On Monday, January 14, 2019, Los Angeles’s thirty-four thousand public-school teachers went on strike. They demanded smaller classes (classrooms had as many as forty-six students), a full-time nurse in every school, modest pay increases, and a cap on the district’s rapidly growing number of charter schools. Four days later, Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (U.T.L.A.), spoke to sixty thousand educators, parents, and community members who were gathered in downtown L.A.’s Grand Park. “U.T.L.A., do you feel your power?” he bellowed. “We have never been at a more critical moment for public education. You all know this, that brewing for a very long time has been a movement to privatize our schools, and it is here now, trying to take over L.A. If we allow this movement to win, then our schools will be privatized, our students will have less equity and less access, and our jobs and our health care will be attacked. Are we going to let that happen?” “No,” the crowd roared in response, stretching one syllable to three.
In 2017, a slate of corporate-backed self-declared “education reformers,” who sought to restructure school districts according to market prerogatives, had taken over the city’s school board. The election in which they came to power was the most expensive school-board race in history. Almost immediately, the board appointed a new superintendent, Austin Beutner, the billionaire former investment banker and brief C.E.O. of the Los Angeles Times. Two months into the job, Beutner declared that L.A.’s public-school teachers, who made an average salary of seventy-five thousand dollars, the lowest among similarly sized cities, were overpaid. He went on to announce a plan to create a “portfolio model” school district, in which public and private schools would be rolled into a financial-management system, operated like a private company. Schools would receive funds or be shut down according to performance metrics, akin to how a hedge-fund manager opens and closes accounts. In cities that have adopted the portfolio model, such as New Orleans, Newark, and Indianapolis, public schools, especially in communities of color, have closed, increasing racial segregation.
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