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Boycott!
Los Angeles Teachers Say NO to More Testing
Illustrator: Alex Bodnar
In the spirit of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who argued that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” the 47,000-strong United Teachers Los Angeles has defied both the law and Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education orders on at least three occasions since the state budget crisis began to unfold and the district began stonewalling employees in negotiations. More than 80 percent of teachers in the nation’s second-largest school district struck illegally on June 6, 2008, for the first hour of school (students arrived late or were supervised on school yards by administrators.) Fifty parents and teachers occupied the LAUSD board room in March 2009, trying to disrupt the board’s vote to send pink slips to over 9,000 employees by shutting down their meeting. (As it turned out, board members snuck into a different room away from the public and took the vote anyway.) And this January, UTLA members began boycotting district-mandated “periodic assessments”—called benchmark assessments in many districts—in tandem with a boycott of after-school faculty meetings.
Immense solidarity, not to mention solid footing on moral high-ground, has saved teachers from much punishment. We sacrificed a paltry hour of pay for the one-hour strike, the board refused to arrest those of us illegally occupying their boardroom in March, and to the union’s knowledge, the district has not followed through on threats to write up any teachers for failing to turn in assessment data.
