Jan Resseger writes here about the cause of Oakland’s fiscal crisis: the expansion and encroachment of charter schools.
This context is important as background to understand the teachers’ strike.
She writes:
Like Los Angeles, Oakland’s financial crisis is related to California’s embrace of charter schools and the school district’s adoption of a portfolio school reform governance plan by which the district manages traditional public and charter schools as though they are investments in a stock portfolio. The idea is to establish competition—launching new schools all the time and closing low scoring schools and schools that become under-enrolled. It is imagined that competition will drive school improvement, but that has not been the result anyplace where this scheme has been tried.
To better understand the issues underlying why Oakland’s teachers are on strike, it is worth examining Lafer’s in-depth profile of the Oakland Unified School District.
Lafer’s report explores the Oakland Unified School District as an exemplar of a California-wide and nationwide problem: Uncontrolled charter school expansion undermines the financial viability of the surrounding public schools. “In every case, the revenue that school districts have lost is far greater than the expenses saved by students transferring to charter schools. The difference—the net loss of revenues that cannot be made up by cutting expenses associated with those students—totals tens of millions of dollars each year, in every district.” “California boasts the largest charter school sector in the United States, with nearly 1,300 charter schools serving 620,000 students, or 10 percent of the state’s total student body.”
“(W)ith a combined district and charter student population of over 52,000 in 2016-17—(Oakland) boasts the highest concentration of charter schools in the state, with 30 percent of pupils attending charter schools.” “By 2016-17, charter schools were costing OUSD a total of $57.3 million per year—a sum several times larger than the entire deficit that shook the system in the fall of 2017. Put another way, the expansion of charter schools meant that there was $1,500 less funding available per year for each child in a traditional Oakland public school.”
Lafer identifies two problems at the heart of California’s enabling legislation for charter schools. First, a local school board has no control over whether charters can expand in the district: “Even when districts determine that there are already enough schools for all students in the community—or even if a charter operator petitions to open up next door to an existing neighborhood school—it is illegal for the district to deny that school’s application on the grounds that it constitutes a waste of public dollars. By law, as long as charter operators submit the required number of signatures, assurances against discrimination, and descriptions of their plans and program, school districts may only deny charter petitions for one of two substantive reasons: if ‘the charter school presents an unsound educational program,’ or ‘the petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition’”
The second problem, Lafer explains, is particularly serious as it impacts Oakland Unified School District: “While charter schools are required by law to accept any student who applies, in reality they exercise recruitment, admission, and expulsion policies that often screen out the students who would be the neediest and most expensive to serve—who then turn to district schools. As a result, traditional public schools end up with the highest-need students but without the resources to serve them. In Oakland, this can be seen in the distribution of both special education students and unaccompanied minor children who arrive in the district after entering the U.S. without their families.”
The problem is made worse because California does not allocate state funding based on the number of disabled students who require special services: “Special education funding is apportioned in equal shares for every student attending school, irrespective of the number of enrolled students with disabilities. Even in districts without charter schools, special education is an underfunded mandate, in that the dedicated funding for this purpose is insufficient to meet the needs that school systems are legally required to serve.”
Lafer reports that in 2015-16, Oakland’s charter schools served merely 19 percent of Oakland Unified School District’s students with special education needs: “The imbalance is yet more extreme in the most serious categories of special need. Of the total number of emotionally disturbed students attending either charter or traditional public schools in Oakland, charter schools served only 15 percent. They served only eight percent of all autistic students, and just two percent of students with multiple disabilities… Thus, charter schools are funded for a presumed level of need which is higher than the number of students with disabilities they actually enroll, while the district serves the highest-need students without the funding they require.”
The bottom line is that it is wasteful and inefficient to run two separate school systems, both funded by the public.
It is especially sad that Governor Jerry Brown, a progressive in so many ways, was blind to the depredations of the charter industry. He opened two charter schools where he was mayor of Oakland and never admitted that he was wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When was the last politician to admit he or see was wrong (without being undeniably caught first)? Does the list of reformers have any names outside this blog? Even the rare media members who have changed views don’t admit they were wrong.
Looking for anti-Reform politicians!
