MAKING MISTAKES AND CALLING IT LEGAL

The recently-released Assessment and Recovery Plan Fourth Progress Report on the Oakland Unified School District by the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assessment Team (FCMAT) takes us into Alice-In-Wonderland/Bizarro world territory, friends. Concluding that the office of the State Superintendent’s office has messed up the Oakland schools for three years and counting without Oakland’s input, our friends at FCMAT continue to assert that this proves Oakland is not ready to run Oakland’s schools. The logic of that assertion escapes me, but it’s all perfectly legal and all built into SB39, the Don Perata-authored legislation that authorized the Oakland school takeover in 2003.

However, to paraphrase Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, calling it legal don’t make it right, boss.

SB39 says that along with other criteria, local control can be returned to the Oakland schools in five separate areas–community relations and governance, pupil achievement, financial management, personnel procedures, and facilities management–if “for at least the immediately previous six months the district has made substantial and sustained progress” in that area. In its recent report, FCMAT said that the district has only made such progress in one area: community relations and governance. All of this raises a number of questions.

1. Since the Oakland school takeover occurred solely because of fiscal problems, why must the district achieve “substantial and sustained progress” in four other areas besides fiscal management before being allowed to return to local control?

SB39 reads at Section 3, after all, that the takeover was necessary “because of the fiscal emergency” and that state control is necessary “in order to ensure the return to the district of fiscal solvency.” That being the case, why didn’t the SB39 language simply read, as Fresno Assemblymember Sarah Reyes suggested in the 2003 Assembly Education deliberations on the bill that “in two years, if you have a payback plan and FCMAT certifies your payback plan, you can have your district back.”

Nobody asserted in 2003, after all, that Oakland was screwing up in the four other areas. In fact, SB39 noted that before the takeover, “the Oakland Unified School District has made demonstrable academic improvements over the last few years, witnessed by test score improvements, more fully credentialed teachers in Oakland classrooms, and increased parental and community involvement.”

2. Since FCMAT has concluded that Oakland has made “substantial and sustained progress” in community relations and governance for more than a year, why hasn’t local control been restored by State Superintendent Jack O’Connell to Oakland in that area?

In many ways, FCMAT’s assessment in the area of community relations and governance borders on the paternalistic. The FCMAT report says, for example, that “in its advisory status, the board has continued to demonstrate a desire to be involved in establishing the district’s direction,” that “the board has worked to demonstrate its readiness to resume some areas of authority through working to define its role in the district’s Expect Success and Community Plan for Accountability in Schools campaigns,” and, finally, that “the conduct of board members at meetings continues to be respectful.” They might as well have said that Oakland’s school board members work well with other children, too.

Still, despite the fact that the September, 2006 FCMAT report notes that “FCMAT has determined that [community relations and governance] is appropriate for the governing board of the Oakland Unified School District to assume,” and, further, that “FCMAT recommended to the Superintendent of Public Instruction in September 2005 that consideration be given to the return of this operational area to the district governing board,” State Superintendent O’Connell has chosen to ignore this recommendation.

Of course, to give back control to the Oakland school board in one area would give the board authority and status at a time when the school board is opposing Mr. O’Connell’s plan to sell off valuable Oakland school property. So perhaps that is one reason he wants to hold off on that, for a bit.

3. Finally, since fiscal problems were the stated reason Oakland Unified was taken over by the state, is putting Oakland Unified’s fiscal house in order Mr. O’Connell’s top priority? It wouldn’t seem so.

SB39, at Section 4, required that the state administrator to be hired by the state superintendent to run Oakland’s schools “shall have recognized expertise in management and finance.”

Did Randolph Ward meet the “finance” part of that qualification when he was hired by Jack O’Connell in 2003 to run the Oakland schools? Mr. Ward had worked for two years as state administrator of the Compton Unified School District, and had been a fellow at the Eli Broad Academy that trains superintendents, so perhaps he picked up some information there on financial management. But his college studies tended to the educational part of education rather than the financial part, with a B.S. from Tufts University in Early Childhood Education and Mental Health, an Ed.M. in School Leadership from Harvard and another in Educational Administration from the University of Massachusetts and an Ed.D. in Policy, Planning and Administration from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. All good areas of study for a potential superintendent. But nothing in this résumé would suggest that Mr. Ward had “recognized expertise” in the field of finance.

So what was Mr. Ward’s financial record at OUSD?

Although failure to balance OUSD’s budget was the reason local control was seized from Oakland in the first place, upon his hiring Mr. Ward immediately announced that balancing the budget was going to be a difficulty. Then-Oakland Tribune reporter Alex Katz (he’s now the OUSD Public Information Officer) reported in June of 2003 that “Ward differed from [former OUSD Superintendent] Chaconas on the need to balance the budget right away, which would be ’very difficult if not impossible for next year without decimating the entire school district,’ [Ward] said.”

In January of the following year, when Ward announced a budget that was $21 million in the red, reporter Robert Gammon, then with the Tribune, wrote that “Ward, his top financial adviser and a FCMAT official … essentially [said that] former Superintendent of Schools Dennis Chaconas and the school board slashed too much from last year's budget. ‘They cut too far,’ Ward said… Barbara Dean, a FCMAT official being paid by Oakland, agreed, adding: "Last year, the focus in this district was 'Let's not get a state loan.'"

That was then, this is now.

Now FCMAT is painting a devastating picture of Ward’s fiscal tenure at OUSD. “The reforms undertaken by the district have not always been compatible with the goal of fiscal recovery and the return to local governance,” FCMAT concludes in its September 2006 report.

And–“The size of the district’s long-term debt has increased and the district has not remedied its previous pattern of deficit spending.”

And again–“The State Controller made a disclaimer of opinion in the 2003-04 financial audit based on the district’s recording errors and lack of sufficient supporting documents for many items, including accounts payable.”

And again–“Very little progress has been made to address the deficiencies in the internal audit function. The district did not implement the general recommendation regarding the establish of an audit committee.”

And on and on and on, such a gloomy fiscal picture that FCMAT rated Mr. Ward’s fiscal management of OUSD at a 4.00 on a 10 point scale, the lowest rating of the five operational areas it was assessing.

Given this dismal fiscal record, you would think that when Mr. Ward resigned earlier this year, Mr. O’Connell would give Oakland the fiscal expert it needs as his replacement. Instead, Mr. O’Connell appointed Kimberly Statham to succeed Mr. Ward. It was the popular choice, winning praise from several board members and staff and some community members, but was it the best choice? While Ms. Statham is universally considered to be a really nice person who is easier to work with than Mr. Ward, her background is in education, not finance.

That would seem to put Mr. O’Connell directly out of compliance with both the letter and spirit of the SB39 state takeover legislation, which concluded that Oakland Unified was having a severe fiscal crisis, and called for the hiring of an administrator with recognized financial expertise.

At the board/administrator presentation of the FCMAT report this week, one citizen said that we were watching the “systematic dismantling of the Oakland Unified School District” before our eyes, a downward spiral with dwindling enrollment and finances as the state botches the running of a local school district. Hard to argue with that. Hard to wonder why we–the citizens of Oakland, as well as the citizens of the State of California–are allowing this to happen.

Oakland Unified made one mistake–granting a needed teacher pay raise that it couldn’t afford–and Oakland has been paying for it, dearly, for the past three years. Who pays for the many mistakes made by FCMAT and the Office of State Superintendent Jack O’Connell during their time at the wheel? Unfortunately, Oakland, again.