Why are teachers leaving Oakland?
By Jeremy Dalmas
It’s 8:08am, the Friday before spring break, and under other circumstances Kathleen Byrnes would already be at work.
“We would be in our classrooms preparing for the day, which is where we would rather be,” she says.
But instead, she’s out in front of Oakland’s Cleveland Elementary School with her fellow teachers -- not working. They’re waiting seven minutes until 8:15 am exactly. Since February, teachers have been protesting low pay by working from only from 8:15 to 3 pm -- the minimum hours required by their contract. It’s called work-to-rule. And it means things that parents expect, like student evaluations, are not making their way home. They are sitting unfinished in baskets.
“And they've been sitting in baskets for about a month, because I don't have time to get to them,” explains Byrnes.
Nobody thinks that being a public school teacher is an easy profession, or a lavishly paid one. But teachers in Oakland have really been feeling the pinch. Despite working in one of the least affordable housing markets in the country, teachers in the Oakland Unified School District have gotten only a few percent raise in the past decade. They’re currently the lowest paid public school teachers in Alameda County. And close to a fifth of them leave the district every year. Teacher turnover is a national issue as well, but in Oakland things have been getting more heated as contract negotiations drag on.
The union wants teachers to get a raise, smaller classes, and more school counselors. The district understands all that but says it doesn’t have the resources to go as far as the union is pushing. And even without the contract problems, many, many teachers are unhappy in the Oakland Unified School District. Seventy percent of teachers stop teaching in Oakland in their first 5 years. Seventy percent. Nationwide that number is between 40% and 50% - which is already huge.
The money...
Just a few blocks up the hill from Cleveland Elementary, right where Park Boulevard meets 580, is Oakland High School. Here, teachers are still working more than the minimum hours, though they did protest by closing their classrooms to students during lunch.
US History teacher Jesse Shapiro grew up in Oakland. Like a lot of Oaklanders, he’s committed to his city. He’s been a teacher for eight years, six of them here.
“Finally I've reached a point where it's like I have a stride, where I can do the other nuances of teaching other than planning,” he says. “I'm able to give better feedback to students, help them out socially and emotionally. Kids come into the classroom and they know they're going to get a good product because people know who I am around here. I've earned that.”
He’s also finally gotten the classroom he’s always wanted.
“Most of the classrooms don't have windows, you can see that I have one,” he says. “The lovely corner penthouse suite that I inherited from Steven Moreno, who was our department head, who fled to a higher paying district just a few years ago.”
Right there is one of the main reasons that Oakland is losing its talent. With an average salary of $55,000, teachers like Shapiro could drive a few miles to San Leandro and get an immediate $15,000 raise. The teacher that left this room was one of Shapiro’s mentors. Shapiro says his mentor is now making close to six figures teaching in Redwood City. And if this teacher called him up --
“And said ‘hey, we've got a job out here, I want you out here, will you come?' It would be pretty difficult for me to say 'no, I love Oakland so much that I'm going to stay here and take a $40,000 pay cut.' You know?”
...And beyond the money
Beyond pay, many teachers feel that the district doesn’t support them and doesn’t respect them. When she stops by Shapiro’s classroom, special education teacher Jessie Muldoon says she can’t afford classroom supplies. She has to use an online donations site.
“It feels pretty crummy that you're begging from your friends and family to subsidize your job basically,” she says, adding that she thinks about leaving the district all the time.
Social studies teacher Emily Macy complains of not having enough support Why are teachers leaving Oakland? | KALW:
