Something is clearly wrong with you.
1. If you know that the district has been under state control for the last 6 years, why would you blame the current school board for what is currently wrong with the district fiscally? Shouldn’t you blame the state? There are many reasons that we got in this predicament. One of the reasons is that Chaconas attempted to give teachers a pay raise (that would raise Oakland teacher salaries from being at the bottom to somewhere in the middle). Unfortunately (or fortunately) when you raise salaries, you also increase retention rates. As more teachers stay, their pay increases. I suppose too many teachers stayed. Don’t worry. We don’t have that problem anymore. We run on cheap new teachers now. The state takeover had nothing to do with student performance–it was pretty much just about money. The dropout rate is still high, students still perform poorly and we’re $15M in debt (the state in six years couldn’t figure out where the money was) but all of a sudden we start to get local control back and in a few months, we finally figure out where the money is . . . hmmmm . . . coincidence? who knows?

Re: Open Court. I’m not a fan (trust me) but it (supposedly) has helped with more students learning to read and helping with decoding for the students that started out with the lowest skills. Can we do better? yes and we should. Our problem is not necessarily an Open Court problem.

Re: charter schools. Yes. The number of students in charter schools is going up but not at the same rate that numbers in OUSD are going down and the numbers are private schools aren’t going up either. So where are the kids? Some say that many families can’t afford to live in Oakland. The housing boom pushed many families to Pittsburg, Vallejo, Stockton. Many of the new Oakland residents are childless (just their dogs). Why don’t you work on those stats and get back to me.

Closing the GAP at the expense of the highest performing students: Are you serious? You’re not really serious, are you? Would you suggest that we raise the scores of the high-performing students at the expense of low-performing students? Why are you so interested in test scores for high-performing students anyway? That’s not education!!! I have high-performing children. I care about them being kind, caring citizens who are creative, thoughtful, critical thinkers. I want them to be socially aware, well-rounded, culturally aware, multi-lingual. There are a lot of things I want my sons to be . . . high-scoring is not high on my list but if that’s what’s important to you. Don’t worry the gap is going anywhere so don’t worry.

Not holding students accountable for their behavior: If you see that happening at a school, you should speak to that teacher (and offer support) as well as speak to the principal (and offer the support). It is unfair and inaccurate to offer a sweeping generalization. Are you basing this on some kind of data or what you have seen in individual classrooms. Do you have data (or even anecdotal evidence beyond “when I was a kid” to show that suspensions and expulsions work to improve student behavior? No, you don’t. Why? Because that’s not true! What about if teachers worked closely with parents and communities to support children. What if when a student acted crazy, the teacher went to their house and sat down with their parents to figure out how to best support that child? What if the teacher lived in the same community and saw the parents at church or temple, at baseball games, and baby showers? Do you think you would see different behavioral outcomes? I think so. I would imagine that a teacher would get a negative performance review not for one referral but a teacher who everyday turns in a stack of referrals is a poor teacher (I’m not saying that they can’t become a good teacher but clearly there are classroom management issues going on that need to be addressed . . . by the teacher). Show me a teacher giving a stack of referrals to the principal and I’ll show you a teacher who is unorganized, inexperienced, and incompetent of teaching in that setting.

Not holding parents accountable for their behavior: You must be the perfect parent. I love when parents just KNOW they know it all (that sounds like a parent who’s never had a teenager). Humble yourself for a moment and reflect on the resources that are available to you as a parent that maybe other parents don’t have. Let’s not even talk about parents with addictions. Those are sicknesses (I personally advocate for treating drug addiction as a public health issue and not as a criminal issue but that’s me). Besides, there are some things that teachers can’t change–parents are one of those things. There are some things that teachers CAN change though (sphere of influence): educational outcomes. A child with really bad parents can still learn to read and write and do math. That child can also learn to sit still and raise their hand and wait to be called on. It happens all the times in classrooms and schools across the country.

CPS: This was already addressed. Did this happen at the same school with the same principal or different schools? I can tell you that this is not widespread. Unfortunately, children taking care of younger siblings or the elderly is widespread. Why don’t we start thinking of ways to address that issue? Like affordable childcare and healthcare for our elderly?

Your studies: You look at a couple of studies that fit what YOU want and decide that the board is incompetent. Really? Honey, that’s not how data works. Why don’t you talk to your school board representative to find out what data they are looking at? Maybe they would be very interested in your data and you can actually make a difference instead of complaining. These people are human beings (I don’t know any personally but they appear to be human beings). Does the job even have a paycheck attached to it? They are PUBLIC SERVANTS. They work for us so we should be just as involved not waiting for them to FIX everything.

