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Oakland Teachers: Enough Is Enough!

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2018 //
5

Teachers in Oakland, California, are preparing to strike. The following press release explains why.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE * FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:

The Wildcat Underground, Oakland High School Educators United

Twitter:​​ @WildcatUndrgrnd
IG:​​ wildcat_underground
FB:​​ Wildcat Underground

Miles Murray,​​ English Teacher, Oakland High OEA Rep: (510) 684-2956
Suzi LeBaron​​, Science Teacher and Department Head/Pathway Director: (707) 695-6873 Cole Margen​​,
History Teacher and Oakland High OEA Rep: (925) 300-8634
Alex Webster Guiney​​, Special Education Teacher: (415) 722-7668

Oakland Unified does not remember the past and is condemning its teachers and students to repeat it.

The teachers of Oakland Unified School District have been working without a contract since 2017.

Oakland Education Association (OEA, AFL-CIO) bargaining with the district reached an impasse last spring. Like a glacier calving in global warming, the rumbling and cracking is escalating in Oakland public schools.

Teachers at Oakland High School are some of the most vocal in the district and are organizing for the inevitable fight.

In the coming weeks, there will be a series of actions, including an Educators Day Out, which will include a march and rally at Oakland City Hall by 70 Oakland High educators, plus students, families, and supporters, on a scheduled school day before winter break.

“You can call it a walk-out or a work stoppage if you want. It is not an official OEA action. Our union has been following the rules in negotiations for almost two years and the district continues to stall, except when moving in the wrong direction. Teachers at Oakland High have had enough. We need to take action to be heard, and the actions will only escalate from here, and hopefully spread to other sites before the School Board does more damage. We must make our city government realize that that the health of our city depends on strong, equitable, public​ schools,” said Miles Murray, English teacher and Oakland High OEA representative, who said that a strike is not off the table. “In fact, it’s looming and hopefully this and, other ‘Wildcat Underground’ actions will show the district, city officials, and our fellow teachers the high level of solidarity, organization, and fortitude we have. If the district finally offers a raise to match inflation, sane class sizes, and all the rest of our demands that will truly benefit our students, we won’t have to strike.”

In 1996, Oakland teachers went on strike in January and didn’t return until spring. Unfortunately, many of the issues teachers face in Oakland have not changed substantially since 1996. In fact, they look eerily similar. Oakland continues to lead state school districts in the percentage of its budget paid to consultants and top-salaried district-level administrators.

“Systemically, nothing has changed in 22 years, since our last strike. It’s scary that OUSD has not figured out how to evolve and improve in more than two decades,” said Alex Webster Guiney, a Special Education teacher and school site OEA rep. “OUSD administration still does not recognize the inherent value of teacher satisfaction and longevity,” she added.

1996 STRIKE HISTORY HERE:

https://libcom.org/library/oakland-teachers-strike-1996-iww?fbclid=IwAR1BscKe60H-EQSnkJ63Ag3VCJrhjMid PiWhdFuqk4RGkqyxd9RlcNtoIIY)

Oakland teachers make considerably less than teachers in surrounding districts in the Bay Area where the cost of living is similar, or even less than in Oakland. The cost of living in Oakland has risen astronomically as San Francisco has tapped it for commuter tech housing, and as the city has experienced a renaissance in restaurants, bars, and shopping. With all of this, rents have skyrocketed as Oakland educators continue to fall behind.

“It is ridiculous that the majority of educators in Oakland can barely afford to live in the community in which we teach,” said Oakland High OEA rep Cole Margen, a history teacher in Oakland High’s RISE Academy, which serves a population of recent immigrants and students learning English as a second language. “Our salary caps out at 80 thousand after 20 years in the district and that is nowhere near enough to live on, or retire on, if we want to support ourselves and our families -– especially with the housing bubble that has so lovingly accommodated the tech exodus from San Francisco.”

By comparison teachers in surrounding districts rise to higher salaries earlier in their careers, and finish much higher with more secure retirements for their time spent teaching.

“The primary difference between Oakland and many of these districts is the percentage of black and brown students we educate,” said Suzi LeBaron, a science teacher, department head, and pathway director at Oakland High. “You can look at the demographics and the comparative salaries and see a clear trend. This is institutional racism at work and no one is talking about it. Vultures in the form of consultants and top-salaried administrators continue to circle and pick our district apart, because that is OUSD’s history.”