The Gambler’s Ruin”
The charter’s a casino
With odds that favor house
In Vegas and in Reno
And Islands of the south
The offer is a jack-pot
But ruin’s what we get
And only crazy crack-pot
Would take the lousy bet
The Charter Rush”
The charter is a gold mine
A hedge-fund schemer’s trick
Like golden rush of forty-nine
It’s offer: “Get rich quick!”
But Gold of fools is our return
For buying into plot
And picks and spades and “lessons learned”
Are all we ever got
So true, SomeDAM!
so many get rich quick, and get out and disappear even more quickly: nothing but immediate profit runs this game
Charter schools working their “magic”, eh!
Just one of the special ingredients in the special privateering sauce.
Oakland’s succession of Broad-trained Superintendents has not helped, nor did the capture of Oakland as one of the CORE districts. CORE refers to the non-government California Office to Reform Education, privately funded with grants from the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation (Stephen Bechtel Fund) and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The CORE Districts are hell-bent on undermining local control and expanding data-gathering on school “performance measures” well beyond the capacity of anyone to act on the information https://coredistricts.org/our-data-research/improvement-measures/
Here are some recent grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed at undermining the public schools in the COre Districts including Oakland.
California Charter Schools Association Date: November 2018
Purpose: to support advocacy efforts by the California Charter Schools Association in Oakland Amount: $1,600,000
The City Fund Date: July 2018 Purpose: to increase the number of high-quality public schools in Oakland Amount: $10,000,000
Teach for America, Inc. Date: May 2017
Purpose: building capacity to recruit and train more high-quality teachers in Oakland to meet the demand created by expanding high quality seats Amount: $1,500,562
CORE Districts Date: June 2018
Purpose: This investment will support CORE Districts to launch a 5-year Network for School Improvement (NSI) in partnership with the eight districts that make up CORE. In our strategy materials, CORE was featured as an intermediary whose work most closely aligned with our vision of NSIs and as a result, CORE was identified as an initial (“pilot”) partner for our School Improvement Delivery model body of work
Amount: $16,003,983 (See this for more information about the grant, the latest effort to define and predict student success by micromanaging what teachers do and using students as if guinea pigs) http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/networks-for-school-improvement/
Oakland had been targeted for takeover by billionaires.
Oakland has been targeted for takeover and destruction by the Disruption Industry for at least a decade.
It has had a succession of Broadies as its superintendent.
Hi Diane,
I would imagine that 100% of the readers here are glad that limits are finally being put on charter schools in California and elsewhere. When you spoke a while back to the California School Board Association (if I remember the organization’s name correctly) about corruption in the California charter industry, I, for one, promoted the video of your speech on my blog and in other local media.
I have one question, however, that persistently gnaws at me.
When I read your book the “Reign of Error” you tried to address the problem of inner city schools in chapter 31, “ The Toxic Mix.” On page 292 you stated, “The greatest forward movement for desegregation—and the most significant narrowing of the achievement gap—occurred when the federal government and the federal courts worked in concert to integrate schools.” Unfortunately I wish the numbers were cited there. I didn’t see them elsewhere in the chapter either.
Why is this important? Your thesis in the chapter was that poverty and racial segregation were the root causes of the problems. This is also the position that most teachers express. If one is going to advocate for strong federal enforcement of desegregation, it would be beneficial to clearly demonstrate the gains to be expected in order to counter the inevitable societal resistance.
My recollection is that Great Society efforts to reduce segregation led to a backlash, white flight from public schools, etc., and this is why these policies eventually fell out of favor. Is our only solution, now that charters are falling out of favor, to return to policies of the past?? What will we do differently this time that will lead to success???
You called in your book for leadership in fighting segregation at the federal level, but, short of creating a dictatorship which someone we all know and love may prefer, why is there much reason to believe that a renewed attempt at desegregation would work better than the previous time? In their favor, I believe that the younger generations are less racist than in the past, but we are unfortunately talking about a social evolution that could still take a very long time, assuming it is successful at all.
At least some of the better-intentioned parts of the charter movement started as an attempt to find a more socially pragmatic way of resolving this Gordian Knot other than demanding that the country desegregate. I believe this is why some (many?) inner city residents ( I have never seen polling results) embraced the charter movement as a possible road out of the morass, although in the recent past, as we all know, the NAACP came out against charters.
