Elections aren’t good because an elected minor official can do things like, oh, I don’t know, make out with (and probably screw) 17 year-old student, and not easily be fired. If Chris Dobbins served at the pleasure of the Mayor, he would be long gone by now.

Oakland is ABSURDLY over-governed. There are over 60 officials that are elected to represent some part of Oakland on county issued ballots. If you include judges that have to be confirmed by the electorate, it gets up into the 90s.

With that many electeds, most of the minor positions are filled by people who get the best union or newpaper endorsements, or who’s names look best on the ballot, or who’s faces look best in the voter guide. Very few people pay any attention to debates or platform statements when they vote for an EBMUD director.

We should reduce the elected officials in this town to 9. Scrap the election of the City Attorney, scrap the election of the Auditor, and leave us with the council and the Mayor. Everybody else should be appointed, and easily dismissed. Being elected makes people too powerful and too hard to get rid of if they’re unscrupulous or incompetent.

Why? This oversight is a job for technocrats, and the oversight of technocrats is a job for legislators and executive elected officials. Making a technical, specialized job an elected position is a sure fire way to fill that job with a wannabe politician instead of a competent specialist.

Look at David Kakishiba: That idiot wrote the Measure OO ballot measure so badly that he nearly bankrupted the city. If he can’t do math, how do we expect him to ensure that our kids can?

By going to http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/990search.php I was able to locate the 2008 990 for Aspire Public Schools (EIN 943311088). According to this document, President & CEO Don Shalvey (who recently stepped down to take a position with the Gates Foundation) earned $190,587 in compensation and $14,483 in contributions to employee benefit plans & deferred compensation during 2007.

The enrollment for the Aspire schools which existed during the 2007-08 school year (16) was 5774 students. You can find enrollment figures on DataQuest.

On the list of Aspire’s five highest paid employees was the principal at one of their Oakland schools, Berkeley Maynard (enrollment of 307 students). Kristyn Klei earned $119,087 and was given $16,660 in contributions to employee benefit plans & deferred compensation. This is all public information since Aspire Public Schools operates as a non-profit organization.

One of my big issues these days is that principals for Oakland’s small secondary schools (350-400 kids) are earning nearly the same amount as principals of our large comprehensive high schools with 1700-2000 students. The challenges, issues and dynamics at the larger schools should necessitate that those schools are provided with leaders who get paid more.

Since many Oakland parents and students prefer the range of classes and activities offered at the large schools – and believe a small school setting would be much too limiting – OUSD needs to keep its remaining comprehensives strong and intact so it can offer ALL types of families the “choice” they prefer. I suspect that these schools may have been given short shrift in recent years since so much administrative attention was given to developing and opening the small schools. By the way, a recent report by the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs revealed that the opening so many small schools caused “collateral damage” to the existing large high schools there. One side effect of the small high schools here is the dramatic shrinking of the pool of AP’s who are acquiring the necessary experience to allow them to move up to principal positions at large school sites.

The district desperately needs to re-evaluate how much it pays the principals who manage the large schools, so it can improve its ability to attract strong candidates. And aside from the money, I know of several very good assistant principals who fled the district because they were not properly wooed, so the district also needs to increase its focus on identifying and nurturing its strong potential leaders who actually like working in Oakland. I don’t think much of this was done in recent years and I hope the new superintendent will take it on. A strong organization knows that doing this is an important part of keeping itself strong.

Katy, do you have any info on these charter schools/CMOs and how much goes towards overhead administrative costs?

Are these CEOs pulling in these types of salaries for the couple of thousand students that they serve? Is that information public and/or should it be part of this conversation given that is a huge cost for educating our city’s children?

It would seem to fit into a similar argument line from Equois post with regards to the failures of the district. How much does it cost on the charter school side to replicate the very positions that already exist within the district?

Wow