Here’s what happened in the last two LAUSD teachers’ strikes, in 1970 and 1989

May 26, 1989: Teachers give the thumbs-up sign as they march back to their classrooms at Venice High School following the end of their strike. May 5, 1989: Chanting “We want Britton,” students from Belmont High School mass at doors of the LAUSD district’s headquarters downtown, demanding to see Supt. ‘’Education, unfortunately, has deteriorated to a terrible level in this city,’’ Johnson said during the strike, decrying “a badly underfinanced school system that suffers from a 40% dropout rate, overcrowded classrooms and shortages of school books and other supplies.” The 1989 strike proved to be another contest for public opinion. But he did not understand that the politics of the district “was no longer that of an ‘all-powerful superintendent’ who was a benefactor of a comparatively weak teachers union,” researcher Stephanie Clayton concluded in a 2008 analysis of the strike for Claremont Graduate University. “Desperate, despicable people” was Johnson’s epithet for district officials when he told 7,000 teachers at a Sports Arena rally: “They are lying, they are lying, they are lying.” Alex Caputo-Pearl, the current UTLA president, has called Austin Beutner, a businessman who had no experience in school administration before being named superintendent, an out-of-touch millionaire with “an agenda to dismantle the district.” Hardball tactics took all three labor disputes into court.