Giving Compass' Take:

• Chalkbeat examines the looming teachers' strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District, interviewing five teachers to find out what the primary sticking points are.

• Some of the issues cited are lowering class sizes, the expansion of charter schools and funding. What lessons can educators in other parts of the country learn from this labor dispute?

• Here are more details on the underlying causes of teachers' strikes — and three ways to help.

America’s second-largest school district appears headed for a teachers’ strike, with more than 30,000 Los Angeles educators prepared to walk out.

Contract negotiations between the teachers union and Los Angeles Unified School District have reached an impasse over class sizes, charter schools, funding for additional counselors, nurses, and librarians, and how to spend down the district’s $1.7 billion reserves.

It’s a thorny tangle of issues. So Chalkbeat asked five teachers to explain which ones they’re thinking about most this week, and whether they feel connected to the broader national “Red for Ed” movement for higher teacher salaries and more school funding.

For this cross-section of teachers, smaller class sizes and more school nurses and counselors mattered most. Pay was top of mind for a few but was not widely cited as a sticking point. (LA Unified, which serves some 620,000 students, has offered teachers a 6 percent salary increase. But the district contends it would go broke were it to meet some of the union’s other demands — something the union, United Teachers Los Angeles, refutes.)

Read the full article about what LA teachers are thinking as strike looms by Gabrielle Birkner at Chalkbeat.