Beruflich Dokumente
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Less than a month after the four OUSD incumbents took their renewed oaths of office, and
before we had even finished the 2016–2017 school year, the other main promise of those
incumbents (that they would expertly run our district budget) swirled and dissolved like
backroom cigarette smoke in the wake of a rapidly exiting superintendent.
The healthy financial management that the incumbents publicly congratulated themselves
on in August, September, and October to win the election in November was shown to be a farce
by end of January. Five million dollars had to come out of school budgets, and more had to come
out of the district budget. Everyone acted as if they were surprised. The blame was placed on low
enrollment and unforeseen expenses. Instead of going up by five hundred students, enrollment
had declined by four hundred. Who had honestly expected enrollment to go up when we had
been steadily losing students to the charters for many years? Shrinking enrollment had become
the norm.
Returning students should have been registered back in May, at the end of the school
year. If I remember right, new students sign up at around the same time. There was no reason for
the lower enrollment budget crisis to be “unforeseen” by the June candidate filing date. In any
case, the full size of actual enrollment becomes clear when the district starts reporting daily
attendance in late August. Yet there was no reporting on or discussion of the cutbacks needed to
balance the budget until well after the incumbents were safely reelected in November.
In California, we use an “equalization” method to allocate school funds. Some funds are
allocated by the State based on a needs formula. Most funds are allocated by daily attendance
reporting. I think that they knew that the money was not there and held that back until the
election was over. Politics as usual, of course, and anyone who follows local politics would
recognize this trick.
Much of what I had seen of district computer use is focused on reporting daily
attendance. The same method is used in the public schools and the charters. Using public money
is about the only strong claim that a California charter school has to being a public school. My
younger son was still in a charter funded by these very same formulas at the time, and there was
no surprise when it came to the funding level available, but somehow the shortfall in OUSD
schools took the school board by surprise.
As far as I know there is nobody from any local news organization on the school beat
other than a person or two from one or another externally funded advocate group and the odd
“expert” reporter producing an occasional report. Darwin Bond Graham of the East Bay Express
runs all over the East Bay, from Oakland to Richmond, covering just about everything local,
from police to schools. The few reports he has done are good, and he exposed the outside money
in the school board race, but he is one guy spread way too thin. Our smallest newspaper, the
Oakland Post and the Berkeley Journalism School’s website, Oakland North, are often among
our best sources when we want to know what’s going on. The former because of a key, well-
informed writer, and the latter because sometimes journalism students do a better job than
professional reporters, because they do not need to be politically “careful.”
The East Bay Times, our largest local paper, does the rare report, usually at some major
juncture, but despite having some good human resources, they are playing so much catch-up that
the articles tend to be shallow examples of “he said” / “she said” reporting. The reporter from the
San Francisco Chronicle, the Bay Area’s leading paper, doesn’t know the difference between a
charter school and a public school, and her reporting suffers for it.
The reports in the local media are always “specials” spaced far apart. Lots of each report
gets lost on covering the basics poorly, such as the role of attendance in funding, because it had
been so long since the last time the “issue” was covered by their paper. Things happen in our
schools every day, with meetings of the board every week, and we are lucky if it gets covered
once every other month. Since the press does not really cover the schools consistently or in
depth, there are few ways of finding out what is going on in general, and you’re really SOL if
you’re trying to find out the important details.
To get reliable information you have to look beyond the press. I have friends who go to
almost every school board meeting and watch the process like a hawk. I make it to a few of
them, but don’t feel like any real discussion happens at these meetings, which are more of a
ceremony where our board members pretend to discuss what has already been decided
elsewhere, while acting like they’re listening to my friends, some of whom speak out on every
issue when the floor is opened to the public.
I trust the regulars who dog the meetings, because most everything they have told me for
the last few years checks out, and most everything I hear from the school board members tends
to be a half-truth. Jim Mordechai is one of the close watchers. He is a teachers’ union activist and
keeps himself very informed. I asked him if it was really any surprise that enrollment (and thus
funding) was declining. My opinion is that the voters were treated to that biggest of all lies, the
lie of omission. He kind of agreed, but was more focused on preventing budget cuts from hitting
his members, who are already overworked due to short staffing, or school sites, which lack
funding for some very basic things, such as supplies.
Jim started a recent post reporting on the first OUSD board meeting after the budget
episode with these words:
The school board is starting the year in the same way they conducted business last year,
by changing the meetings at the last minute, not allowing public comment, and making
decisions in closed session. These are clear violations of the Brown Act and are thus
illegal. It also makes it clear that the school board does not want to engage the
community.
My observer friends, Jim included, tell anyone who will listen that the superintendent and
a lot of the staff in senior positions are very expensive people, each pulling down six figures.
They also say that the district rarely keeps to the administration / school site spending ratios
required by law. The requirement is not as tilted in favor of the classroom as you would think,
and the formulas for calculating it are certainly more complicated than one would assume. It took
years to get management’s costs down to the required level and not everyone trusts the numbers
provided.
