UTLA does right by UTLA, not students

The United Teachers Los Angeles has presented what union leader Cecily MyartCruz is calling its “most ambitious bargaining platform.”

The union, which represents teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is calling for 20% across-the-board raises over the next two years.

The union also is calling for scrapping any form of standardized assessments that aren't required by state or federal law, as well as restrictions on allowing charter schools to co-locate on district campuses.

Of course, the demands for more pay is a given.

That's the sort of thing unions naturally will ask for.

Obviously, with government unions, there's no ability to link pay with performance, which brings us to the latter point.

It's no surprise UTLA wants as few assessments as possible.

“There is no such thing as learning loss,” UTLA's leader told Jason McGahan of Los Angeles Magazine last year. “Our kids didn't lose anything. It's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience.”

McGahan further noted that, “She even went so far as to suggest darkly that `learning loss' is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.”

So yes, it's no wonder Myart-Cruz and the union is taking a stand against them. Myart-Cruz is, evidently, a conspiracy theorist who dismisses the tremendous harm done to LAUSD students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

And of course it shouldn't be forgotten that LAUSD in 2018, for example, long before the pandemic, just 42.31% of LAUSD students met the state's standards on English language arts, while fewer than 32% met the state's standards on mathematics.

In a world in which the needs and interests of students were put first, it would indeed be helpful to know how effective teachers actually are.

But, alas, UTLA doesn't care about accountability.

UTLA's ongoing war on charter schools, which are just public schools with greater flexibility, further confirms that UTLA is, at this point, only concerned about increasing its grip on the district.

We can only hope the district will show a backbone and ensure that the end result of negotiations with UTLA are reasonable.