Tag Archive for: UTLA

L.A. Teachers Union: Give us $250 Million, Or Keep Schools Closed

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The second largest public school district in the United States is in turmoil. Los Angeles Unified School District, with over 600,000 students in kindergarten through twelfth grade at over 1,000 schools, may not be open for the business of teaching on August 18. How to handle the COVID-19 pandemic is the issue, and there is nowhere near a consensus on how to handle it.

The union representing LAUSD teachers is the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), which has recently put out a lengthy document outlining what they believe are “Safe and Equitable Conditions for Starting LAUSD in 2020-21.” It’s a doozy.

Laced throughout the document are references to the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has on “people of color.” The document leads off with a section entitled “The Same Storm, But Different Boats,” making the case that LAUSD’s student population is disadvantaged compared to the general population. They are more likely to live in higher density housing, more likely to live in multi-generational households, more likely to live further away from medical care, more likely to use mass transit, etc., etc. Their point: All of this “structural racism” means that compared to other school districts in California, more will have to be done before LAUSD can open.

The problem with this litany is it predates COVID-19 and ignores a crucial question: Are disadvantaged communities going to be better off or worse off if schools don’t reopen? If it is impossible to meet all of the conditions that might be necessary to ensure that schools in low income communities eliminate all these extra risks and disadvantages, then what?

UTLA Conditions to Reopen Go Well Beyond Medical Concerns

According to the UTLA, the “total additional expenses to restart physical schools could be nearly $250 million.” Moreover, this sum of money, monstrous as it is, will “not take into account measures to address the increased need for mental health and social services, the educational needs of children who may have fallen behind in the shift to crisis distance learning, regular testing of students and staff, or the long-term effects on students that will need to be addressed over multiple years. Finally, these costs do not include investments into distance learning, which will continue to be provided, either to all students under a full distance learning.”

So UTLA is looking for somewhere between a quarter-billion and a half-billion dollars before they’ll agree to reopening schools. And to be clear – LAUSD was in serious financial trouble before COVID-19 came along. To recap:

  • In exchange for 180 days of classroom instruction per year, the average LAUSD teacher makes over $100K per year in pay and benefits (grossly understated estimate because it doesn’t take into account paying down their unfunded pension and retirement health care liabilities).
  • The “modest” strike settlement negotiated between LAUSD and UTLA in early 2019 left LAUSD in worse financial shape than before.
  • Taking all expenditures into account, California spends, on average, over $20,000 per K-12 pupil per year. There is not a revenue problem, there is a spending problem.
  • An under-reported reason the teachers unions want to unionize – or abolish – charter schools is because they need to fold more pupil counts, and hence more revenue, into their annual budgets. Only in this way can they hope to spread their existing pension debt over a larger revenue base.

So where will $250 million (or more) come from?

At the federal level, the UTLA is calling for federal assistance including an emergency bailout, along with increased Title I funding, increased Individuals With Disabilities Education funding, and “Medicare for All.”

At the state level, UTLA is calling for passage of the proposed property tax increase that is already on the November ballot, along with a “Wealth Tax” of 1 percent a year, and a “Millionaire Tax” of up to 3 percent surtax on high income Californians.

And at the local level, UTLA wants to “Defund Police,” provide free housing to anyone, ten additional sick days for all private employees, a moratorium on charter schools, and “financial support for undocumented students and families.”

None of this political agenda is new, apart perhaps from “defund the police.” Even UTLA admits this in their conclusion, which leads off with “Normal Wasn’t Working For Us Before.” Perhaps on that, everyone can agree. LAUSD was failing to deliver educational outcomes for its students that they deserve. LAUSD was in financial trouble. And the student population of LAUSD had a higher than average percentage of students from low income families. But we didn’t shut down the schools.

The Medical Debate is All That Matters Right Now

Almost lost in UTLA’s position on reopening the LAUSD schools, given their ongoing fixation on race, class, and every other perceptible category of disadvantage, is the medical debate. But here again, just as with the political and financial conditions they’ve set for reopening schools, what they’re asking for is impossible to achieve. Some are tougher than others.

