FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 10, 2020
Contact: Bethany Meyer
OEA Secretary and Communications Chair
(510) 575-7060
bethanynmeyer@gmail.com
This week, educators from the Oakland Education Association began talks with the Oakland Unified School District to determine what learning will look like for students in the upcoming school year. We, the educators of Oakland, want more than anything to return to our classrooms so we can be with our students on the first day of school. However, we do not believe it is safe yet to do so.
“I would love more than anything to be back with my students,” said Chela Delgado, Humanities teacher at Coliseum College Prep Academy, “but we know that COVID is disproportionately impacting black and brown communities, and the rates in East Oakland are higher than anywhere else in the country. I believe it would be irresponsible to open in the Fall.”
We believe that the planned date for a return to in-person instruction must be based on community safety and grounded in objective public health metrics.
Our plan puts safety first. Over the course of yesterday and today, we presented our plan to OUSD, and explained that unless the following criteria are met, we cannot return to in-person instruction:
Criteria One: We must determine Risk is Low enough to return, with low community transmission in Oakland. OUSD must have a detailed, science-based testing and contact tracing program for all students, families, and school staff, paid for and supervised by county public health departments. There must be a downward trajectory, and near zero incidence of documented cases, hospitalization, and positivity rates for at least 14 days in Oakland in order to consider in-person instruction.
Criteria Two: Once Criteria One is met, OUSD must then ensure that Safety Standards and Precautions can be established and maintained. This includes providing PPE (i.e. masks, face shields, gowns, etc.) for all students and staff, class sizes small enough to accommodate six feet of physical distancing, increased cleaning and staffing inside buildings, and facilities upgrades for proper ventilation.
We are disappointed that OUSD’s initial offer does not contain a serious plan to address the safety of students, staff or the community.
“Cases are much higher now then they were when schools were closed in March.” said Keith Brown, president of OEA. “It is difficult to understand how it would be safe to open schools in a matter of weeks when the community transmission is so much higher than it was in March. We want to return to the schools, but we can only do so once we contain the spread of the virus, implement widespread testing and tracing, and ensure proper safety for students, families, and school staff.”
Remember when Reagan fired all the flight controllers to break their union?
“On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life. … The civil service ban on the remaining strike participants was lifted by President Bill Clinton on August 12, 1993.”
I think Trump and DeVos will attempt to do something similar to public school teachers and these two monsters will use any refusals as an excuse to attempt to replace unionized public school teachers with TFA recruits, for instance. For that to succeed, district administrators and/or elected school boards would have to cooperate with Trump and DeVos. Trump cannot fire public school teachers and ban them from teaching for life because they do not work for the federal government, but he is a malignant narcissist and a psychopath with a corrupt attorney general in William Barr. I will be surprised if Trump and/or DeVos doesn’t try something that will end up probably going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision to open a school should be made by the teachers at that particular school.
Not by some brain dread politician (forgive the redumbdancy)
I want to add to brain dead politicians.
Not by brain dead politicians and uncredited Broad Superintendents Academy faux public school administrators that think and lie like Evil Eva Moskowitz and Betsy the Beast DeVos
These are monsters that will lie down with anybody and then they will also lie about it.
After 40 years of attacks on public schools from both the right and the left, the Establishment is more than willing to sacrifice teachers and children on the altar of Vulture Capitalism. One might want to read yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, which is insisting that schools “must reopen.”
Not a word about the health risks for the adults in the building.
The Times is getting excoriated in their comments sections, and rightfully so.
yes, it is truly getting old: so many articles and interviews and news blurbs about the nation’s children with few mentioning the adults required to run a school
Here the latest: proposal for distance learning starting August 10 for at least one month…”Oakland Unified has announced that it will start the school year will all students in distance learning on Aug. 10, then will gradually phase-in in-person instruction starting with small groups of the most vulnerable students, including those in special education and those who are homeless or foster youths. The district also expects to ramp up its distribution of digital devices and internet hotspots so students will have the resources they need when school starts. The district will host a town hall meeting from 5-7 pm Monday, when it will release more details.”
At the press conference where DeVos (I think) first uttered the line that “it’s not a matter of if schools open, but how.” I heard her cite a “Center on Reinventing Public Education” study on the importance of face-to-face instruction. I always enjoy looking up these think tanks to see who the Administration is listening to, and I found a really disturbing report in the Progressive:
The CRPE, funded by Gates, Walton, etc. is housed at the University of Washington (one of Trump’s Radical Left Indoctrination camps), and this article (https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/secret-group-wants-take-school/) chronicles the activities of CRPE in Minneapolis, which the author reports has absorbed the Minn. Public School District into its “network” with the help of McKinsey and Co.–of course. While there is a heartening account of local resistance to the market fundamentalist funding model being imposed on the school district, the whole thing is outrageous, and I encourage anyone interested to read the whole thing.
The most striking coverage is of a presentation given by Marguerite Roza (of Georgetown University, another bastion of the Radical Left, where, incidentally, Robert Redfield took his M.D. and developed his ghoulish stances on HIV/AIDS) at the 2013 meeting of CRPE “Portfolio Network members” titled “Dollars and Sense Accountability.” Roza instructs attendees to embrace performance-based teacher compensation and push schools on the issue of radically growing enrollment because “schools will always say they’re too full.”
Further developing the theme of running schools like businesses, she emphasizes: “I hope when you leave this session, you realize that the money part of the equation has to be part of the accountability bit, so you have to start connecting the spending and the outcomes together”…”If we’re trying to get to a system where we’re leveraging our money to get the best possible outcomes we could get, we need a more robust relationship between spending and outcomes than we have.”
As a proud member of my (public) high school’s jazz band, which has produced a number of career musicians and performers over the years, this quote really infuriated me:
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[Roza’s] solution [to ‘overspending’ schools]? Force such schools to “take more kids,” and don’t listen when they tell you they’re too full. In fact, when they do tell you they are too full, simply ask them, “All right, did you want to give up the jazz band or the golf team?” Because, it seems, they must be lying about their ability to “cram more kids in,” as Roza puts it, just so they can protect their elite, district-funded programs. (Roza seems not to understand that, in Minneapolis, there are wealthy neighborhoods, but there are no wealthy schools rolling in district dollars.)
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Links to blog posts and other material debunking Roza’s policy prescriptions can be found in the comments of the article.
This group, which, the article compellingly shows, shares both its extreme market fundamentalism and shadowy operating procedures with ALEC, is who DeVos is taking advice from in developing a reopening plan.
I have read that DeVos is a dues paying member of ALEC
Yes, she is.
Yeah, CRPE sucks. They’ve been the architects of privatization in Oakland and other major cities nationwide for years.