BETWEEN A BEAR AND A GORILLA
This fall brings an enormous lesson in civics and
how to understand the secret and inner workings of our government. Sometimes in the
rush surrounding a particular event or action or piece of legislation, details get
lost or overlooked, and it is only with the passage of time, and patient digging,
that we begin to learn the truth of how a particular government action came to be.
Thus it is with our emerging understanding of the actions of the Bush Administration
with regard to terrorism both before and after the September 11th attacks.
Thus it is, too, with our emerging understanding of the 2003 takeover of the Oakland
Unified School District, which we were reminded of this week by the release of the
Fourth OUSD Assessment and Recovery Plan by the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance
Team.
Many members of Oakland’s education community had been looking forward to the FCMAT
report, hoping that it would show enough progress in the school district to either
allow State Superintendent Jack O’Connell to begin giving back some measure of local
control. They were disappointed. While FCMAT said that OUSD was slightly improving–averaging
a little over 3/4ths of a point improvement on a 10 point scale in the five operational
areas that FCMAT is judging–the improvement was only good enough for FCMAT to recommend
returning local control in one area: community relations and governance. While FCMAT
can recommend, Mr. O’Connell makes the ultimate decision.
More on the community relations/governance thing in a moment.
We know, now, that back in 2003 when the Perata bill was going through the state
legislature, there was a fierce struggle between O’Connell and FCMAT over the “end
game” of state control of the Oakland schools–that is, who would have the ultimate
say over when Oakland could get its schools back, the State Superintendent or FCMAT.
In testimony to the Assembly Education Committee in May of 2003, then-OUSD School
Board President Greg Hodge likened it to a fight between a bear and a gorilla, with
Oakland school officials only hoping that the district didn’t get smashed in between.
Mr. Hodge wasn’t the only one concerned.
At the same hearing at which Mr. Hodge made his bear/gorilla remarks, Fresno Assemblymember
Sarah Reyes raised the same question. “I’m trying to figure out the timeline for
deciding whether or not you can have your district back,” the Assemblymember said
to Mr. Hodge and State Senator Don Perata. “I don’t want a Compton. I don’t think
you want a Compton, where [the state] is going to be running you for the rest of
your lives.” Reading from the language in Mr. Perata’s bill that outlined how Oakland
would eventually get its schools back, Ms. Reyes said, “I don’t know from my perspective
if this language is clear and concise enough… As you move this bill forward, you
really, Senator, need to narrow that focus. Because we could have a Compton here.
I’d like to see that language tightened up to say in two years, if you have a payback
plan and FCMAT certifies your payback plan, you can have your district back.”
Ms. Reyes went on to explain the problem with returning local control to the Compton
Unified School District, which was taken over by the state in 1993.
“We’re right now trying to struggle to get a bill for [Los Angeles Assemblymember]
Dymally. Compton has been okay for a while and [the state is] still there. They’re
doing well. They’re in the black.”
A month after the May, 2003 Assembly Education Committee hearing on Oakland, ten
years after the state originally took over, local control was restored to Compton
Unified.
Meanwhile Ms. Reyes, whose own West Fresno Unified School District had earlier been
taken over by the state, explained why she was concerned about the return to local
control language in the Oakland takeover bill. “My problem with this language is
it’s kind of esoteric,” she said. “If I think you’re doing okay, then you can have
your district back. If I don’t think you’re doing okay, you can’t have your district
back. There’s no third party analysis.”
Ms. Reyes’ complaint was that the Oakland takeover bill put too much discretion over
return to local control in the hands of the State Superintendent. She felt that more
authority should be given to FCMAT. “They have the number crunchers,” she explained.
“That’s what FCMAT does.”
But is FCMAT an objective body that has set objective standards for Oakland to return
to local control of Oakland’s schools? Hardly.
In August of 2003, when reporter Robert Gammon was with the Oakland Tribune
(he has since moved over to the East Bay Express), Mr. Gammon wrote an article
that charged that rather than helping prevent the takeover of the Oakland schools,
FCMAT may have helped to orchestrate it.
“Before the state takeover of Oakland schools, top officials from a Bakersfield agency
with power over the district kept in close contact with two high-profile East Bay
politicians and the future boss of the city's schools, public records show,” Mr.
Gannon wrote in an article entitled “Phone logs link 'politics' to school takeover.”
“Critics say office and cell phone records obtained by the Oakland Tribune
provide evidence the takeover, and the resulting loss of local control of Oakland's
schools, was politically orchestrated,” Mr. Gannon continued. “The records show top
officials from the Bakersfield-based County Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance
Team (FCMAT) called Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the office of state Sen. Don Perata,
D-Oakland, and then-Compton schools chief Randy Ward at least 40 times each in the
months before the takeover. Brown and Perata at differing times in the past year
voiced support for the takeover, which took effect in June and placed Ward and FCMAT
in charge of the school district. By contrast, FCMAT officials made no calls to the
Oakland school leaders they were appointed to advise on how to solve the district's
financial problems.”
But what interest could FCMAT have in the state taking over of Oakland’s schools?
Part of it is in the structure and purpose of FCMAT itself. A non-state organization
set up by state legislation, one of FCMAT’s major mandates is to intervene in “troubled”
California school districts. To do so, it hires teams of consultants, whose salaries
are paid for by the intervened districts themselves. Every time FCMAT is called into
a new district, these consultants have more work to do. Further, the longer they
stay in a district, the longer the consultants continue to get their paychecks. And
it is the consultants–who set the standards by which the districts must be judged
and then decide, themselves, whether or not the districts have met those standards–who
decide when they (the consultants) are no longer needed. Before our conservative
friends got so hot on privatizing government, they used to call this a classic conflict
of interest.
But these are by no means the only problems with FCMAT’s intervention in Oakland,
as well as its system of assessments.
FCMAT gives an overall score–between 0 and 10–in each of five operational areas.
It also gives scores for individual areas within those five operational areas (within
the area of Financial Management, for example, FCMAT rates 30 individual subtopics
or subsets). To decide when it will recommend when Oakland can regain local control
in any of the five operational areas, FCMAT has decided that it will do so “when
the average score of the subset of standards in a functional area reaches a level
of six, and it is considered to be substantial and sustainable, and no individual
standard in the subset is below a four.”
Those level numbers and requirement that the individual subsets much reach a certain
standard are FCMAT’s own, not SB39’s. The state legislation only reads that one of
the requirements for return to local control is that “FCMAT … determines that for
at least the immediately previous six months the school district made substantial
and sustained progress in implementation of the plans in the major functional area.”
FCMAT, which has a financial interest in remaining in Oakland as long as it can,
was left to set the “substantial and sustained progress” bar wherever it wanted.
There is no objective standard so that legally, under its own rules, FCMAT could
string out the state takeover indefinitely. The American colonists once launched
a lively rebellion when the British king and Parliament invoked the same type of
arbitrary authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, how odd is FCMAT’s fourth progress report on Oakland Unified? In a district
which has been completely stripped of local control, where democratic rights are
no longer operable, where neither school board members nor the taxpaying public has
any say in its operation, and where the State Superintendent has managed to completely
ignore the wishes of the community in a major decision (the selling of the downtown
OUSD properties, which is opposed all over Oakland), the only area where FCMAT says
OUSD is doing well is in Community Relations And Governance. No, that’s more than
odd. That, my friends, is perverse.