Los Angeles Teachers’ Road to Durable Power, 2014–2016

From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, the dominant forces within the Democratic Party helped create, shape, and drive bipartisan neoliberalism in public education. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, a variety of billionaires, and others promoted a model based on austerity, market-based carrots and sticks, attacks on teachers’ unions, and unregulated growth of charter schools that undermined traditional public schools. These policies reinforced historic racial and class-based inequities in schools and demonized educators themselves.

Fast forward to 2019, when House Democrats proposed cuts to federal funding for charter schools, and the party began constructing a 2020 platform that would, for the first time, call for guardrails, accountability, and transparency for charters. At United Teachers Los Angeles’s (UTLA) leadership conference following its historic 99.9 percent–participation strike in January 2019, US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders signed on to support the pro–public education coalition California Calls’ statewide referendum to close corporate tax loopholes, Schools and Communities First (SCF). SCF challenged the iconic national symbol of austerity and the “third rail” of California politics, Proposition 13, which passed in 1978; by severely limiting property taxes, the measure starved public services in California. Presidential candidates Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker followed suit and endorsed SCF.

These actions reflected a shift in the Democratic Party — not complete, but significant. This shift was caused by long-term organizing — including the national Red for Ed educator upsurge that began in Chicago in 2010, “red” and “blue” state mass uprisings among educators in 2018 and 2019, expanded educational justice community organizing, the organizing around Sanders’s campaigns for President, and UTLA and other local and state unions’ long-term power-building trajectories. The…