Board vote will help bring non-charter and charter schools together to benefit all students
Blog note: this article references a recent Alameda County Grand Jury report.
These days we mostly hear about how district and charter public schools are at odds, but we have much more in common than not, especially here in Oakland. Thankfully, our elected Board of Education just demonstrated some leadership in support of our new homegrown superintendent, giving us hope we can end the zero sum game and get back to focusing on our shared passion for educating kids.
After four months of public hearings, study sessions, individual meetings and extensive rounds of edits and feedback from the community, the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education voted 5-2 on June 27 to pass a “Community of Schools” policy calling on new Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell to develop a citywide plan by Nov. 15 that addresses quality and equity for all kids. It also calls on charter public school organizations in Oakland to come to the table and work with the district to ensure a shared plan for our community.
The hope is that this plan will address the fact that there are underutilized and vacant properties that could be better put to use for kids, that both district and charters need to do a better job of serving special needs students, and that if we shared best practices and resources better, kids and families would benefit.
This policy is more critical than ever in light of a recent Alameda County Grand Jury report that closed with eight recommendations, including calling on OUSD to “expand collaboration between traditional district-run schools and charter schools, especially those sharing campuses.” It noted that there are many examples of successful collaboration at the school and classroom level.
We should know. We live this collaboration every day. As teachers from both types of schools, we see the ways district and public charter schools are already working together every day even without this policy, and how much better we could do with it.
Cox Elementary and REACH Academy both sit on a shared campus off Bancroft Avenue in East Oakland. Our schools serve students from the same neighborhood.
We’ve seen success in collaborating across schools to put students first. The leadership of our two schools determined the importance of ensuring that students on our campus were receiving reading interventions and did a cost-share to ensure Reading Partners worked with 51 students across both schools (26 from REACH and 25 from Cox).
Reading interventions only scratch the surface of addressing what East Oaklanders need in order to thrive.
Children with similar backgrounds receive different educations, depending on what school a child attends. Class sizes and hours of teacher preparation allotted during the day differ; student extracurricular offerings such as music, art, and physical education vary at each school, as do special education services. We need to work together to ensure we’re using them intentionally and equitably.
We need to stop thinking of ourselves as district or charter teachers and instead come to the table as Oakland teachers. And we need the OUSD board to adhere to its role as leaders responsible for Oakland students and support the superintendent in following through on this policy to develop and implement a plan for a community of schools that serves current and future needs of all public school students in Oakland. We also need our charter boards to come to the table and commit to a true community of schools that includes them.
Passing the Community of Schools Policy is a good step to start bringing together all public education supporters in Oakland. It is a statement in these divisive times that we can find common ground and focus on what is best for our community.
July 6, 2018
The Mercury-News
By Caitlin Dobson and Edgar Rodriguez-Ramirez
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