Clearly tenure and layoff rules are flawed. There has got to be something that works better for students and the teachers that serve them best. Shouldn’t we be focused on them?

OEA Email:
Are you 55 or older with at least five years of experience? 50 with at least 30? Over the winter break many of you will receive a letter from OUSD with some important information concerning OUSD’s new Early Retirement proposal. OUSD is offering to buy out employees who have the requisite years of experience in OUSD. Highlights of the program:
· OUSD will pay an employee 75% of the employee’s current yearly income if the employee quits the district effective the end of this school year.
· The money would not be given as a lump sum, but would be annuitized.
· The amount of buyout money would be divided into 60 equal payments and paid out over five years, or smaller payments paid out over a longer time at your option.
· There is no Health Care Benefit provided with early retirement. As with all retirees, early retirees will need to pay out-of-pocket to continue their health care. While we are trying to negotiate some health care reduction for retirees by asking HealthNet and Kaiser to keep early retirees at the lower “active pool” rate, it is unlikely that will occur. (See the table below for current monthly expenses for retiree health care.)
· However, buyout money could be used to pay for health benefits.

Kaiser Early Retiree ($ monthly)
HealthNet Early Retiree
($ monthly)
one person
two person
family
one person
two person
family
727.97
1455.94
2060.15
826.39
1624.15
2350.39

OEA and all the other employee unions made it clear to the district that we were not officially endorsing the buyout, in part because of the way it was rolled out without sufficient advance notice to allow us to communicate fully with our members, and also because of the high cost of retiree health care for those needing a “bridge to Medicare.” OEA also noted our concern with the potential loss of many experienced teachers, stating in a letter to the district:

“OEA has and will continue to advocate about the primary role experienced teachers and other certificated employees play in making a difference in the educational lives of children in most need and not the quick-fix fads and teacher bashing currently being promoted across the country. We continue to advocate for real measures of reform, which include changing the working and learning conditions for teachers and students through such things as lower class size, improved compensation, greater supports for students in need, among others. These measures would encourage experienced teachers to remain in the district.”

However, while we are concerned about the potential loss of experienced teachers in our district, we realize that the buyout proposal would be a benefit for some of you and that you would appreciate the opportunity to retire before the age of 65.
We wanted to let you know the Early Retirement letter is coming so that you can have some time to start thinking about the proposal. OEA will have resources available for those of you who may be considering retirement as a result of this buyout. We will keep you posted about those plans.

1) Administrators make the difference in the success of the school. Good administrators require discipline at all levels (in both senses of the word). They demand that all teachers perform and maintain high standards in the academic areas as well as in the social interactions of the students. They are responsible for setting the tone of the school. They also have the tools to remove nonperforming staff. Yes it takes some doing, but it is their job. Administrators that hold children and families accountable for the childrens’ behavior have less safety issues at school and therefore more time to spend on actual academics. Here comes success.

2) From about 4th grade on, children like learning real things. Marginal readers become real readers when presented with text and information that interests them (in schools where science and history are well taught kids read, they want to, and they find out that conquistadors are cool – they had swords). This also allows children to learn critical thinking skills, and as often as not they want to research and learn more. This has been true with the kids I worked with in the flats and the hills.

3) Teachers old and young need to be committed to learning and revisiting what they do in their classrooms using all the data available to them. When a teacher does any thing because it keeps them organized, and not because it furthers the learning goals of the students in the class, the teacher needs to retool. (Can be yearly, daily, hourly or all of the above.

4) The rules regarding job protections need to be maintained, because power is an absolute and the power to hire and fire needs to be tempered with accountability, not just because this year’s principal only likes teachers who came through their program, or have the same background or are willing to play dodge ball as team building activity (yes, dodge ball). The dropping of these sorts of job protections in the non-education world are part of the reason manufacturing jobs, and those lovely people who help us when our computers die are overseas.

4) We, as adults, need to understand that if we do not take care of, and offer options to the youth behind us, our society is going to become more divided. We need to focus on bringing jobs back that are diverse and good paying. We also need to make sure that we teach compassion and generosity (I know families should do this, but the world needs to reinforce it for the kids).

