American Studies 102:Â Oakland | City - University of California
2019 TEACHERS' STRIKE:
THE STRUGGLE WITH FUNDING AND PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE CITY OF OAKLAND
"Oakland can’t afford any more years of neglected, underfunded schools. If we stand idly by while the leadership of the Oakland Unified School District closes 24 out of 86 public schools, then students and families will pay the price for generations." - Keith Brown, President of the Oakland Education Association, February 19, 2019
FEBRUARY 21, 2019: The Strike Begins
More than 3,000 teachers and staff from schools in the Oakland Unified School District, unionized under the Oakland Education Association, walk off the job. On February 4th, 95% of the union vote to authorize the strike due to concerns over low pay, large class sizes, high student to teacher classroom ratios, lack of support staff, and possibilities of school closures, among many other issues, after spending 18 months negotiating with the district. Teachers, alongside their students and community members, picket in front of all 86 public schools in Oakland. This strike will be the longest and largest since the 1996 “Classrooms First!” strike, when Oakland teachers walked out for smaller class sizes, higher wages, and more classroom supplies. Oakland becomes one of many cities that participates in the larger #RedForEd wave of teacher's strikes across the nation, alongside teachers in Los Angeles, West Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, and more.
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Rafael Casal is an artist based in the Bay Area, particularly in Berkeley and Oakland. He wrote, starred, and produced the 2018 film Blindspotting set in Oakland alongside Daveed Diggs.
OAKLAND UNIFIED
Oakland Unified School District is a diverse public education district, consisting of 87 district-run K-12 schools and 34 authorized charter schools. In 2018-2019, the district served 50,077 students with the majority of students being Latinx or Black. 50.2% of students speak a language other than English at home, and 33.0% are considered English language learners. OUSD also serves a significant number of newcomer students– 2,547– from refugee, asylee, or unaccompanied immigrant backgrounds.
However, OUSD suffers from chronic underfunding and administrative bloat. Like many other school districts in the state, the district receives only a limited amount of state funding and relies heavily on local taxes to stay afloat. The funding issue is only compounded by a history of fiscal mismanagement. In 2003, the district became insolvent and required a $100 million state bailout loan that it struggles to pay back today. In 2018, an independent state investigation discovered a pattern of unsustainable spending, a lack of basic accounting practices, and misuse of various funds.
“At an institutional level, Oakland Unified has been a nationally known dysfunctional district for probably the last 20 years– and that’s not unique to the school district in Oakland. In Oakland Unified, there have been various iterations of financial mismanagement and perhaps a legacy of past mistakes.” - S, a former teacher at OUSD, April 9, 2020
CHARTER SCHOOLS
Oakland Unified aims to implement the “portfolio model” of running schools, which provides additional autonomy to schools. Parents are allowed to choose the schools their child may attend, and a school’s performance is measured in student-based metrics, such as test scores. Charter schools do particularly well under this model, and from a funding perspective, it offers the possibility for districts to reduce operating and construction costs by placing the burden on the charter. However, teachers' unions say that this type of model destabilizes district funding and affects the students most in need.
The problem is that school funding is heavily based on student attendance. With school choice, students– primarily only those with the resources and privilege to do so– can choose to leave their neighborhood schools and attend a smaller, better resourced charter school further away. This leaves public schools with lower funding due to lower overall attendance and a disproportionate level of students with disabilities, who tend to cost more as the school needs to hire specialists for these students. Oakland Unified in 2020 serves only 37,000 students compared to 50,000 in 2018. In 2016-2017, a California Teachers Association report also found that Oakland charter schools only enrolled about 7.67 of students with disabilities compared to 13.58 percent at public schools. This higher needs population, combined with legacy costs and decreasing attendance and funding, places significant strain on Oakland public schools.
As a solution, OUSD proposed the closure of 24 public schools to help consolidate costs. This issue became a major issue for the strikers and the Oakland Education Association, which argued that this was inequitable, as community schools predominantly served underprivileged Black and brown students who could not afford to attend school outside of their local neighborhood.
INTERVIEW WITH POLICY ANALYST AND FORMER OUSD TEACHER
WHY DID THE STRIKE HAPPEN?
In some ways, the biggest motivation for striking is a situation where people are underpaid and they’re not happy with their working conditions. I think the pay was especially poor; in my seventh year teaching, with a master’s degree in education, I made $50,500 in Oakland. If I was still teaching in Berkeley, I could make $10,000 more than that. So, I would essentially be doing a harder job with kids who would experience more trauma, less supplies, bigger class sizes, and significantly less pay. Oakland teachers were categorically just underpaid. And for me, there was definitely a dissatisfaction with the way newcomers were being served at the elementary level.
WHAT ARE THE ISSUES WITH OUSD?
At an institutional level, Oakland Unified has been a nationally known dysfunctional district for the last 20 years - and that’s not unique to the school district in Oakland. There’s historic dysfunction within the city, and in Oakland Unified, there have been various iterations of financial mismanagement and perhaps a legacy of past mistakes. There’s also a history of mistrust between the district and the union because repeated administrations have failed teachers, and the district has proven to be an untrustworthy partner.
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS?
