Guest Post by Joe Guzzardi
If any reader can describe a more comic-tragic state than Los Angeles Unified School District teachers demanding smaller classroom sizes when their union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), vigorously supports unlimited immigration, please contact me at the email listed below.
Last week, striking teachers approved a contract between their union and Los Angeles Unified School District officials that will give instructors a 6 percent pay hike, additional staff support and, over a four-year period, smaller class sizes. As one LAUSD English teacher told CNN, “39,42, 50” students are “stuffed” into a single room.
The details on how to get to those smaller class sizes will be worked out later, weasel words for nobody has a clue. And why everyone is clueless is because thousands of immigrant children flock into California’s public schools every year with the blessing of every official with decision-making power. Starting with Gov. Gavin Newsom and down to the local school principals, everyone, at least officially, is all in on immigration.
All are welcome in sanctuary state California, and the UTLA is among the most welcoming. The UTLA has hosted “Immigrants’ Rights for Educators,” and participated in “Freedom for Immigrants” and “Here to Stay” rallies, actions that belie searching for classroom overcrowding solutions.
Some legislative history partially explains how California’s schools got into the mess they’re in today. In 1982, the Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision ordered equal access to all children regardless of their immigration status. At about the same time that the Supreme Court handed down its decision, California’s legal and illegal immigrant population began to increase dramatically. Today, about half of the country’s 43.7 million immigrants live in California, Texas and New York, with California accounting for 24 percent, or about 10.7 million, according to Pew Research. The state’s entire population is 39.8 million.
In 1994, Proposition 187, which would have denied some benefits to illegal immigrants, including public education, passed with 59 percent of the vote. But after immigration advocacy groups with the assistance of then-Governor Gray Davis filed serval law suits, eventually Prop 187 was dead.
How much blame for California’s education failures can be attributed to the Supreme Court, Prop 187’s federal court scuttling or the subsequent 25 years of unenforced immigration laws with myriad loopholes in the law that encourage immigration is hard to pinpoint. But bundle the three variables together, and the explanation for California plunging from one of the nation’s most effective and respected public school systems to tenth from the bottom becomes apparent.
For the 2017-2018 academic year, about 25 percent of LAUSD’s total enrollment is classified as English Learners. About 100 languages other than English are spoken in LAUSD, mostly Spanish, but also Korean, Armenian, Tagalog, Cantonese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Russian.
Statewide, the EL breakdown is similar. Of the state’s 6.2 million enrollees, about 1.3 million are ELs. The California Department of Education doesn’t identify whether the non-English speaking students are legal immigrants’ children, the American-born citizen children of illegal immigrants or illegal immigrants. But using the widely accepted cost per pupil rate of roughly $10,000 annually, California taxpayers spent approximately $10 billion last year and have spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the decades to educate non-English speaking students. That amount of money and teacher effort comes with at least some consequences to the mainstream students. A teacher has only so much time during a demanding day.
Going forward, if L.A. teachers truly want smaller classes, they must defy their union on the grounds that it’s unreasonable and unfair to promote more immigration when so many existing students are already underserved.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Voting is a waste of time in California too.
I learned in public school that there is nothing wrong with the educational system that a bunch of money won’t fix.
I learned, by observation, that public school is one thing that a bunch of money can only destroy.
The lefty lunes get what they want and then complain about the end results. Most teachers are liberal and “welcome” their neighbors from the south with open arms UNTIL reality its in. When those same teachers who are open to unlimited migration have to deal with the actual consequences it becomes a totally different game. To bad they couldn’t understand Ayn Rand’s line. “you can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of reality”. Duh! Enjoy!!!
Unless I am missing something in all this, it would seem we are missing the point. The teachers for the most part don’t want less immigration. They want more schools built, more pay for a profession that has failed the customer or student, however you wish to look at it and more immigration. The teachers for the most part are socialists! There is nothing they can’t fix if you would just pony-up more of your money. As far a going against their union is concerned, good luck, they know enough to not bite the hand that is both feeding them and at the same time stealing from them. Margret Thatcher had it correct, “socialism is great until you run out of the other guys money”. If you want to change the educational system, STOP FUNDING IT! Home school or send your children to a locally funded private school. Just saying & I don’t apologize for my opinion or the fact I might be somewhat of a cynic.
I truly hope everyone has a good life, just not on my back.
oldtimer505
This like watching a group of old ladies standing around a dead possum in the road discussing what vet they should take it to.
You have that right! The discussion has gone so long that the possum is beginning to ripen a bit too much. This very same thing is going on in the socialist state of michigan as we speak.
Taxpayer theft-funded teachers don’t actually care about students or education. Its all about the short year, long vacation, endless days off, and the pension after only 20 years of work. If they cared about education, they would be working in the private school setting, or better yet, getting together with their colleagues and starting up their own schools.
Let them, Californians, choke on their students, classroom sizes, teacher demands, language teaching requirements, immigrant populations, taxes, traffic, homeless persons, feces-in-the-street, and whatever else they have brought onto themselves. Let them also continue to elect persons such as Gavin Newsome, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Kamala Harris and not expect moar better outcomes.
Let them fucking choke on it I say.
Californians aren’t electing the Democrats, Mexicans are – the votes for Republicans are roughly the same percentage as the white population percentage, this isn’t a coincidence. We were dispossessed by judicial fiat in the 1980s.
The imported Mexicans vote for the Dems. This is why they were imported.
OK, it’s important to realize that schools in CA are (supposed to be) funded by property taxes. The illegal aliens aren’t property owners, they rent, and they can’t pay their own rent (presumably because they are sending too much cash from their illicit yobs back to Mexico or Guatemala or wherever – they generally don’t pay income tax, either, btw), so the government is paying their rent – which means that, indirectly, the State is paying itself property tax on those illegal-alien-containing rental properties – and *that* money comes from the ever shrinking number of whites that actually own property and actually pay taxes.
I wonder what happens next?
The host goes John Gault or dies. Then all those parasites have to find a new host. I suggest you don’t wait to die.
Malware everywhere suddenly?
Getting redirected to ‘givirsou.net’
Tried a new ad company. It’s a Fail. I turned it off. Are you still having problems?
Haven’t noticed so far. Though, I blocked their domain entirely – so, if there were still issues, I likely wouldn’t see them.
I am getting ‘notification’ attempts on the article pages, I’m denying them, but these are new.
I tried to edit my comment, disappeared.
I was seeing push notification attempts on the main page and the article pages. I’ve now disabled that in the browser, but it’s a new problem.
Even with it disabled in the browser, I’m still getting the push notification crap. Annoying.
When I tried to scroll to the comments I got stuck in an endless list of articles but when I hit the “comments” at the bottom of the page it went straight to them. No big deal.