I was seeing reports that the enrollment was down because of the enormous loss of
students to the so-called charter schools. All the reported numbers tend to confirm this. Kim
Davis is one of the leaders of a group called Oakland Parents United for Public Schools, which
around here we just call Parents United. Kim gets to most of those school board meetings, along
with Jim and the other regulars. She is a good source of information on the charter schools and
their supporters and her grasp of OUSD funding it damn sharp. Had I been elected, I would have
asked her to be one of my advisors. She, for one, knew that school board would not meet the
budget and said so. I would have said the same thing on the campaign trail, but I lacked reliable
numbers because the district had not reported them yet.
Kim also posted a chart showing how a version of the budget that they sort of released to
the public would disproportionally cut the schools with the highest needs, while leaving funding
in less troubled, “high demand” (mostly privileged) schools in more affluent neighborhoods. I’ll
take that from Kim on faith, as it matches what I saw over the years as a parent volunteer.
Mike Hutchinson ran for school board twice. First against Rosie Torres, the GO backed
candidate in 2012, and the second time in 2016, when she was the incumbent. Rosie lost the GO
endorsement in 2016, clearing the way for a third candidate, a Latino charter school teacher
named Huber Trenado directly funded by GO. Their district is largely Latino, as are Rosie and
tHuber, while Mike is black. In the end, the incumbent Rosie won with Mike’s second choice
votes.
I’m not sure if you can even hold a school board meeting without Jim, Kim, or Mike. In
any case, I have never been to a board meeting where one of them wasn’t present and speaking
publicly about every item on the agenda. If you’re looking for someone who is always there with
a copy of the agenda, having read the reports and reviewed the proposals, with plans to speak
out, Mike’s your man. Mike attends everything from school board to city hall by way of the
police commission and has season tickets for Oakland Raiders. Mike is everywhere, and the
OUSD will never get rid of him, because Mike will never give up.
They won’t ever be rid of me either, but I don’t see the point of talking to deaf board
members in a mostly empty room. I do, however, see the point of talking with Mike and then
reading the reference materials he comes up with. He knows that labyrinth. Mike confirmed what
Kim and Jim had to say about the new, revised 2016–2017 budget (January version) and pointed
out some other aspects of it to be unhappy with as well. Mike also agreed with Jim that the
constant change in meeting times and moving budget items on short notice served to make public
criticism difficult—compounded by the fact that many special meetings are called.
A lot of money was / is being spent on buildings and projects, while there are not
sufficient funds for operations. This shell game includes lobbyists who make sure that budgets
include “earmarked” funding for their “development” companies that is not transferable to other
areas no matter how bad the situation in the classroom gets. So, for example, while my son’s
primary school did not have funding for classroom computers or to hook up the bathrooms in the
portables, we did have funding for a high-end wireless in one building and a new phone system
for the whole campus, both of which nobody uses. Check out your local city and school budget
and you will find that there is “discretionary” spending and “non-discretionary” spending. And,
of course, most cities, counties, and school districts have funds coming into the pot that must be
spent on specific items.
Back when we had good local reporters, they would trace this earmarked funding back to
the politicians who wrote the proviso into the law and look for the relationships with the people
whose service or product is on the “must buy” list. In Oakland our last muckraker reporter,
Sanjiv Handa, has passed away, so now we don’t get the details, but we do know that a lot of
funds come from the State with strings attached.
In Oakland our local politicians talk down to us when we ask why we are spending on
stuff we could easily do without rather than on our students’ educations. One of the terms that
our insiders throw around to show how much they are “in the know” about how things “really
work” (and by inference to call us out as ignorant if we even suggest that funds be moved from
new buildings to operations) is “buckets of money.” We get lectured about how the approval
process is sooooo different for each bucket. These are the same board members who never
seriously go to that State of California legislature and ask for a change or reallocation despite
having the job of representing our schools. All they do is have a hired lobbyist who reports on
what kind of new funding might be in a bucket for them. It seems that we are never able to talk
to the people putting money in separate buckets before they give it to us.
As I am starting to understand it, a professional politician depends on endorsements,
exposure, and campaign donations. They have friends, working relationships, and are involved in
private networking and are not in position to be publicly calling out or making trouble for
professional politicians further up the food chain. So, there is little complaint from local Oakland
Democrats about how big Sacramento Democrats treat our schools. There is a line, and one
should not step out of it. I am sure in other states there are similar lines and food chains
involving both of our official political parties. I know for a fact that earmarked funding exists at
all levels of government and is considered normal.
Mike agreed with Jim on the overspending on administration as he filled me in on some
details about the different real estate deals and building boondoggles, at the same time telling me
that the budget approval process had turned into a game of hide and seek. His story checked out,
as it usually does. There were late and only partial releases of revenue and expense information.
There were versions of the budget discussed out of the public eye, only ever released with a very
brief public discussion process. I was all ready to go to one meeting, only to find out at the last
minute that the budget had been pulled off the agenda.
Nobody will ever convince me that the news of the loss of funds and the departure of our
superintendent was not purposely withheld from the public until after the election.
And it was only January.