The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a $7.5 billion 2017-18 budget this week on a 5-1 vote with Superintendent Michelle King

But despite the upbeat rhetoric, a crisis is looming in the nation’s second-largest school district as enrollment falls from a projected 514,000 in 2017 to 480,000 in 2020. Since the state’s main education funding formula is based on average daily attendance, this could force mass layoffs of teachers or even drastic measures like shortening the school year. A $422 million deficit is anticipated in 2019-20, with red ink after that for as far as the eye can see.

None of this comes as any surprise. A blue-ribbon commission’s report issued in November 2015 said L.A. Unified was facing fiscal disaster because of the enrollment declines, which are primarily due to falling birth rates, and because of the cost of pensions and retiree health care benefits. Employee retirement benefits will claim 8 percent of the school budget in 2017-18 and more than double that sum in coming years as the state’s 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ratchets up required payments from districts and as more of the district’s aging workforce retires.

These costs are the primary reason that while the 2017-18 LAUSD budget is nearly 7 percent larger than for the just-concluded school year, the plan still only penciled out after 121 layoffs or “separations,” mostly for holders of clerical positions. About 180 employees will be reassigned, many to part-time duties.

Blue-ribbon panel warned of disaster in 2015

Since the grim 2015 report was issued, three developments have cast L.A. Unified’s finances in an even harsher light.

The most significant is charter school advocates backed by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and other wealthy reformers taking over the LAUSD school board in a May election, defeating teachers union-backed candidates who have generally controlled the board in recent times. Broad wants half or more of Los Angeles students in charters, double the current amount. While reformers have a case that this would be better for students, it would sharply reduce state funding under control of district officials and thus make it harder to forge any comprehensive response to the coming budget crisis.

The second development is a legal challenge mounted by civil rights groups that alleges the district has misspent vast amounts of state funds that were supposed to go specifically to help English-language learners, impoverished students and students in foster homes.

Filed in July 2015, the claim initially seemed unlikely to succeed. The previous month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson had overruled a subordinate and held that Local Control Funding Formula dollars could be used for teacher raises – suggesting the restrictions on how the funds could be spent weren’t as strong as reformers believed.

But in May 2016, the Department of Education that Torlakson oversees held that L.A. Unified had improperly diverted $450 million in Local Control dollars.

The third development is the election of Donald Trump as president. Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, federal funding for education programs in all 50 states seems likely to significantly decrease. Federal dollars covered 9 percent of California’s education spending in 2016-17.

Children entering charter schools in Los Angeles already outperform peers who attend traditional public schools, then pull ahead even a bit more, especially those attending charter middle schools … .

 

Pupils who enter charter elementary or high schools displayed significantly higher test scores, relative to counterparts entering traditional public schools at the same grade levels, the report said. Elementary students in charter schools benefit from slightly steeper learning curves, relative to peers remaining in conventional schools, researchers said. Charter high schools were no more or less effective than traditional schools in boosting student performance.

 

Charter schools, while publicly funded, operate independently of many state requirements and the administration of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Some 274 charter schools operate in L.A. Unified this fall, more than any school district nationwide.

 

The four-year study of 66,000 students at charter schools in Los Angeles Unified — one of the largest research projects yet on charters — offers generally positive news about their quality of education.

The $490 million ‘Great Public Schools Now Initiative’

The study is sure to be invoked by Broad and others unhappy with the quality of education in the nation’s second-largest district. In September, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of a 44-page report prepared for Broad called “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative” that corroborated earlier stories that Broad hoped to increase from 16 percent to 50 percent the number of L.A. Unified students in charters, which would require the creation of an estimated 260 new schools. A key passage in the executive summary:

The opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion of high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles. Thanks to the strength of its charter leaders and teachers, as well as its widespread civic and philanthropic support, Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow.

According to the Times account, the report cited …

… numerous foundations and individuals who could be tapped to raise money, including the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bloomberg, Annenberg and Hewlett organizations. Among the individuals cited as potential targets for fundraising were Eli Broad, Irvine Co. head Donald Bren, former entertainment mogul David Geffen and Tesla’s Elon Musk.

 

It also suggested a strategy of grassroots organizing and civic engagement designed to generate more interest among parents in charter schools.