I can’t help but think that, when teachers say that poverty and segregation are the reasons they can’t fix the problems of inner city schools, many members of the public immediately conclude that the problems are insoluble. Inner city residents might be forgiven if they logically conclude that advocates of this position are unintentionally condemning their children to a continued life of poverty!
Now that it is eminently clear that charters are not going to provide a solution, we need to find alternatives other than what failed previously. Does anyone have any new ideas??
In chapter 6 of her book “Teacher Wars,” Dana Goldstein described in great detail the history after Brown v. Board of Education and noted one unintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision was the following: “The federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare estimated that between 1954 and 1971, the nation lost 31,584 black teaching positions and 2,235 black principalships, even as the total number of jobs in public education grew.”
There is always a danger that, as these events fade into the past, we repeat our previous mistakes. This is where your role as a historian of education is so valuable, and I thank you for all of your work!!
David,
What do you think would have happened if Arne Duncan had turned “Race to the Top” into “Race for Equity”?
What if he had announced a competition for states that come up with the best plans to promote racial integration of their schools?
Please read Gerald Grant’s wonderful book “Hope and Despair in the American City.”
If we don’t try, we will get resegregation.
If we try, we will make progress.
The footnote, if I recall correctly, was to a report by Paul Barton called “The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped.” Barton shows the federal policies that narrowed the gap and demonstrates the effects of those policies. When the courts turned more conservative, it stopped enforcing the policies that brought progress.
Nicole Hanna Jones wrote article for Pro Publica on the number of districts that were under court orders to desegregate but over time, simply ignored or even forgot about those orders. Google her work in that journal.
Great! Thanks for providing these additional references. I thought “Reign of Error” was a great book, but that particular chapter left me unsatisfied.
Have you read the “Teacher Wars” book I referred to above? I am clearly not a specialist in education history and would like to hear your view of it.
Did you read “Left Back” or “Death and Life of the Great American school System”?
I purchased “Left Back” recently after another commenter on your blog mentioned it. I read “Death and Life” years ago.
Goldstein’s book, however, specifically detailed the negative impact of the Brown decision on black educators, particularly in the south, and how this may have inadvertently handicapped black students. Her report definitely stuck in my mind. Being a former Peace Corps teacher in Malaysia, I have often thought that children need positive educational role models from their own culture. Diversity is essential to avoid racial stereotyping, but kids can also be harmed if they are made to feel like complete outsiders in an “integrated” environment.
PS – as a layperson with respect to your specialty, I found Dana Goldstein’s chapter on Brown v. Board of Education in her book one of the most eye-opening things I have read in this area.
Diane,
I looked back through my copy of “Death and Life…” and saw that you discussed the Brown decision in chapter 7 and the reference there led on to a discussion of vouchers and charter schools which were on of your targets in that book.
Goldstein, who I realize is a journalist, not a historian, emphasized different aspects of the decision.
The following is an extensive quote from her chapter 6 to give a flavor of what she covers:
“Though segregated schools were the norm all over the country, including in the North, the Brown ruling applied only to the seventeen southern, western, and border states, as well as to the District of Columbia, where explicit laws prevented white and black children from attending the same schools. (In the North, school segregation could be attributed mostly to the neighborhood demographics that resulted from discriminatory housing policy, as well as to school districts’ deliberate decisions to assign black children to predominantly black schools, even when they lived near white schools.) Forty percent of the nation’s public school students, some 10.7 million children, would be affected by the ruling. But what about teachers? Even before Brown there had been concern in the black community that merging black and white schools could decimate the black middle class, which depended on jobs in segregated schools. Writing in The Nation in 1953, the black sociologist Oliver Cox wondered if Negro teachers would become “martyrs to integration … Freedom to work is at least as sacred as the right to non-discrimination in education.” Any school desegregation program, Cox argued, must contain strong protections for black workers. The text of the Brown decision mentioned teachers only once, noting that southern states had already taken steps to equalize teacher qualifications and pay across black and white schools. In fact, state legislators had done so with the hope of forestalling demands for integration. Now the court directed states to move with “deliberate speed” to integrate schools. But the justices did not define their terms, and in the absence of specific requirements white southerners turned to nakedly racist political tactics, collectively referred to as “massive resistance,” that fought desegregation in large part by attacking veteran black educators. Half the southern states passed laws revoking the teaching license of anyone who joined an organization that supported school integration, including the NAACP. In 1955 Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia all repealed teacher tenure, with the goal of more easily terminating black teachers in the event that they began to compete with whites for jobs in newly integrated schools. Four southern states even modified their constitutions to abolish the right to a public education. In the wake of Brown, many white southern legislators behaved as if an integrated public school system would be worse than having no public school system at all. A few prominent black southerners, themselves proud alumni of segregated schools, sized up white resistance to integration and concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble. When asked about Brown v. Board in 1958, Anna Julia Cooper, the trailblazing feminist teacher in Washington, D.C., told a newspaper reporter, “I’m against it.” She was one hundred years old, old enough to know, she said, that in black schools led by black educators, children were more likely to “take pride in themselves and the achievements” of their race. The sixty-four-year-old writer Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in segregated central Florida, agreed. In a 1955 letter to the Orlando Sentinel, she worried that committed black teachers and administrators would lose their jobs as all-black schools were shuttered and their students dispersed. “The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people,” Hurston wrote. “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” “
This is why I am always wary of simple solutions. How many times in life do we get skewered by unintended consequences when people removed from the day to day issues impose solutions from the top?!?? At the same time I realize that this very argument can be used by racists to protect their domains.
