What We’re Striking For

An open letter to Oakland Unified School District Director Sam Davis (District 1)

Note to readers: As we click “Publish,” Oakland Education Association (OEA) is still negotiating with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). At this point, OUSD has made a one-year, non-contractual agreement with OEA to create the shared governance for Community Schools discussed below. Our sentiments persist.

If we are to have a democratic society, people must find or invent new channels through which decisions can be made. Given genuine decision-making powers, people will not only learn rapidly to make socially useful decisions, but they will also assume responsibility for carrying out decisions based on their collective judgment. The problem is not that people will make irresponsible or wrong decisions. It is, rather, to convince people who have been ignored or excluded in the past that their involvement will have meaning and that their ideas will be respected. The danger is not too much, but too little participation.
— Myles Horton

Dear Director Davis,

I-statements here: I (Ellen) have been doing my best these post-pandemic years, which is not my best, but it’s the best I can do. I’m tired in my soul. Most nights, I lie awake, spending a lot of mental energy cycling through all of the ways that I’m failing my kids and countering myself with all the reasons/excuses for why. But I had a day last Wednesday that re-clarified for me that I could never hope to be enough — an email letting me know a student had been jumped and critically injured; a group came to me with the old sketchbook they’d found belonging to their friend (also my student) who died of a fentanyl overdose last summer; a student asked me to talk him through their excruciating desire to go harm himself in the bathroom; and a student confided that she was three days sober, then came back sobbing because she’d lied, had drank earlier that day, and hated herself for it. One day. It’s too much. I need help. I need more kids to be and feel safer in more spaces and with more adults at Oakland Tech. I need Oakland Tech to have more restorative justice support so peace and joy have a fighting chance against widespread hopelessness. I need actual mental health professionals to do their thing so I can teach English, my actual area of expertise. I need to be able to take days off and know that a substitute teacher will show up.

We urge you to lend your support to OEA’s common good proposals, because we know our kids deserve all of the above and more. Unfortunately, for years, we’ve watched Board members ignoring and disrespecting dozens of hours of community testimony — hard-won experience and expertise — remaining unmoved even by students’ well-organized attempts to be heard.

That’s why we’re on the line, and proud to be — because we believe that creating additional channels for collective decision-making, inclusive of those most impacted by the decisions, is worth it. You and too many of your colleagues (and your predecessors on the Board) have demonstrated time and again that we, the teachers and community, cannot trust your judgment. We want the contractual power to hold OUSD accountable to listening to us when we tell them about our own lives and what we need.

Here’s one screenshot of your recent high-horsing:

Text of post: I needed a break from all this and I had signed up to proctor an AP test at Oakland Tech back when I didn’t think there would ever be a strike, so with the permission of those on the picket line (I would never cross a union picket line without permission), I’m here watching students do advanced calculus. / It’s good to see them working so hard at this culminating activity, but it’s a shame that this is the only student activity the union to process during the strike — it’s inequitable to privilege AP students over other students with greater needs in our schools.

Castigating “shame” on teachers, suggesting that we’re not considering students’ experiences of inequity in our school, is insulting and absurd. With your foot on our neck, you have repeatedly spread word through both social and traditional media that our shouting for relief is creating inequity.

Actually, a 2020 Brookings Institution analysis of the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection concludes that “schools are the principal source of disparities… The important thing to note is that schools create…socially relevant categories, and teachers and school leaders sort students into them.” The status quo creates inequity, not our picket line.

We are critically aware that striking puts stress on families, especially on single parents and families with low income, but it’s also naive to think that school (that we) don’t harm kids every day because we haven’t/don’t/can’t/won’t provide the [money-costing] support OUSD pledged when it “announced its intent to be the nation’s first Community Schools district” in 2011.

We teachers are intimately familiar with the everyday realities of words like “inequity” that you try to use against us in your since deleted post. While we know that a steering committee will not end systemic racism, we also know that solutions founded in the everyday experiences of the community will be better than ones generated without us.

In 2019, in solidarity with OEA’s strike, the All City [Student] Council called for a city-wide student sick-out, demanding that OEA and OUSD prioritize student leadership; teacher retention; college and career readiness; and mental health, nutrition, and wellness. When the strike was settled with a contract that didn’t adequately address these needs, OEA and OUSD let students down.

In his personal history of the 2019 strike, OEA member and former Tech (and now Life Academy) teacher Heath Madom remembers the first day back in the classroom:

After circle we transitioned to watching the live stream of the board meeting. At the meeting, student after student delivered angry testimony. About a half hour into watching, two of my students got fed up and left the classroom to go join the other students at the Board meeting. They showed up on the live stream about a half hour later to deliver their own pointed comments to the Board. Their fearlessness was inspiring.

Unlike Mr. Madom, the Board was not moved by students’ fearlessness. OEA’s common good proposal, attempts once more to give students more power over their own lives. Two students on a committee of 16 would have the ability to advocate for spending funds on All City Council’s prioritized needs like mental health, nutrition, and wellness.

A 2022 update to the California Community Schools Partnership Act requires “shared decision-making and participatory practices… including students, families, staff, and community members” for districts who receive this funding — OUSD’s slice is $66,000,000. We’re fighting for a contractual district-wide steering committee that will sit parents, teachers, support staff, and students at the table. It’s impossible for us to trust OUSD to do what it is obligated to do, especially since opposition to including this in the contract indicates that the district may not be intending to uphold the law.

Winning the contractual right to shared governance of Oakland’s Community Schools will give us the power to protect teachers, students, and parents’ right to direct funds for the crucial issues we, unlike you, actually face on the ground every day.

Like you, we wish we were back in our classrooms. But we have to consider what we’re teaching students about democratic participation and the power of the people to create a world with more peace and some justice.

Sincerely,

Ellen Dahlke, English teacher at Oakland Tech
Kylise Hare, Biology teacher at Oakland Tech