You’ve heard that California students lag behind the rest of the nation in math. It turns out LA teachers aren’t good at math, either — which is how they turned a billion-dollar raise into big layoffs.

As The California Post has reported, the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) is almost insolvent, and will have to cut some 6,000 jobs.

The crisis comes just months after the school board caved to the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union and agreed to over $1.2 billion in raises.

The surrender helped the district avoid a strike that the union had cynically planned for April, the middle of the school year. It was a threat that, if carried out, would have hurt the working families that rely most on public schools.

Months before that crisis, it was already clear that LAUSD was running short of money. The district was already suffering from a deficit of nearly $200 million, and was already considering layoffs.

A “smoking gun” letter reported first by the California Post showed that the LA County Office of Education (LACOE) had written a letter to every board member, warning them of a budget explosion if they approved the raises in the union deal.

The board went ahead anyway. 

The other problem is the lingering effect of Gavin Newsom’s disastrous 2018 law, AB 218, which effectively eliminated the statute of limitations for sexual misconduct lawsuits going back decades.

LAUSD, like school districts and local governments, was forced into massive settlements and payouts. The district has already authorized $750 million in borrowing to pay for the lawsuits, and the final bill could reach $1 billion. 

This year Newsom signed another bill, SB 577, that raised the standard for proving sexual abuse in these cases, but bowed to the legal lobby in refusing to cap damages.

The district has also been suffering from declining enrollment — a legacy of the COVID era, when the union pushed for lockdowns, and state leaders complied for a year. 

And the district suffered a leadership crisis this year when LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho was suspended following FBI raids on his homes and office. 

Again, all of this was preventable. The failure starts at the top — with Newsom’s bad laws and failed COVID policies. But board members who indulged the unions — and left-wing obsessions like slashing the LA School Police Department — bear the brunt of the blame.

New leadership is needed, and it’s needed now.

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