For example, UTLA is asking for “drastically reduced class sizes to no more than 12 per classroom.” They are asking for personal protective equipment for all staff and students, presumably to mandate that everyone including students wear masks. If you read the entire list of steps UTLA considers necessary in order to open schools (pages 7, 8, and half of page 9), it is clear that what they are asking for cannot be achieved without – and they’re being forthright about this – an infusion of over $250 million for this school year, with no end in sight. Is this necessary?

Here is where, with tragic and ongoing consequences, political priorities have distorted the public health debate over how to handle COVID-19. From the start, the priority has been to lock down the healthy, instead of quarantining the vulnerable. And from the start, any information that might point to inexpensive therapies has been suppressed.

Here is a partial list of mitigating factors that ought to be included in the discussion of school openings:

  • The number of pre-adolescent children who have become sick with COVID-19 is statistically negligible.
  • Children also do not appear to spread COVID-19.
  • Older children can catch COVID-19 but the rate of cases that either are fatal or leave serious long-term damage is statistically negligible.
  • Healthy teachers can take several measures to protect themselves from possible exposure to infection, including the approved methods – face shields, masks, frequent hand washing, social distancing.
  • Teachers with health conditions or in at-risk age groups should consider taking a leave of absence or retiring.
  • Preventive steps can be taken including getting an updated Rubella vaccine, taking 400 mg per week of hydroxychloroquine, taking zinc lozenges, getting at least 8 minutes per day of exposure to full sun or taking vitamin D3, taking Pepcid, and taking chewable vitamin C;

These preventative measures may not all be valid. But there is strong evidence that some of them are valid. They have been unfairly dismissed.

Why?

To learn more about alternative therapies and preventative measures, local policymakers ought to do their own research. Review the most recent studies that acknowledge the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine: Henry Ford Health System; Infectious Diseases Unit, Central Defense Hospital, Madrid; NYU Grossman School of Medicine; So Ahn Public Health Center, Republic of Korea; American Journal of Epidemiology; Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, France.

To further investigate both sides of the debate over hydroxychloroquine, read the online postings of Dr. James Todaro, virologist Didier Raoult, Dr. Victor Zelenko, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, or even Dr. Judy Mikovits. Read “A Tale of Two Drugs: Money vs. Medical Wisdom,” by Dr. Elizabeth Vliet, published by the American Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Even if you disagree with the conclusions ventured by these dissident doctors, you will come away with far more information.

UTLA, as its supporters would almost certainly claim, has an illustrious record of standing up to the supposed establishment, including, on must surmise, “big pharma.” So why doesn’t UTLA apply their formidable resources to looking into these inexpensive and possibly game changing COVID-19 therapies?

It is probably fair to say that behind their chronic need to call for more staff and more pay and benefits, UTLA nonetheless will support any preventative and therapeutic treatments for COVID-19, even if (especially if?) these treatments don’t pour billions into the bank accounts of big pharma.

Could it be that UTLA, along with virtually everyone else associated with the Democratic party, is more interested in seeing nothing get better in America until after the November 3 election?

An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

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Modest Strike Settlement Nonetheless Puts LAUSD in Even Worse Financial Shape

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One of the grievances expressed by the union during their recent strike against Los Angeles Unified School District was that, according to them, charter schools are draining funds from public schools. This assertion, repeated uncritically by major news reports on the strike, does not stand up to reason.

Public schools in California receive government funding based on student attendance. Since one of the other primary grievances of the union was overcrowded classrooms, it would be reasonable to conclude that LAUSD schools are not underfunded, but overfunded. There should be plenty of money, but there’s not. LAUSD is teetering on insolvency, and the strike settlement agreement is going to make their financial challenges even worse.

