This is a struggle over our vision to reinvest in the civic institution of public education, and Austin Beutner’s and the privatizers’ perspective, which is to downsize the public school district and continue to accelerate privatization.

Our strike authorization vote had historic numbers — not only in the 98 percent “yes” votes, but also in the 83 percent turnout among thirty-five thousand members across nine hundred schools (at a time where you sometimes have 10 percent of people voting in city council elections).

We have proposals that fall into three categories. One category is economic demands. The district can more than afford them: it has a record-breaking reserve this year of $1.86 billion. The state requires that 1 percent of the district’s budget be put into a reserve; the district has 26 percent of its money in reserve. The school district serves over 90 percent students of color and over 85 percent low-income students — our students need the money now.

Our economic proposals include things like reducing class size, getting more nurses, counselors, and school psychologists into our schools; and a fair wage for educators, since, as we head into a teacher shortage nationally, we’re going to need to be able to recruit and retain educators in some of the most difficult places to teach.

The second category is non-economic — things that the district could do that would either actually save the district money or wouldn’t cost anything. One is cutting back on standardized testing. We have state and federal mandated tests, which are fine. We know that we have to do those. But there are also eighteen other discretionary tests that LAUSD makes teachers use. You could have an LAUSD student who, from transitional kindergarten to sixth grade, faces over one hundred standardized tests over the course of those eight years.

This is an incursion on instructional time, and it de-professionalizes teaching. We’re calling for teachers to have discretion over what standardized tests are used in their classrooms.

The second non-economic proposal is regulation of charter schools. Charters have grown 287 percent over the last 10 years. This drains about $600 million per year out of public district neighborhood schools. We believe in what the original intent of the 1992 charter law was, which was to have small experiments of charter schools serving high needs populations and then feeding lessons back into the public system, but that’s not what the charter school movement is now. It’s a vehicle for billionaires to privatize the system and undermine the public district.

The third non-economic proposal would increase parent and educator voice in how money that is at the discretion of the school site is spent. So if a school believes that they need more money invested into parent engagement or more time for counselors, we want parents and educators to have more voice there.

The third category is common-good proposals. Not only did we do massive member surveys to figure out what we wanted to bargain about for members, we also did community surveys and meetings with parents, students, and community organizations. We believe that the moment of a large public sector union contract negotiation should be used as a moment to also address the needs of the people that we serve, which are students and parents and families.

So we have also brought to the table, for example, the idea that there should be more green space at our schools. That’s not something that mandatorily must be bargained in our contract, but the district and we could agree that we will bargain over it, to make sure that we don’t just have slabs of concrete at our schools but green space (which has been proven by research to decrease anxiety among students and help with brain development, the more kids are outside in pleasant environments).

We’ve also got proposals around stopping racially discriminatory “random” searches of students and proposals on using unused district land to build affordable housing.