This is our 5th edition ready for download.  It features a critique of the recent report put out by GO Public Schools.  The report is very troubling and includes recommendations of merit pay and evaluating teachers by test scores.  Combine this with OUSD’s participation with 8 other school districts in the California Office to Reform Education which is moving towards similar goals and the importance of this report–and its rejection–becomes very important.  Also included in this issue is an update on the continuing and growing struggle to keep alive Adult Ed in OUSD, a solidarity letter with the teachers-led movement to resist corporate reform in Guerrero, an interview with an OUSD custodian, and a parent-written article about how his child is dealing with the closing of her neighborhood school, Maxwell Park, last year.  We hope you enjoy and learn from this newest issue.  As always, we love feedback–positive or otherwise–so please join the growing conversation and movement against corporate education reform.

In solidarity,

ClassRoom Struggle

Click the image to download a pdf version.

A new update on the growing current struggle to save and rebuild Adult Education in OUSD.  At the end are the demands of the students and teachers of Adult Ed and K-12 who are fighting as well as a summary of the reasons to keep Adult Ed fully funded and in OUSD.  Also, be sure to come out to the Board meeting on May 22nd.  It’s an all out mobilization for the deciding vote!  Click either the English or Spanish flyers below to download them.

Adult Ed Students Fight Back!  Defending Current Classes and Demanding More

By Margarita Monteverde

In March, the OUSD school board voted to support the proposal by Superintendent Smith (now resigned) for the flexibility to cut all adult education (AE) classes across the district. Since then, there has been outrage from the students and teachers of these programs directed squarely at the school board members and Tony Smith. 

Tony Smith, throughout his years in the district, has championed the idea of “full service community schools” yet with this cut (solely his proposal) the district he presides over is eliminating funding to support families in the district. In order to create “Full service community schools,” the district must prioritize funds to provide real services for the families of students. These classes are one of the only concrete ways that OUSD schools reach out to and serve the families of their students.

These students remember all too well that 90% of the adult education classes were cut less than 3 years ago. As one adult ed. student said, “students in East Oakland remember the school on 73rd Ave. that used to have English as a Second Language (ESL) and other classes every morning, afternoon and night. It’s ridiculous that 13 million dollars were cut from our program and no one knows where that money went.” Now there are only six Family Literacy classes (consisting of ESL and curriculum designed for parents to better assist their students) left in the entire district. 

These cuts become more despicable when considering that current national proposals for immigration reform require a basic level of English — highlighting the need for more of these classes. Adding to the irony, how can it be that the federal government emphasizes the importance of large-scale immigration reform, while our local governments continue eliminating possibilities for immigrant families to succeed? 

On Wednesday April 24, 40 adult education students delivered a letter to the school board and superintendent’s offices demanding a morning meeting with school board members because their work and childcare schedules make it impossible to attend the bi-monthly evening meetings. The letter denounced the decision to close these classes stating, “If you take away this opportunity to learn, then we cannot progress. Within immigrant communities, English and GED programs are very important tools for overcoming adversity in this country.”

The school board responded by scheduling a meeting addressing the concerns of the students and teachers with members Rosie Torres and David Kakishiba on May 1st at 10am. 

The meeting took place in the Coliseum College Prep Academy auditorium. Three board members attended (Torres, Kakishiba and Harris) as well as over 150 adult education students and teachers as well as other supporters. The meeting took place in Spanish, Arabic and English and was facilitated by CCPA adult education students. There were people in attendance from many schools including: Korematzu, Allendale, La Escuelita, CCPA, CUES, Futures, ROOTS, Fruitvale, Lafayette, New Highland, Brookfield, Esperanza. During the meeting the adult students came out in force to present demands and speak to the necessity of these classes and more! The board members expressed support for adult education but made no commitments. The board members said that a decision will be made regarding this issue on May 22nd and invited all supporters of adult education to attend that meeting. 

When explaining their decision to cut adult education classes, some board members stated that we must prioritize our children, that in Oakland we care about our children. Some of the greatest determinants of child success is the involvement of parents in their students’ education, and also the income levels of their families. Adult education classes keep parents involved in schools, allow them to get better jobs and learn the language that helps them support their children’s academics. There is no such thing as choosing between children and parents. It is both or neither. 

The district has also tried to defer all responsibilities for these cuts to the state government’s decision transitioning adult education classes to community colleges. There are many complexities to the state situation, but it is clear that regardless of what decision is made in the next month at the state level, OUSD has a decision to make in our school district. They can prioritize these classes within their budget plans or they can cut them and not serve these communities. The OUSD budget is under the direct control of the school board and they can choose to fund these classes if they want to.

When asked what it would take to win this struggle, one student said that we need the “unity and power of all the other schools”. The students believe that, “it is our right and our obligation to learn in order to defend ourselves in this country” and for this reason have continued to fight and gain support. The students’ inspiring energy and commitment to this struggle has given renewed strength to the adult education teachers and K-12 teachers to fight for these adult education classes and for other needs in our schools.

It is clear to the students in the class that there is money in this district and there is money in this country, and they demand an answer to this question: “As documented and undocumented people in this country we pay taxes, where is that money going? They need to return to us some of what we contribute.”

Demands of the family Literacy students at CCPA: 

1. Do not remove the classes of Family Literacy and GED for adults in Oakland.
2. We need free classes, with child care, in our communities and with consistent teachers.
3. We demand to have English classes in the evenings for parents that do not have the opportunity to attend during the day.  As one of the requirements of the possible immigration reform is to have basic English skills, we need these classes available for all immigrants.
4. We demand the return of the adult classes and schools that were closed 3 years ago.
5. We demand no cuts. Not for our kids and not for adult students.
6. When the district makes decisions about funding, you don’t take our opinions as parents and adult education students into account. We want to be taken into account when decisions are made about our schools.

Why save adult education?

1. The district’s slogan is: “Full-service community schools,” yet they are cutting classes that serve the community. This is very contradictory.
2. We need to prioritize funds for schools not for jails. Why are we closing schools and opening prisons?
3. The district received tremendous support from our community to pass Proposition 30 and bring in additional funds. The money is there. Now we are asking for your support.

Margarita Monteverde is an OUSD teacher.

Our recent post critiquing the National Council on Teacher Quality’s report entitled “Teacher Quality Roadmap” got the most hits out of any of the posts on Classroom Struggle.  This demonstrates there is clear interest in understanding the politics and economics behind a seemingly well-intentioned nonprofit organization such as GO.  With that said, we’re publishing Jack Gerson’s biographical sketch of Jonathan Kelin, the executive director of GO Public Schools.  Let’s understand who our “allies” are before we co-sign their political projects.  

Oakland’s Jonathan Klein and the Rogers Foundation

- Jack Gerson

The corporate forces who orchestrate and bankroll the assault on public education are destructive and lethal, but they are not stupid. They can see as well as we that their divide-and-conquer strategy is beginning to break down: the strategy of blaming teachers and teacher unions for the problems of public education. They saw the powerful alliance that was built between teachers and parents in Chicago — especially black and Latino parents. They see a similar alliance developing in Philadelphia, where 23 schools are being closed and the school district effectively handed over to charter school management organizations. They see the anger being directed at school closures and denial of resources, and they see it being directed where it belongs: at them, the

GO’s Jonathan Klein, looking straight out of a corporate boardroom presentation.

corporate deformers. And since they are not stupid, the corporate forces are trying to regroup, to change their packaging a bit (e.g., talking more “how to improve teaching” before moving on to the need for standardized high stakes testing ["to hold teachers accountable"] and to “close down or turn around failing schools”). Same core program, but new packaging.

But they have money to burn. They’re slick. And in Oakland, long a laboratory for the corporate privatizers, they are pulling out all stops to rebuild support from the community. Their representatives here are very slick and very skilled. OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith’s background is pretty well known. But how many are aware of the pedigree of the man who founded and runs GO Public Schools?

Who is behind GO Public Schools? Jonathan Klein is the Executive Director of GO Public Schools. It would be hard to find an individual anywhere whose resume better illustrates how thoroughly the corporate billionaires — especially the Broad Foundation (and the local Rogers Foundation) — have planned and executed the dismantling of public education in Oakland as we have known it, especially during the state takeover of OUSD and its aftermath.

Klein was student body president at Yale, and then a TFA teacher in Compton, California (Compton was then in state receivership, run dictatorially by its state-appointed administrator, Randolph Ward). He came to Oakland in 1999 to run Bay Area Teach for America (1999 – 2003). Klein then studied and taught at UC Berkeley’s business school, where he got an MBA and taught some business courses. Then he was installed in OUSD by Eli Broad — Klein did his Broad Foundation residency from 2006 to 2008 as Special Assistant to each of the three State Administrators (all of whom were themselves graduates of Broad’s Urban Superintendents Academy: Randolph Ward, Kimberly Statham, and Vincent Matthews.)

Jonathan Klein left OUSD in 2008 and became Chief Program Officer at the Rogers Family Foundation, Oakland’s home-grown corporate billionaire public education-bashing foundation. (From the Rogers Foundation’s home page: The Rogers Family Foundation supports schools, charter management organizations, and non-profit organizatons that are making measurable changes in the lives of Oakland students.) T. Gary Rogers, as CEO of Dreyers, played a major role in pushing the toxic “Expect Success” initiative on OUSD during the state takeover. His son, Brian Rogers, now the Executive Director of the Rogers Foundation, founded Lighthouse Charter Schools, ran unsuccessfully for school board on a corporate deform agenda (basing teacher evaluations and pay on student standardized test scores; closing down “failing” public schools and opening more charter schools; etc.).

Jonathan Klein used the time and resources made available to him at the Rogers Foundation to enhance the connections he’d made at Yale, TFA, the Broad Foundation, and OUSD top management to lay the groundwork for GO Public Schools. A little over a year ago, Jonathan Klein left the Rogers Foundation to became the first Executive Director of GO Public Schools.

For Jonathan Klein’s biosketch at the Broad Foundation, see:

http://www.broadcenter.org/residency/network/profile/jonathan-klein

For his biosketch at GO Public Schools, see:

http://www.gopublicschools.org/about/board/

For more on the Rogers Foundation, go to:

http://www.rogersfoundation.org/

We are very excited to announce that the Occupy Oakland Education Committee and the Education for the 99% Newsletter and Blog have been renamed.  Our new name is ClassRoom Struggle and we are calling to Transform Education, Abolish Capitalism and Heal (TEACH .  Following is an explanation of this decision.  Please comment to share your thoughts and reactions to this piece.

Also visit the Classroom Struggle Blog to check out our most recent newsletter, the Mi Pueblo Lesson Plan, and many more new articles.

In struggle to defend and transform our public education system,
ClassRoom Struggle

classroomstruggle@gmail.com
www.classroomstruggle.com
http://www.facebook.com/Educationforthe99

Why we chose ClassRoom Struggle to be our new name

Our committee grew out of the Occupy movement.  The first political project that brought together many of the founding members was the organization of the student, parent and teacher march for education on November 2, 2011.  We have been supporters of much of the work of occupy, have received financial support from Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Commune as well, and were leaders of the Lakeview occupation in protest of school closings and privatization in our school district.  In the course of the spring and summer, our organizational relation to the Occupy Oakland general assembly became less clear, to the point where our committee began to function as a semi-autonomous committee of education workers, rather than as a branch of Occupy.  As individuals we have a high level of respect and solidarity for the activists of Occupy Oakland, and as a committee we have appreciated our political relationship with Occupy Oakland for the space that has been opened for radical politics and struggle as a result of OO’s actions.  With that said, we have not been formally a part of Occupy Oakland for quite some time, and we want to be clear about where we’re at as a committee. For this reason, we’ve decided to rename our committee, newsletter and blog, and and have chosen a new name that represents our dual commitment to the struggle for radical changes in both our schools and our society at large – ClassRoom Struggle.  We see this struggle as a struggle both internal and external to the classroom itself, and deeply entwined with the struggle of working class people to create a new society.

Central to the work of ClassRoom Struggle is a dual call to not only defend our our public school system but to transform it in the process. While public schools have served a role in developing white supremacist, capitalist and imperialist ideology and social structure (for example through segregated schools, tracked programs, mandated pledge of allegiance, etc.), they have also been key sites of struggle and served as assets for movements of working class students of color and other youth struggles.   This has been true since Reconstruction in the US South when black slaves who had fought to emancipate themselves from slavery organized toward establishing public education with funding from the capitalist state as a form of reparations; it was evident during the student walkouts in the late 60’s, and could be felt over the last two decades in Oakland where teachers and students have repeatedly joined forces to fight Prop 21, state budget cuts and gang injunctions.

In many ways, public schools are the last commons that we have in this country, the last place where people – children, teenagers, teachers, parents, school workers, neighbors – meet across difference and share the only assets that cannot be taken from us – our knowledge and vision.  Yet our K-12 schools, the very last free public service still provided to ALL people inside U.S. borders, are under attack.  Between austerity policies that slash school budgets, union busting that threatens the quality of teaching, corporate backed reforms aimed to turn young people into work ready robots rather than creative thinkers, and the rapid privatization of our schools (of which Oakland is a leader with 30% of students in charter schools), our schools are very literally under attack.  And for this reason we call for their defense.  What we are calling to abolish is not education but rather capitalism.

We see the struggle to abolish capitalist schools as one place where we can begin to chip away at capitalism’s grasp on our society.  Capitalist tendencies run deep into the structure and politics of schools.  Whether we consider the way in which capital benefits from public schools by tracking students within academic programs, or within schools that themselves function as tracked systems; or whether we consider the way that the school system itself was organized around the logic of a factory, complete with bells ringing and time managed just like a factory, it’s clear that the origins of public schools include a deep relation with the need of capital to reproduce a division of labor.  Meanwhile global capitalism’s ongoing austerity strategy even more severely limits the educational opportunities of working class students.  UC/CSU systems are increasingly raising tuition, defunding people of color outreach programs, cutting the number of professors, increasing class sizes and pushing students of color and all working class students out of higher education.  In public secondary schools we see ongoing cuts in funding, increases in class sizes, and attacks on school workers.  Despite progressive and radical attempts to re-structure schools, promote ethnic studies and other forms of radical curriculum, there is no fundamental hope for a liberatory education under capitalism.  This is why we say we must push the education struggle to its limits and fight to make it as much of an anti-capitalist struggle as possible.

Given all this context, we know that the whole of public education as it currently stands, is a very unjust system to say the least. We also know that the roots of this injustice are not ignorance or ineptitude, as the education reform movement commonly frames the issue.  We call to “transform” rather than “reform” education because we don’t understand the public education system to be a “broken” or “failing” system that simply needs to be fixed, but rather we believe it is acting in ways that have been deliberately designed to reinforce a hierarchical race/class structure. Public education is used to support a fragmented, deskilled, and deeply hierarchical workforce, where poor students and students of color who are not supported are funneled into underground economies, chronic underemployment, and low wage work; middle class students are trained to be professionals; and wealthy students are trained to become the ruling class.  The school to prison pipeline, zero tolerance policies, tracked classes, unequal distribution of resources, racist administration and teachers, hostility to students’ communities, Eurocentric history standards, english-only classrooms, the list of oppressive practices could go on and on.  It is not enough to defend our schools, perhaps more importantly, we must also be working towards their transformation into intergenerational centers for healing, exploration, learning, self-actualization and the development of resilient communities not only able to survive current and coming disasters but to build skills, relationships and power to overthrow the current power structures of our society.

Finally we know that part of our work as educators and organizers to facilitate healing within ourselves, our schools and our communities.  Capitalist exploitation and white supremacy create social, emotional, and psychological conditions of permanent trauma for working class and POC.  The ongoing trauma of daily life under capitalism leads to internalized oppression that we take out on one another horizontally.  There is a profound need for healing from this oppression through struggle against the conditions that reproduce it.  While the process of healing is often co-opted through government agencies and nonprofits, this should not mean that the process of healing itself is not radical.  It is a centrally human need we have that our struggles and educational practices should be aimed toward meeting, even if fundamental healing is not possible in any complete way while we’re stuck in webs of capital and racial oppression. As we organize ourselves we should seek ways to overcome alienation and trauma so that we can build new social relations of compassion, care, and solidarity.  The work of the educator is the work of reproducing the worker, but it is also the caring work of reproducing a caring, critical, and autonomous social being.  We strive to push our work toward the humanistic side of the contradictions we face in our organizing and educating.

As ClassRoom Struggle, we are building a network of projects based out of Oakland, CA aimed towards this commitment to transforming our education system, participating a movement for the abolition of capitalism, and developing a culture of healing to sustain our communities through the current struggles and those ahead.  We hope you will join us and be in touch: classroomstruggle@gmail.com, www.classroomstruggle.com, http://www.facebook.com/Educationforthe99.

This is a blog post from a former Oakland teacher reflecting on the Newtown massacre and advocating for a different kind of gun control than that commonly echoed in the mainstream media.

The original post came from http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2012/12/commentary-on-mass-killings-in-newton.html.  The blog is called Facts For Working People.

Commentary on “The mass killings in Newtown”

by Jack Gerson

Some of you may have already read the piercing comment that Gary (one of this blog’s [that is, Facts for Working People, not this blog, ClassRoom Struggle] regular readers) wrote in response to Richard Mellor’s “The mass killings in Newtown, Conn. have deep social roots”.  Gary’s comment really resonated with me. Here’s Gary’s comment in full, followed by a bit more from me:

I would like to add to some of your fine posts here. I grew up 5 minutes down the road from Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT. My home town, where my parents still live is Monroe, CT. The next town over.

School reconstitution.  Last minute classroom reassignments.  Overbooked class-load assignments.  Constant turnover of the best teachers at your school.  Sounds familiar to you?  If so, this post from a teacher at Fremont High captures a lot of what you’re probably feeling.  And, note, that’s Fremont High in Los Angeles because unfortunately these problems are all too common.  Let us know below if this story resonates with you.

The original post can be found at: http://fremontwatch.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/the-abcs-of-keeping-teachers-no-apologies-to-the-la-times.

Continue reading →

Here we take a look at a fraction of the Mexican teachers’ union called the CNTE.  La CNTE works within the larger union (the SNTE)–and outside the SNTE in larger social movements–in a variety of ways.  This snapshot of their work focuses particularly on Escuelas Integrales (holistic schools).  These are schools run by parents and teachers with locally developed and relevant curriculum that stands against the push towards curricula oriented towards standardized tests.  They were established through protests and won government funding through more protests.  This model offers interesting alternatives to developing locally rooted schools that are not charter schools and not part of the attacks on working class students and teachers.  Clearly, we should investigate them more.  In the meantime, however, let us know your reaction to them in the comment section below.  Also we’ve included discussion questions below if you would like to study this with friends and allies.

Author’s Note: The information within this article about education struggles in Mexico comes mainly from a conversation with one Mexican teacher who works with a part of the Mexican teachers union called the CNTE. This article represents that perspective with limited outside information and does not represent all education struggles happening in Mexico nor all of the different currents/projects within the CNTE. We hope to illuminate more of this in future issues and please contact us with any other perspectives that you have.

This CNTE banner says, “The teacher in struggle is also teaching.”

Resistance to Education Attacks in Mexico: Lessons for Oakland

By Margarita Monteverde

At the beginning of August, a group of Oakland educators met with a teacher from Michoacan, Mexico to discuss her organizing and teaching in Michoacan and share about the current situation of the US public education system. The conversation with Graciela was refreshing and humbling. Although the differences between Mexico’s struggles and ours were evident, we are both fighting similar privately funded neoliberal “education reforms.”As we, in the US, continue to fight against privatization and for quality fully-funded public education, Michoacan’s models are useful to push our imagination of what is possible here, what our unions or other teacher organizations could look like, what kinds of collaboration between parents, teachers and students could exist and ways to take back our schools that don’t rely on charters, private funding or non-profit organizations.

Continue reading →

Truly excellent panel on lessons from the strike and the organizing behind it. A must see.

(scroll to end to see all the videos)