Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and mathematics, has been keeping a close watch on the machinations of the privatization movement. He writes here about Oakland, which has suffered two decades of indignities at the hands of corporate reformers. The district was taken over by the state because it had a deficit in 2003. The state gave Eli Broad a free hand in picking its superintendents, who proceeded to open charter schools, close public schools, and drive the district deeper into debt. In time, the state restored Oakland’s elected school board, but kept it under the control of outside monitors who demanded more school closures.
Tultican supplies the background for the Oakland disaster.
He writes:
The map of charter schools in Oakland and proposed school closings shows that both are all in the minority dominated flats (the low lying area between the bay and the hills). With all of these closings, residents in the flats may no longer have a traditional public school serving their community.
Much of this can be laid at the door step of the six billionaire “education reformers” living across the bay – Reed Hastings (Netflix), Arthur Rock (Intel), Carrie Walton Penner (Walmart), Laurene Powell Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Doris Fisher (The Gap).
Reed Hastings established America’s first charter management organization (CMO) in Oakland. There are now six Aspire charter schools serving Oakland families.
Arthur Rock, Doris Fisher and Carrie Walton Penner have been investing in Teach For America (TFA) and charter school growth in Oakland. Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell Jobs have been pushing education technology as well as TFA and charter schools.
Along with these billionaires, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg and Tulsa billionaire Stacey Schusterman have joined in the spending to sway Oakland’s school board elections.
Oakland’s own T. Gary Rogers established a foundation before he died that continues to be central to the local school privatization agenda. It significantly supports and directs privatization efforts by GO public education and Education78. The City Fund created by Reed Hastings and John (Enron) Arnold recently gave GO and Education78 a total of $5 million (EIN 82-4938743).
This brief outline of the money being spent to privatize schools in Oakland would be woefully incomplete if Eli Broad was not mentioned. Although his direct spending to advance privatization in Oakland has been relatively modest, the four Superintendents and many administrative staff members that he trained and got placed in Oakland are central to OUSD being the most privatized district in California. A key training manual developed at the Broad Center was the “School Closure Guide.”
“Black Hole Mike” Hutchinson observed,
“A lot of these policies were first tried out in Oakland. If you go back and look at the Eli Broad handbook on school closures, a lot of the source information that they used for that report is from Oakland.”
The billionaire spending has resulted in 39 charter schools operating in Oakland today. Nine were authorized by the county, one by the state of California and 29 by OUSD. Using data from the California Department of Education, it can be shown that 31% of the publicly supported k-12 students in Oakland attend privatized charter schools.
It is disturbing that 22 of the 39 schools have a student body made up by more than 90% Hispanic and Black students. Overall 67% of Oakland’s charter school children are Hispanic or Black but only 50% of the residents of Oakland are Hispanic or Black. The privatization agenda has driven school segregation in Oakland to new heights.
The other divisive agenda is gentrification. Ken Epstein is a longtime observer of OUSD and a bay area pundit. He observed,
“Many school advocates view these school closures as a land grab of public property by privatizers. Others see this is a way to force Black and Latino families out of Oakland, making education inaccessible for them by closing the schools in the neighborhoods where they live.”
If a well financed developer could gain control of the flats, the profit possibilities are immense. These concerns are further fed when OUSD board President Gary Yee tells a Skyline High School parent that the school should be closed because the property is too valuable to be used for public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The long term purpose of starting charters is to milk the schools for all they are worth while they are operating (by setting up holding companies that charge the schools exorbitant rents and by paying principals exorbitant salaries, etc) and , if possible to pay hold to valuable public property (buildings and real estate) that can be sold off when the schools inevitably “fail” (accidentally on purpose)
I really like a meme which says “Gentrification is the New Colonization” — it speaks volumes to what we have seen happen inside our city with years and years of school “reform” and the notable changes made to population/business make up
yes!!!!
This same MO has played out in cities with expensive real estate before. The politicians work with the wealthy to displace poor black and brown families by closing schools in order to clear a path for developers. Sometimes this plan includes transferring the titles of real estate from a public asset and turning it over to a private companies This is a way to steal valuable real estate, all very legal, of course. The main objective of this scheme is to change the socioeconomic and racial composition of a neighborhood while making lots of money for developers. Selective charters schools the flood the area so that the schools will remain mostly affluent and white. This is not the “free market.” It is a manipulated market that benefits the wealthy and their political allies
“This is not the “free market.” It is a manipulated market that benefits the wealthy and their political allies.”
Bingo, bango, boingo! Whoa, ladies and gentleman, you all aren’t going to let me get out of here with any Kewpie Dolls. Our third winner today! Give that nice lady a Kewpie Doll!
“…too valuable to be used for public education.”
This points out to me the inherent danger of the hyper-urbanization we are experiencing now. I know, I am a country boy and know nothing of the city. I also know urban areas are generally more cosmopolitan than rural areas, and tend to vote democratic. Still, I consider dense cities to be places of transience, making things like neighborhood schools difficult to maintain. Since urbanization brings dense populations of mostly young people to live in urban areas, it is legitimate to ask how this is to develop into stable communities with community institutions like schools and meeting places.