Charter Schools Outperform LAUSD’s Unionized Schools

The reason LAUSD is running out of money has little or nothing to do with charter schools. It has to do with inefficient use of funds. A study conducted by the California Policy Center in 2015 calculated the per student cost in LAUSD’s traditional public high schools to be $15,372 per year. The same study evaluated 26 charter high schools and middle schools located within LAUSD’s geographic boundaries, and found their cost per student to be $10,649 per year.

At the same time as LAUSD spends far more than charters per student, they do a poorer job educating their students. The same 2015 study, “Analyzing the Cost and Performance of LAUSD Traditional High Schools and LAUSD Alliance Charter High Schools,” compared the educational outcomes at nine charter high schools to nine traditional public high schools in LAUSD. These 18 schools were selected based on their having nearly identical student demographics to LAUSD’s traditional public high schools – i.e., the same percentage of English learners, learning disabled students, and low income students. The charter schools clearly outperformed LAUSD in every important metric – SAT scores, graduation rates and college admissions.

There are two critical issues here, neither of which appear to have been discussed in the strike negotiations. One, why do charter schools generally manage to educate students better than traditional public schools, and two, why do they manage to do it for so much less money?

The answer to the first may be hard for the union leadership and their supporters to accept: These charter schools are able to better educate students because they are not subject to union work rules. Incompetent teachers can be dismissed. If layoffs are necessary, the best teachers can be retained, instead of the most senior. What is more teachers do not acquire “tenure,” a job-for-life right negotiated by the teachers union despite its origins in the university with the purpose of protecting scientific inquiry, not protecting bad teachers in K-12 schools.

There are a host of reasons charter schools don’t cost as much as traditional public schools. Much of it has to do with teacher compensation. The average base pay in charter schools is less than in public schools, as is the average cost of benefits. But the “other pay,” typically taking the form of performance incentives, is higher in the charter schools. An interesting compilation, using data taken from Transparent California, estimated the bonus pay in the charter networks within LAUSD (Green Dot and Alliance) to average two to three times the average in LAUSD’s traditional public schools. This disparity, wherein compensation in charter schools is linked to the effectiveness of individual teachers, undoubtedly also helps explain why they achieve better educational outcomes.

The Cost of Benefits is Breaking LAUSD

LAUSD’s cost of employee benefits increased from $1.54 billion in 2015-16 to $1.92 billion in 2016-17, an increase of 25 percent, when the total employee headcount only increased by six-tenths of one percent. The reason for the increase is simple, and immutable: LAUSD, like many public agencies throughout California, has fallen woefully behind in its funding of retirement benefits, and they have reached a point where they must dramatically increase payments in order to catch up.

Staggering Pension Debt: LAUSD now carries an unfunded pension liability of $6.8 billion. Just paying down that debt over twenty years should be costing LAUSD over $600 million per year, not including the normal contribution they have to pay each year as their active employees earn additional pension benefits. As it is, including the normal contribution, in 2018 LAUSD “only” paid $584 million to CalSTRS and CalPERS.

The financial sickness relating to pensions is a statewide problem. CalSTRS, the pension system that collects and funds pension benefits for LAUSD teachers, as of June 30, 2017, was only 62 percent funded. Sixty-two percent. CalPERS, the pension system that collects and funds pension benefits for LAUSD support personnel, is only slightly better off financially than CalSTRS. It has already announced it will roughly double the required employer contributions between now and 2025. CalSTRS, if it wants to survive, will likely follow suit.

Retiree Healthcare Costs: If anything, the financial challenges surrounding LAUSD’s other primary retirement obligation, retiree health benefits, are even more daunting. LAUSD’s OPEB unfunded liability (OPEB stands for “other post employment benefits,” primarily retirement health insurance) has now reached a staggering $14.9 billion. Like many public agencies, LAUSD does not pre-fund their retiree health benefits. In 2018, retiree healthcare cost the district nearly $400 million. A 2016 study prepared for LAUSD estimated that cost to double in the next ten years, and to nearly quadruple within the next twenty years.

