The Broad Foundation, elected by no one, has been experimenting on the Oakland, California, public schools for a decade or more. Its goal is to get rid of all democratic governance and privatize all the schools. It has not closed the achievement gap or reached any of its goals.

Oakland public school parent Jane Nylund describes the reform plan in Oakland (whose last Superintendent Antwan Wilson bailed out after adding administrative bloat and became chancellor of the D.C. schools, then resigned in D.C. after trying to transfer his daughter into a coveted school, violating the lottery plan he authored.)

Nylund writes:

“It is with disappointment, but not surprise, to find out that our community is still being used as a mouthpiece via CRPE [Center for Reinventing Public Education] and other reform groups, to come up with a narrative that will make it more palatable to sell school closure to the public. This narrative, which is being communicated to the public via the Blueprint committee, is lockstep with the plans that CRPE and others have put in place to continue the expansion of charter schools in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. If there was any doubt as to what the grand plan is, you can read all about it in this report. CRPE makes no effort to hide it, but it’s still a major disappointment to once again find that our community is being used as “engagement” pawns in the charter expansion game.

“From Center for Reinventing Public Education:

https://www.crpe.org/publications/slowdown-bay-area-charter-school-growth-causes-solutions

[It says:] “Ultimately, the growth of charters will be fundamentally constrained as long as districts fail to consolidate or close underenrolled district schools. Serious attention needs to go into developing a strategy that requires or incentivizes these actions and provides political backing to district and board officials who are trying to make these adjustments.” [End quote]

“High level: the Bay Area is saturated with charters, there aren’t any more reasonably priced facilities, so what is a charter operator to do? The added complication in Oakland is its “toxic local politics.” Meaning, this community won’t go down the primrose path willingly, so the district has to sugarcoat it. A lot.

“Step 1-Come up with a survey that isn’t really a survey. It’s a way to steer respondents into answering questions that favor school closure/consolidation

“I read it and was amazed by the complete lack of any sort of objectivity. This “survey” needs to be called out for what it is-a method to “engage” an unsuspecting public for buy-in to justify more disruption in the district to close/consolidate schools. It is not a real survey; it’s full of biased, leading questions-who wouldn’t want safe, supported schools? But then, once the data is collected and put out in the media, the district uses that completely biased information to justify their decisions. “Well, it’s not our fault we closed your school and opened a charter in its place-it’s what you said you wanted on the survey”. If the district’s plan is to disrupt the district even more than they have in the past, then they need to own that decision and stop using the public this way. It’s unconscionable, but it seems that is the usual method.

“Slide 8 is my favorite. Respondents were asked several questions about changing school sizes/consolidation; the questions didn’t get much support. But, just to make sure that the district could turn those non-supporters into supporters, they added a survey choice “Potentially support based on the outcomes of local engagement”. To the respondent, that’s a definite maybe-or-maybe-not response, but the district captures the “potential support” as actual support, combines the two positive numbers together, and lo and behold, now everyone supports school closure/consolidation, even the non-supporters. It’s all good! And these numbers will be repeated over, and over, and over….

“Slide 16 is another good one. It concerns sizes of elementary schools. There is this random quote on the slide that has nothing to do with the data presented on the slide:

“OUSD does not perform better than the identified peers with minority students using 2017 CA School Dashboard data”

“Meaning what? The subliminal message is that OUSD doesn’t do a good job having these smaller elementary schools/classes (shown on the slide), so we don’t need them. Terrible example of overreach and causation which doesn’t exist. Don’t fall for it.

“Step 2-Use a Broad-trained employee to create an enrollment model

“I know, right? This isn’t going to end well.

“Step 3-Use data to generate a list of “peer” districts that will determine some kind of random school size target, with no thought as to whether those sizes are what works for Oakland

“Generate a benchmark? This one is so far out there in terms of random data crunching that I don’t know where to begin. For starters, the peer list did not include West Contra Costa, a local district that is nearly a perfect match to our own. The fact that West Contra Costa didn’t make the list makes me question the criteria was used to generate it. Again, keep you eyes on the target and your seat backs and tray tables in the full and upright position. So someone pulls together a peer list of schools (LA Unified? With 400,000+ students? Not our peer) and comes up with some sort of average school size that OUSD should meet. Why? If logic dictates, then it goes without saying that these peer districts must be full service districts with wraparound services. Remember, that’s what’s being sold to the community. Reach the size of the peer district, and that’s what you will have.

