Beyond union rabble-rousing ahead of what’s sure to be a contentious contract negotiation, Occupy LAUSD highlights a stark and widening disagreement about what American public education should be. With their billion-dollar endowments, Gates and Broad are powerful players among an ideologically diverse coalition of reformers that includes conservative Republicans, Milton Friedman libertarians, and urban Democrats. But Gates and Broad are hardly the prime movers or the last word in education reform—a point that UTLA and its left-wing union allies refuse to concede. In general, reformers hold that public education should teach students how to be autonomous, knowledgeable, and self-governing citizens. The how and the where matter less than the what. So reformers advocate empowering parents with a range of options, whether they’re charters or “virtual schools” or opportunity scholarships aimed primarily (but not exclusively) at lower-income families. Traditional public schools should compete with alternative models. Excellent teachers should be rewarded with higher pay. Bad teachers should be eased out of the system.

When Deasy took office this summer, he laid out a handful of proposed contract changes, including more school-site flexibility with hiring (thus curtailing the “dance of the lemons”), overhauling tenure rules, and experimenting with merit pay. Occupy LAUSD opposes every one of those ideas. For the occupiers, public education means tax-funded schools operated by union-organized administrators and teachers with little testing and accountability and no choice. Seen in that light, Occupy LAUSD is less radical than reactionary.

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