UTLA, CTA gear up for public-relations war

The California Teachers Association and its largest chapter, United Teachers Los Angeles, are ramping up for the challenge. The UTLA has already launched a picketing campaign against the plan. At a November rally, CTA President Eric Heins said, “We are here to say to Eli Broad and to Walmart that our schools are not for sale. … The 325,000 members of the California Teachers Association stand arm in arm with UTLA and with CFT to say no to Eli Broad, to say no to Walmart, and to help build the schools that all L.A. students deserve.”

The CTA has won support from Diana Ravitch, a high-profile education reformer and author who’s made an odyssey from harsh union critic to someone who agrees with the union claim that there is something unsavory, corporate and ominous about a school reform movement organized by billionaires. That’s how she characterized Broad’s effort on her website.

“Will the [LAUSD] board go along with Eli’s silent coup or will they choose someone to represent the public interest?” Ravitch wrote.

Broad’s defenders describe his school reform ideas as very comparable to President Obama and his push for school and teacher accountability. But the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (which counts the CTA as its biggest affiliate) and the American Federation of Teachers (the California Federation of Teachers is its biggest affiliate), reject that comparison.

Obama’s recent decision to sign the Every Student Succeeds Act, a national education framework replacing 2002’s No Child Left Behind law, would appear to back up the NEA’s and AFT’s view. It pulls back sharply from federal accountability requirements imposed on states and individual school districts.

The new law swept to bipartisan passage because of an unusual coalition of Democrats who joined teacher unions in saying too much class time was being spent on testing and Republicans who said Congress should not be a “national school board,” in the phrase of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former secretary of education.

Cohn’s reasoning builds off the premise that the nation’s second-largest school district is so sluggish and unresponsive that it is beyond repair:

LAUSD’s governance structure is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced by smaller units of school governance that are much more capable of delivering educational change that better serves students and their parents. In addition to being nimble and flexible, smaller school districts are physically closer to the parents they serve, and can initiate change strategies in a much more timely fashion.

Breakup would be good for struggling kids

And he also notes the timing is right because of the new education spending rules kicking in. The rules are billed as shifting resources to the neediest students:

The argument for breakup becomes even stronger today when you consider the important equity promise of Gov. Jerry Brown’s remarkable LCFF/LCAP school funding reform initiative, which places even greater authority at the local level to get things right for kids. When Los Angeles Unified screws up, more than half a million California youngsters are denied a critical opportunity to get a decent education during their one shot at using education to alter their life chances.

Cohn, who is the director of the Urban Leadership Program at Claremont Graduate University, made those observations in an essay for EdSource. The piece is unsparing:

Last October, you had students at Jefferson High School still walking the halls and in auditoriums without scheduled classes even though school had started back on Aug. 12. Even worse, you had a superintendent giving a deposition in court (Cruz v. California) that he was powerless to get these students scheduled in the right classes, and that he needed assistance from the State of California to get this basic responsibility done. …

The missteps of the district are legion – everything from expensive attorneys arguing for the district that a middle school student was mature enough to consent to have sex with a teacher to the billion-dollar iPad and MiSiS technology debacles and school board elections where records have been broken for adult special-interest-group spending.

No single event better captures the failure of this system than the recent revelation that 75 percent of the current class of 2017 is not on target to meet the school board’s 2005 adopted policy requirement that all students must meet UC/CSU A-G college entrance requirements in order to receive a high school diploma …

District shows callousness to disabled students

Cohn also offers an anecdote that implies the district is not just poorly run but cruel. He wrote that it resisted providing minimum legally mandated help to disabled students even after a federal decree. This “intransigence” speaks to larger problems of lack of accountability and slowness in implementing change, Cohn suggests.

Cohn’s tenure in San Diego was marked by school board battles, and he faced criticism for the district’s perceived hostility to charter schools. But his run in Long Beach was remarkable, as these details from his bio point out:

During his tenure as Superintendent, the LBUSD achieved record attendance, the lowest rate of suspension in a decade, decreases in student failure and dropout rates, and an increase in the number of students taking college preparatory classes. Through exemplifying this commitment to leadership and improved student achievement, he won the McGraw Prize in 2002, and the district won the Broad Prize in 2003.

