500,000 Students Are Affected by the L.A. Teachers Strike. Most Are Latino.

“There is no way to describe the persistence of such conditions other than racial discrimination,” oh my God give it a rest. Not to be negative, but the compelling arithmetic is that when you inundate the public school systems of the United States with the children of millions of mostly-illiterate Latino illegal immigrants, then yes, strikes will effect that demographic more. “There is no way to describe the persistence of such conditions other than racial discrimination?" How about the effect of open borders now so desperately defended by Democrats but trying to shift blame onto racial discrimination? It must be MAGA?

Tax and throw away the U.S. citizen while we educate the illegal immigrant? Only in CA !!!

well, it does look like illegal immigration is a net drain of resources after all...if illegal immigrants contribute so much to the economy, why can't they contribute enough in local taxes to pay for their kids' education and meals?

The entire LA barrio shows up for a Quinceañera but none of them make it to school on time!

LAUSD teachers are on strike, claiming the schools need more nurses, counselors and librarians, which are all union jobs. Thus, the union wants more dues-paying members. This strike has nothing to do with benefiting the students.

Only a cruel monster who has been scared out of compassion and reason says that the problem here is “illegal” children who don’t pay taxes. These families do pay taxes. And there are plenty of wealthy citizens in the US who are engaged in tax avoidance. The state of California has a budget surplus and can afford to better fund its schools. The problem is that Austin Beutner, the LAUSD superintendent, defers his fiduciary responsibilities by claiming a scarcity of resources while reallocating funds towards privately governed interests, namely charter schools. Beutner’s claim that resources are scarce (convincing us all that our resources are limited because of “illegal immigrants”) is a common strategy of billionaires in the US like him who want to pass austerity measures while diverting the existing funds away from public institutions towards privately governed institutions (in this case charter schools).

Their undocumented parents aren't paying their fair share, and are relying on non-Latino Californians to pay for their undocumented childrens' education. Frankly I don't feel very sympathetic to their situation.

“There is no way to describe the persistence of such conditions other than racial discrimination,” Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. So 10% of the students are white. 10% black and apx. 80% are Latino. Now the 10% white are for the most part paying the taxes for the education of the other 90%. Didn't the Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime? isn't that what the 10% white families now facing? Is it just possible that there are difference in abilities between groups, might that account in some fashion for the disparities. Or are we seriously going to condemn this incredibly noble group of people who are doing their best to help as being responsible for the problems of the other 90%.

In 2006, the L.A. Unified School District spent $232 million on the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, a public high school where 90% of the 1500 students are people of color. Please.

CA taxpayers can not afford to pay for the education of 1,000s of illegal students from Mexico and Central America.

The poor of the poor, hoping for an education, just got sabotaged by the left leaning teachers who want more cash. So much for pretending they care for the people at the bottom of the barrel.

Dear NYT: The single explanation of racism does not stand up. The reasons for this ongoing failure are complex. First, LA public schools are overwhelmed by undocumented students who require much more services, including ESL, schools meals, after-school care, counseling, tutoring and psychologists and incumbent students. They live in poor communities beset by drugs, gangs, lack of jobs, lack of hope. They don't pay sufficient property taxes to fund the local schools. After raising taxes on millionaires with the promise of high net classroom spending, California public schools failed to deliver. Too much goes to administration and equity hires. And most fundamentally, about a third of every dollar spent in the district was devoted to health care and pensions, said Nick Melvoin, vice president of the Los Angeles Board of Education. Requiring teachers to pay a premium for insurance, or asking future educators to work longer before earning certain retirement benefits, could help free up money for higher salaries, smaller classes and other union demands, he argued. This is more than only racism, though there is an element of anti-Latino bigotry. The middle class have worked hard for their position in ex-urban LA. They use zoning, high housing costs and NIMBYism to keeps coral too many Latinos in the inner city -- despite all the virtue signalling from Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris about California the sanctuary state -- welcoming all.

