A reader watched the Oakland school board meeting to the bitter end. Despite overwhelming opposition by students, parents, and educators, the board voted to close the schools. Maybe the decision was foreordained.
Reader comment:
The Board voted to close the schools 4-3-2 at 1am with 1000 people still on Zoom, many still wanting to speak.
Unconscionable.
2 Abstentions.
Oaktown needs another strike.
A revolution.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane: I smell Koch or some other oligarch/fascist(s). Remember the Koch’s and their trying to buy influence at George Mason University (Un-Koch our campus). Their only hope is that they really do not know what they wish for.
Thank you for your coverage. CBK
You might be right but I think this is more Reed Hastings, Arthur Rock and Carrie Walton Penner than Koch. Gates and New Schools have been spending heavily to advance ed tech and privatization in Oakland. Bloomberg and Schusterman have been spending heavily to influence elections there. It is a credit to the never give-up pro-public school activists that there are any public school left in the flats of Oakland.
This time around we were only able to save one school but I think the cause was made for big victories at poles later this year. The Superintendent of Alameda County public schools is not running unopposed this year. And it is likely that up to 2 OUSD board seats become more aligned with equity for parents living in the flats.
Yep, agree.
In my experience, school boards rarely allow parent and student comments at hearings to factor into their decisions. They know what they’re going to do before the hearing happens and they stick to it.
That is probably true of big-city school boards wielding huge amounts of $$$ and political clout. Certainly not true of my 30k-pop NJ town, and I suspect there are many like it. A dozen yrs ago, the board negotiated generous raises with our teachers union during summer when everyone was on vacation—just prior as it turned out to a big slash by Christie in our state funding. Christie later backed down and restored most of it, but the board never heard the end of it, and meetings became even more standing-room-only for years after.
Perhaps this just reflects the sort of BOE politics in NJ towns where residents pay way too much in RE taxes to ensure top-notch pubschsys which supports their homes’ market prices. But BOE meetings in much less swanky parts of NJ also give max voice/ clout to taxpayers… And that may be a culture thing. People in my state are very provincial and fiefdom-y. Their voice means more to them than their wallets, and the elected quail before it. It takes a year of debate before small adjoining towns with their backs to the wall to even agree to sharing sanitation arrgts.
New Jersey has the Abbott districts, which are marked by high poverty. But as a state, New Jersey on average has excellent schools.
One of the abstentions was Student Director Gallegos, who has more guts than any other member of that board (save for Student Director Pal). Calling him gutless is outrageous. You should not publish this comment, Diane.
I was wrong, it was Student Director Pal. Regardless, the comment you posted is terrible and shouldn’t be left up on this public blog.
Which comment are you suggesting should be deleted? I have scanned them all and can’t find one that is “terrible.”
I think it was in your original post, Diane.
yes, the comment in your original post that the two abstentions are “gutless.” one of those abstentions was a student director (whose vote isn’t binding, by the way) who is VERY far from gutless. That kind of attack on an OUSD student shouldn’t be on your blog. Your “reader” who stayed up to watch til the bitter end doesn’t speak for Oakland students and parents when they say a student director is “gutless.” it is quite obviously someone who does not understand Oakland or OUSD.
Thank you, I will fix it
Correct me if I’m wrong, but fascists, anarchists and libertarians all have similar goals (they overlap), to destroy and/or control the public sector and that means public schools.
Because they are basically autocrats (and some are brutal), they will do anything to win.
Lie and lie again!
Outspend their opponents and grind them into dust if need be.
We are at war. Eventually, words as weapons will not be enough.
You’re really gearing up for armed conflict, eh?
We do not arm, but that doesn’t mean we do not fight. We fight with peaceful walkouts and boycotts. Lloyd is right, it is time again to fight.
“fascists, anarchists and libertarians all have similar goals (they overlap), to destroy and/or control the public sector and that means public schools”– Right on, LL! So much of the Dem public is buffaloed there. They are always commenting to the effect that Reps want uneducated voters, that’s why they attack/ privatize pubschs. It seems to sail right over their heads that pubschsys are the last bastion of locally-elected, grass-roots democracy. THAT’S what they’re trying to stamp out.
I, too, watched until the “bitter end.” One thing that struck me is that two board members had joined together to present a complicated set of amendments that no one had seen until the unveiling not long before the vote was taken. I thought it was illegal for school board members to meet privately over school business, much less draft a complicated bill amendment. Am I missing something?
