Jerryifcation and Oakland Schools

Crony Profits Prioritized over Children's Education
by Frederico Antonio Salazar
(originally published in The Commemorator)

While the federal government passed another $350 billion tax cut for the wealthy in June, school districts around the nation announced more teacher layoffs, cutbacks in the number of school days and the cutting of yet more programs.
Although President Bush says, “No Child Left Behind,” his agenda seems to be making sure that no money is left behind either as his cronies at Bechtel, Halliburton and APL feast off of lucrative government contracts.
Bush has led the nation from an unprecendented government surplus of $10 billion to an historic federal deficit of $450 billion, and Governor Davis has led California into a $38 billion deficit.
With leadership like this, is it really any surprise that our schools are bankrupt as well?

The recent $100 million state buyout of the Oakland Unified School District may have made history for its size, but it is merely a continuation of the systemic assault on public school children that was institutionalized with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.
Hailed by conservatives as a “tax revolt,” Prop. 13 was really a sinister wedge used to forever divide Californians by pitting landowners against the state’s public school system.
The measure, written by a landlord attorney, put a cap on property taxes and shifted responsibility for collecting and allocating tax money from local governments to the state, irreversibly hampering local communities’ ability to adequately care for their citizens.
By cutting revenues, Prop 13 crippled state public education (as well as other services), cutting school funding in half overnight, and consequently, California has gone from being among the top five states in the nation to among the bottom ten in per-pupil education spending.
It is no wonder why, in the past 25 years since Prop. 13’s passage, California academic achievement in grades K-12 has likewise gone from top 5 in the nation to bottom 10.
While proponents of the “tax revolt” are quick to boast that Prop. 13 benefits low and middle income homeowners the most, they fail to point out that only 1 out of every four dollars lost to local governments remained in the pockets of residential homeowners.
According to Assemblymember Jackie Goldberg, “Commercial property owners reaped 40 percent of the savings, while over a third of the benefits from the property tax reduction went back to the state and federal government in the form of higher income taxes.”
Local governments were left with nothing but an increased dependence on the politicians in Sacramento. The state got all the money and made all the rules, and local communities just had to make do, often competing with each other for funding, and operating within strict spending restrictions.
In response, 25 of the state’s 58 counties passed so-called “Boston Tea Party” Resolutions in 1993; mostly symbolic legislation where the county purportedly refuses to send locally collected tax revenues to Sacramento. None have actually withheld money as of yet.

Also in 1993, the Compton Unified School District was seized by the California Department of Education in the third of what has now become six state takeovers.
Marketed as a remedy for mismanagement and corruption, the Compton model, last administered by state overseer Randolph Ward (the fifth to hold that post in Compton), prioritized fiscal solvency at the expense of the students.
Although fiscal solvency was restored, and the District was handed back to local control in 2003, the state takeover ultimately left the district still lagging academically, with less than 20% of the original state-mandated changes completed.
In 1997, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California filed a class action lawsuit against the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for failure to properly manage Compton USD and provide adequate education and a safe environment for its students.
The filing alleged that students were “deprived of basic educational opportunities” available to children in other districts, and cited a lack of textbooks, toilet paper, habitable facilities and certified teachers.
An LA Times article quoted then Gubernatorial Education Advisor Maureen DiMarco as saying, “If these schools were prisons, they would be shut down.”
In 2000, the suit was settled out of court, with the state guaranteeing that students from even the poorest districts would be guaranteed the right to an equal education opportunity under the state constitution.
The Richmond and Emeryville School districts were also taken over by the state in the 90s.
West Contra Costa School Board member George Harris III summed up the experience in a recent Oakland Tribune article: “What the state takeover did to our district, what we found out that no one really knew before, was that the number one priority of the State Office of Education was not the education of our children.”

In Oakland, a crisis occurred due to a lack of resources due in large part to local officials who had another agenda.
Immediately after assuming the position of Oakland Superintendent of Schools in 1997, Carole Quan was attacked by new State Senator Don Perata.
Despite raising academic performance, decreasing dropout rates and stepping up the pace of the district’s efforts to repair aging and neglected school buildings, Perata, who spent more time attacking Quan in the press than he did getting funding for the district, eventually succeeded in forcing her out of office in 1999.
Said Quan in response to Perata’s attacks, “It’s difficult when you have to cut a dollar a thousand ways.”