Excuse me! There would be plenty of resources available if these kids would stop cutting class. This article fails to mention that Truancy among the Latino Students of LAUSD is among the worst in the nation. Each day a student skips class the school loses money.. See below.. "In School Year 2016–2017 (SY16-17), over 80,000 LAUSD students, 14.3 percent, were chronically absent. That percentage increases to almost one-third of LAUSD students missing significant amounts of school if one adds the 17.9 percent of students who missed 8-14 days. The financial impact of student absence is significant as well. The vast majority of revenue theDistrict receives is tied to daily student attendance. For SY16-17, the District’s budget target for chronically absent students was 11% and the impact of not achieving this target was approximately $20 million in foregone revenue. Further, if every child in LAUSD attended one more day of school, the District would have approximately $30 million more to invest in the classroom."

Latino is not a race so it is not clear how the lack of funding represents racial discrimination. Further, California should cease providing free education, healthcare and other safety net provisions to illegal aliens.

Los Angeles Unified is the second-largest public education system in the country, providing horrible service to nearly half a million students. I fixed this paragraph for you.

so are the teachers "racists" for going on strike? Or is the LAUSD racist for not acceding to their demands?

This piece, or column, is another example of inequality and discrimination tolerated by our society. To only focus on non-whites is segregation in print. And hypocrisy.

But - but - but - hasn't the Times repeatedly assured us that schools are unaffected by immigration and that immigrant children cost taxpayers nothing?

Why are the students 75% Latino? Can we guess?

"El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities." So other news and culture not appearing herein, is not "relievant" to people who are Latinx?? Are the "news and culture" presented in this column not relevant to non-Latinx communities? I suspect the answer is, "No, that's not what we meant to suggest." And answer to which I say: Then employ a better writer to craft the descriptions of your special columns. The quality of writing coming from the NYT has been declining as it buys into the hype about "Millennials" and, to a lesser degree, GenZ's and continues to assign them to higher level positions than their skills and level of experience warrant. (I'm not a trained journalist, so my own writing may not live up to NYT (former?) standards, but the columnist's and copy editor's writing should.)

Perhaps we need to build a wall around California. The rest of the country needs to be sheltered from California's idiotic decisions

Talk about illegals biting the hand that literally feeds them. Yet another blame whitey article. I challenge the author to identify a single Latino country where the general population reveres education. Every culture ought to accept responsibility for their abject failures instead of heaping blame on their generous hosts.

Dear NYT: The Times adopts the social warrior story line of structural racism without bothering to actually investigate why many California public schools are struggling. “There is no way to describe the persistence of such conditions other than racial discrimination.” A few other factors: 1.Schools are overwhelmed by non-English speaking and largely poor undocumented, who are much more costly on a per pupil basis, and whose parents earn less and often pay less in taxes than they consume. These kids need tutoring, language skills, breakfast and lunch, after-school care and many other basic services. The federal government should help more but does not. 2.The last major California tax increase supposedly reserved for schools was sucked up in back-filling shortfalls in teacher retirement and health care funds. Teachers need to pay a bit more for their pensions and health care, which is much better than most private sector employees enjoy. Are they willing to do so? 3. School districts continue to waste too much money on administration costs as opposed to classroom spending.

The comments here are astonishing. Immigrant children are not the problem. The state of California has a budget surplus and should spend more on education. Wealthy US citizens and corporations engaging in tax-avoidance are a much larger drain on the system than immigrant children enrolled in school. The problem for LAUSD is not immigrant children, but the superintendent, Austin Beutner, who like all rich people, claims resources are limited while passing austerity measures and reallocating the budget towards privately governed interests, namely charter schools. Embracing a fear of illegal immigrants, xenophobia, is just another part of this strategy.

