Teachers at three charter schools in South Los Angeles walked off the job Tuesday, marking the first time ever that a charter school organization in California went on strike, according to the teachers union. The strikers joined thousands of other L.A. educators who began a strike a day earlier against the L.A. Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system. Charter schools are publicly funded, but can be privately operated. They are also exempt from union contracts affecting school districts. Although it’s rare, teachers at charter schools may organize and seek representation from a union, just as the teachers at the Accelerated Schools did. This is said to be only the second time nationally that instructors at a charter school organization went on strike. Advertisement Union representatives for teachers at the Accelerated Schools said more than a year and a half of negotiations with school management failed to yield a contract. At a morning news conference, teachers and their supporters chanted and waved signs outside Accelerated’s campus on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Founded by two former Los Angeles Unified teachers, the three Accelerated schools serve 1,700 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. As passing cars honked in support, teachers stood on the sidewalk and spoke about the constant turnover at Accelerated. Between 2016 and 2018, there was a 50% turnover rate among teachers at the school, the union said. “Teachers leave and find better opportunities,” said first-grade teacher Kari Rivera. “Better salaries, better health benefits and better job protections.” Accelerated co-founder and CEO Johnathan Williams said in a statement that “Accelerated Schools is disheartened that the United Teachers Los Angeles leadership has called for a strike, putting our students and families in the middle of contract demands.” His statement said the union last year had agreed on a three-year contract “for a significant salary raise of more than 17%, which teachers now enjoy.” He also said the school’s pending proposal includes $17,000 per year in benefits coverage. The union rejected the school’s latest offer, “which included a process for teachers with strong performance evaluations to receive a guaranteed two-year contract with a $2,000 bonus upon completion,” Williams said. Tuesday’s action followed a recent four-day walkout at the Acero charter school network in Chicago. It also came one day after 31,000 UTLA members walked off about 900 school sites across LAUSD. Advertisement Charter schools serve about 1 in 5 L.A. public school students and are either nonunion or have separate union contracts. UTLA represents more than 75 teachers at Accelerated. Nearly nearly all of the teachers stayed away from work Tuesday, said Hong Bui, the union’s chief negotiator with Accelerated. UTLA’s impasse with LAUSD focuses on class size and charter school expansion. On Tuesday, protesters outside Accelerated raised the same points. Bui said contract negotiations broke down over other criteria, including binding arbitration in the grievance procedure, job security and health benefits. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, joined picketers outside the school. She said the charter school’s management has “turned the charter system on its end and has made it ideologically against the teachers, against parents, against the community.” Advertisement “Teachers are not widgets, children are not test scores. And we need to have teachers who are stable, stable people in children’s lives,” Weingarten said. “So that they know year after year, they can count on teachers in the school. “These are things that are basic to education. Frankly, these are things that every middle-class or rich parent demands of the schools that their kids go to.” Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, also marched with teachers and told reporters the two labor disputes have similarities. “Accelerated management has money to take care of the issues on the table,” he said. “Also in common, is that Accelerated management is being driven by ideology, looking at teachers as disposable and not as indispensable. “ Advertisement He called it “an historic week for educators and for public education in Los Angeles.” High school Spanish teacher Ashley Avilla said she was striking in part to protest the size of her classes at Accelerated, which typically have 38 students. “It’s hard to give them individual attention,” she said. However, freshman Mark Arroyo, 14, said some of his classes at Accelerated are too small. There’s not enough participation when there are fewer students, he said.Standing outside Accelerated on Tuesday after school ended, Arroyo said his classes were taught by substitutes so it felt like a “normal day.” Advertisement Arroyo said he supported the striking teachers: “They have the right idea trying to make the school a better place.” dakota.smith@latimes.com Twitter: @dakotacdsmith<doc-sep>Charter schools, which are generally not unionized, were not officially on the bargaining table in the protracted negotiations between the union and the district. It is the state, not the school district, that crafts the laws governing charter schools and their growth. But it was always a central message of the union during the strike: Charter schools, they argued, were taking students and money away from traditional public schools. Still, charter schools have proven popular among many parents in Los Angeles. Some schools have long waiting lists and the district already has more students enrolled in charters than any other public school system in the country. It is still unclear how much practical impact the deal will have on charters. Charter school supporters