The Brief

If your child’s teacher hasn’t threatened to go on strike recently, they probably will soon.

Thousands of California K-12 teachers have walked off their jobs or voted to strike in the past few months, as part of a strategic, statewide effort by the California Teachers Association to boost salaries and benefits — and get the public’s attention.

“All these districts going out on strike — it’s not a coincidence at all,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “Everywhere in the state there are people with unmet needs. The conditions have been ripe for a long time.”

San Francisco teachers went on strike for four days this month. West Contra Costa teachers went on strike in December. San Diego, Woodland, Apple Valley, Duarte and Madera teachers planned to strike in the past few months but reached a settlement at the last minute. Teachers in Los Angeles, Oakland, Dublin, West Sacramento, Twin Rivers and Natomas have voted overwhelmingly to strike. In Berkeley, Soquel and other districts, teachers are holding rallies and appear headed for strike votes.

Ten local teachers unions under the umbrella of the California Teachers Association worked for years to align their contracts so they’d expire at the same time: June 30, 2025. The idea, Goldberg said, was to trigger a wave of negotiations and potential strikes to garner public attention and flex political muscle. Teachers unions from at least a dozen other districts have also joined the effort, even though they weren’t part of the original cohort.

“We’re a strong union with a lot of resources, and we’re taking advantage of that,” Goldberg said, whose union represents about 310,000 teachers. “Teachers are learning from each other, and getting some clarity on how to win resources for public schools.”

Public and political priorities

Teacher contracts vary by district, but the demands are similar: higher salaries, better benefits and amenities that affect student well-being, such as sanctuary protection for immigrants.

Considering the ever-escalating cost of living in California, the demands are not a surprise, said Julia Koppich, an education consultant who specializes in labor-management relations.

Teachers in expensive cities like San Francisco often can’t afford to live near their jobs, she said, noting that starting teachers in San Francisco Unified earn about $80,000. San Francisco’s starting police officers, by comparison, make about $120,000.

It’s been a frustration for the teaching profession for decades, she said. But districts don’t have much control over their revenues and substantial increases in spending would have to come from the state, she said.

“To be sure, the issue of marshaling sufficient resources is a district conversation about teacher worth,” Koppich said. “But, ultimately, it’s a state discussion about public and political priorities."

District financial hardships

At the same time that teachers are demanding more money, school districts are facing financial hardships. Declining enrollment, especially in urban districts, has meant half-empty classrooms and less money from the state, which funds schools based on how many students show up every day. Closing schools is the obvious answer, but that’s proven to be deeply unpopular and few school boards appear willing to take that step.

Another financial challenge has been the end of pandemic relief money. California schools received more than $23.4 billion in one-time grants intended to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss. State and federal authorities advised schools to spend the money on temporary tutors, after-school and summer programs and other short-term expenses. But some districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Diego Unified and San Francisco Unified, used some of their funds to increase teacher pay or hire permanent staff, which they’re now struggling to pay for after the grant money ended.

So even though the state has increased K-12 school funding the past few years, some districts are financially strapped. It’s unclear whether they can afford teachers’ demands for higher salaries or more generous benefits, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

Los Angeles Unified, for example, gave its teachers 5% raises plus a $2,000 one-time stipend and a $500 bonus. The district’s nurses, who are also represented by the union, got $5,000 stipends.

“The unions are saying, ‘We know you have an ATM back there. If you were nice, you’d push the buttons,’” Roza said. But districts’ money is tight, she said, “so we’re at a stand off.”

If districts agree to teachers’ demands, cuts will have to come from somewhere — most likely from programs considered non-essential, such as sports, electives, advanced placement classes and other offerings, she said.

It could also mean staff layoffs. Tutors, classroom aides and newer teachers would be the most vulnerable.

Those cuts would harm low-income students the most, Roza said, because they’re more likely to rely on special school programs and attend schools with newer teachers. Low-income students are also more likely to be affected by a strike, she said, because families typically have fewer options for child care and those students are more likely to suffer from academic disruptions.

School boards need to stand up for those students, she said, and do a better job negotiating with teachers unions. That entails more transparency about finances and a willingness to close under-used schools.

“It’s so irresponsible to erode services for vulnerable students because you don’t have a spine,” Roza said.

‘Kids as leverage’

Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy at the California Policy Center, said California should get rid of teachers unions altogether. Teachers deserve higher salaries, he said, but the teachers union does not always act in the interests of students.

The union devotes too much time to defending incompetent teachers, he said, and strikes are harmful to students and families. He also said the California Teachers Association has a political stranglehold on Sacramento that “overshadows every conversation in the Legislature, even if it’s not about education.”