Having a distinguished educator from next door knock the Los Angeles Unified is unusual and has caused buzz in education circles — not the general media. Still, Cohn’s criticism is so harsh that he may face a counterattack from the CTA and its largest local branch, United Teachers Los Angeles. They branded former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, as “dangerous” when she began criticizing the union and LAUSD in 2007. When Romero ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2010, she finished third in the primary after facing a brutal series of CTA-funded attacks.

Student Matters, launched by optics engineer David Welch, sued the Los Angeles School District and the state of California in 2013, targeting state laws protecting veteran teachers from being fired for incompetence and giving tenure to teachers after less than two years on the job. The lawsuit argued that these laws had created the equivalent of a segregated school system — one in which the lowest-quality teachers were funneled to schools in poor neighborhoods with largely Latino and African-American student bodies.

In June 2014, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu agreed, saying the state status quo “shocks the conscience.” He stayed his ruling invalidating five teacher protection laws pending the state government’s appeal, which is under way.

Welch’s new legal case — Doe v. Antioch — is more straightforward. It focuses on trying to get school districts to comply with a 1971 state law, the Stull Act, that requires student performance be part of teacher evaluations.

The EdSource website has details on Student Matters’ action:

It is suing 13 school districts that it claims are violating the state law requiring student scores on state standardized tests be a component of a teacher’s evaluation.

 

The lawsuit, filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, says that the districts illegally agreed in contracts negotiated with teachers to exclude test scores. …

 

Students Matter argues that student progress on state tests is an important and reliable measure of effective teaching. The Legislature agreed, when, in 1999, it amended the Stull Act to include test scores on state tests among the multiple measures in evaluations. The lawsuit says that in violating the law, the 13 school districts “intentionally disregard valuable student achievement data that are accessible to them, choosing instead to remain ignorant as to the quality of the teachers in their schools.”

 

The 13 districts serve approximately 250,000 students. Along with Antioch Unified, they are Chaffey Joint Union High School District, Chino Valley Unified, El Monte City School District, Fairfield-Suisun Unified, Fremont Union High School District, Inglewood Unified, Ontario-Montclair School District, Pittsburg Unified, Saddleback Valley Unified, San Ramon Valley Unified, Upland Unified School District, and Victor Elementary School District.

LAUSD lost similar case, still hasn’t fixed policy

Tori Rector/flickr

What makes this lawsuit seem close to a certain winner for Students Matter is recent legal history and the clarity of the 1971 state law in question. In 2012,  Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled that the Los Angeles Unified School District violated the Stull Act with its teacher evaluation process.

The L.A. Unified board chose not to appeal the ruling after being told by district lawyers it had little chance of winning.

But in an illustration of why Welch is pursuing changes through the courts instead of at the Legislature or in local school districts, L.A. Unified has never changed the policies that Chalfant ruled were illegal.

Instead, district officials and United Teachers Los Angeles have been negotiating new standards for years.

In February, CalWatchdog.com reported on the UTLA’s contract talks with LAUSD administrators. The union’s official position is that the district should use the same performance evaluation standards it had in 2011-12 — the standards that Chalfant had found to be illegal under state law.

The year before Garcetti ascended from council president to mayor in 2013, the city adopted a new retirement tier for civilian employees hired after July 1, 2013 that lowered maximum pension benefits to 75 percent from 100 percent of final compensation. It also limits retiree health care to the employee, excluding dependents. Projected savings over a 30-year period are expected to be $4 billion, with the majority of savings in out years.

 

Strides made by the city include significant progress toward reducing fixed cost burdens for pension and other post-employment benefits such as retiree health care, according to a Moody’s Investors Service report in December.

 

The rating agency affirmed the city’s Aa2 general obligation bond rating in November and upgraded the city’s outstanding real property and lease-backed debt ratings to A1 and A2 from A2 and A3, respectively.

The 2015-16 spending plan estimates that pension and other retirement benefit costs will be $1.077 billion — just under 13 percent of the city’s total spending. That’s a vast increase over pension costs from 15 years ago. But the rise has stabilized, and Santana told reporters that the pension fund for city firefighters would be 92 percent funded by 2020 — a far better figure than in most California cities.