A newly credentialed teacher with a BA starts in Oakland at $46,570. Our median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment is $2,330/month. (Oakland demographics, 25.3% Hispanic/Latinx, and 28% African American).
In Fremont, where the median rent is $2,086, a teacher starts at $66,398, nearly $20,000 more. (Fremont demographics, 14.8% Hispanic/Latinx, and 3.3% African American).

In Mountain View-Los Altos district, where the median rent is about $450 higher than Oakland, the starting salary is $82,819. (Mountain View demographics, 21.7% Hispanic/Latinx, and 2.2% African American).

In fact, even though Mountain View teachers don’t get a raise in the first five years, at the end of those five years they have earned ​$170,611 MORE ​​than a 5-year teacher in Oakland. That’s the difference between home stability and no home stability. Oakland teachers cannot continue to work to better the lives of our students while their own livelihood is at risk. They can no longer tolerate a system of attrition.

Another point of contention is the education of children with special needs: “These children are disproportionately assigned to our public schools because their applications can be rejected by charter schools,” Guiney said. Charter schools are NOT obligated to provide services to children with special needs, but public schools are. As a result, OUSD wants to raise the cap on Special Ed class sizes in order to balance out overcrowding in general ed classrooms. “Adding more high-need children to a Special Ed classroom in order to reduce the number of children in general ed classrooms is an inefficient way of handling overcrowding, and will only end up reducing the quality of education for all students,” Guiney added.

Unfortunately, OUSD’s continued financial woes are the result of continuing sloppy mismanagement due to the historic attitude that students in Oakland didn’t, and still don’t, matter as much as students in surrounding communities.

OUSD supports a larger percentage of consultants, upper-level managers, and administrators than other state school districts, and a smaller percentage is spent on direct services to students (include the salaries and retention of their teachers). This is a classic example of educational redlining.
Instead, the district is increasingly relying on additional sources of revenue (parcel taxes and state support for career and technical education, as two examples) to keep programs robust for students. The actual work of teachers, however, continues to be minimized.

Additionally, the growth of private and public charter schools in Oakland (staffed with non-unionized teachers) has resulted in a well-documented “white flight” from Oakland’s public schools, further emphasizing inequities.

While OUSD talks about the possibility of closing 24 public schools, the district has approved a large number of largely-unregulated charter schools that continue to drain resources and students from public schools, with no proven outcomes. In fact, OUSD has recently hired another top-level (highly paid) administrator to oversee the Office of Charter Schools, all the while refusing to bargain with its nearly 3.000 public school educators represented by OEA.

Categories Accountability, California, Oakland, Racism, Teacher Pay, Unions

Steven Singer: The Silence of the Reformers and the Chicago Charter Strike

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2018 //
15

Steven Singer notices a deafening silence from Reformers, who say nothing in response to the nation’s first charter chain strike in Chicago. Come to think of it, the Reformers were silent last spring, during the historic Teacher Revolt in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Co,orado, Noth Carolina, and Arizona.

Are the Reformers on the side of teachers who want smaller classes and a decent salary? No se.

Singer writes:

Charter school teachers in Chicago are in their fourth day of a strike.

Yet I wonder why the leaders of the charter movement are quiet.

Where is Peter Cunningham of the Education Post?

Where is Shaver Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform?

Not a word from Campbell Brown or Michelle Rhee?

Nothing from Bill Gates, Cory Booker, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

Not a peep from Betsy DeVos or Donald Trump?

This is a historic moment. Teachers at various charter schools have unionized before, but it has never come to an outright strike – not once since the federal charter school law was established in 1994.

You’d think the charter cheerleaders – the folks who lobby for this type of school above every other type – would have something to say.

But no.

They are conspicuously silent.

I wonder why.

Could it be that this is not what they imagined when they pushed for schools to be privately run but publicly financed?

Could it be that they never intended workers at these schools to have any rights?

Could it be that small class size – one of the main demands of teachers at the 15 Acero schools – was never something these policymakers intended?

It certainly seems so.