Diane,
I read through your section entitled “The Crisis of African-American Schooling” that begins on page 371 in your book “Left Back.” At the bottom of page 375, you describe the tragic conditions, described by Charles Johnson, that existed in small 1-2 teacher schools in Louisiana in the 1940s:
“The buildings were mainly dilapidated, the equipment was meager, and many of the teachers were poorly educated. The teacher in the typical one-teacher rural school was barely literate, herself the product of an inadequate education; she was also a very poor teacher, unable to move beyond empty and mechanical activities and memorization of meaningless, disconnected facts.”
This led to a “vicious cycle” that perpetuated this outrageous state of affairs.
After reading this, I might assume that you would not share Goldstein’s concerns that I noted above about the loss of jobs by black educators? Based on reading both books it may very well be the case that many of these teachers were woefully inadequate, but this conclusion would be an extrapolation of Johnson’s description of Louisiana in the 40s to the rest of the region. Johnson, a black sociologist whom you note was educated at the University of Chicago and later became president of Fiske University, somehow was a happy exception to the above situation.
The section then describes among other things, the migration of blacks to the north, the low expectations that white teachers held for black students, problems with “life adjustment” education methods, vocational education for urban schools advocated by Harvard president James B. Conant, the critique by Kenneth Clark which advocated holding ghetto schools to high standards, and how rising anger in the black community led to moves away from integration to demands for black control, a sentiment that I find completely understandable in terms of what that community has gone through.
Again, I raise all of these points in reference to charter schools being an attempt to find a way out of this morass before they were hijacked by all kinds of bad actors. My question remains: now that that the tide is turning in the charter school battle, where do we go next?
I have obtained Gerald Grant’s book that you recommended above and maybe that will provide an answer. I remain concerned that black students need more black teachers as positive role models to help break the cycle of poverty, and the same is true for other ethnic groups. This is simply because a child is much more likely to strive for something if he/she sees someone who looks like them and who has attained success; witness the current focus on sports as supporting evidence for this point.
This would point to using education funds to train and pay well minority educators in inner city schools. It seems to me that this would be a more immediately useful path to progress than federal efforts to desegregate neighborhoods which struck me as your recommendation in “Reign of Error.”
My point above is akin to the remedies that you described in Left Back presented by Kenneth Clark. Your description of his ideas seemed to be favorable, but I could not tell with 100% certainty if you agreed with him on all points or were striving for “journalistic objectivity” in parts of that section. In the end, you said that events in the 60s led to his recommendations being ignored; your final sentence in the section sounds supportive of Clark. However, some of what he said also seems to be central to some charter school philosophies, so please pardon my confusion on where you stand!!
David,
I would have to write a book to answer your many questions, but I will begin by saying that when I write as a historian, I always strive for objectivity. Not journalistic objectivity, but scholarly objectivity.
As I am now 80 years old, I am more likely to write as an advocate.
I advocate for equal educational opportunity for all children.
