Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/15938
Oakland schools suffer from half-baked reforms A line on the playground divides two Oakland schools — Reach Academy and Education for Change. Both schools share the site of what used to be Cox Elementary School. Oakland Education Association (OEA) member Katherine Clarke-Hines, a teacher at Reach Academy, says the line is a really a divi- sion between haves and have-nots. It’s difficult, she says, for those at her school to witness every day the advantages of those across the line at the char- ter school. “At the charter school they have coaches for subject matter,” says Clarke-Hines. “They have sports, they have manipulatives in their classrooms, their teachers have personal computers — and they also pick and choose their stu- dents.” Charters in Oakland created by been used to divide large schools into smaller schools. The combination of the small schools movement and charter school proliferation has had a negative impact on the urban dis- trict overall and should serve as a warning to others about accepting money with strings at- tached, says Olson-Jones. Oakland has 32 charter schools that en- Betty Olson-Jones Oakland Education Association corporate foundations have drained money from the district, says Betty Olson-Jones, OEA president, because they decrease attendance and per-pupil funding from mainstream schools while operating costs stay the same. In Oakland, foundation money has also roll 18 percent of the K-12 population. Most were funded by corporate foun- dations within the past decade and are non-union. The Eli Broad Foundation gave $4.7 million to Aspire Public Schools, a Northern California charter company that has three schools in Oakland. The Walton Family Foundation also donated large sums to charter schools there. And New Schools Venture Fund — a nonprofit “venture philan- thropy” funded by corporate foundations — has also made hefty contri- butions to Oakland charters. “The agenda of those creating charters is to further erode public education,” asserts Man- ny Lopez, an OEA member who left Cox after the conversion to a non-union charter. “They talk about giving parents so-called options, but parents just want good neighborhood schools. And dividing schools into really small schools is not cost-effective either.” Twenty to 30 Oakland schools may be closed. Some are small schools created by the breakup of large schools from Gates Founda- tion funding. But the five-year Gates grants have dried up, and the schools are too expen- sive to continue operation, especially given the current state budget crisis. Small schools translate into big costs, since each has its own administrators and support LEFT: Oakland Education Association member Katherine Clarke-Hines, a teacher at Reach Academy. 14 California Educator | SEPTEMBER 2010 staff, even if it shares a campus with other small schools. So now Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is liable for “excessive admin- istrative costs” to the state for 78 excess ad- ministrators and must pay fines. Fremont High School was a large compre- hensive high school in Oakland that was di- vided into four small schools in 2003. Paul Robeson School of Visual and Performing Arts, which hasn’t been able to afford arts in quite some time, closed in June. Craig Gordon, a social studies teacher at Robeson, said he was very unhappy at the top-down decision to see Fremont divided into smaller schools, but thought that if done right, it could benefit students. He added that many people confuse small schools with small class size, but some class- es actually got larger, with fewer teachers at each school to teach each subject. Electives were reduced or eliminated due to the small teaching staff. Three of the small schools at Fremont still have AP classes, but Robeson In LAUSD corporate A year ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced plans to push through a proposal to allow public charter school operators and other outside groups to bid for control of 50 new schools and hundreds of existing schools over several years. In a victory for teachers, labor and public education, the Los Angeles Unified board of education ultimately decided to hand over 29 out of 36 schools to teacher- led groups in the district. Nonetheless, there are 161 charter schools in LAUSD, serving approximately 58,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Nearly all of them are funded by private corporate money issued through foundation grants. And much of it comes from Eli Broad, a retired life insurance magnate and homebuilder who is a staunch believer that schools should be run like businesses. In 2007, the Broad Foundation issued $10 million in grants to the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools to open 13 new charter schools. In 2008, Broad awarded $23.3 million in grants to three charter school organizations: KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Aspire Public Schools, and Pacific Charter School Development. These grants brought the total Broad Foundation investment