He noted that charter schools and private schools are rarely unionized, and sometimes have better outcomes than traditional public schools. A handful of other states don’t allow teachers to collectively bargain, and at least 35 don’t allow teachers unions to strike.

“The union uses kids as leverage,” said Christensen, who ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2022. “Right now, CTA is the biggest evil in California education.”

Next steps in San Francisco

In San Francisco, parent Meredith Dodson said she’s relieved the strike is over. Although most parents support teachers and believe they deserve better compensation, the strike was stressful for families and disrupted learning for thousands of students.

The $183 million settlement includes raises and improved benefits for teachers, which the district plans to pay for by draining its reserve funds.

Parents now are bracing for the inevitable cuts. The district’s finances remain shaky, and aren’t likely to improve any time soon.

“What comes next? Layoffs? Increased class sizes? State intervention?” said Dodson, who is executive director of the San Francisco Parents Coalition, a parent advocacy group. “There’s going to be some hard questions for the board, and they’re going to have to ask themselves, what’s best for kids?”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

In October 2023, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appointed herself to the board of the regional Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA.

No other mayor had done that. It was a bold move designed to signal she wasn’t going to stand by and allow others to make important decisions on the homelessness crisis without her.

Two years later, Bass touted a 17.5% drop in the number of people living on the streets in the city.

But that downward trend did not continue. The latest LAHSA homeless count numbers showed overall homelessness — referring to people without a fixed nighttime residence — crept back up 3.4% last year. Street homelessness — referring to people living in tents, cars and outdoors — jumped 7.9%.

More than 45,000 unhoused people live in the city of L.A., about 36% of whom live in shelters, according to LAHSA.

Homelessness remains a key issue for L.A. voters, and the latest homeless count numbers were a blow to the incumbent mayor who put homelessness at the top of her agenda.

They could threaten her reelection bid in November.

“It really undercuts her core reelection pitch,” said Sara Sadhwani, associate professor of politics at Pomona College. “This increase is a major step back for Bass.”

The mayor blamed cuts in funding for the increase.

Mayor Karen Bass at a LAHSA meeting on Feb. 28, 2025.

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Nick Gerda

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“Last year our efforts ultimately couldn’t keep up with policies and funding cuts at the federal and state levels that pushed more people onto the streets,” Bass said in a statement last month following the release of the count results.

Bass’ challenger in the mayoral election, L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, has pointed out that the funding cuts occurred after the homeless count, which took place in January.

The numbers from the count looked good for Raman, whose council district saw a drop in street homelessness.

But Bass has said that decrease is due, at least in part, to her signature Inside Safe program, which targets encampments for removal while offering people living there temporary shelter and services.

Effects of Inside Safe

Raman, who was elected to the council in 2020, said there’s been a lack of oversight of Inside Safe. She said people brought in off city streets have lingered too long in temporary shelters, like motels, without moving on to permanent housing and haven’t been given the social services they needed to get back on their feet.

“The city has spent millions of dollars moving encampments from one block to the next without actually bringing people indoors, and a LAHSA analysis found that 81% of those sites were repopulated,” Raman said at a news conference last month.

Nithya Raman, an L.A. City Councilmember at a mayoral campaign event in May 2026.

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Aaron Schrank

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Raman, who chairs the City Council’s housing and homelessness committee, hyped a 49% drop in unsheltered homelessness in her council district during the homeless count period from January 2025 to January 2026. Her district stretches from Silver Lake over the Hollywood Hills to Sherman Oaks.

However, hers had a smaller number of unhoused people to begin with compared with other districts.

“We have one of the most aggressive interventionist approaches across the entire city,” she said. “My office pioneered having a homelessness team embedded in the council office when I first started.”

She said her staff knows many of the people experiencing homelessness in the district by name. And she said staffers are tracking homeless encampments on maps.

Raman contends the mayor’s Inside Safe program has fallen short. But Bass stresses that Raman’s district has benefitted from the program.

“It is hard to believe both statements could be true,” said Bass campaign strategist Julie Chavez Rodriguez. “Inside Safe is ineffective and yet it drove down homelessness in council district four — Councilwoman Raman’s district.”

Credit vs. criticism on homelessness

A UC Berkeley/L.A. Times poll found 66% of voters see moving homeless residents indoors as “very important.”

“It's one of the big issues, if not the top issue,” Grose said. “I think it's part of a broader quality-of-life discussion.”

Zev Yaroslavsky, who directs the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said Bass should get credit for taking on the issue.

“She is the first mayor in my lifetime who actually said from day one that this is an issue she’s going to take on. She put it on her shoulders,” said Yaroslavsky, a former county supervisor and City Council member for four decades.

But Yaroslavsky said Bass overpromised on the number of people who could get housed. During her 2022 campaign for mayor, Bass said she would move 17,000 people into shelters during her first year in office.

