Oakland public school teachers have been on strike since Thursday. Working without a contract for almost two years now, and following rounds and rounds of austerity budget cuts—including in the middle of last school year—teachers find themselves far apart from the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). The educators have been asking for a 12 percent wage increase over the next three years, as well as budget increases for smaller class sizes, resource room help, and school nurses. The board has pled poverty—the result of a reported $30 million outstanding loan—offering 5 percent increases to teachers who are paid, with adjustments for standard of living, adding up to some of the lowest wages in the country for educators.
Oakland teachers have reached their breaking point, and are marching for what many are calling a “living wage,” as well as better support and commitment to the student body by the state and county of Alameda. They follow in the footsteps of teachers across the country and in Los Angeles. California public schools have the dubious distinction of receiving money based on attendance, so most parents and students are supporting their teachers by keeping their children home.
Part of the big problem for districts like Oakland is that privately run, public charter schools siphon off children in different areas without having all of the same obligations that public schools do. By law, the Oakland school board cannot weigh the detrimental financial effects that a new charter school might have on the rest of the OUSD system when considering whether or not to okay a new campus. However, that same school board has a few new members who ran on being into reforming the scourge of charter schools in the East Bay. California is still one of more than half the states in the country that has not returned to pre-recession levels of funding per student. In a state that spends more on prisoners than the rest of the country, ranking near the bottom for spending on students, a teachers’ strike makes sense.
After negotiations reportedly “puttered out” over the weekend, it was reported that Monday negotiations were much more fruitful. However, the state superintendent’s office trustee Chris Learned says that even if both teachers and OUSD agree to the 12 percent wage increase, he will veto it, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, saying that the district cannot afford it: “Under my authority as the fiscal oversight trustee for OUSD, I will stay and/or rescind any agreement that would put the district in financial distress.”
I have a 7-year-old in the OUSD and a 4-year-old that will likely be there before I know it. The teachers I’ve met are hard-working people, living in increasingly difficult times, handling our society’s most precious cargo. The school board wants you to believe that the budget issues are an immovable object. The problem is that Oakland public schools—like many public education programs across the country—are in crisis, and it’s time to find that money and those resources, the way that we seem to find them to pay for tax breaks and wars for the rich.