LA teachers strike leaves parents wondering what is being taught
LOS ANGELES — Kathleen Whitehead vowed to keep her 14-year-old daughter home on Tuesday, after the teen reported not learning much the day earlier at a Los Angeles high school staffed by a skeleton crew of substitutes as tens of thousands of teachers walked off the job in the nation’s second-largest school district.
Whitehead said she grew “more and more irritated” as the ninthgrader texted that she and her classmates at Reseda High School were “shuffled from one large auditorium to the next” in big groups so they could be looked after by fewer adults.
“It’s semi-organized chaos,” Whitehead said on Monday.
The teen told her mom that some kids huddled around a TV showing former first lady Michelle Obama’s recent appearance on Carpool Karaoke, a segment from The Late Late
Show with James Corden, while others browsed the internet for busywork assignments.
Meanwhile, educators and parents packed streets in pouring rain to march from City Hall to district headquarters, pressing for higher pay and smaller class sizes that school officials say could bankrupt the system with 640,000 students. The rain-slicked streets filled with demonstrators toting umbrellas and picket signs contributed to heavy downtown traffic, but there were no major incidents or arrests.
With no new negotiations planned, union members planned to strike again on Tuesday.
Teachers are trying to tap into the “Red for Ed” movement that began last year and won big raises even in states with “right to work” laws that limit the ability to strike. They started in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona and moved to Colorado and Washington state.
All 1,240 schools are open
But unlike those strikes, which shut down many schools and forced parents to find other care for their kids, all 1,240 K-12 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were open.
For kids who went to school, bus service was normal, breakfast and lunches were served, and “students are safe and learning”, Superintendent Austin Beutner said.
The district has hired hundreds of substitutes to replace educators and staff members who left for picket lines, a move that the teachers union has called irresponsible.
Taehyum Kim sent his two sons to their San Fernando Valley schools so they wouldn’t ruin their perfect attendance records. But then he picked them up early after they complained they weren’t doing anything except playing chess on iPads.
Only seven of the 24 students in his younger son’s third-grade class showed up, Kim said, adding attendance was better at the older boy’s middle school.
Neither child brought back any homework. Kim said he’s considering keeping both boys home Tuesday, partly to send a message to school officials.
“Because what’s the point?” he said. “They’re not learning anything and you know that.”
Some took their kids to the picket lines.
District officials estimated that more than 141,630 students — less than a quarter of the usual daily total — attended 1,240 schools on Monday.