Reading articles like this, I'm increasingly cynical about the compassion shown by the politicians on the left for illegal immigrants. I think what is really going on is that states like CA, NY, NJ, and IL, have declining populations because of a net outflow of (legal) citizens from high-tax states to low-tax (e.g. TX, FL) states. These states have figured out that illegal immigration is one way to make up for this population loss just ahead of the national census. Note that states like NY and NJ were losing their congressional representation already back in 2010: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/nyregion/22nycensus.html Instead of lowering taxes and reducing burdensome regulations to make their states more business friendly, in these states (NY, NJ, etc.) the Democrats have resorted to importing congressional representation via sanctuary cities. The education of the children of these immigrants, it seems, is not necessarily the primary concern.

In supporting open borders and sanctuary cities, the Democrats who run California pretend to have compassion for immigrants. But their failure to develop a plan for paying for all of these immigrants hurts the US citizens who attend the LA schools and the immigrants—many who are through no fault of their own are I’ll-prepared to succeed in school. And a classroom with 40 or 50 students where 20 to 50% are students without the necessary language skills or early education will fail all concerned including the teachers.

American children are already shortchanged - they receive an education that is of a lesser quality than their parents pay through taxes. At the expense of citizens and those who are legally present, our children's education is compromised - overcrowded classrooms, sources diverted for special needs, free lunches, and English as a second language (one of the signs demanding that a dwindling middle class spend yet more is in Spanish, another is in Spanish and English). Far too little attention has been given to the enormous cost of providing education - as well as healthcare, food, etc. - to illegal immigrants and their offspring. Due to declining opportunities for upward mobility and entry into the middle class, we are creating a huge and growing underclass - likely to encompass most illegal immigrants as well as increasing numbers of legal and poorly educated citizens - which will drain society for generations and harm our economic competitiveness, and therefore influence, in the world.

Most of the students in the Los Angeles School District come from poor families and so qualify for free lunch. While L.A. teachers would like their classes to be as small as those around the rest of the country, many researchers think that poor children need to be taught in classes that are even smaller than average. Families may be poor because the parents are disorganized and/ or because they have had little education, themselves. Research has shown that children from these families need more school resources to succeed. California welcomes illegal immigrants, virtually all of whom have had little education and are poor, yet it does not want to pay for the cost of successfully educating them or their children.

"California spends less per pupil than the national average." As pointed out by others, many of these pupils are living here illegally. An honest article would have pointed made this explicit and to be truly informative would have at least given us an estimated of how many of these students are living illegally in the US. The issue appears to be less of a funding issue and more of people living in the country illegally. It is for reasons like this that it is important to have a full security barrier *and* to enforce laws such as e-Verify which ensures that employees are living in the country legally with very heavy fines for employers who hire people living here illegally. As for poor states like Kentucky and West Virginia which overlaps with Appalachia, the states were spending a great deal of money that should have gone to teachers instead of very high healthcare costs for the very high tobacco use and high rates of obesity. Neither state had taken effective public health interventions (like those used in NYC/NY State). So in effect in California, the teachers are paying not because of lack of funding per pupil but because so many of those pupils are living here illegally. In Kentucky and West Virginia, the teachers are paying for the high healthcare costs of residents of the state who smoke and who overeat or have bad diets. In all 3 states, fixing the underlying problems of immigration and smoking/obesity, would solve the problems of low teacher pay.

Let's have an honest conversation. This is one of the long term consequences of open borders and not having enough taxpayers to fund schools as well as low property taxes. CA has 10 times the number of undocumented immigrants compared to any other state in the country at over $2.5 million. We know that undocumented immigrants don't have SS numbers and generally don't pay state or federal taxes, and many are paid under the table. Meanwhile, Middle Class US citizens in CA pay almost 50% in taxes due to the addition of high state taxes, and then an extra 10% in sales tax. We can't have open borders and also fund schools, have a wide safety net, and medical care that covers undocumented people as in CA. This is unsustainable and harmful to the middle class people in CA who are actually paying taxes and funding the system for everyone else. I know at least 5 families with dual incomes and graduate degrees who moved out of CA this year alone because they were literally unable to afford a two bedroom condo in a decent part of CA where the schools were good.