The charterization rate in Oakland is higher than any other city in California - it’s about 30 percent. I’ve taught at charters and district schools, and there’s nothing inherently evil about a charter. But what happens is that a charter destabilizes district finances; in the very short term, it affects the fixed costs, leaving the district with operating shortfalls on a very regular basis. You also have the basic phenomenon with charter schools in which those who are interested and able in navigating the charter application process leave the public district system, and the students who are left behind are disproportionately those with serious special needs, or disengaged parents, or undocumented folks, or those who just don’t have the language skills or bureaucratic know how to navigate that, until you’re left with a significantly higher need population in district schools.
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF FUNDING?
Oakland is very different from the rest of the state, but also the Bay Area in general. Under Proposition 13, 40% of the state budget every year is expected to go to education, which is a lot but still not very much. As a result, school funding is dependent on a local control funding formula, which is supposed to privilege English learners, socieconomically disadvantaged youth, and foster youth, but there’s just not enough tax dollars in Oakland. The closest analog is probably San Francisco, right across the Bay. Both Oakland and San Francisco are equity minded, but the funding and history is better in San Francisco. If you’re offered the same job, San Francisco would pay you $120,000, but Oakland would pay you $90,000, and you would still have a bigger impact in San Francisco. Being in the worst housing market around gives San Francisco a competitive advantage in hiring at every position, which further increases the inequity in Oakland.
Interview with Ismael Armendariz
Ismael Armendariz is Oakland Education's 1st Vice President. Before his work with OEA during and after the Teachers' Strike, Mr. Armendariz worked as a special educator at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland.
K-12 FUNDING AT THE STATE LEVEL
K-12 education in the United States is dependent on a mix of local, state, and federal funding. In the state of California, schools are primarily funded through two avenues: the state and local sources. However, California is ranked 41st in the nation for per-pupil spending when adjusted for cost of living, spending $10,291 per student, or $1,900 lower than the national average.
This is due to the history of taxation and funding in California. Before the 1970s, schools were primarily funded by local property taxes. This led to significant disparities between neighborhoods; oftentimes, wealthier communities were able to provide children with disproportionately greater access to educational opportunities due to higher property tax revenue. In 1971, the Supreme Court of California held in Serrano v. Priest that this practice violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by discriminating against poor students and making “the quality of a child’s education a function of the wealth of his parents and neighbors.”
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In part due to this case, Californians passed Proposition 13 in 1978, which significantly limited property taxes and created a supermajority in the legislature to increase statewide taxes. For education, this was supposed to equalize funding across districts. However, as a result of Proposition 13, school districts lost a significant portion of their revenue. Before Proposition 13, school budgets consisted of 60% local funds and 30% state funding. After Proposition 13, this switched - budgets consisted of around 20% local fund and 60% state funds. As a result, with limited state funding, local schools lost a large portion of their budgets, as per pupil spending dropped significantly. Californians attempted to fix this with Proposition 98 in 1988 by setting a minimum percentage of the state budget to be spent on K-12 education. However, that minimum has been treated as a ceiling, rather than a floor, and school districts have never been able to regain the same level of funding.
The state has attempted to solve this issue with a local control funding formula, which funds schools based on their demographics, attendance, need, and other factors. The City of Oakland attempted to supplement this by implementing parcel taxes, but the funding is still not enough, especially due to past debts, administrative overspending, reduced attendance, and other issues. These funding issues trickle down to the teachers. Combined with the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area, teachers with OUSD must deal with low salaries, small staff sizes, low retention rates, and increased proportions of special needs students. Oakland students and families too are affected by this, as they face lower quality of education and loss of neighborhood schools.
FEBRUARY 28, 2019: The Strike Ends
OEA and OUSD reach a deal, with a contract that ensures that teachers receive an 11 percent pay raise over the next four years and a 3 percent bonus. OUSD agrees to hire more support staff– counselors, psychologists, special education teachers– reduce class sizes, and provide nurses with raises and bonuses as well. The 24 schools slated for closure will remain open.
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However, OEA and OUSD also agree that there must be a statewide moratorium on the formation of charter schools. At the root of the issue is the problem of education funding in California; charter schools and OUSD's administrative problem compound the issue. To deal with the issue of public education funding in Oakland– and the rest of California–– one solution lies in legislation and taxation to ensure that school districts receive adequate funding and are able to support all of their students in an equitable way.
"We will strike with our parents, whose overwhelming support in the last few weeks has been felt by every single teacher in Oakland. We will strike for our students, we will strike for educational justice, we will strike for racial justice, and we will strike for the future of public education in Oakland. Our students, families, and community are the center of everything Oakland educators do, and we are all in the fight for the schools Oakland students serve together." - Keith Brown, President of the OEA, February 16, 2019
SOURCES: INFORMATION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ian Castro
Ian is a Media Studies and Microbial Biology major at the University of California, Berkeley. He works as an undergraduate student instructor with the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society, teaching the courses Data 6: Introduction to Computational Thinking, Data 8: Foundations of Data Science, and Information 290: Introduction to Data Science for Graduate Students. He is interested in issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in higher education, which led him to research Oakland Unified.