Jane Nylund, parent activist in Oakland, reports on the good news from that district. Oakland has been the Disrupter/Reformer playground for nearly twenty years. For most of those years, billionaire Eli Broad picked the superintendents.
Jane Nylund writes:
Good morning, the good news out of Oakland is that our grassroots campaigns for 4 school board seats beat back Bloomberg and his privatization machine. The board flipped 3 out of 4 seats, to elect the following:
District 1-Sam Davis
District 3-VanCedric Williams
District 5-Mike Hutchinson
District 7-Clifford Thompson
In addition, Oakland’s Measure Y, which passed by a whopping 77%, will provide $750 million for new school building construction/rehabilitation for our crumbling infrastructure.
Measure QQ, giving 16 and 17-year olds the right to vote in school board elections, also passed by a wide margin.
In nearly 20 years of privatization push into Oakland, this is the first time since 2003 that Oakland schools will be returned to local control by a school board that values and embraces authentic public education. Remaining hopeful for the future, and look forward to strengthening and improving Oakland’s schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Outstanding!!!
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🍎🍎🍎
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Yes!
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This is a big win for community schools. Stakeholders should have a voice in how their tax dollars are spent instead of billionaires with a privatizing agenda.
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Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend.
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This is no minor achievement. The district had long been captive of CORE, the non-governmental privately funded agency allowed to flourish in California and standardize draconian accountability measures.
CORE is an acronym for “California Office to Reform Education,” a name that emerged as matter of marketing and convenience in applying for California’s Race to the Top Phase II application. Under Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) Superintendents of Oakland and about eight other districts agreed to collaborate and standardize data collection and accountability measures.
For a time I monitored this operation, who promoted it, and what happened to the data. Data links that checked at random for specific schools all took me straight to the GreatSchools.org website.
Teacher evaluation had been a key component of the Race to the Top application: states could earn up to 58 points for their plans to improve teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance. The final California application committed to a new principal and teacher evaluation system based on multiple measures, at least 30 percent of which would derive from student achievement growth.
This whole effort was designed to keep teachers and unions out of the picture and install corporate “talent managers” among other terrible ideas favored by the many private foundations (usual suspects) who supported the project. An evaluation of that project can be found here;” CORE-Cross-District-Collaboration-Report-August-2015.pdf and a later one here with a list of the foundations that supported it. https://www.transformingeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TransformingEducationCaseStudyFINAL1.pdf
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