are lobbying the school board, which has steadfastly supported charters for more than a decade, to vote down the resolution for a charter school cap this week. Even if it passes, advocates are certain to take the fight to Sacramento, where a bill calling for a moratorium seems likely. They will argue that charters have given poor students and students of color essential options for better schools. But the defeat in the court of public opinion is clear: After years of support from powerful local and national allies — including many Democrats — charter schools are now facing a backlash and severe skepticism. Over the past two years, charter school supporters were dealt painful political defeats in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and other states. As the push for alternatives to traditional public schools has come to be more associated with President Trump and his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, the shift in Democratic Party politics has been especially pronounced. President Barack Obama supported expanding high-quality charter schools, and pushed teachers’ unions to let go of some of their traditional seniority protections and put more emphasis on raising student achievement.<doc-sep>It’s a confusing time to be a charter school teacher in Los Angeles. Usually, I consider myself to have everything in common with my husband and friends who teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District. We put in the same long hours, confront the same piles of ungraded papers and share similar worries and hopes for our students. But the teachers’ strike that ended Tuesday exposed a long-simmering rift between charter and district schools, and it made me confront my own role in the problems we face in Los Angeles education. The teachers and their union made clear during the negotiations that they believe schools like mine pose an existential crisis to schools like theirs. More than 100,000 children living within district boundaries now attend charters, and the money the state provides for their education has followed them out of LAUSD schools. Moreover, the teachers pointed out, charters tend to pick off the students with more involved parents, leaving public schools with a higher percentage of tougher cases and less funding and space. Advertisement I think the striking teachers raised valid concerns – including about charters. But we need to figure out how to address the issues as allies, not enemies. We need to figure out how to address the issues as allies, not enemies. I love my school, my colleagues and my students fiercely, and I’m proud of what we’ve built. We have been able to reimagine our curriculum to support our many immigrant students. We have instituted co-teaching partnerships that we think better serve our students with special needs. We have implemented restorative justice and focused on teacher and student wellness. It’s hard to think of any of that as a problem or that my school should be dismantled. The community we have is worth protecting. Early charter schools in Los Angeles were approved at a time when the district was bursting at the seams, and the new schools served as a pressure valve for a struggling, overcrowded district. That’s no longer the case, however. The number of K-12 students in the area LAUSD serves is declining as families are priced out of the city, yet new charters are still being approved, as mandated by state law. I believe in my charter school, but I don’t believe that the charter industry’s mission to increase its share of the educational marketplace in Los Angeles can solve the problems we all face educating children. In fact, the strike has made me consider how charter school expansion is harming the city. As more money is invested in new ideas and new campuses, fewer resources and students are left for the many great programs still trying to gain their footing in our current district and charter schools. One thing to come out of the strike negotiations was that the school board will vote on a resolution asking the state to establish a charter school cap and the governor to appoint a committee on charter schools. Those things would be a start, and every school board member should strongly support them. Everyone loses when district and charter schools wage an ugly competition for students and dollars. Already, schools have found that losing a few students or missing enrollment targets can mean no volleyball team, or the loss of a teacher. Those losses in turn encourage flight from a school. Advertisement At the root of charter expansion is the belief that the right group of people working together, without being shackled by the district, can fix education. But that so misidentifies the problem. The real problem is ever-shrinking resources being thrown at kids with ever-growing needs, and that’s a problem facing every teacher in Los Angeles. Many students, whether they attend charters or district schools, are living with poverty, instability and trauma. We can’t hope to offer such students what they need and deserve when we are stuck in a fight over too-scarce resources. Our schools, charter or district, won’t thrive until we collaborate on changing that. We are a long way from a system in which we are deeply invested in the success of every school and every student in L.A., but we must make that the mission. We must find a way to stabilize school enrollment, fairly distribute resources and high-need students, and ensure that the charter and district schools currently serving our students get the funding and support needed to offer every single student a safe, caring and inspiring learning environment. These goals should be Los Angeles and Sacramento’s top priorities. Advertisement Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute » Charters face many of the same challenges the district does, and collaboration can better us all. The district and the charters within its boundaries alike need to be more democratic, giving power to parents, teachers and other stakeholders. They need to be far more transparent. And more charter teachers should seriously consider unionizing. No one would argue that L.A. schools are perfect, and affluent parents across the city have voted with their feet, fleeing the district for private schools or helping to form new charters. Everyone understands the desire to do right by our children. But I would urge Angelenos considering their education options to hold this thought: The schools you judge not good enough for your children or grandchildren or nieces and nephews aren’t good enough for any child. Riley McDonald Vaca is a teacher at Camino Nuevo High School and an LAUSD parent. Her views do not represent those of her school‘s management.<doc-sep>
The strike talk was mostly about new hiring, smaller class sizes and salary increases. But lurking just below the surface during the teacher walkout in the Los Angeles Unified School District was another issue: charter schools, which many teachers (and their union) fear and loathe, seeing them as an existential threat to traditional public schools. Indeed, one of the less-noticed provisions of the agreement to end the strike was that the school board would call for a statewide reexamination of the role and effect of charters, and that it would consider asking the state for a moratorium on any new ones. Board member Richard Vladovic said he will introduce a resolution on those subjects on Tuesday. The state’s law authorizing the creation of charter schools has been around since 1992 and legislators have made it easier during the ensuing years for such schools to open. In L.A. Unified, their growth has been explosive: The district now has 277 charters, most of them independently run, though they receive public funding. Most are non-union. They enroll close to 140,000 students — about one in five in the district. Their growth is responsible for about half of the declining enrollment in traditional public schools that has sapped the district’s finances over the last 15 years. Charter schools should operate on a level playing field, and they should supplement, not supplant or harm, the larger school system. So yes, it’s time for a thorough state assessment of charter schools, including how successful they’ve been and what their impact has been on traditional public schools. The state has been generally lackadaisical about regulating charter schools and has altogether ignored the ways in which the budgets of school districts may have been harmed. There has also been tension between charters and traditional schools when they have been required to “co-locate” on a single campus. Charter schools were originally intended to be “laboratories of innovation,” showing district-run schools new ways to provide more successful educational experiences, especially for low-income students of color. They provided an option for parents whose children were stuck in truly awful schools. No matter what you may have heard, L.A. schools were not doing fine before charter schools came on the scene. There were schools where some of the teachers read newspapers in the back of the classroom while showing their students Disney videos on a regular basis. Some high schools didn’t even offer the courses required to apply to one of the state’s four-year colleges. There were math and science classes taught by a series of rotating substitutes who had no expertise in the subjects. It’s not surprising that academic outcomes were shockingly bad. Parents who couldn’t afford to move or pay for a private school were stuck. School administrators too often brushed off their concerns. Charter schools gave these families their first chance to have a voice in their children’s education. And in ways, the competition successfully prodded L.A. schools to improve. In response to the move of students to charters, for instance, the district started offering more high-achieving magnet schools to keep students within the district. As charter schools offered students a pathway to college, more district schools started doing the same. The district began listening to parents more. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute » Yet charter schools haven’t always lived up to their promise. Some manipulated the system to bring in students more likely to succeed. It took investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union to discover that dozens of charter schools were requiring parents to volunteer significant time to the school, a deterrent to low-income families that couldn’t spare that kind of time. Extensive applications, sometimes provided only in English, discouraged all but the savviest applicants and those with a commitment to their children’s education. Requirements for documents would have forced families to reveal their immigration status, discouraging them from applying as well. For a long time, charter schools weren’t educating their fair share of special-needs students; other requirements tended to screen out lower-performing students. Many of these problems appear to have been fixed or at least improved, so that charter schools are closer to taking all comers, but the fixes came only after a backlash. Meanwhile, donations from generous charter-supporting benefactors created an unlevel playing field. Studies on charter schools have shown mixed results, but one of the best surveys, produced by Stanford University, found that Los Angeles’ charter schools in general provide better outcomes than its traditional public schools.