Two decades after signing Prop. 13 into state law as Governor, Jerry Brown mounted a successful campaign for Mayor of Oakland. The Bay Area housing market was hot at the height of the Dot.com boom, and the former governor promised to “redevelop” the downtown area so that it would be “more livable” for all of the outsiders flocking to the region.
Once elected, Brown unveiled his “10K Initiative” to attract 10,000 new high-income residents to Oakland by redeveloping 7 cluster areas in and around Downtown. Of course, such a plan required evicting the current residents of those cluster areas, and Brown diligently set about his work of “Jerryfication.”
Under Prop. 13, property is taxed at a fixed rate, and assessed at the market value at the time of the purchase. The only way for a city to get more tax dollars out of a property is for the property to be sold when its market value is higher. This is the motive for Brown’s agenda of evicting old Oakland residents in favor of newer ones.
Brown then entered into a five-year contract with the federal government that would allow the city to take over control of properties seized by the feds, and used this contract to create a mobile police command center to harass Oaklanders into submission (or run them out of town). This, as the infamous “Riders” were making headlines with a high-profile police corruption scandal.
In 2000, Dennis Chaconas assumed the reigns of an Oakland School District that was a perennial cellar dwellar in terms of performance.
Himself a product of Oakland schools, Chaconas set about the monumental task of improving the district within the tight fiscal confines brought about by Prop. 13.
Chaconas successfully experimented with small schools, and raised teachers’ salaries to be competitive in the region. An influx of credentialed teachers, a dropout rate that was cut in half and rising test scores throughout the district gave credence to his reforms, but his refusal to cut costs in other budget areas were about to catch up with him.
When a new accounting system was installed in 2002, it showed a $27 million debt that had gone unnoticed in the previous system.
To make matters worse, the district also mishandled a $40 million commercial loan when it faced a payroll crisis in 2002.
Oakland District Controller Romi Selfaison, Alameda County Superintendent Sheila Jordan and independent auditing firm KPMG all failed in their responsibility to monitor the district’s finances, but a large chunk of the blame can be attributed to “Jerryfication.”
Mayor Brown’s 10K initiative eroded the district’s enrollment as blue collar families were sent packing in favor of childless professionals.
Since state funding is allotted based on actual enrollment, but district budgets have to be made based on projections of the coming year’s enrollment, Brown’s three-year “Any Cause” eviction campaign came home to roost in the form of a $15 million deficit for Oakland schools.
Seizing on the opportunity, Sen. Perata launched an assault on Chaconas through the media.
The day after Chaconas released a controversial recovery plan for the district that would allow him and the school board to remain in power under the supervision of a state-appointed trustee, Perata told the Oakland Tribune that Chaconas had “done virtually nothing” for Oakland schools.
Although only the County Board of Education had the power to hire and fire superintendents, Perata was demanding the head of a second one in five years.

Despite his fiscal shortcomings, community groups rallied around Chaconas, whom they felt was good for academics and essential programs in the district. After all, his main contribution to the district’s debt was that he spent money in an effort to make the schools better for the students.
Chaconas was simply trying to do the same thing that Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy purports to do, which is put fully credentialed teachers in classrooms. Such a task in an urban district operating under the budget restraints of Prop. 13 is obviously impossible without additional funding.
Yet once again, Perata chose to attack an overwhelmed superintendent rather than flex his considerable political muscle to help Oakland kids.
Perata, who has designs on the Mayor’s office, is Senate Majority Leader, and is considered to be the front-runner to be the next Senate President.
He is basically one of the most powerful people in Sacramento, yet he did nothing to bring more funds into the District.
He co-authored a bill with Wilma Chan to maintain local control of the district, but did nothing to muster the seven votes needed to pass it out of the Senate Education Committee. He only submitted the bill to cover up for his public attack on Chaconas, and then let it die in committee.
In contrast, however, Perata’s bill seeking a $100 million bailout (district officials felt that they only needed about $35 million) from the state passed, despite being considered an “urgency” measure that required two-thirds approval in both the Senate and Assembly.
Before Governor Davis even signed off on the buyout though, Perata was already trying to sell off the District Headquarters property to help his friend at City Hall proceed with his 10K initiative, which targeted the property as one of its redevelopment cluster areas.
Perata claimed that the Lake Merritt Channel property could contribute $30 million to the district’s empty coffers, calling it “a really outstanding piece…for housing it would be really spectacular.”
Meanwhile, even though he had absolutely no say in the matter, Brown began actively maneuvering behind the scenes to try to handpick the overseer himself, and his first choice was a first-year graduate from a right-wing foundation that trains business executives to be superintendents.
Fortunately, it wasn’t his choice.
The state took control of Oakland schools in June, and appointed an overseer to implement their finances-before-academics agenda: Randolph Ward.
Chaconas was fired, the school board has been relegated to an advisory role, over a thousand workers have been pink slipped and several generations of Oakland children will now go through the school system without any parental control or oversight.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who appointed Ward, ordered the overseer to “put himself out of business as soon as possible.”
However, it took Compton 10 years to pay back a $20 million state loan. How can it be possible for Oakland to pay off a $100 million loan in even twice that amount of time?
The damage has been done.

The Prop. 13 “tax revolt” guaranteed that California’s public schools would forever be underfunded, and now that lack of funding has allowed the state to take local control of schools away from Oakland.
Since the politicians weren’t willing to fight for local control of Oakland schools, it is now even more important for the community to participate in the education of their children.
In wealthy communities, parents take up the slack through private schooling, PTA fundraising or non-profit foundations.
Lower income communities don’t have those same resources.
After touring Fremont and Castlemont High Schools in East Oakland, an emotional overseer Ward told a community forum that the schools “couldn’t have been a place where we send our children.”
Three years after an ACLU lawsuit proved that Ward’s Compton schools weren’t either, the resignation in his voice didn’t contain even a hint of optimism.
“I’m going to be honest with you, the state didn’t do a lot for us, we did a lot for ourselves,” said Compton High School science teacher Maxine Kemp.
If there is to be any hope for the future in Oakland, we will need to as well.