Oakland Schools Are Guinea Pigs in Billionaires’ Experiments

Oakland Schools Are Guinea Pigs in Billionaires’ Experiments

To the Editor:

Randy Ward’s regime is providing an assortment of social engineers with a “window of opportunity” to ram through some pet projects that would never see the light of day had there been voter-elected control over the Oakland schools.

The truth is Mr. Ward has no ideas of his own. Though an educator himself, he serves as the tough front man for billionaires who are using their tax-free foundations to destroy public education through the back door, since most anti-public school initiatives were defeated time after time at the polls.

One of the billionaires with the most juice in the Ward administration is pre-fab housing king Eli Broad, whose market-oriented superintendent training program recycles well-worn public officials and a bunch of retired military officers who know nothing concrete about the corporate sphere, having spent their lives in one of the largest and most wasteful bureaucracies in the world. Most can offer no realistic program f improving education since they have not the slightest experience as educators in a classroom or a school.

Broad’s idea is to create charter schools, competition among schools, schools that use pre-packaged curriculum and evaluate students and teachers based only on numerical tests. He is tearing up our schools - to replace them with what? There is no research that shows that any of these schemes lead to improved schools or student success.

It is well known that schools that are successful are the ones where teachers and students work together in mutually respectful and nurturing relationships. With no concern for these relationships, wonderful teachers and administrators are being driven out of this district in the name of “higher standards” that will be ignored when it comes to judging the new pet programs.

Schools that are successful are democratic: they respect children and adults. They seek input from teachers and their unions. They trust the judgment of parents, who after all are the students’ primary educators.

These disrespectful, undemocratic social engineers are using us as their guinea pigs. Does anyone believe they would have ever been allowed be to set up shop in Piedmont, Hillsborough or San Ramon?

Sincerely,

Oakland Teacher (Name withheld)