LAUSD does face declining enrollment, something they claim is exacerbated by diversion of students into charter schools. Total enrollment in 2013-14 was 621,796, and by 2017-18 it had declined somewhat to 591,411. As a percentage of total enrollment during that period, unaffiliated charter enrollment rose from 15 percent to 19 percent of all students. But LAUSD nonetheless contends with bursting classrooms. LAUSD’s traditional, unionized public schools are still collecting revenue based on attendance that stretches the capacity of their facilities. If they are still attempting to teach more students than their facilities can handle, they can’t blame charters for their financial problems.

There is, however, an indirect financial threat that charters represent to traditional unionized public schools that is very serious indeed. The problem is not that charter enrollment steals money from LAUSD’s classrooms, because the classrooms are full. More students might bring in more money, but they would also require more classrooms. The problem is the growth of charters shrinks the revenue base LAUSD needs to pay the costs for retirees.

Charter Schools Dilute LAUSD’s Revenue Base Necessary to Pay Retiree Benefits

As LAUSD’s traditional unionized public schools contend with burgeoning per-retiree costs, every student that they lose to charters represents less available revenue to feed the pension funds. Every student lost to charter schools decreases LAUSD’s ratio of active workers to retirees.

These compounding effects are similar to what faced the auto industry back in the 1980s – retirees collecting expensive benefits, supported by companies with fewer workers and lower revenues. The difference, of course, is that public schools, and public sector unions, do not contend with the irresistible reality of global markets. Instead their ultimate solution will be to call for higher taxes.

This prediction is borne out by the strike settlement, which called for more hiring of teachers and support personnel, retroactive raises, and nothing in the form of benefit reductions or higher employee contributions to their benefits through payroll withholding.

The other key victory for the union, an aggressive stance by the LAUSD Board against any new charter schools, is a rear guard action to preserve the revenue base necessary to pay retiree benefits. Stop the charters, or reform pensions and retiree healthcare formulas. It was one or the other. But all this war on charters does is buy time.

LAUSD Will Eventually Have to Adapt to Financial Reality

Sooner or later, financial reality will strike. LAUSD’s total expenses in 2016-17 were $7.6 billion. Benefits constituted $1.9 billion. Twenty-five percent of all spending. Ten years from now, those benefit costs are likely to double, as the pension fund payments rise to around $1.2 billion, annual OPEB contributions near the $1.0 billion level, and current benefits – which constituted around $900 million in spending in 2016-17 – rise with inflation. Can LAUSD afford to pay current and retiree benefits equal to 40 percent of all spending? Will higher taxes, to enable much higher per student reimbursements – make up the difference?

Financial reform to put LAUSD on a stable financial footing requires benefit reform. Teachers will have to pay, through payroll withholding, a higher percentage of the costs for their current health benefits, their retirement health benefits and their pensions. The alternative is for them to get more state funding for these benefits, or accept lower benefits. Increased state funding is on the way, but it is unlikely it will be sustainable.

There is another solution that bears discussion, which concerns the ratio of teachers to other employees. Based on their own data, LAUSD in 2016-17 had 26,556 classroom teachers, and 33,635 administrators and support personnel. Why is it necessary to have so many non-teachers? Why is it that between 2016-17, and the year before, the number of classroom teachers declined by 271, while the number of non-teaching employees grew by 639? In this regard, charter schools also offer a lesson. Just as they don’t spend precious funds on employee benefits that dwarf what private sector professionals typically expect, charters also don’t spend as much money on support personnel.

Not all charter schools succeed academically, but the ones that do offer examples that LAUSD and other traditional public school districts could emulate, and would emulate, if it weren’t for the intransigence of the teachers union. In all critical areas, from benefits reform to tenure, dismissal policies, and layoff criteria, the teachers union fights change. They have declared war on charters, and just won a major battle in LAUSD. But like the auto industry in Detroit back in the 1980s, unionized public schools need to adapt to changing times.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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