Unions counted on to make concessions

But there are reasons to wonder if the sunny speeches Garcetti has been giving about Los Angeles City Hall’s future are too optimistic. The first is that the city budget will balance in the fiscal year starting July 1 only if Garcetti and Santana win new concessions from public employee unions. The spending plan “assumes that about 20,000 city workers will agree to no raises and many will pay a bigger percentage of their health care costs, but talks with city employee unions have dragged on since their contracts expired last year,” the Daily News reported.

This will be tough to swallow for non public-safety unions, given that police won a four-year, 8.2 percent raise this spring, and given the United Teachers Los Angeles’ success in securing a 10 percent, two-year raise from the Los Angeles Unified School District in April.

The second, much bigger problem is downbeat expectations for the city’s private-sector economy. Garcetti and other city leaders are counting on the local economy to finally begin a strong recovery at a time when pessimism in elite circles has never been higher.

The Los Angeles 2020 Commission, consisting of powerful figures from in and out of government, issued a report in December 2013 that warned of chronic stagnation without sweeping changes:

As the result of two decades of slow job growth and stagnant wages, 28 percent of working Angelenos earn poverty pay. If you add those out of work, almost 40 percent of our community lives in what only can be called misery. The poverty rate in Los Angeles is higher than any other major American city. Median income in Los Angeles is lower than it was in 2007.

 

When it comes to job creation, Los Angeles has not kept pace with the nation or other cities. Our unemployment rate is among the highest for any major city. This is not just a consequence of the Great Recession. We have lagged behind in each of the three business cycles since 1990. Los Angeles is the only one of the seven major metropolitan areas in the country to show a net decline in non-farm job employment over the last decade.

 

Activity in most of our key economic sectors is flat or in decline. We have repeatedly ignored or fumbled opportunities in one of this era’s major growth industries, the intersection of science and engineering — a field where our university-based intellectual capital ought to make us a leader. With the closure of Boeing’s plant in ‡Long Beach, there is no longer a large-scale aircraft, space vehicle fabrication or assembly facility left in the area.

Only key policy change: Much higher minimum wage

Garcetti and other leaders welcomed the report and acknowledged the challenges facing the city’s private sector. But the most significant major policy change since the report’s issuance came just this week, when the City Council approved increasing the minimum wage within city borders to $15 an hour by 2020.

The sharp increase was opposed by business interests, who warned it would make the city’s business climate even worse.

However, there are concerns that the funds are being diverted either to broad programs that don’t specifically benefit these struggling students or to teacher compensation.

In January, the Legislative Analyst’s Office released a study that found none of the 50 school districts it surveyed, including the state’s 11 largest, had adequate safeguards in place for LCFF dollars. Two of its main findings:

Districts Rarely Differentiate Between New and Ongoing Actions. In most LCAPs, we found that districts are not distinguishing between actions that are a continuation of efforts from the prior year and those that are new for the upcoming school year. Without such differentiation, we could not determine whether districts were using the new funding generated under LCFF to pursue new actions to improve performance or to continue or expand prior activities.

Districts Often Fail To Provide Sufficient Information on EL/LI Student Services. Often, districts’ descriptions of services for EL/LI students consist only of recapping the actions they will pursue on behalf of all students and indicating those actions also will benefit EL/LI students. In addition, few districts provide clear or compelling rationales for using their supplemental and concentration funds on a districtwide and schoolwide basis.

That same month, the California Legislative Black Caucus presented testimony to the State Board of Education on rules governing how the funds were spent. Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, expressed concern that vague guidelines would make it easy to divert the money meant expressly for struggling students. Her key point:

Any authority for the use of supplemental or concentration grants to schoolwide and districtwide expenditures must clearly link the services to demonstrated effectiveness in increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps, and demonstrate that the expenditures are proven effective for “concentrations” of unduplicated children in schools in the district where concentrations exist.

Weber, a former San Diego school board president and San Diego State University professor, has already taken on the California Teachers Association and the education establishment this year over tenure reform. Her proposal was rejected by the Assembly Education Committee last month, but only after she had stern words for defenders of the tenure status quo.

The deal was sold as a win-win proposition by both LAUSD and UTLA leaders. But for nearly a year, LAUSD number-crunchers had fought for a much smaller raise in briefing L.A. school board members, citing the need to prepare for the pain of the phased-in 130 percent increase in district contributions to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System required by the 2014 CalSTRS bailout legislation.

