Daniel Olsen
This January, hundreds of Oakland teachers held a wildcat strike and picketed in front of Oakland Technical High.
Oakland, California teachers held a strike vote this week, over problems that are dramatic, but not unusual. Their three central concerns are their rock-bottom pay, large class sizes, and lack of supports for students. More than 80 percent of teachers cast a ballot — the highest turnout in the union’s history — and 95 percent voted in favor of the strike authorization, said Keith Brown, president of the Oakland Education Association, which represents about 3,000 teachers in the district.
Teachers in Los Angeles just held a six-day work stoppage over similar demands, and in response to years of chronic underfunding. And last year, teachers walked off their jobs in a wave of labor actions now referred to a #RedforEd.
The Oakland version of the national underfunding of our schools has made teachers’ salaries so low that an Oakland teacher needs a supportive family just to be afford to live in the district, which has skyrocketing real estate prices. According to the union, the district loses one teacher in five every years due to economic reasons.
An emerging theme of teachers’ strikes are the high costs of charter schools to public education. Los Angeles and Oakland have some of the highest percentages of students in charters in the country.
Billionaire charter advocate Eli Broad was part of a cadre of big spenders backing five of the seven trustees on the Oakland School Board. Broad money not only supports the majority of the school board members, but also the “Great Oakland Public Schools” (GO) movement, and has provided most of our recent Superintendents and other top brass via the Broad “Academy” for school district management.
Aside from the audacious cynicism behind the name, GO is also very slick. It is multiracial, takes stands against Trump on immigration, is LGBTQ-friendly, and takes part in the local liberal Democrat political, non-profit, and faith community. Many of those local groups have their own charter or small school program and have become part of the problem.
Our biggest problem is one we share with the whole country: State law keeps local school funding low.
Now GO’s board members have come up with the idea that we are “all part” of the Oakland school community. It reminds me of cuckoo birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests.
But our biggest problem is one we share with the whole country: State law keeps local school funding low.
Local funding alone won’t guarantee local independence; how we teach and test is very much controlled by the state.
But local funding is how we maintain a drastic inequality. A majority black and brown student district like Oakland has larger problems and fewer sources of funding than the professional, upper class, mostly white and Asian district in Orinda, for example, a nearby suburb.
California state law places two thumbs on the scales. First, Prop 13, which limits property taxes, and Prop 39 which gives charters a share of the district resources but limits local control. California charter schools have a de facto voucher system that channels money and real estate directly from the limited public-school resources.
Nothing stops California from raising other taxes to support public schools. But the results are mixed and have never made up for the Prop 13 tax cuts. California ranks near the bottom for per student spending.
Props 13 and 39 keep the public schools struggling and make it easy for the privatization movement to peel off resources at the same time—failure by design.
Recently, my son’s high school educators held a wildcat strike. The kids enjoyed the day off and the teachers marched down Broadway to the school offices along with many parents and other supporters. Their handouts talked about state funding levels and charters siphoning off resources, but the words spoken were about school closures, bureaucratic incompetence, and high price of the district management.
Former Superintendent Antwan Wilson, a Broad Academy grad known for having to resign in disgrace from Washington, D.C. schools, left the Oakland district in 2017 after having regularly overspent his budget by over 100 percent. The words “failure by design” come up repeatedly to mind.
Oakland parents are upset about the most recent round of school closures proposed by the school board. Furthermore the district administration is declaring that there will be yet another budget shortfall that could put us at risk of a state takeover.
In my view, the school board has been trying to close schools and make that real estate available to the charter movement for several years. Now they want to shut popular programs in black and brown neighborhoods. The Board just voted to cut the very popular Roots Academy despite public support. In calendar 2017, there were four budget cuts, three of them mid cycle and all of them somehow unforeseen, making this school board and the district management even more unpopular with parents, teachers and their union.
The only surprise is that our teachers were not on strike before now.