Spearman just called me up to say she was about to resign her presidency, a post she has held for just four months. She said she came to this decision on her own, and that no one else pressured her to do so. She will remain on the school board.

“I just don’t think I was effective,” she said. “My management style is just different than most.”

A new board president will be elected tomorrow at a special meeting that begins at 5 p.m. Spearman says Noel Gallo, the current VP, is most likely to become the next board prez. Gallo is listed as “acting president” on the agenda.

“I like to speak my mind,” Spearman said. “I don’t like to be in the forefront.”

Anyone who has attended an Oakland board meeting can certainly attest to the first half of her statement. Still, I wonder what precipitated this.

Like Michael Moore Sr., Saddler is an Oakland native with a long history with the school district, beginning as a teacher in 1979 (She attended the Anna Head School for Girls, which is now Head-Royce, for 12 years).

While chatting with her briefly today, I learned that she was the teachers union president between 1986 and 1992 – a time of labor peace, she said. She also served four years as the City of Oakland’s Education Legislative Analyst under then-Mayor Elihu Harris before returning to OUSD.

“I know so much about what’s happened and what’s been tried; I’ve worked with so many superintendents,” Saddler said. “I just know that we can turn a corner if if we continue this work we’ve been doing.”

At this moment, the school board is supposed to be narrowing down the list, and interviews start soon.

Save the Date: May 20 is the day in which the top two or three finalists will be presented to the community, likely at the school district office. I don’t believe the time is posted.

For now, I present you with two would-be leaders of the Oakland Unified School District: Michael Moore Sr. and Hae-Sin Thomas. They won’t know until tomorrow night whether they are among the candidates that the school board and its advisory committee will interview.

Michael Moore is a 29-year veteran of Oakland Unified who graduated from Oakland High School in 1975. He started out as a school security officer, and has since served OUSD in a dizzying array of capacities (15 in all, he said), from a food service truck driver to a middle school teacher and dean to a Senior Change Leader for the district’s Expect Success project. Now, he heads the Oakland Athletic League and supervises the district’s Procurement and Distribution Division.

His philosophy, in five words? “You don’t fix, you build.”

Moore says he’s not looking to build his resume, though. “I hope it’s obvious from my body of work that I love Oakland and I love the district,” he told me today. “I know I can do the job.”

Hae-Sin Thomas also confirmed today that she is in the candidate pool. Thomas is the president and CEO of a new educational consulting non-profit, urbanED Solutions. Before that, she oversaw the design and opening of Oakland’s new, small schools as a Network Executive Officer for OUSD’s New School Network. Thomas, a former Teach for America teacher, was the founding principal of ASCEND, a small elementary school in East Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.

You can see her public profile here.

Have some leads on other candidates or their qualifications? By all means, send them my way, at kmurphy@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Today marks the end of hundreds of adult education programs for seniors and the disabled — in Oakland, alone. Across the state, classes that once provided a source of needed stimulation for the elderly are falling by the wayside.

One reason behind this phenomenon is a 15-20 percent cut in state funding. But what really appears to be undermining some adult school programs more than others is a policy shift. California school districts can now take from the adult education fund to cover their expenses. To prevent this from happening, many adult schools are favoring programs with a clear benefit to their school districts — diploma classes, parenting programs and the like – rather than classes for those with mid-stage dementia, for example.

I’ve received a number of calls today from people who are crushed by what’s happening. Some people felt that the Oakland adult education program overreacted and cut too much (254 classes have closed, 206 of which are for “older adults”), especially since the district — as of now — doesn’t plan to dip into the adult education fund next year.

What do you think? You can read the story here.

Of the $100 billion earmarked for schools in the federal stimulus package, Duncan says, the government has about $5 billion in discretionary funds. With that “unprecedented” amount of money, he said, “We’re gonna work exclusively with those states and those districts that are really willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better.”

I forgot to mention earlier that Duncan wrote a letter to the participants of the performance pay conference I attended on Monday commending them on their “willingness to engage one another in dialogue about how new forms of teacher compensation can help us to get the results we expect from our schools and our students.”

There was a sense of urgency at the conference, at least by some, and it was clear that it was tied to these federal dollars. Should Oakland act quickly to get in on some of these discretionary dollars?

I didn’t stay until after 2 a.m., when the meeting finally wrapped up, but one of the things that struck me from the first five hours of the meeting was the principal theme that emerged.

Dozens of people — parents, teachers, neighbors, and even City Councilwoman Desley Brooks — urged the board to keep Al Sye, the popular new Skyline High School principal who received a layoff notice this month after an investigation into the complaints of several staff members. There was also a supportive contingent from Maxwell Park, a newly redesigned/reopened elementary school whose principal, Mary-Louise Newling, got the same dreaded release letter, to staff’s dismay.

And then there was something you don’t see too often: a whole crew of teachers speaking out publicly against their principal. Teachers from CBIT, the Castlemont Business Information & Technology School, gave the board a letter –  apparently signed by 80 percent of the school’s staff — with a litany of academic, safety and management problems they say they have experienced under the leadership of Susan Ryan, the new principal.