The CalSTRS fix will cost LAUSD an extra $1 billion a year in fiscal 2020-21 when the phase-in is complete. That’s a giant burden for a district that this fiscal year has a $6.6 billion budget.

Nevertheless, school board members were ready for labor peace after the UTLA took serious steps toward a districtwide strike. They not only agreed to a 10 percent raise over two years, they dropped their hard line on making teachers pay more toward their health benefits.

Union ID’d funds for raises that were supposedly encumbered

The question of whether LAUSD had the legal authority to grant the raises never was seriously addressed. Early in negotiations, the UTLA sought a 17.6 percent immediate raise and cited the influx of funds the district had available because of the Local Control Funding Formula reform adopted by the Legislature in 2013.

That reform was supposed to earmark additional school funds for districts to specifically help troubled English-language learners and other struggling students. When the reform was adopted, Gov. Jerry Brown depicted it as a “revolutionary” step toward helping ensure California had a skilled workforce in coming generations. His aides downplayed the idea that the reform could be gamed at the local level by powerful local union chapters.

However, the Brown administration had no reaction to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report in January that none of 50 California school districts it surveyed, including the 11 largest, had adequate safeguards to make sure the funds were not diverted.

Another aspect of the labor talks also received little attention from the mainstream media. That was UTLA’s claim that members had not received a raise in eight years. In fact, in most California school districts, teachers receive automatic pay raises of 3.5 to 4 percent for 15 of their first 20 years on the job — “step” increases. They can also improve their pay classification by taking graduate coursework in any field — “column” increases.

In large school districts, this usually means at least 60 percent of teachers get pay-scale raises every year. The percentage is higher in districts with more turnover.

However, the Legislative Analyst’s Office surveyed 50 school districts around the state, including the 11 largest, and warned in a January report that not one had proper safeguards to prevent diversion of funds. In Los Angeles Unified, among other districts, the local teachers’ union last summer pointed specifically to new, incoming LCFF dollars as a kitty to tap for pay raises.

In coming months, this issue is likely to emerge as a point of contention in Sacramento because of concerns raised by the California Legislative Black Caucus about State Board of Education rules governing how LCFF funds are used. Here are three of the caucus’ main points:

— Any authority for the use of supplemental or concentration grants to schoolwide and districtwide expenditures must clearly link the services to demonstrated effectiveness in increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps, and demonstrate that the expenditures are proven effective for “concentrations” of unduplicated children in schools in the district where concentrations exist.

— The terms “most effective” or “effective” should be defined, and at a minimum be tied to demonstrated effectiveness in meeting the “student achievement” goal and closing any persistent achievement gaps or deficiencies as it relates to the unduplicated students, and not just a generic reference to the state priority areas.

— The proposed regulations also do not provide the Board or county superintendents clear standards by which districts must explicitly demonstrate or explain, at a minimum, how expenditures of supplement and concentration grant funds will support services that will actually improve the academic achievement of unduplicated students or close persistent academic achievement gaps.

These concerns are from Assemblywoman Shirley Weber’s remarks to the State Board of Education at its Jan. 16 meeting on behalf of the Black Caucus.

Dan Walters wrote a Feb. 26 column in the Sacramento Bee noting that a “broad coalition of civil rights and education reform groups” had expressed worry about the LCFF not being implemented according to the goals cited in 2013 upon its passage. But this effort seems likely to be much stronger with the aid of state lawmakers.

The Black Caucus has 12 members — Weber, Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr., Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Cheryl R. Brown, Autumn Burke, Jim Cooper, Mike Gipson, Christopher Holden, Kevin McCarty and Tony Thurmond in the Assembly, and Isadore Hall III and Holly J. Mitchell in the Senate.

A third key demand by UTLA hasn’t gotten as much attention, and it seems to be one the school district could never accept. The union wants LAUSD officials to adopt a vague teacher-evaluation process and to use 2011-12 standards in evaluating teacher performance for the current school year. The UTLA’s proposal can be seen here.

But as a Los Angeles Superior Court’s 2012 ruling in the Doe v. Deasy case made clear, LAUSD’s teacher evaluation methods used in 2011-12 and before then violated a plainly written 1971 state law, the Stull Act. Its key provision requires that student progress be considered in teacher evaluations.

