Educational opportunity

Los Angeles teachers are about to finish voting on a new labor contract, which if approved, will generate new opportunities for cooperation between the district and educators that will in turn benefit students.

The agreement the teacher’s union (UTLA) obtained from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) begins a new phase in a school reform process that seeks to ensure students are fully prepared when they graduate.

This deal with result in a key change in the LAUSD: a three-year moratorium on charter schools. The charter movement gave a much needed wake-up call to a complacent public school system, where the conflicting interests of adults often displaced the interests of students. There are good and bad charter schools. As we have said before, if charters are no better than LAUSD’s regular schools, they have no reason for being.

However, this does not mean that the reforms the charter schools started will disappear. The principles of autonomy, local control and more flexibility for the administration will become a renewed effort that should lead to better cooperation among parents, teachers and administrators.

This new policy does not imply stepping forward and backward, but continuing on a similar path and remaining within the changes the latest LAUSD School Board election brought about. The agreement on which teachers now have the last word reflects this in its new focus: implementing reform in the school district without resorting to outside operators. This is a big challenge.

It is worth mentioning one aspect of the contract that establishes support for high-needs schools. The proposal is good and even includes an improvement in reclassifying students, although how the initiatives will be funded in times of budget cuts is still an open issue.

We hope the teachers ratify the agreement between UTLA and the LAUSD, and that this becomes a model of cooperation toward the common goal of student achievement.