In all, five Oakland principals learned this month that they had likely lost their jobs (as of June 30), said Jo Anna Lougin, executive director of the Oakland principals union, United Administrators of Oakland Schools. That includes Sye, Newling, Rachelle Sallee (Tilden), Michael Rothhammer (Garfield), and Ifeoma Obodozie (Joaquin Miller).

Lougin said this was the first year she could remember in which principals received final release notices in March, rather than in May. Typically at this time of year they get warnings of potential layoffs, or pink slips, like other district employees, she said. But this year, Lougin said, these principals have already been told that they’re out — but not until June 30, three months (and an entire high-stakes testing cycle) from now.

That doesn’t make sense, Lougin said. “They still have to run a school.”

What do you think?

Lopez is not your typical educrat, if there is such a thing. He’s all about the hard work and humilation approach to schooling, a la Ben Chavis – at least, when it comes to educating poor kids. He says this method would never fly in a more affluent community, nor would it be necessary; in fact, he went the Montessori route for his own preschool-age children.

When I visited the charter academy last fall, Lopez readily acknowledged that the school played mind games with its students in order to motivate them – and that he imposed a daily detention quota on at least one of his teachers (A former teacher had told me that he sometimes had to arbitrarily pick on kids to meet his quota. Lopez confirmed it was true).

The Oakland Charter Academy is not for everyone, but the kids there do seem to be learning. A lot. The instruction is very math-focused, and includes extra class time (after school, summer, some Saturdays) for kids who need to catch up. I wrote about the school and its skeptics after it won a National Blue Ribbon award last fall from the U.S. Department of Education for its huge test score gains. (See story here.)

This month, the Oakland Charter Academy was named one of two charter schools of the year by the California Charter Schools Association.

I should note, to all of you charter-phobes, that Lopez is not pro-charter school, even though he runs one. In fact, he likes to point out that there are too many bad ones in Oakland, in his opinion, and that they should close. At any rate, Jack O’Connell and the California Business for Education Excellence are happy about Lopez’s appointment. They have sent out releases applauding the new addition to the BOE.

In the mood for a good read? A couple of years ago, the East Bay Express ran a colorful cover story on Lopez, titled “The Method of King Jorge.”

photo by D. Ross Cameron/Tribune staff

Well, indirectly.

It’ll be in the paper tomorrow, but you can read it here.

photo courtesy of The Skyline Oracle

Tribune file photos of Ben Chavis and Yvette Felarca

Let’s just say that when I chose my furlough dates last month, I had no idea that the below event would be happening in the middle of my time away.

Ben Chavis, the infamously temperamental, “Bay Area liberals”-loathing former director of the American Indian Public Charter Schools is taking on Yvette Felarca, a likewise outspoken leader of BAMN (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary) and her colleague, Shanta Driver, in a debate about charter schools.

I wonder if OUSD is taking any additional security precautions.

With school board member Chris Dobbins moderating, Felarca and Driver are going to argue ”that charter schools are part of a new Jim Crow system of education that forces an increasing number of black and Latino students into separate, inferior schools.” (I don’t know which system they consider to be separate and inferior, as more than 80 percent of Oakland’s charter school students are black or Latino — and some of the city’s charter schools are better than others – but I suppose they are referring to district schools.)

Chavis is slated to take the opposite position, which is interesting because I don’t think he’s necessarily pro-charter as much as he is for his particular brand of education — and as much as he is against groups like BAMN. Here’s the flier:

Charter Schools: A Step Forward or Backward for Public Education?

A debate between opponents and advocates of charter schools is scheduled to take place Thursday, February 26th, at 5:00 PM in the OUSD Administration Building, Hunter Hall. In Oakland, and nationally, the growth of charter schools has been one of the most hotly contested changes in the educational system over the past ten years.

Arguing that charter schools are part of a new Jim Crow system of education that forces an increasing number of black and Latino students into separate, inferior schools will be Shanta Driver and Yvette Felarca, representatives of the civil rights group Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (BAMN).

Arguing that charter schools provide students with an education to enhance their academic skills in order to compete and be productive members of society will be Ben Chavez (sic), founder of the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, and Janet Roberts, current Principal of the American Indian Charter School.

Oakland Unified School Board Director Chris Dobbins will be moderating the event. Hunter Hall is located at 1025 2nd Avenue, near Laney College. The public is invited to attend and will have ample opportunities to pose questions to the speakers in what is sure to be a hotly contested debate.

Bill was a reporter and a beer blogger and, when I first started at the paper, he edited copy on Friday nights. He used to go out of his way to let me know when he liked something I had written. Then he’d shake his head and say how boring he found most articles about education.

Yesterday, I dug up an email Bill wrote me about a year ago. He had just read one of my pieces, which shall remain unnamed. “Fascinating, horrible, depressing,” he wrote. “Keep up the good work.”

He died early yesterday morning, almost two weeks after he was hit by a Muni train in San Francisco. Angela Hill wrote a humorous and touching obituary about him, which I thought I’d post. You can read it here.