Greedy Teachers’ Union Could Bankrupt Los Angeles Schools

The further left the greedier, until you reach communism, whose proponents are so pathologically covetous of other people’s property that they will use violence to seize all of it. Just short of communism is the mentality prevailing at a typical teachers’ union, the avarice of which threatens to financially ruin whole states like Illinois. Yesterday teachers were on the march in Los Angeles:

Educators and parents wearing ponchos and rain boots and carrying umbrellas gathered downtown to march from City Hall to district headquarters in the pouring rain, pressing for higher pay and smaller class sizes that the district says could bankrupt the school system with 640,000 students.

Austin Beutner, Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, stands accused by United Teachers Los Angeles of the ultimate sin against Big Government moonbattery: promoting privatization. Beutner took to the Wall Street Journal to observe that someone has a math problem:

During a three-year period that began last summer, Los Angeles Unified will spend about $24 billion educating students. The district’s revenue during that time will be closer to $22 billion, forcing us to spend all our reserves.

The teachers union’s demands would cost an additional $3 billion during that same three-year span.

Obviously, the money would run out. This would likely result in bankruptcy and a state takeover. Experience indicates this could result in turn in layoffs and a wage freeze — the exact opposite of what the teachers are demanding.

Regarding their demands, this reflects the job performance for which they insist on being extravagantly rewarded:

Nearly 70% of the students in Los Angeles Unified are not proficient in math. About 60% are not proficient in English.

The teachers were offered a generous 6% raise. They turned it down, demanding ever more.

Elsewhere in today’s WSJ, we learn how cushy LA teachers have it already:

Los Angeles teachers earn on average about $75,000 per year … though compensation including health and retirement benefits exceeds $110,000.

Only in pro sports are people so grotesquely overpaid who don’t even have to work the whole year.

Teachers can retire as early as age 55 and don’t have to pay a dime for health insurance until they qualify for Medicare and then receive subsidized supplemental coverage.

More money looted from taxpayers would likely mean not better education, but rather more extravagantly generous pensions.

Recall that in 2012 public unions and Democrats championed a tax referendum to soak the wealthy—putatively to raise money for schools. Voters in 2016 extended the tax hike through 2030. Well, state K-12 spending has increased 70% since 2012, yet pensions have swallowed the tax windfall.

Meanwhile, the unions do everything in their power to crush the charter schools that provide kids with dramatically better education. Insatiably greedy teachers’ unions are the worst enemies that education ever had.

On tips from Varla and 1-Bodhisattva.

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