“(a) The governing board of each school district shall establish standards of expected pupil achievement at each grade level in each area of study. (b) The governing board of each school district shall evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to: (1) The progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments.”

Judge James C. Chalfant is unlikely to be happy with this development. In his 2012 ruling, he noted that district leaders’ testimony in defense of their policies actually confirmed the violation of state law.

“Superintendent [John] Deasy agrees that the District’s current evaluation system does not comply with the Stull Act. Thus, he testified that there is not uniform process to include any student achievement in teacher evaluations … . His admissions underscore the above conclusion that the District is not complying with the Stull Act.”

UTLA believes, with good evidence, that Deasy wanted LAUSD to lose the lawsuit because of his frustration over teacher reviews he considered inadequate. Its members played a key role in his recent exit as superintendent.

The EdVoice reform group filed the lawsuit against LAUSD on behalf of several students it argued were being harmed by the failure to include pupil progress in teacher performance reviews.

Reformers hoped the Doe vs. Deasy win would have a ripple effect around the state, with districts updating teacher evaluation policies.

However, EdVoice issued a report in January that found few school districts around the state properly complied with the Stull Act. Key findings:

• The majority of districts do not formally assess whether or not a student is actually learning when considering the job performance of that student’s teacher.

• The San Ramon Valley and Upland Unified School Districts are in violation of the law by explicitly prohibiting the use of mandatory measures of pupil progress.

• Overall, 86.5% of evaluations did not include a connection to pupil progress in their comments. Even in the best district, only 36% of district’s teachers had an evaluation that included any mention of pupil progress.

• In one district, 100% of teachers received a rating of “meets standards”; however, the overwhelming majority of actual evaluations provided no evidence that students in the teacher’s classroom made any progress in reaching grade-level expectations.

They presume Brown is nervous about the capital-gains revenue rollercoaster as well as the revenue lost when Proposition 30’s temporary sales tax hike expires at the end of 2016 and when its temporary income tax hike expires at the end of 2018. Their solution is to seek to extend the tax hikes, which generated $6.2 billion in fiscal 2013-14.

But another jolt is on the horizon: the cost of the CalSTRS bailout enacted last year, which will ramp up contributions annually for the next six years. The full phase-in is far off. But with 90 percent of the eventual $5 billion annual cost borne by state taxpayers — 20 percent directly and 70 percent indirectly, paid by state-funded local school districts — the bailout tab had Moody’s investor service worried last summer, before it even took effect:

Managing rising pension costs will prove challenging over time because CalSTRS rate increases are back-loaded. School districts face future budgetary stress not only from rising pension costs but from salary and benefit expenditures and programmatic priorities. Further, school districts have minimal revenue flexibility. … Rising pension costs will pressure financial operations and may cause a deterioration in credit quality for some school districts.

LAUSD faces $1.1 billion in new costs in 2020-21

And the California Department of Education’s warnings to local school districts to prepare for a difficult era as the CalSTRS bailout is phased in show that issue is very much on the radar of the Brown administration.

Los Angeles Unified could be near a teachers strike because UTLA rejects the district’s offer of a 5 percent raise as inadequate in a time of healthier revenue. But L.A. Unified leaders emphasize that they face a $1.1 billion bigger pension bill in 2020-21 than the district now pays and have been surprisingly resolute, given the UTLA’s ability to target and defeat board incumbents who are independent.

In the bigger picture, the U-T San Diego reported some districts see the budget problems posed by bailout costs as impossible to address:

Officials in districts throughout California are talking about forming a coalition to explore ways to fix the teacher retirement system without cutting into their own school programs.

As the pension contributions grow, “the things you want and need for educational purposes will take a second seat to funding this retirement system, or paying for utility bills,” said Gary Hamels, assistant superintendent in charge of business services with San Marcos Unified School District.

“It’s going to hit the fan because you’ll have to make a decision — I have to pay this so you can’t buy that,” Hamels said. “We’ll have a situation where there’s demand for some academic improvement but this is where the money is going first.”

CTA and CFT officials have touted renewing the temporary sales and income tax hikes for months. So far, the unions have been quiet about doing anything to address the fiscal turmoil looming in local school districts because of the cost of the pension bailout.