Downtown Los Angeles, 1989 © Joe Crawford

On Monday over 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers under United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) went on strike, calling for pay increases, smaller class sizes, more funding for counselors and nurses, and stronger regulations on charter schools. This is LAUSD’s third strike in almost fifty years. It’s worth thinking about LAUSD’s two previous strikes, which happened in 1970 and 1989, because both echo many of teachers’ current demands and — like all strikes — demonstrate what’s possible when workers band together, tell their bosses to take a hike, and fight for what they (and in this instance, their students) deserve.

One day in April 1970, half of LAUSD’s teachers didn’t show up for school. Instead, they were out on the picket line, fighting for their first ever contract. They demanded pay increases, smaller class sizes, and more spending on reading programs. (Some students even supported the strike by writing “scab” on the blackboards.) Sound familiar? Teachers went on strike for five weeks straight and faced considerable hostility from the district. If the strike continued, LAUSD threatened, they would attempt to have union leaders sent to prison and eliminate after-school sports. But the teachers didn’t back down.

Even after a Superior Court order came down declaring the strike illegal, it continued. (California teachers didn’t have the right to collectively bargain until 1975.) At the end of five weeks, LAUSD teachers had beat the school board: teachers went home with a paltry 5 percent pay raise but gained reductions in class sizes, the establishment of advisory councils, and new reading programs. The strike, in a word, was a success.

Eight years later — in what would later prove to be a profoundly disastrous decision— California passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that ruled out any future increases on property taxes, which made up — at the time — a significant portion of school districts’ funding. Whereas 60 percent of 1978 school funding came from property taxes, it’s now around 20 percent. In turn, hundreds of districts across the state have suffered round after round of relentless spending cuts. And the damage appeared very quickly: In 1965 California ranked fifth in the nation for per-pupil spending; by 1988 it had fallen below the national average. (Today, we comfortably sit at 43rd.)

In 1989 LAUSD teachers again went on strike. Wayne Johnson, then-UTLA president, decried “a badly under-financed school system that suffers from a 40 percent dropout rate, overcrowded classrooms and shortages of school books and other supplies.” Sound familiar? Thousands of teachers rallied outside of LAUSD’s headquarters, and eleven people were arrested for crossing police lines. In the end the strikers won out with an immediate 16 percent pay raise and another 8 percent raise the following year. Teachers were also able to secure a union-friendly majority on the school board. The second strike was as successful — if not more so — than the first.

Today LAUSD teachers face a new, formidable threat: charter schools. Charter schools, which receive public funding but are privately operated, have in the past decade siphoned off from the district about 100,000 students. Each year, falling enrollment deprives LAUSD of $600 million. Los Angeles has more charter schools than any other district in the country, and falling public school enrollment strips districts of badly-needed funding.

Charter schools are said to provide parents with more “school choice,” but here “choice” is misleading: “Radical self-interest and self-preservation is the rotten, racist core of the whole ideology of school choice. There is no ‘we’ in this: The entire point is to give individual kids an advantage,” says Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson. In fact, “it was in the 1950s, when civil rights reformers used the legal system to attack the system of apartheid, that the notion of ‘choice’ first came to public attention.” The choice back then, though, was whether or not to send your white kid to school with black kids. I would argue that today, it’s fundamentally the same choice. Education policy studies have consistently shown that charter schools “increase school segregation and racial disparities in educational outcomes.” The outcome, of course, is highly predictable, given that whiter and well-funded charters function quite well while minority communities’ students and teachers, as we have seen in New Orleans, invariably face “inadequate funding and support.”

In May LAUSD appointed Austin Beutner, a former hedge fund manager and charter school advocate, as superintendent. Luckily, Beutner brought prior experience: He had helped to defund New Orleans’, Detroit’s and Newark’s school systems and gut their teacher’s unions. In his effort to decentralize LAUSD, Beutner has recently drawn up a “portfolio” program designed to, according to UTLA, “get rid of central oversight and accountability” of charter schools. If put into practice, the program “would allow the unchecked spread of the worst of the charter sector abuses: not serving all students, financial scandals, misuse of public funds, and conflict-of-interest charges.” Beutner, of course, has no incentive to meet any of UTLA’s demands, “since such improvements would undermine his privatizing mission.”

Although this whole situation may seem hopeless, the reality is more sanguine. Last year’s spate of teachers’ strikes across the US bodes well for LA’s striking teachers. Starting in West Virginia, thousands of teachers fought for and won major wage gains while also making public education a national talking point. The district and state certainly have the money to meet all of UTLA’s demands: LAUSD is sitting on a $2 billion reserve; the state has another $30 billion in its reserves; and if that’s still not enough, then a significant increase in taxes on billionaires and corporations ought to be in order. (That should be in order anyway.)

This strike isn’t just about smaller class sizes and salary raises: It’s about the future of public education in California. And when teachers’ unions win, all workers win. Strikes are fundamentally about shifting the power dynamic between employees and bosses. Fostering labor solidarity, especially when “fewer workers are represented by unions than at any point in the last 70 years” and “strike numbers have been declining for decades” is critical. We may be witness to a public school board’s deliberate decision to turn public education private. But maybe (hopefully) we won’t. Teachers fought hard and won in 1970, and they did it all over again in 1989. It’s time for LAUSD’s teachers to, once again, make history.