ANALYSIS: FALSE. LA Teachers Strike: 73K Is Not Enough.

Let’s begin with the makeup of the school district: It boasts a $7.52 billion budget and more than 60,000 employees, including about 26,000 teachers, with the average annual salary being $73,000. While employment has gone up 16% since 2004, enrollment has dropped 10% in the same period.

According to the latest available data, California school funding surged by nearly 10% from 2015 to 2016. If you examine a five-year period (2011 to 2016), school funding in the state is up a whopping 26%. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has further proposed the “largest ever investment” in the LAUSD.

Plus, the district already offered LAUSD educators a pay raise of 3% this year and another 3% in 2020. It was rejected.

But the school district can’t afford another pay hike. Next year, LAUSD will have a $422 million budget deficit, mainly because employee pension and health care costs represent a great portion of the budget – they will account for more than half within 10 years. Overall, it has $5.1 billion more in liabilities than in assets and another $15 billion in unfunded health care benefit liabilities for retirees and current workers.

So if you want to know why teachers can’t get a pay raise, it’s because of teachers.