundation, condemns UTLA’s “over-the-top salary and staffing demands” in light of Los Angeles Unified School District National Assessment of Educational Progress exam scores.
However, as retired educator Jill Stegman explains, low scores “reveal far more about the conditions California children are growing up in than the quality of classroom instruction”.
Qualifying for free or reduced price school meals is a commonly-used proxy for low-income levels–according to the California Department of Education, five of the nine most populous counties in California have qualifying rates of 70% or higher, and all nine have rates of 54% or higher.
A 2024 analysis found that one out of every 25 California students were homeless. According to the California Department of Education, from 2021 to 2024 there was a 26% increase in student homelessness, and as of 2024 there are almost a quarter million students who are homeless.
Student homelessness is a major issue at the Los Angeles Unified School District, particularly at the high school where I teach. I’ve had students living in garages, church basements, with relatives far away from the school. No matter how much our counselors try to help students, no matter how hard teachers encourage them and push against their continual absences, our ability to resolve or bypass this problem is very limited.
One of our counselors, Jose Ruvalcaba, says, “I am amazed at how resilient the students are, despite the challenges they face daily.”
For some families, merely having an able-bodied high schooler in school all day instead of working or caring for younger siblings is a luxury they struggle to afford. It’s difficult for such students to attend school regularly, and every time they come back and start to gain traction, they’re gone again.
Even when they’re in school they’re often pulled out of classes, sometimes to complete the standardized tests they missed. Teachers hate it, but short of barricading the student in our rooms during class time–which, believe me, I’ve considered–what can teachers do?
Looking over my current roster, I see numerous students in trying situations. In November, Immigration & Customs Enforcement nabbed and deported the fathers of two of my seniors. Both students are now working full time to support their respective families and send money to their deported fathers, while also trying to stay on track to graduate in June.
Critics might argue that middle-class high school kids also often work. True. But we worked to pay for cars and car insurance or to have money for dates or concerts. Some of our students are working to prevent their families from being evicted.
Stegman explains:
“Poverty and residential instability suppress academic outcomes…California’s much higher share of students facing these hardships and attending public schools–rather than being absorbed into private ones–exerts a downward pressure on statewide scores.”
Language is another crucial issue. Statewide there are huge disparities between students who began as English Learners and those who didn’t. This remains true whether they later demonstrated English
language proficiency and transitioned from English Learner status to Reclassified Fluent English Proficient or not.
I teach Latino students whose parents are overwhelmingly immigrants, and my students routinely struggle with vocabulary words I’ve known since I was 12 years old. Why? Luck–my parents were educated professionals, my students’ parents usually didn’t make it to high school in their own countries.
Union critics might argue that our students can succeed anyway. True. And many of them do. Some win college scholarships and go on to achieve great things.
For example, Chaka Tellem, one of our 2019 graduates, became the only student in UC Berkeley’s 158-year history to be elected student body president twice. He now attends Yale Law School.
Nonetheless, if you take 1,000 students from disadvantaged backgrounds and put them up against 1,000 middle class students, the middle class students, as a whole, will score better on the standardized tests upon which schools are judged.
Stegman notes that “in some higher-income districts, many of the highest-achieving students now opt
out of the state’s standardized testing altogether, meaning statewide averages increasingly reflect a more skewed testing pool…state and national tests rely almost entirely on public school samples. Private school students–who are disproportionately affluent, stably housed and high-performing–are not included in state averages.” One out of every 13 California students attends a private school.
I’d add that I’ve taught at elite private high schools as well as at my current school, whose students’ socioeconomic level is among the lowest in the nation, and I would argue that in many ways the teachers at my “low-performing” school are, as a whole, more effective than those at the “high-performing” schools. Why? Because we’ve had to adjust to a much tougher teaching environment.
For decades conservatives have largely refused to consider the impact that the vast array of problems faced by America’s large underclass have on the public schools these children attend. Instead, they mulishly insist that somehow all those problems don’t matter, instead pinning the blame for low test scores on one of their principal political enemies, teachers unions.
Politically convenient? Yes. Accurate? No.
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