Chartering Austerity: A Look at the Fight Against Charter Schools in Oakland

FW: Recently, students took action at Oakland Unified School Board meetings against the possible closure of public schools and their conversion into charters. Why are students and teachers angry and taking action?

CS: School communities – school workers, students and families – have been carrying out various actions at their schools and at board meetings due to the neoliberal policy called the “Call for Quality Schools.” This policy is targetting 5 “underperforming” schools and putting them through an RFP process. RFPs, or Request For Proposals, are a way in which the OUSD administrators and school board members can treat each school’s management positions as a commodities to be put on the market. Charter School Organizations, non profits funded by corporate money, and other entities are being put in competition with the school sites to determine who has the “best plan” for running the schools.

The new Superintendent of OUSD, Antwan Wilson, is from Denver and has brought a bunch of highly paid and well connected administrators from Denver to take positions in the OUSD. They are carrying out this process in a very blunt and aggressive manner – steamrolling their proposals without considering the school community’s own needs and processes, making hasty decisions and putting them out over email prior to being clear on what’s happening.

All of this has lead to the emergence of a polarization against the OUSD administration that we have not seen in several years in Oakland.

FW: In recent years, there has been a push by those in power to switch to charter schools. How is this an attack on students and workers?

CS: While there are a minority of more independent and social justice oriented charter schools in Oakland, charter schools are generally problematic due to a few factors. One is that they get to “cream” which students come into their school; for instance, Oakland School of the Arts – funded by Jerry Brown – requires students to go through an audition process before they can even get in. Other charter school chains, many of them in East Oakland, are known by students to be schools where kids who may not have great academic habits get pushed out so that they don’t bring down the test scores of the school. Further, charter schools do not tend to meet the needs of recently arrived migrant students who need special programs to support the development of their bilingualism; charter schools are also not required to provide services for students with learning disabilities, meaning that many of these students do not last long at certain charter schools. All of this means that the charter schools can cherry pick students who are already set to do well in school and leave students who have more social, emotional and academic needs to stay in the public schools. This results in a segregated and tracked system that’s not good for anyone in the school community – students, parents, school workers.

Lastly, charter schools also tend to be de-unionized, which makes it easier to exploit charter school workers AND attack the unionized teachers in the public schools by pitting them against each other.

FW: Oakland has seen a rash of school closures in the last several years. Why have local elites pushed to close these schools?

CS: The short answer is austerity. School budgets in Oakland have declined for a long time, and though there is a bit more money in the budget now due to some level of economic recovery, it’s nothing compared to what’s been cut in the past years of downturn and crisis. As a result, the OUSD takes the austerity route: cutback on staff, schools, and programs and attempt to do more with less. It’s the everyday means through which the public sector carries out capitalist exploitation.

Oakland in particular also has a large state debt that was imposed on it when the state took over the district in the early 2000s. The takeover was carried out due to the fact that the district had terribly mismanaged funds, but the state decided to impose a 100million dollar loan on OUSD, which means to this day the district is paying 6-8million in principal/interest yearly. So we see a similar dynamic of structural adjustment and austerity as a result of declining public funds and imposed “bailouts” that we see in countries like Greece.

FW: What has been the response over the last several years by the official worker organizations, the school teachers and employees unions to these attacks? In what ways have these actions been hindered by bureaucratic organization and reformist politics?

CS: The teacher’s union, OEA, while one of the more progressive unions around has not fought back as hard as it could have. OEA has been beaten down by the OUSD for the past few years, and also weakened internally by neoliberal teachers associated with GO Public Schools – a nonprofit front group for the Roger’s Foundation, the philanthropic wing of the Dreyer’s Ice Cream firm. Further, the “team concept” has dominated among the OEA leadership – this means that they have sought to “collaborate” on equal terms with the OUSD; this has functionally lead to concessions during contract negotiations, and weak organizing on issues outside the contract.

This has in a very real way raised the question: what should revolutionaries, radicals and progressive folks in OEA do? There has not been a concerted effort to run candidates to take over union leadership in many years. This is now on the agenda because the efforts by militant teachers to take action on the shop floor through work-to-rule has spread from one school to 30 schools from late January to now. Further, militant teachers have independently organized to fight against the privatization and displacement of Dewey High school, and now against the attempt to privatize the 5 schools. If we had the backing of the union leadership, it would be much easier to put out broad statements in support of all this organizing, use union resources to develop the rank and file initiatives, and carry out more militant bargaining with the employers.

It’s easy for some of us as revolutionaries to assume that it’s never good to take leadership positions in unions, but when you’re on the ground constantly being undermined by the inertia of the current leadership you see the need to really take the question seriously.

FW: Recently, teachers in the Hayward area have staged work to rule actions against attacks on health care. Do you see these actions spreading?

CS: Unfortunately I am not in touch with Hayward teachers, but as I mentioned above we currently have over 30 schools out of about 90 doing work to rule; and our work to rule is completely rank and file initiated – the official leadership attempted to stop this from spreading by saying it would make us look “divided” but we’ve kept it going and it’s brought in a bunch of new school workers into direct action on the shop floor that have never done something like this before.

FW: In what ways have students been self-organizing in recent months against these closures? Have these actions been influenced by the recent revolts in Oakland?

CS: I would venture to say that the national rebellions that have happened have had a direct impact ont he consciousness of students, school workers and parents. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough of a direct linkage between the activists involved in street protests and the organizing happening in one of Oakland’s largest employers – OUSD. We would love to change that – people should hit us up at classroomstruggle [at] gmail.com if they want to strategize with us about how to fight privatization of schools, displacement of schools, and de-unionization.

OUSD Admin tried to tell the students to go off into another room while they were disrupting the "community engagement" meeting. Instead, the students linked arms and blocked the entrance to the side room, and then took over the stage.

FW: If people are interested in showing solidarity with this struggle, where can they go to hear updates and learn more?

CS: Classroomstruggle.org is one of the best websites on OUSD analysis and strategic reflections.

They should also check out FightForTheFive.wordpress.com for updates from the coalition forming against the closure/privatization of the 5 schools.