According to the Mayor’s Office, Inside Safe has moved more than 6,000 people into motels and other types of interim housing so far.

That’s progress Bass probably isn't getting credit for, said Yaroslavsky.

“When you’re not popular, you have a harder time getting people to believe that you’re making progress,” he said.

In June, the federal government suspended LAHSA from future federal funding opportunities, threatening more than $240 million in annual grants. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cited a pattern of financial mismanagement, unverified housing sites and conflict-of-interest violations at LAHSA as reasons for the suspension.

Los Angeles County in February slashed nearly $200 million from homelessness programs, driven by lower-than-expected sales tax revenues and expiring pandemic-era relief funds.

USC political science Professor Christian Grose said it's not surprising that the mayor pointed to those federal and state funding cuts for the overall increase in homelessness.

“It's normal for a mayor who is facing a tough reelection fight to blame other levels of government,” he said. “It's also a smart political move to blame the Trump administration for a reduction in funding.”

Raman said the mayor should take more responsibility.

“The mayor’s job is not to explain why someone else is responsible," she said. "The mayor’s job is to take charge of the system and deliver results.”

Raman said, if elected, she would reduce street homelessness by 50% before the 2028 Olympics and eliminate it entirely by the end of her first four years in office.

Yaroslavsky said that’s unrealistic, given the enormity and complexity of the challenge.

Rodriguez told LAist the mayor remains committed to reducing homelessness.

“She remains focused on addressing this critical issue,” Rodriguez said. “Before she came into office, homelessness was on the rise and she’s going to continue to focus on bringing it down.”

A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to slam into the moon on Wednesday, according to scientists.

The piece is expected to hit the moon around 2:35 a.m. ET at more than 5,000 mph according to analysis by Bill Gray, who develops software that tracks objects in space. It is part of the rocket's upper portion and about the size of a five-story building.

It was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that carried two lunar landers and scientific instruments to the moon in January 2025.

The piece is expected to hit a sunlit side of the moon facing Earth, which will be partially illuminated, in the northwestern portion near the Einstein Crater, according to Gray. The impact could leave a crater at least 17 meters in diameter, he said.

SpaceX did not intend for the defunct piece to hit the moon, according to the Associated Press. NPR reached out to SpaceX for comment but has not received a response.

Brent Garry, a project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said the orbiter will pass over the region before and after the impact to get a sense of any changes to the surface.

"After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is. We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact and get some targeting over where the site is," Garry said in June during a discussion about the upcoming impact held by NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.

The impact may not be visible. Even a plume of dust may be difficult for professional telescopes to pick up, according to some researchers.

"Rocks ejected by the impact may form a 'plume' that will be visible against the dark background once they're off the moon," Gray wrote on his website. "As with much in science, the answer is 'we don't know; let's find out'... . Maybe we'll see rocks ejected from the crater."

But some researchers also say that while viewing may be challenging, it could be visible with sensitive telescopes. It also presents an opportunity for scientists to get a glimpse of impacts to the moon.

"Given these are so rare, I would encourage people who are interested and aware of the risks to take a look," according to Ben Fernando, postdoctoral fellow and researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was part of the discussion.

"To be clear, this is not something that you're going to see by pointing a pair of binoculars at the moon, but if you have the right equipment and the right time…why not take a look?"
Copyright 2026 NPR

The largest food assistance program in the U.S. is undergoing a massive overhaul. But even before the most drastic changes take effect, more than 4 million people are estimated to have already lost the critical food aid between last July and April — many of whom are children.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, has seen a rapid and consistent decline in participation since last July, the same month that a sweeping Republican tax and spending package became law. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act included major changes to the food assistance program. At the time, the White House called SNAP "bloated" and said it was failing its mission to serve as "temporary help for those who encounter tough times."

Starsky Wilson, the president of the Children's Defense Fund, a child advocacy group, says he has been alarmed by the speed of the tax law's impact.

"We're upset about how quickly this has happened," he says. "There are some supports that are still staged to go away later this year. So there could be an even greater sense of desperation among children and their families as we come to the end of this year."

The food assistance program has already begun tightening eligibility. But the biggest shift, the restructuring of SNAP's funding model, starts in October. Each state will soon have to pay millions in additional costs to keep the program going. Food policy experts warn that these new costs could drive states to scale back or withdraw from SNAP. If that happens, neither food banks nor existing government programs would have the capacity to fill the gap, according to Wilson from the Children's Defense Fund. 

" There's no replacement for SNAP if a state gets rid of it," he says.

Here's how the program works, where things stand and what's changed.

