The deal includes caps on class sizes, and hiring full-time nurses for every school, as well as a librarian for every middle and high school in the district by the fall of 2020. The union also won a significant concession from the district on standardized tests: Next year a committee will develop a plan to reduce the number of assessments by half. The pro-charter school board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools. Teachers also won a 6 percent pay raise, but that was the same increase proposed by the district before the strike.
The settlement came after tens of thousands of teachers in the nation’s second-largest public school system marched in downtown Los Angeles and picketed outside schools for six school days, and after a round of negotiating sessions over the holiday weekend.
The contract still needs to be ratified by the roughly 30,000 members of the union, but that approval is widely expected. Teachers are expected to be back in their classrooms Wednesday morning.
“Today is a day full of good news,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Tuesday morning at City Hall, as he stood alongside Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.
“The strike is painful and had a cost,” the mayor added. “But there is no question to get here, the strike helped.”
The Los Angeles strike was the eighth major teacher walkout over the past year. A movement that calls itself Red For Ed spread like wildfire from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond. But the strike in Los Angeles was a union-led one against Democratic leaders who are usually on their side. It also was one of the first to highlight one of the most controversial questions in education: whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, hurt traditional schools by competing with them for students and funding.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.