Oakland Schools Need to Improve. Now.

As a resident of Oakland, I am feeling increasingly inclined to write about this.

I attended a city council meeting on February 5, 2019, and what I saw shocked me. Oakland's school district, OUSD, is quickly falling apart. They have a $30 million deficit and the school board is scrambling to find a way to recover from this. Meanwhile, Oakland schools are not seeing much improvement.

Two weeks ago, OUSD voted to close Roots Academy, a small middle school of ~100 students in East Oakland. This is a horrible, inequitable disaster. Many of Roots Academy's students will have to find a new school for next year, and Roots Academy is located in one of the less wealthy neighborhoods. Not everyone has the ability to get too far for school, due to various financial and personal reasons, and we should not be closing down schools to save money, for we need all of them.

OUSD's policy is as follows: they want to close down schools to save money while also decreasing class size. The second goal requires the opposite of the first-- in order to have fewer students in each classroom, we also need more schools and more teachers. These are messed up priorities. Rather than closing down schools, our society should be hiring more teachers.

Yet hiring more teachers is easier said than done. Teachers in Oakland are not paid a fair living wage for their communities and a strike is imminent. They deserve one. We do not pay them enough. One person who spoke at the city council meeting I attended said she lives in a home with nine other OUSD teachers, and they do not have a restroom, forced to leave their home to use one. This is a crisis. Until OUSD raises the wages of teachers, it will be hard for them to hire more teachers. OUSD needs to double the wages of not only teachers but all low-level school employees-- janitors, the people who control the internet, and everyone else who does not currently have a fair living wage.

Yet raising the wages of teachers, while necessary, is also easier said than done. Oakland simply does not have the money at this time to spend more paying teachers. The school district has a $30 million deficit and paying teachers more while hiring more teachers will only increase that deficit. The district will fall further and further into debt until it eventually cannot support itself, Oakland's schools reach the brink of being unusable, and our children are being poorly educated.

This is a loop of death-- Oakland lacks money, so they pay teachers less, but they need to hire more teachers, and then the teachers go on strike and demand higher wages, so Oakland must pay them higher wages in order to educate students at all, which causes the initial problem of lacking money to get much worse. Yet we can escape this loop-- it will require a major capital investment.

The Bay Area is severely mismanaging its priorities. We are on the verge of spending billions of dollars building a 6-mile extension of BART to Santa Clara (an extension that is not needed), spending $100 million just studying the possibility of a second Transbay Tube without even a design, and ordering another 500 new BART cars on top of the 775 already ordered at a cost of billions. These projects are all important. Bart going to Santa Clara will increase the freedom of East Bay residents commuting to San Jose, a second Transbay Tube would fix everyone's current commute issues going to San Francisco, and more BART cars would ease congestion. Yet none of this should come above rescuing our schools.

OUSD is on the verge of closing 24 schools in the next six years. It would have so few schools that the district would barely be operable. Even now, Oakland schools lack basic equipment-- textbooks, stable infrastructure, even in some cases art and music programs. I am not saying we should halt all the new BART expansion-- rather, what we should do is spend $150 million in state money to bail out OUSD, double teacher wages, hire more of them, and stop closing schools, plus invest in necessary school supplies including textbooks, art materials, musical instruments, and potentially opening another high school. $150 million may seem like too much, but it is not. Gavin Newsom's cancellation of the main line of California High Speed Rail will free up billions of dollars, only a fraction of which will be required to revitalize Oakland schools. We must take action soon to fix our schools and break out of this loop of death before it is too late.

Sincerely,

Nathan