In cities, Roy, what used to be called the Yuppies would come and go, but there were typically, as well, long-established ethnic enclaves. When I lived in Chicago, there were literally hundreds of these–Polish, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Serbian, Russian, descendants of Great Migration black folk, etc., all with their shops and markets and restaurants. The trend in recent decades in many cities, as I understand it, has been to squeeze these out to make room for more Yuppie development.
Roy, I can tell you from my adult years in New York City that with the exception of a small number of test-in high schools, the city schools were neighborhood schools. Mayor Bloomberg, in his desire to tear apart the entire school system, closed hundreds of schools. Elementary schools are still zoned for neighborhoods but middle schools and high schools are not. Kids apply to a dozen schools and hope to get into one of them. Many students travel an hour or more to get to school. Choice destroys communities as few kids living in the same apartment building or on the same block attend the same school. A very very high level official in Bloomberg’s “Department of Education” told me that this was done on purpose, to prevent parent protests against whatever he wanted to do.
As Bob noted, NYC–like Chicago–holds many ethnic neighborhoods with strong bonds. The school was their glue. No more.
Politicians often facilitate the process because they know the gentrified housing will bring in much higher tax ratables to the city. San Francisco has some of the highest prices for homes in the country. Silicon Valley would likely find a “transformed” Oakland as a place for their worker bees to live.
Thank you for helping me understand the city. I still recall seeing the old Italian neighborhoods in Baltimore with older people carefully polishing their white steps leading into their row houses. It really did look like a neighborhood.
What I wonder about is the effect of gentrification, and to what extent is the urban charter school movement designed to bring folks into the inner city without having to confront the poor who live in the neighborhoods that are in decline.
City neighborhoods remind me of agricultural neighborhoods in a way where schools are concerned. As agriculture mechanized, and people left the farm, small communities across the country declined in population. Once thriving communities became places on the road to somewhere else. Along the way, the local school became a building on the side of the road.
I wonder if the difference is that the places where houses are cleared for high rise apartments (this is a development I have noticed in Nashville) are generally home to those less fortunate. Is ridding the place of the neighborhood school as mentioned above a way for people to make money on real estate? Already the relationship between real estate and charter schools has been a discussion on this page. Is gentrification the chief motivation for urban support of charter schools?
“to what extent is the urban charter school movement designed to bring folks into the inner city without having to confront the poor who live in the neighborhoods that are in decline.”
I can only give my own knowledge of NYC, but in this city, my answer would be: None. What you describe is NOT what urban charter school movement is all about.
The urban charter movement is “successful” because of the implicit racism of far too many white people in education.
Here is a fact: Even within the most disadvantaged at-risk communities, there are plenty of families who are highly motivated to get their kids a good education and those families are very different than at-risk families where parents are in great distress and may suffer from addiction or untreated mental illness or are incarcerated (or recently incarcerated.)
Even within the most disadvantaged at-risk student population, there are students for whom academics comes easier and students for whom academics is a struggle, with some of them having severe learning issues.
The charter movement depends on the implicitly racist myth that finding a family who is highly motivated to get their kid a good education and who has a student who will perform at or above grade level with the most mediocre teachers is like finding a needle in the haystack.
But of course it isn’t. Even in NYC, there are tens of thousands students living in poverty who attend underfunded under-resourced public schools and perform at grade level.
Charters pick off the most motivated families. That in itself should have been enough, but the greedy charters decided that tossing out those students from the most motivated families was acceptable because their main purpose was never to teach as many kids as possible, but to teach as many of the “right” kids as possible.
But charters use the implicit racism of so many white folks because too many white folks believe that families and children like that in urban areas must be like finding a needle in a haystack.
it’s based on a “feeling”, because any decent education journalist (those are sorely lacking) could have easily seen that there were many tens of thousands of those students in public schools. Maybe some of their public schools only have 40% of the students meeting standards. Maybe some of them only have 20%. But contrary to the implicitly racist myth that any student in NYC who achieves in a charter would have been abject failure withjout the “no-excuses” educaiton that white folks believe in their hearts is the only thing that turns those kids into scholars, the students who survive in those schools are exactly the same ones who woujld thrive if they had been in a well-resourced public school that didn’t reat them like criminals in the making who needed to have their violent tendencies tamed.
Yes, it’s that ugly.
Those charters – at least in NYC – aren’t about bringing non-poor folks into the city.
They are about pushing the nastiest racist tropes in which finding a student who can perform at grade level is supposedly as rare as finding a needle in a haystack. It is about attributing all those students’ success to other people drumming that education into them. And it is about saying that the students who leave are just like those students who remain except that the ignorant parents decided they wanted their child to be the abject failure that all the remaining students would have been without the charter imposing no-excuses discipline on them.
If these schools were in middle class white suburbs, no one would ever buy that the students would be abject failures without the no-excuses discipline, because white students who do well in public schools are visible to the media.
But Black and Latinx students who do well in public schools are INvisible, and the media and too many of the public believes the lie that those students barely exist except in charters.
It might be different in Oakland, however.
The best way to avoid another strike is to be ready to again go on strike.