CA Teachers Union Coordinating Strikes, While Student Learning Loss Continues

Nearly six years after the start of the COVID pandemic, student learning loss is still a major problem in California, the state with the longest, 3-year, lockdown. And now we are seeing a wave of teachers strikes across California, which is no coincidence: They have been carefully orchestrated and coordinated – by the California Teachers Association labor union to put pressure on school districts over teacher pay – not student learning loss.

COVID pandemic funding has ended, and school districts are out of money – and students. Many students never returned from the COVID lockdowns and classrooms have empty desks. Many school districts have shrunk since COVID.

The massive teacher strikes across the state are over working conditions and pay, and not at all about students’ learning loss.

Any outstanding teacher will tell you that teaching kids in a one-room schoolhouse or a state-of-the-art high school does not matter if the priority is making sure the kids learn at grade level.

The CTA initially coordinated with 10 district unions to align their contracts to expire on the same date CalMatters reported: San Diego Unified, Anaheim Union High School District, Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco Unified, Oakland Unified, Berkeley Unified, West Contra Costa Unified, Sacramento City Unified, Twin Rivers Unified and Natomas Unified.

Notably, most of these school districts are in dire financial straights. How can that be possible when California schools received $23.4 billion in pandemic funding from the Biden Administration during the COVID years?

Sacramento City Unified School District is facing near insolvency – again. In 2019, the Globe reported California’s State Auditor reported that the Sacramento City Unified School District was facing insolvency. “Because It Has Failed to Proactively Address Its Financial Challenges, It May Soon Face Insolvency,” the auditor wrote.

In less than 10 years, Sac City School District is back at the trough, threatening layoffs and insolvency. They learned nothing and continued to spend as if the magic money would always be there.

The primary cause and effect is the same today as it was in 2019: as the teachers union maintains complete control of the budget, “Sacramento Unified has not proactively addressed its financial problems and is close to insolvency—it projects facing a $19.1 million shortfall in fiscal year 2021–22.”

What the California State Auditor reported about Sacramento City Unified School District in 2019 is applicable today:

The Sacramento City Unified School District serves about 41,000 students and employs 2,200 teachers. Since fiscal year 2016–17, its expenditures have exceeded its ongoing revenue by $9 million to $25.9 million each year.

During this same time period, it has increased spending in three main areas—teacher salaries, employee benefits, and special education—without taking sufficient action to control these costs.

California’s public school system hogged up $23.4 billion in pandemic funding from the Biden Administration, but that funding expired in 2024. What did school districts think would happen with “temporary” funding? That the state would backfill it?

How school districts spent the pandemic funding was not surprising, except that they were warned.

A 2023 report found that in a national sampling of 17,400 students, math and reading scores among America’s 13-year-olds fell to their lowest levels in decades, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2023. Math scores plunged by the largest margin recorded since such testing began in the early 1970s on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is often referred to as the nation’s report card because it tests students in a consistent manner across the country.

“If the money is not spent effectively, it could become a lost, one-time opportunity,” the LATimes said.

“L.A. Unified, which spent far more on health measures than other school systems because of a groundbreaking districtwide weekly coronavirus testing effort, has pulled back on such spending. The district had earlier planned to spend $272 million of relief funding this year on coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vaccinations. Instead, the actual spending is estimated at $26 million.”

“Instead of taking the funds and applying them where they were needed most — to address learning loss, student well-being and the serious impacts and widening equity gap we saw … from the pandemic — San Francisco Unified chose to plug our structural budget deficit,” said Meredith Dodson, co-founder and executive director of San Francisco Parent Coalition. The district “just used them to kick the can further down the road.”

In announcing their spending plan, officials acknowledged that most of the funds “are being used to maintain core district and school operations, to stabilize student services and resources, and to retain school site and district staff.”

The funding wasn’t used to improve student learning. Schools used it for themselves: school operations, student services, school site, school staff – for empty schools during COVID. And it wasn’t needed. California’s property tax revenues in 2023 were booming.

During the COVID pandemic, parents increasingly turned to homeschooling because of significant learning loss in students.

A 2021 study by McKinsey & Company found “that not only showed huge learning losses among American children due to the pandemic, but also shocking estimates of the long-term economic impacts these learning losses would have on the U.S.”

According to the McKinsey researchers, “Our analysis shows that the impact of the pandemic on K-12 student learning was significant, leaving students on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the school year.”

Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute Lance Izumi, told the Globe at the time that the reasons McKinsey reported for the learning losses are because “districts oscillated among virtual, hybrid, and in-person learning environment,” plus students “faced multiple schedule changes, were assigned new teachers midyear, and struggled with glitchy Internet connections and Zoom fatigue.”

“These learning losses impact not just later graduation and the likelihood of attending college but will have ripple effects on the economy,” Izumi said.

The information was available in real time during the COVID lockdowns, but the labor unions, schools and districts chose to spend on themselves, and not on the significant learning loss of students.

And now school districts are facing a self-inflicted insolvency. The CTA is flexing its muscle and leveraging students and teachers to extort more funding from the state. It may not work this time.