Changes in eligibility

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, more adults need to prove they work or volunteer for at least 80 hours a month to access food benefits. These work requirements now apply to veterans, homeless individuals, young adults aging out of foster care, parents with a child between 14 and 17, and people between 55 and 64.

Changes to work requirements alone are expected to reduce SNAP participation by 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Last summer's tax law also cut food stamp eligibility for certain immigrants. While almost all recipients are either native-born or naturalized citizens, a tiny fraction are noncitizens, according to federal data. Members of that small group — refugees, people seeking asylum and victims of domestic abuse or trafficking — are now no longer eligible for federal food aid.

The current fallout

Last year, an average of 42 million people received food stamps to use toward groceries each month. That's about 1 in 8 Americans. As of April, the total is now 37 million people, according to preliminary data from the Agriculture Department.

Nationally, SNAP participation is down by 11% between last July and April, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a left-leaning think tank. So far, the biggest impact has been in Arizona, where SNAP enrollment is about half the size it was a year ago, or over 400,000 fewer participants. For the first time, there are more Arizonans visiting food banks each month than enrolled in food stamps, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network.

"We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine," says Natalie Jayroe, the CEO of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. "We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario."

Alongside Arizona, some of the steepest declines took place in Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma. The CBPP also reviewed data from 19 states that provided numbers of children on SNAP and found that in those states alone, over 1 million kids have lost food benefits since last July.

What's driving the decline 

In a July statement, the Agriculture Department told NPR that participation for food benefits tends to fluctuate and the drop isn't representative of any one policy. Back in late April, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also spoke about the decline, adding that it's possibly a good sign.

"A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn't have been, and then a lot of it is just a better economy," she said on Fox Business.

Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, is skeptical of this assessment. She points out that over the past year, unemployment has largely stayed flat while food prices continue to go up.

" What that's telling us is that this is not happening because fewer people need help affording groceries. It's the result of these policy changes," she says.

According to Bergh, part of the issue is that many state agencies are struggling with staffing pressures and paperwork backlogs, especially amid efforts to prevent errors on food aid applications and avoid new federal penalties.

"People are calling and calling, and they can't get through to anyone," she says. "Or they're being asked for more and more and more documentation of every aspect of their lives, and maybe they don't have a way to document everything."

That's in line with a survey conducted by the Urban Institute and the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA). Out of 39 states that responded to the survey, 15 states said they were prioritizing payment accuracy over benefit timeliness.

More drastic changes to come

One of the most consequential changes from last year's tax law is the upcoming cost burden on states.

Before, the federal government split the bill 50-50 with states to cover administrative expenses, such as paying and training staff at state agencies. But starting in October, the federal government will only pay 25% of those costs while states will have to shoulder the remaining 75% of operational expenses.

Furthermore, in October 2027, the federal government will no longer cover the full cost of food benefits. States will also need to chip in if their error rate — a measure of overpayments and underpayments — is at or above 6%. Almost half of states may each owe $100 million or more because of penalties tied to their error rate, according to the think tank CBPP.

The Agriculture Department has argued that improper payments totaled $10 billion last year. It's important to note that an error rate largely reflects unintentional mistakes by state agencies or food stamp recipients, according to CBPP's Bergh.

"It largely reflects unintentional mistakes by state eligibility workers and participating families," she says. " So someone made a typo or a state worker misapplied a policy or a family didn't understand what information they needed to report and when."

SNAP experts say it takes time to lower those rates, which is why some local officials are urging the federal government to delay the new penalties.

Through all of these changes, the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality estimates that on average, states will need to spend two to three times more on SNAP to keep the food assistance program running — which could result in higher taxes or other state budget cuts.

In the same survey conducted by the Urban Institute and the APHSA, 29% of states said they may consider further narrowing eligibility for food assistance, while 11% said they may need to withdraw or pause the program altogether if the new costs become too burdensome.

" There's really an existential crisis in the future of SNAP," says Lexie Kuznick, the director of policy and government relations for APHSA.

Changes to SNAP have ripple effects — not only on low-income Americans, but also across food banks and grocery stores, according to Kuznick. The National Grocers Association estimates that the drop in shoppers receiving food aid will reduce grocery store sales by nearly $88 billion nationwide through 2034.

"Groceries are a significant cost in the lives of low-income families, and it truly is a lifeline for them to be able to meet their family's needs," Kuznick says. "We also know how critical the benefits are for entire communities."
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60% of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling — not collected and thrown away — could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public — they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether, the judge said.

Products recycled at a rate below the 60% threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse — including plastic bags and other plastic films — can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.”

Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information — like their greenhouse gas emissions — or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts — including plastics recycling — were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction. Their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.”

A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said.

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions — including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level.

“We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/is-the-recycling-symbol-free-speech-a-judge-just-ruled-it-could-be/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.