A District Divided
How public school quality is lost in the battle between district and charter schools.
When I joined the school board, I wasn’t naive, but I thought we would be able to leave most of the politics behind and work on strategies to really help students accelerate in the classroom and community.
In a few instances we were able to stall the politics enough to get a few things done like the passage of Measure N and Measure G1. These parcel tax measures fund everything from college and career readiness pathways for high school to middle school language, music, and arts. It was labor unions, ed reformers, teachers, students, and community organizations that all worked together to get G1 passed, which included teacher salary bonuses for every public school teacher. Both voter approved parcel taxes combined generate roughly a quarter billion dollars over a 14 year term, more than 90 percent of which works in service of teachers and students (the rest goes to administrative fees).
Though these are both huge wins, I can’t help but wonder what else we might have been able to achieve had the question of district and charter schools not been such a controversial and polarizing issue.
The divide became palpable in 2012, the first year I ran for school board. The preeminent question that I faced wasn’t about how I wanted to help students, it was whether or not I was for or against charter schools.
When the endorsement processes came, it was like getting picked for teams back in the day in elementary school. On one side, there was the so called ed reformers and on the other side was the union led team. I won’t name groups specifically because it really doesn’t matter. They might be different unions or political organizations, but they all fall on one side of the district or charter issue or the other. In Oakland, nuance has become more and more elusive. There used to be less focus on this divide, but now it is the dominant conversation in Oakland school politics. Whoever endorses you and you choose to be endorsed by (in so far as you can control it), will live with you— as it lived with me— for the entirety of your service.
In both my elections, I was endorsed by the ed reform group and as a consequence of that endorsement was tagged as a charter school advocate (whether I liked it or not) who’d been bought and paid for by the privatizers trying to gain control of Oakland public education. By my second election, there was major statewide energy behind the effort to tag me a dangerous privatizer.
The union side had mounted a force against me that I could not possibly comprehend. It was intense.
And when I looked at the aftermath, I was clear on why tensions were so high. In that 2016 election super PACs spent more than $125,000 on campaigns to support my election. That was 100 percent more than they’d spent in 2012. And before that, next to no money was spent in school board races in the 1990’s and early 2000’s in Oakland. If we are spending this kind of money now, won’t it get worse and more divisive going forward? What is the end game?
When I learned about the staggering sum, I was shocked. Seriously shocked. “No wonder they said I was bought and paid for,” I thought. Even though I was not running to do the bidding of anyone except the people of East Oakland, it was hard as hell to make that case with those kind of expenditures and with all this money from largely white led organizations impacting Oakland’s elections. It felt and feels like dirty business. In just one election, they’d spent that much money— not to help students or teachers, but to help get me elected so that I could in turn help children.
And on the other side, I can still see the lie printed on the sign with my big head featured, “Director James Harris bought by privatizers for over $124,767.00.” I can still hear teachers telling me “they say you don’t care about district schools, you just work for charter schools.”
They went through elaborate measures to make sure that people were aware of the big money being spent, and also to seed the belief that I was a privatizer and not to be trusted, nothing about my record or what I actually stood for or voted for, or that my campaign was not getting any money from these super PACs. For them, the money and the connection to those other organizations was enough. Their thinking was clear: if they are spending that kind of money on him, he must be bad for Oakland. The whole thing is tremendously frustrating, but I understand where they were coming from.
Somehow, I was able to swim in these dark waters, but never felt able to find the key to unlock how to really help students. It’s like they were trapped beneath us— waiting, while we fight for chum. They are still there waiting now.
A Reflection
What I have learned from watching hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on elections and even millions of dollars spent on various charter or district run programs is that money poured on an issue with no coordination and collaboration will not help solve the problem. In the end, it will only help perpetuate a system of haves and have nots.
What if we could find a way to get rid of the politics and focus on quality? To spend that money we have proven so willing to spend on actually educating and improving outcomes for the students that need it most?
The one thing I learned from Measure N and Measure G1 is that together we can create revenue streams that directly impact the challenges we face. We can create community oversight commissions to watch this revenue and work to achieve the best value on our dollar. However, these efforts only come with partnership and collaboration. That cannot happen if half of us are fighting for one thing and the other half for another. Is that how we would teach children to solve a challenge?
We need that innovative and collaborative spirit now more than ever. Because right now as fights are breaking out amongst our educators and policymakers, I see a world that is longing to divide itself about whether to go back to school or not and who is on the right or wrong side of the issue. But for students that have been repeatedly failed by the pre-pandemic system, what are they going back to?
If we could rethink how we are spending on education and what we are actually spending it on, we might be able to come up with something that positively impacts students lives. But the trick is, we can only do it together.