Here is the answer, Steven. Charters were funded to kill unions. You guessed it. Now you know it.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Class size, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Unions

Chicago: CTU Charter Strike Enters Second Day

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2018 //
11

A news bulletin:

NEWS ADVISORY:

For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org
CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org
Wednesday, 6:30 a.m., Dec. 5: Picket lines continue at Acero campuses
Wednesday, 10:00 a.m., Dec. 5: Press conference and rally at Chicago Board of Education, 42 W. Madison. St.
CTU charter educator strike against UNO/Acero enters second day

Picketing continues at 15 UNO/Acero sites, culminating in a rally downtown at the Chicago Board of Education.

CHICAGO—CTU teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff at 15 charter schools run by the Acero charter network formerly known as UNO will enter the second day of their historic strike—the first against a charter operator in U.S. history—starting with 6:30 a.m. picket lines outside of their schools.

Educators will then rally and hold a press conference at the board of education at 10AM to update the press and public on the status of bargaining, in advance of the Chicago Board of Education’s monthly meeting. CTU President Jesse Sharkey will raise strikers’ issues at the CPS board meeting at 10:30 a.m. Those issues include why CPS has allowed the charter operator to stockpile tens of millions of public dollars designated for students’ education instead of investing those funds in classrooms.

Management and the CTU bargaining team remain far apart on critical issues that include: class size, sanctuary school community language in the contract, fair compensation for paraprofessionals, and lower class sizes, which are currently set at 32 students per class—four more than what Chicago Public Schools seeks to meet at district-run schools. CTU members have called those class sizes both outrageous and unsafe for students, particularly children in kindergarten through second grade, where one adult simply does not have the capacity to safely supervise, let alone educate, 32 young children.

Management continues to refuse to include language in the contract that would provide assurances that Acero would follow federal law in providing special education services to students, and refuses to include a commitment in the contract to ensure that its schools operate as sanctuary schools, a virtually no-cost commitment that would provide protection for UNO/Acero’s overwhelmingly Latinx student population.

# # #

The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at http://www.ctunet.com.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Class size, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

CEO of UNO/Acero Lashes Out at Strikers and “Outside” Interests

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2018 //
8

The CEO of UNO/Acero Charter Schools, Robert Rodriguez, is angry that his teachers went out on strike. He blames the union and “outside” interests who are anti-charter. Apparently, he does not take seriously his teachers’ demands for higher pay and smaller class sizes. He disrespects them by not hearing their voices.

He released this letter.

This is a video of him reading his letter.

In his letter and statement, he describes Acero as “one of the best performing charter networks in Chicago.”

Dana Goldstein wrote in the New York Times, however, that “At Acero schools, a quarter of students met standards on state exams in 2016, the same percentage who met standards in the Chicago district schools, according to a report from the Illinois State Board of Education.”

If that is what it means to be “one of the best performing charter networks in Chicago,” that speaks poorly of the entire charter sector.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Class size, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Unions

Dana Goldstein on the Chicago Charter Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2018 //
1

Veteran journalist Dana Goldstein now covers education for the New York Times.

She writes here about the Chicago charter teachers’ strike:

Over 500 educators in Chicago began the nation’s first strike at a charter school network on Tuesday, shutting down 15 schools serving more than 7,000 children. Teachers for the Acero Schools network rallied at local schools to call for higher pay and smaller class sizes, among other demands.

The action is the latest mass teacher protest in a year when educators have closed ranks in places where organized labor has historically been weak — first in six conservative or swing states where teachers walked out of classrooms, and now in the charter school sector, where unionization is sparse.

All of the picket lines have formed out of a dispute over public dollars — whether education funding is adequate, and what percentage of the money should go toward educator pay and classroom resources versus other costs.

“Everyone is feeding off each other and hearing this rallying cry,” said Martha Baumgarten, a fifth-grade teacher at Carlos Fuentes Elementary School in the Acero network and a member of her union’s bargaining committee. “A lot of this comes down to lack of funding. But teachers across the country are seeing each other stand up and say that’s not O.K. We’re not going to support budgets and politics as usual.”

Charters are funded by taxpayers but independently managed by nonprofit organizations, like Acero, or by for-profit companies. Educators at Acero earn up to $13,000 less than their counterparts at traditional public schools in Chicago and cannot afford to live comfortably in an increasingly expensive city, according to the Chicago Teachers Union, which represents the striking workers.

