Oakland’s Teachers Will Strike Thursday to Protest Low Salaries, Fiscal Crisis, and School Closures | janresseger l #Unite4OaklandKids #WeAreOEA #WeAreCTA #strikeready #REDFORED

Oakland’s Teachers Will Strike Thursday to Protest Low Salaries, Fiscal Crisis, and School Closures | janresseger

Oakland’s Teachers Will Strike Thursday to Protest Low Salaries, Fiscal Crisis, and School Closures

A predictable and tragic perfect storm is brewing in Oakland, California, where teachers will strike Thursday to protest low salaries and untenable conditions for students. The teachers union also intends its strike to protest the school district’s five year plan to close 24 traditional public schools. Like Los Angeles, Oakland’s financial crisis is related to California’s embrace of charter schools and the school district’s adoption of portfolio school reform, a governance plan by which the district manages traditional public and charter schools as though they are  investments in a stock portfolio. The idea is to launch new schools and close low scoring schools and schools that become under-enrolled. It is imagined that the competition will drive school improvement, but that has not been the result anyplace where this scheme has been launched.

For EdSource, Theresa Harrington describes the district: “About 30 percent of the roughly 50,000 students in Oakland attend charter schools, leaving about 37,000 students enrolled in district schools. That enrollment shift is one of the reasons the district is looking to close 24 of its 86 schools over the next five years. The district has 44 charter schools. The Oakland teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association, says the district made school closures a bargainable issue by linking its plan to close schools to its ability to meet teachers’ salary demands.  But the district disagrees and does not plan to bargain its closure plan.”

At the end of January, Harrington reported that the school board approved the closure of Roots International Academy, located in East Oakland and serving primarily African American and Latino/Latina students. Oakland’s school superintendent used the same argument to justify the school closures as administrators in Chicago used when that school district closed 50 schools in May of 2013: “Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell and the school board members who voted for the closure said the decision was necessary to ‘right-size the district,’ which has too many schools for the number of students it is currently educating. The district’s enrollment of about 37,000 is expected to continue to drop by 2023.”

The Bay Area News Group‘s Nico Savidge reported last Saturday that Oakland’s teachers have set Thursday, February 21 as a firm strike date: “The Oakland Education Association has been without a contract since July 2017 and is seeking a new one that would deliver a 12 percent pay raise over three years, smaller class sizes and the hiring of additional counselors and CONTINUE READING: Oakland’s Teachers Will Strike Thursday to Protest Low Salaries, Fiscal Crisis, and School Closures | janresseger