There’s a growing sense in Los Angeles that communities are being cleaved and traditional schools underfunded by the flashiness and promised innovation of charter schools. I was surprised by the extent to which striking counselors and teachers brought up these issues of funding and privatization. The union’s demand for more school counselors has emerged more strongly than in other recent teacher strikes—because, teachers said, of the increasingly acute needs of the majority brown and working-class student population. In this sense, the strike was as much about an ideological question as a labor dispute: Who is the public being served by public education?
Source : The Striking Demands of LA Teachers