The chief executive of Acero, Richard L. Rodriguez, earns about $260,000 annually to manage 15 schools, a similar salary to that of Janice K. Jackson, the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools system, which includes over 500 schools.

In addition to higher pay for teachers and support staff, the union is asking that more money be spent on special education services for students and on a program that allows classroom assistants to continue their education and become lead teachers. The union also argues that Acero’s class sizes — up to 32 students at every grade level — are too high.

Acero says the comparatively large class sizes allow it to serve more families, noting that many of the network’s schools have wait lists. It acknowledges that its teachers, who earn an average salary of $65,000 per year, are making less than their peers in traditional schools, but says that is because of inadequate funding from the state. Mr. Rodriguez earns a salary that is competitive given his duties managing the network’s facilities and real estate, it added.

Helena Stangle, a spokeswoman for Acero, said that after the network’s teachers unionized in 2013, management has repeatedly agreed to reduce hours and shorten the work year for teachers, but that to do so any further would erode what makes the schools attractive to parents.

“The focus of the discussion today is maintaining our own identity as a network of schools,” she said. The promise of an extended school day and year is “a real differentiator and important to our families.”

The strike comes shortly after a midterm election in which a burst of progressive Democratic energy led to defeats for charter school advocates in Illinois and other states.

That teachers in a charter network were able to organize, let alone walk out of their classrooms en masse, is notable given the history and aims of charter schools.

Only about 11 percent of the nation’s 7,000 charter schools are unionized, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Although the union leader Al Shanker helped popularize the concept of charter schools in the 1980s, intending them as laboratories for educational innovation, he became a fierce critic when reformers began using charter laws to open nonunion schools. The reformers hoped that student performance would improve outside the bureaucratic constraints of contract work rules, and that underperforming teachers could be fired more easily. Results in the charter sector have been mixed. At Acero schools, a quarter of students met standards on state exams in 2016, the same percentage who met standards in the Chicago district schools, according to a report from the Illinois State Board of Education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Class size, Education Industry, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: How Kansas Wasted Money on TFA

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2018 //
3

The Kansas State Department of Education has money to burn (but not on tezchers’ Salaries), so it burned $270,000 to hire three inexperinced temporary teachers from TFA. The three will be gone in two years or so, meaning this was a very unwise expenditure.

Mercedes Schneider explains the folly here.

The real winner in this bad deal is TFA and its recruiter.

Note to state education departments: Don’t do stuff that makes you look foolish.

Categories Education Reform, Kansas, Teach for America, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage

Carl Petersen: Why Teachers in Los Angeles Might Strike

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2018 //
7

The teachers of Los Angeles have authorized a strike. As you will see in this article by LA parent Carl Petersen, negotiations remain stalled.

The district claims it can’t afford to settle with its teachers. This having raised Board Member salaries by 174% and paying its new superintendent a base salary of $350,000 (supporters of former investment banker Beutner originally said he would take no salary).

One of the richest cities in the nation claims it can’t pay its teachers or provide the services children need. Yet LAUSD managed to find an extra $1 billion for JOHN Deasy’s iPad Fiasco.

Cue the world’s smallest violin.

And this:

“As previously stated, Superintendent Beutner has no professional experience or training in the field of education. UTLA leadership is comprised of people who are education professionals. Yet Beutner has stated that deciding “what tests students take” is not something that the LAUSD “would, should or could bargain with labor over.” “Under a UTLA proposal, teachers would be required to give only the standardized tests required under state or federal law”.

“While the union proposal is a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough. Under state law, parents have a right to opt their children out of all standardized testing. Unfortunately, LAUSD teachers are not allowed to inform parents of this right. By instituting an opt-in system, all parents would be informed of their rights before their children were forced to take these tests.”

Why does the investment banker think he knows more about testing than teachers?

Categories Accountability, Los Angeles, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching

New York Times: Teachers and Their Second Jobs

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
11

Our society shows its disrespect for teachers by not paying them a salary they can live on without working a second job.

In state after state, the powers that be have cut taxes, cut education spending, and boasted that they are not “throwing money” at schools.

Meanwhile, as this feature in the New York Times shows, many teachers have to work extra jobs to meet their expenses.

This is shameful!

Legislators think it’s fine to “throw money” at those who are the 1%. The less they need money, the more they get it from the state, while teachers give up their days off to patch together a living.

Having paid as little as possible to hire teachers, legislators complain about them, demand more of them, strip away their collective bargaining rights, attack their pensions and healthcare.

We have a crisis in education: a crisis caused by greed. Pure, unadulterated greed, which enriches the richest and neglects those upon whom we depend to educate the next generation.

Into this crisis come the Reformers, with their cost-cutting ideas, their plans to replace teachers with technology or increase class sizes or import low-wage temps from TFA, but no proposals to guarantee that teachers are paid as professionals.

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Pay

TIME: “I Work Three Jobs and Donate Blood Plasma to Make a Living”: A Teacher in America Today

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
52

TIME magazine has made the discovery that teachers in America are underpaid.

North Carolina teacher Stuart Egan noticed that TIME had done a dramatic turnaround.

So did I. But I thought of TIME’s two cover stories lambasting teachers, one in 2008,the other in 2014.

That was then, this is now.

In this story, TIME presents a sympathetic portrait of teachers in America. This stands in sharp contrast to their heroic cover story about Michelle Rhee in 2008, written by Amanda Ripley and their cover story in 2014 about the “Rotten Apples,” the teachers who alledly could never be fired. The 2014 story referred to the Vergara case in California against teacher tenure, which was ultimately dismissed by the highest state court.

Maybe the news here is TIME’s abandonment of its war against teachers.

The story begins:

Hope Brown can make $60 donating plasma from her blood cells twice in one week, and a little more if she sells some of her clothes at a consignment store. It’s usually just enough to cover an electric bill or a car payment. This financial juggling is now a part of her everyday life—something she never expected almost two decades ago when she earned a master’s degree in secondary education and became a high school history teacher. Brown often works from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. at her school in Versailles, Ky., then goes to a second job manning the metal detectors and wrangling rowdy guests at Lexington’s Rupp Arena. With her husband, she also runs a historical tour company for extra money.

“I truly love teaching,” says the 52-year-old. “But we are not paid for the work that we do.”
That has become the rallying cry of many of America’s public-school teachers, who have staged walkouts and marches on six state capitols this year. From Arizona to Oklahoma, in states blue, red and purple, teachers have risen up to demand increases in salaries, benefits and funding for public education. Their outrage has struck a chord, reviving a national debate over the role and value of teachers and the future of public education.

For many teachers, this year’s uprising is decades in the making. The country’s roughly 3.2 million full-time public-school teachers (kindergarten through high school) are experiencing some of the worst wage stagnation of any profession, earning less on average, in inflation-­adjusted dollars, than they did in 1990, according to Department of Education (DOE) data.

Meanwhile, the pay gap between teachers and other comparably educated professionals is now the largest on record. In 1994, public-school teachers in the U.S. earned 1.8% less per week than comparable workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank. By last year, they made 18.7% less. The situation is particularly grim in states such as Oklahoma, where teachers’ inflation-adjusted salaries actually decreased by about $8,000 in the last decade, to an average of $45,245 in 2016, according to DOE data. In Arizona, teachers’ average inflation-adjusted annual wages are down $5,000.

Categories Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching

Steven Singer: Public Support for Public Schools at an All-Time High

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2018 //
17

Steven Singer reviews the latest Phi Delta Kappa poll of public opinion about public schools and finds that public support is at an all-time high, with one exception: Though people admire and respect teachers, they don’t want their children to grow up to be a teacher. They understand that teachers are underpaid and undervalued.

He writes:

According to the 50th annual PDK Poll of attitudes about public schools, Americans trust and support teachers, but don’t want their own children to join a profession they see as underpaid and undervalued.

In almost every other way, they support public schools and the educators who work there.

When it comes to increasing school funding, increasing teacher salary, allowing teachers to strike, and an abundance of other issues, the poll found a majority of people unequivocally in favor of endeavors meant to bolster learning.

In fact, support for education and educators has never been so high in half a century.

“Two-thirds of Americans say teachers are underpaid, and an overwhelming 78% of public school parents say they would support teachers in their community if they went on strike for more pay,” according to PDK’s Website.

Categories Opinion Polling, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers
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