I would like to see more teachers of color in the classroom but I don’t necessarily agree that only teachers of color can teach children of color. That leads to a world that reinforces segregation. I would like to see integrated staffs and student bodies. In some districts, that is a distant goal, but I repeat what I said before: If Arne Duncan had offered $5 billion to states to come up with realistic, actionable plans to desegregate their schools, we would have seen dramatic progress on this front. Instead we got a “race to the top” that failed to achieve anything.
Thanks again for your response, Diane. I won’t make further demands on your time regarding this subject (no need to reply to this), but I want to end by saying that I agree completely with what you say in your last response, particularly about not having only teachers of color teaching children of color and thereby resegregating schools. I noted above that diversity in schools is essential to combat racial stereotyping.
I only wish to state that problems arise when teachers of color represent a distinct minority of the faculty in schools populated by a majority of students of color. Given the sad history of racial animosity (which, while bad in the U.S., is definitely not confined solely to this country), majority white faculty in majority non-white schools can sometimes end up being perceived by students as part of an “oppressive establishment” even though they may have joined those schools with the best of intentions to help children. Teachers of the same race/ethnicity as the students do not have to surmount that suspicion from the “get-go.”
That is why I think supporting the training and extra compensation of excellent teachers of color should be a primarynational goal to get us out of the current situation. I believe that path stands a greater chance of success than lobbying for residential desegregation. Residential segregation often is due to income levels, not solely race.
Charters were a failed attempt for the numerous reasons you have noted. However, I would be very concerned if the victory over charters as is happening in LA, Oakland, and elsewhere does not result in lifting us to a higher plane. The country can not afford to let the “poverty” rationale become another excuse for inaction as too many people are all too prone to do.
Hi Diane. I know I said that my previous comment would be the last but this issue of equal opportunity for all is at the core of public education, and I made one more discovery that I need to share with you.
I did a search on “Dana Goldstein” in your blog archives to see if you had referred to any of her writings previously and discovered that you had on many occasions. Several of the references to her work seemed favorable although there were also a few barbed comments, e.g., in your most recent 2/2/2019 posting. I also saw that you promoted a third party review on 5/5/2015 of her “Teacher Wars” book, but it is not clear if you have read that book yourself. Dana works for the New York Times, and I am well aware of your dissatisfaction with their education positions, but do not know if this also extends to her reporting.
I found chapter 6 of her book “The Only Valid Passport from Poverty” detailing the effects of racism in our school system to be one of the most memorable things I have read on that subject. I realize that she is a journalist and not a professional historian, and this is why I was asking if you have read that section and if you believe it is accurate on the whole (I’m not expecting a detailed line-by-line explication; just a 👍 or 👎 if that is all you have time for). Her work follows a different line than what you took in “Death and “Life” and “Left Back” but hopefully adds very useful (??) information to the topic?
Very sorry to pester you again on this, but this is such an important issue. If you haven’t read at least this chapter in her book, I sincerely hope you get the time to do so
some day soon.
Thanks again for everything you do!!
For example, after detailing a lengthy history of injustice she makes the following statement which seems worthy of very serious consideration to my layperson mind:
This painful episode in American education history has generally gone unacknowledged by today’s accountability reformers, as they pursue policies, such as neighborhood school closings and school “reconstitutions” as charter or magnet schools, that lead disproportionately to the loss of teaching jobs held by African Americans. According to a federal lawsuit filed by the Chicago Teachers Union, 40 percent of the city’s teachers were black in 2000, but only 30 percent were black in 2010. When the district reconstituted ten schools in 2012, 51 percent of the teachers dismissed were black, although black teachers make up only 28 percent of teachers citywide. In New Orleans between 2007 and 2009, the proportion of black teachers fell from 73 percent to 57 percent, a net loss of a hundred jobs, as fast-track teacher training programs with comparitively low minority representation expanded their presence in the city’s schools. Unlike in the past, today’s layoffs are less a function of explicit racial animus than an outgrowth of the fact that black teachers are more likely to work in underperforming, segregated black schools targeted for closure or layoffs. And like other baby boomer teachers, they are beginning to retire in large numbers. But these figures are worrisome all the same, given a half century of research demonstrating that teachers of color are more likely to hold high expectations for students of color and are more likely to work in high-poverty schools over the long term—and both factors are correlated with higher student achievement and college-going rates among students of color.