Those are my thoughts – I am sure as time progresses and our state population continues to refuse to pay for things it values (education, roads, police….) we will have to figure out where to go next for those things, and the answers will be interesting.

Obviously school “enrichment” is worthwhile, to a point. When you think your idea of enrichment can change lead into gold, you are doing more harm than good.

White liberals like to ignore the critical basics while they run after fantasies they believe will magically transform people into something they don’t want to be in the first place.

I’ve grown up in an era of black “firsts”. It’s a lot of fun to surprise people – there is a downside sometimes. I just have a problem with white liberals thinking they can magically transform people when they simultaneously ignore morals, discipline, verbal skills and every other foundational thing (usually because they don’t want to “upset” the chillun).

I can see this as soon as I walk into a ghetto classroom as a guest speaker.

This thread is on layoff rules. I believe civil service rules are clear and the argument is academic. The districts have to follow the rules and the labor contracts.

I believe the urban districts are on the way out and the employees just don’t get it. These schools will be supplanted by other schools. They will shrink. And if the state collapses – as seems likely – education will be increasingly automated or labor reduced anyway.

You are obsessed with the notion that student success comes from visiting the requisite number of art galleries or “enrichment”. You seem to think that if we put the ghetto kids on a bus to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and enough other attractions it will change them and they will turn white or jewish. Kind of like that scene from “To Sir With Love” where Sidney Potier takes the East End kids for an outing and they stop trying to stab each other.

You think Piedmont “develops critical thinking skills” by some magic classroom work (it’s that pixie dust theory again), and OUSD doesn’t. OUSD has got to shop around for better dust.

You assume the Piedmont parents generally do homework with their kids? Not working all the time to cover the mortgage and lifestyle payments or just being drunk (or otherwise busy) or divorced?? You think the “difference” is facetime with Mommie and Daddie?

What kind of a teacher are you? You believe in fairy tales.

Lower class people – and lower class adolescents – have no use for information they can’t use at once. They are present oriented and live only for the moment. If you think a classroom can add abstract concepts and long term research and learning to an unreceptive disinterested audience you are in the wrong profession. What you will do is run off the audience – by trying to sell them what they don’t want to buy. That’s what OUSD does with the black students and that’s why the black dropout rate is where it is. Just go ahead and add one more “graduation” requirement, like math or writing or foreign language or even classical music. Watch them run home.

You want to do something for the Oakland Blacks? You want to teach them to read and count? Return driver’s ed and training to OUSD. That’s a reason to go to school. Add an Automotive Tech program. Add any number of vocational programs – which include basic reading and math – you know, the 8th grade kind you need for an exit exam.

Stop telling these kids that they have to follow a Piedmont style college prep course and offer them something they can use immediately. Run a college prep program – a tough one that expels people who don’t keep up – up in the hills or at Oakland Tech or somewhere on it’s own. And let the students vote with their feet what they will commit to.

You will have greater success by all measures.

If you were to switch the Piedmont Teachers into Oakland ghetto schools the results for the ghetto would not significantly change. The ghetto students would still be poor students and the school administration would still prevent any disciplining of them.

The reason Piedmont Unified works and OUSD fails is that Piedmont will flunk and transfer out screw ups and Piedmont is full of better students. Oakland Unified has a dominant group of bad students, has no discipline and mixes good and bad students in the same campus and classroom. One bad apple can spoil the barrel and all that.

Given this definition of success, I would argue that we should be trying our darnedest to talk to the handful of 25 year olds out there making $200,000+/year in posh jobs to figure out what they think we should be doing to educate kids (they may never have been teachers themselves, but they probably had more great teachers than most of us have had)? Instead, we dismiss anyone’s contributions if they haven’t themselves been a teacher before, feel bad for our own teachers for having to work 50-60 hour weeks (there are lots of people out there working 70-100 hour weeks) and instead focus on fancy and meaningless terms like “scaffolding” and “whole child” that are invented by professors at teaching schools who, let’s be frank, probably don’t know good teaching when they see it.