A teacher is a mandated reporter of child abuse/neglect. That duty to report cannot be countermanded by the school district, and cannot be restricted. Any OUSD attempt to do so should be addressed quickly by the Teacher’s Union, with an injunction if required. Teachers who improperly obey the district’s orders not to comply with the reporting law subject themselves to criminal and civil liability.

It doesn’t surprise me that OUSD would do such a thing. I am not surprised they would flout the law, that they would subject the teachers to liability, or that they would create ambiguity that would expose students to danger and risk of harm. The reason I’m not surprised is that I seriously doubt OUSD cares a whit about the safety or well being of students they don’t provide “schools” for. If you cared about the kids and their futures you wouldn’t raise them in the schools to be undisciplined, unemployable, uneducated people at age 18.

And than blame the results the school board created on bad teachers or bad parents (not bad OUSD Schools).

I clearly understand that the schools are not CPS and cannot act as such. But the principals and even the school board has required that teachers not call CPS directly, but go through the principals. If the principal does not see or hear of physical or sexual abuse, only absenteeism, they do not call CPS to get the child back in school.

Also, it is not my intention to lay blame. Only to state that as a district our policies, everything from the simple annual school calendar to the complicated closing the GAP is given the same bureaucracy levels (only one year calendar used as a bargaining chip and the rigid teaching of page 137 on school day 38 whether the child has advanced past the material or is two grade levels behind.)

The school district needs to accept responsibility because their words have stated one objective and their deeds match another. If a teacher were to say in fifth grade we will study the American Revolution and you must read a novel taking place in that time period, then assign Little House on the Prairie, there would be a disparity. Students would be confused, parents would be confused, the students would not have learned the fifth grade standards and it would not be placing blame on the teacher to say, you said we were studying the American Revolution, yet your reading material did not support that and we did not learn what we were supposed to be learning.

I agree about two parent families. What I have found is that often in after school, library and tutoring programs the individuals are better equipped than parents to help with homework and assignments. On the lower end of the socio-economic scale, parents believe it is the school’s job to make their children learn the material. Often, teen moms are simply not equipped to help with their children’s educational needs.

The school board members need to be willing to put in the time and effort to read the studies, understand them and make decisions based on them. I know the school board members have other jobs. I know their compensation is low. But they have a contract to do a job for a certain amount of pay to the best of their ability. I am not sure that each member has fulfilled that contract.

In general, I haven’t been impressed with the school board at my district down the freeway which just rubber stamps the superintendent’s desires. Since OUSD’s school board has only recently had some power granted back, we are in a different position to create a more pro-active school board. I agree that it is important to have a vision, a plan, and systems set in place to realize the plan and the vision. But all parties must be part of this: all unions, parents, students, and administrators.

Some of what people are describing is work that should be done by site administrators. Although all schools should follow the rules and policies established by the school board, site administrators should be held accountable for what is happening at their sites. If a school is lacking a principal, teachers, enough substitutes on a given day so that classes aren’t doubled up, etc., then it is the school board’s responsibility to rectify that situation. It is not the job of the school board to monitor parental behavior and whether they get their kids to school on time, fed, and with homework done. The school board can have a policy on that, but ultimately, they are not CPS and don’t have unlimited resources to make that happen.

What they can do, though, is offer more support to the sites, hold district administration accountable, scrutinize the policies handed down by the superintendent and other administrators, mind the money, and listen to the complaints of teachers, other staff, parents, and students and then do something about them. Too often, school board members don’t take the time to know what it is they need to know, to read, understand, and think about what it is they are voting on, and to spend time at the various school sites seeing what teachers are teaching, students are learning, and what the bathrooms and the play yards are like, and whether the principal is going around and observing and evaluating teachers. I would venture a guess that most of our school board members do not routinely visit the schools they are supposed to be representing. How can they possibly know what is going on if they don’t do even that?

I don’t believe we need more corporate types running our school boards. Look what they’ve done to our economy? I agree that schools in so many ways were better in the past. But I don’t know if that’s because the school boards were better or if because our society’s support for public education was far stronger. For one, there was a lot of support for arts programming. Schools were funded and we didn’t have to beg for money or decide whether we will fund toilet paper for the bathrooms or photocopy paper for the classrooms. When I was a kid in the 60s there were far fewer two-working parent families and single-parent homes so kids weren’t home alone after school or spending hours in after care. And we weren’t taught to the test and the tests didn’t have the high stakes they have now. And don’t even get me started on California’s ridiculous and often developmentally-inappropriate standards. When I was a kid, there were no standards that teachers had to teach.

It is really easy to lay the blame at someone’s feet, such as the school board or the teachers or even the parents. But is it really useful?

OUSD is not in the business of operating “schools”. Maybe the Charters are, I know the private schools are.