The Los Angeles teachers union must be dislodged from its position of power. By whatever means necessary, Los Angeles must no longer be held hostage to the union’s capricious greed and deep dishonesty.
I note this in light of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike planned for Thursday. Teachers union head, Alex Caputo-Pearl, says the strike is a moral necessity in defense of investment in student futures. If that contention were truthful, Caputo-Pearl’s strike might even be justified. But the union boss is not truthful.
This strike is not about better student futures. It’s simply about extracting short-term gains for union members at the cost of the school district’s more expedient bankruptcy. Let’s consider the data.
First up, there’s the fact that the Los Angeles school district runs a structural deficit. While this is bad enough, the teachers union says that it doesn’t matter too much because the district retains a financial reserve that can be used to pay for its two key demands: a 6 percent-plus pay increase (on top of previous inflation-busting increases), class size reductions, and hiring of more support staff (so as to boost union enrollment and bargaining power). Again, however, reality tells a different tale. The school district’s budget chart below shows that retaining even a minimal reserve will require planned reforms, not union payoffs.
Why the decline? Simple. Because of rising personnel costs in healthcare and retiree obligations. The next chart evidences as much. Note the escalating costs in employer provided CalSTRS and CalPERS pension costs. Also note the rapidly rising healthcare costs.
These charts show why Los Angeles schools have such a big problem. While the teachers union has a point in arguing that California spends too little per pupil on education, the union contributes greatly to the problem by diverting those already stretched resources away from teacher hiring and into the reinforcement of already exceptionally generous teacher benefits. That takes us back to healthcare costs. The education nonprofit news site the 74 noted in August that the Los Angeles school district “has the highest cost per pupil for health benefits among similar districts in California: San Francisco, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, and San Diego Unified. For the fiscal year 2016-17, [Los Angeles district] health care costs were $1,968 per student, while Long Beach Unified spent $1,561 per pupil. San Francisco Unified spent $450 less per student than [Los Angeles]; if [Los Angeles] could pare that amount off its health costs, it would save $224 million a year.”
Yes, you read that right, $224 million a year in potential savings if Los Angeles required healthcare contributions from school district staff in a way similar to other California districts. Reallocation of that money into hiring new teachers would go a long way to addressing the very real concern of excessive class sizes in Los Angeles schools.
That brings us to one final chart. This time from the U.S. government’s Nation’s Report Card website. It shows the 2017 math proficiency of 8th graders in the Los Angeles school district. At every proficiency level, Los Angeles failed to match the nation or the average large American city. Indeed, a staggering 47 percent of Los Angeles 8th graders were “below basic” in their math proficiency. The data also shows even more staggering racial divergences in proficiency levels, with black and Hispanic minorities at the bottom.
What might fix that achievement canyon? More teachers and greater charter school competition. But that won’t be possible with the current teachers union. While conservatives don’t have all the answers on education reform, and they too often blame teachers rather than parents for poor results, there is no question that the Los Angeles teachers union deserves a hefty share of the blame here. Diverting resources away from students and into their own pockets, the union has reinforced rather than redressed the educational failings of its city.
