Los Angeles Teachers Reach Deal to End Strike

“Educators and parents reached a boiling point.”

Elementary school teachers Iris Marin, Mireya Gutierrez, and Lorena Redford, rally in downtown Los Angeles on Friday. Damian Dovarganes/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

After six days of striking teachers picketing their schools, the teachers union and the Los Angeles Unified School District reached a tentative agreement that would end the first educators’ strike in the city in 30 years.

The tentative deal, which the city’s Board of Education is expected to ratify, would give teachers a pay increase and divert funding toward hiring new support staffers, such as counselors and nurses. It is expected to eliminate a provision that gave the district authority to raise class sizes under certain circumstances. Teachers still need to vote on whether to approve the agreement. With the district and United Teachers Los Angeles coming to a deal, more than 34,000 teachers are expected to return to schools on Wednesday. In the meantime, after picketing at schools for another day, teachers converged on City Hall on Tuesday morning for a rally, while students continued to attend schools with bare-bones staff.

“Educators and parents reached a boiling point. It’s not just a boiling point over last six months. It’s one over the last 10 years,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said at a press conference Tuesday. “It has brought us not only to an agreement, but a commitment to fight for public education.”

Los Angeles schools superintendent Austin Beutner told reporters that the details of the agreement would be released within the next few hours, noting that the district continues to have “tremendous concerns” about the schools going insolvent. “We can’t solve 40 years of underinvestment in public education in just one week,” Beutner told reporters.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who acted as a mediator with his staff, noted that the deal would also reduce class sizes in schools over the next four years. “It’s time for a new day for public education in Los Angeles,” Garcetti told reporters. “This is not the end, this is the beginning of making sure LA gets the schools they deserve.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate