Opinion: Refusal to close Oakland schools threatens progress

Oakland Unified finds itself at a dangerous crossroads.

Since moving into state receivership in 2003, the school district has improved fiscal responsibility while serving the needs of our diverse student population. But that progress is threatened by the rigid stance from some vocal advocates that we should not close any schools, even when they are too small to adequately support their students.

As members of the Oakland Board of Education, who have each worked for many years on the ground in schools, we see the constant roller coaster of OUSD’s finances, coupled with chronic low pay, leading to high turnover. That is what truly harms our students.

Advocating for good fiscal stewardship of our district is not a conservative position — it’s a very progressive vision. Persistent racial achievement gaps for our students can only be closed when we fully resource our schools equitably.

It’s challenging to do this when enrollment is declining. From 2001 to 2017, students were leaving OUSD for charters. But since 2017, charter school enrollment has also declined. Over the past four years, district enrollment dropped from 36,524 to 34,627 students, and charter enrollment proportionately dropped even more from 16,867 to 14,962 this year.

Declining enrollment is not unique to Oakland. In schools across California, families are moving to more affordable locales, while others opt out of public education, and demographic changes mean fewer babies overall.

As neighboring districts in Piedmont, Emeryville and San Leandro also see declining enrollment, they are advertising to Oakland families to fill the gap, and OUSD is marketing itself to compete.

Meanwhile, in Oakland, we are very good at fighting among ourselves, but are we good at winning positive improvements in outcomes for our students and more resources for our hard-working educators?

The school board is struggling to reach agreement, failing to pass necessary adjustments last week, without which there won’t be room in our budget for urgently needed increases in compensation for our employees. This comes a month after the board rescinded five of the school closures that we approved last year, without first considering the fiscal impact of that turnaround.

Opponents of closures pose a false dichotomy between reducing the number of schools and shrinking our central administration. In part, we have a large central office because the district has so many schools to manage.

Nevertheless, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell has repeatedly made reductions to the central office since she took the helm in 2017. There were once again many central administrative positions on the list of budget adjustments that our fellow board members failed to pass last week.

But there are diminishing returns to additional central office cuts. It’s impossible to use that strategy alone to reach the compensation increase target that we want to achieve, especially when the $5 million in savings from the slated school closures was just rescinded.

In our two years serving together on the board, we have landed on a common vision even though one of us was elected as a charter critic and the other as a friend of charters.

We ask our colleagues to join us in that vision, which is that if our schools have more resources, with transparency, accountability and clear plans to improve, we will see amazing results for our students. We’ve seen it happen in our high schools, where graduation rates have skyrocketed in recent years across Oakland, and even more dramatically for African-American students, thanks to a popular initiative funded by a voter-approved special tax.

By concentrating our dollars in fewer, better-resourced schools, we can bring that kind of positive change for all students and eliminate the opportunity gap for our African American and Latino children.

Sam Davis and Clif Thompson were elected to the Oakland School Board in 2020.