“Wrong. In small type, the author does concur that “The above is based only on peer benchmarking; peers may or may not have quality community schools.”

“Again, go back to the quote at the beginning of the message. Does CRPE say anything about full service community schools? No, of course not. It’s about charter expansion and getting tasty real estate by the Lake. It’s always been about that.

“Turn this entire exercise on its head. Maybe those peer districts want to have full services. Maybe they want smaller class sizes like we have in Oakland. But due to all kinds of constraints, like funding, they can’t have these things. So why would OUSD want to match these peer districts? LA Unified and San Diego Unified are both going broke. Oh, right, so is OUSD.

“Step 4-Use inappropriate districts in your peer list to make it look like Oakland doesn’t perform as well as its “peers”, and therefore it’s okay to have larger class sizes, just like their “peers”

“Don’t use districts like SF Unified as a peer. They might be our neighbor, but their FRPL is around 56%. OUSD is about 74%. Not the same. But adding wealthier districts to the peer list creates the narrative that Oakland doesn’t perform as well as their peers (with the bigger schools/class sizes). Wealth generates higher test scores.

“An analogy would be, “Well, we give all of our Oakland kids breakfast but only half the kids in a wealthier district get breakfast. Our kids don’t seem to be performing better than those other kids, so therefore we should take our kids’ breakfast away.” Seriously.

“Step 5-Come up with a breakeven enrollment model that uses teachers’ salaries as variable costs. Huh?

“I’m not an accountant, but I do have an MBA. I was taught that generally salaries are considered fixed costs, at least in the short run. Teachers don’t get paid by the hour, or by how any widgets they make. They get paid the same whether they teach ten kids or thirty. Variable costs are things like books and food. So what’s up with using a model that treats teachers like books or food?

“Well, turns out there is a model for that very concept. It comes from the Friedman Foundation, another ed reform group which espouses Milton Friedman’s dream of sending kids to private schools through vouchers. In order to justify the cost of using a voucher (and thus taking that money away from public schools), the group has espoused the idea that teachers themselves are, in fact, a short term variable cost of doing business, and not fixed. Like supplies or pizza workers. In other words, Friedman’s model assumes that we have a ready supply of teachers of all sorts, experienced, certified, that we can tap into and hire and lay off at will at any time. It also assumes that all that hiring/firing in no way will cause any kind of disruption and impact to learning. Oh, and it won’t increase class size, either. Maybe in some other parallel universe. So by treating teachers as variable costs, the Friedman group can now advocate for a larger dollar amount of the voucher by claiming that the voucher covers only the variable cost portion of educating the child. Which according to them, includes books, food, and teachers. If they left the teacher portion out of that voucher, it would be a lot smaller.

“If teachers’ salaries were treated as variable costs in the breakeven calculation, I have to question the entire validity of the model. Maybe the answer would be the same, but it’s difficult for me to accept cost assumptions pattered after a reform group that wants to take my tax dollars (and yours) and give it to a student to attend a school that teaches that man and dinosaurs lived together. That’s just not cool with me.

“Step 6-deal with community pushback by dangling a carrot, that really turns out to be a stick
What to do when you need to convince the community that a bad idea is really a good idea? Easy. Use their emotional buy-in to support full-service community schools. And then, gently explain to them that in order to provide these services, we must close schools. That’s exactly what the survey did. Then, as if by magic, millions of dollars will appear that the district will use thoughtfully and responsibly to fund these programs. That is the predetermined outcome that the survey was after, and that’s what they got. Sounds great, right?

“Right, only it’s magical thinking. See CRPE quote at the beginning of this email if you’re not convinced. Closing schools does one thing: allows another charter to move into the building (gotta have more!). The last 19 school closures resulted in 15 charters opening. OUSD enrollment drops (think charter expansion), millions of dollars leave the district, and all those purported savings go up in smoke. No money for programs. Not going to happen. But, CRPE gets what it wants, as do the local charter operators, who by their own admission, desperately want to expand. Because we don’t have enough schools as it is. Or do we? Hey, it’s the free market at its finest. What could possibly go wrong?”