As more than 30,000 educators and supporters prepared Monday to protest the Los Angeles school district’s overcrowded classrooms, low teacher salaries, and refusal to hire sufficient support staff, observers noted how the lines being drawn reflect divisions within the Democratic Party regarding education policies: corporate-backed privatization versus strengthening public schools.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attacked teachers across the country for going on strike last year over their chronically low wages, claiming Oklahoma teachers were allowing “adult disagreements” to get in the way of “serving the students”—ignoring the fact that educators there walked out of classrooms last April largely because funding cuts had left schoolchildren with dilapidated textbooks and insufficient supplies.
But the fight over the future of education and teachers’ rights in Los Angeles is revealing rifts among Democrats and progressives, with former Education Secretary Arne Duncan also expressing support for the school district while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) stands firmly on the side of the educators.
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Sanders has vocally supported other teachers’ strikes in recent months, expressing solidarity with educators in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona last year as demands for fair wages and sufficient resources spread through several states.
Meanwhile, Duncan, President Barack Obama’s education secretary and a charter school proponent, released a statement over the weekend saying Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) “is spending half a billion dollars more each year than it brings in and is headed toward insolvency in about two years if nothing changes… It simply does not have the money to fund UTLA’s demands.”
LAUSD posted the comments on its Twitter account along with the claim, “The community agrees: a strike will hurt our kids.”
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