The protest abstention from one of the student board members gave another board member who clearly favored the closings an opportunity to abstain and still win. That student member shouldn’t feel bad. She couldn’t have predicted that deviousness, which probably wouldn’t have occurred without the initial abstention.
This vote, railroaded through without prior review of the actual wording of the resolution, was go4ing to pass anyway, given this five-to-four majority on the board in favor of it. So, I the one student abstention, I’m pretty sure, was a protest vote. Both student members of the board strongly opposed this, like just about everyone else in Oakland. With regard to those who supported the resolution: follow the $$$$ back to the oligarchs, as usual.
At the very beginning of the pandemic I said this would be the beginning of the end of brick and mortar schools. It is.
Last night the LAUSD board voted to add many online schools. Don’t be surprised when Oakland does the same.
https://news.yahoo.com/lausd-prepping-thousands-unvaccinated-students-130052523.html
We know beyond doubt that students learn far more in brick and mortar schools than online.
Agree the pandemic provided the chaos & online-schooling to give another foot in the door to the usual suspects. However they now will have to fight the pushback from conservatives who have bought into in-person classroom teaching as the way to own the libs, covid-wise. Even if conservatives are indifferent to pedagogy [i.e., sitting at laptops doing CBE so what], it‘s a start. It gets them into the brick&mortar bldg, committed to the benefit of social exchange.
Parents Are Starting To Organize Against The Plundering Plutocrats.
Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue — a national network of like-minded, mostly Democratic suburban women — believes the only way to fight back is to present a calm face to counter the angry groups that have dominated and disrupted board meetings and in some cases threatened officials.
Her network of more than 300,000 women recently broadened its focus to fight the rising number of book bans across the country, launching a case tracker on Jan. 31, and is running training sessions to help women testify and manage highly charged government meetings. “We believe it’s time to get off defense,” Paris said. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves? This is not why we moved to the suburbs. We moved to the suburbs for high-quality schools.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/09/suburban-women-voters-organize/
This is how school choice and the charter sector works.
First, introduce charter schools. The schools will limit student enrollment and therefore be able to optimize their financials. The existing school can’t do that once a small percentage of families are peeled away from public schools. If 10% of an elementary public school leave for the charter, the public school will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars but it won’t change the costs of staffing (because the number of students will not sink far enough to require fewer teachers). The building costs are also fixed.
Cuts have to come from somewhere and that will not help the public school improve. In fact, it will make things more difficult and will make the school less competitive. So more students will leave. Soon, the charter sector is adding to new schools that can mange those finances better because it can control the flow of incoming students.
As the public school worsens, there’s a snowball effect that just leads to more going to charters. The charters aren’t better, in fact research generally shows that the performance measures as a whole are mixed just like public schools. But the rules and evolution favor the charter.
This is what happened in Detroit fifteen years ago. This is going to happen in every urban district. New Orleans was the harbinger. After the initial ascent of scores in New Orleans, it leveled off quickly and fell a little as well.
What charter school supporters do well is this: they identify a school that does well, make it the focus of their argument or editorial and then convince people that this is the norm. Read them all. They will chose a student or school and say, look at this case! But it’s typically an outlier.
Charter advocates claimed that charters would be a “firewall” against vouchers.
But we know now that this is not true.
Charters introduce a slippery slope by promoting the idea that “school choice” offers better education to students.
It does not.
Charters push the narrative of competition and privatization.
Then vouchers become available.
None of these choices are better than public schools, which are required by law to be accountable for finances and academics and to be transparent. Public schools are also required to hire qualified teachers. Charters have a lower bar, and vouchers have none at all.
With poorly prepared teachers, it is no wonder that so many charters and vouchers are worse than public schools and have high rates of attrition or close.
Can someone answer my question concerning the legality of school board members joining together in private and drafting an addendum to a board proposal, which is what apparently had happened for last night’s OUSD meeting? In Oregon, where I live, it is illegal.
“All meetings of public governing bodies shall be conducted in public unless specifically exempted.
No quorum of a governing body may meet in private to decide, deliberate on, or gather information on which to deliberate, toward a decision on any matters except those exempted by law. (Board Policy BD/BDA)”
It is a violation of Sunshine Laws for elected officials to meet in private and decide on changes to law prior to an open vote. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know if states have different interpretations of what would constitute a violation. Indeed, there is little to no enforcement of Sunshine violations. ALEC successfully incorporates their corporate agendas, all prepared in secret, into electoral tactics. Finally bringing about decisions most people don’t want or never asked for.
Thanks.
A couple board members noted that the vote was illegal–that it didn’t follow the board’s own transparency rules.
Here is a good write-up on the current situation: