MR. O'CONNELL COMES TO OAKLAND, PART TWO
Sorry to continue to be a bother about this,
but I continue to be puzzled over the details of how Oakland's schools got taken
over by the state, and what needs to be done to get the schools back in Oakland's
hands.
In last week's column, we noted that State Senator Don Perata's SB39–the 2003 legislation
that authorized the state seizure of Oakland's schools–gave a mandate for how the
Oakland schools should be run during the takeover: "To the extent allowed by
district finances, it is the intent of the Legislature that the [revised education
program to be implemented by the state superintendent and his administrator] shall
maintain the core educational reforms that have led to districtwide improvement[s]..."
Does anyone ever actually look at these things after they are passed?
Print that sentence out, tape it on the wall above your breakfast table,
and then read (or re-read) Robert Gammon's long and informative article in the April
27, 2005 East Bay Express on state-appointed administrator Randolph Ward's
overhaul of the Oakland Unified School District and its education programs [The
Caustic Reformer]. Rather than maintaining Oakland's core
educational reforms begun during the regime of former Superintendent Dennis Chaconas,
as called for in the law that authorized his hiring, Mr. Ward has taken Oakland education
in a completely different direction. His own? Financier and education-dabbler Eli
Broad's? It certainly ain't what Oakland had decided we wanted, and which we'd been
having success with until the bottom blew out of the budget.
(In one of those revealing passages you sometimes find like a gold nugget in the
midst of government documents, the State Superintendent's multi-year fiscal recovery
plan for Oakland released last week said–a little too eagerly, I think–that "OUSD's
current financial crisis creates an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond recovery
to the old academically ineffective system to true renewal of the Oakland school
system." True renewal? And who's to be the determinator of that?)
Meanwhile,
after two years were spent by his state-appointed school administrator doing things
that SB39 didn't authorize, like revamping the education program, California Superintendent
of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell came to Oakland Technical High School last month
to tell Oaklanders why he was so late producing something that was specifically
called for in the legislation: the multi-year plan for the Oakland system to get
out of its fiscal difficulties.
In his opening remarks to the packed audience in the Tech auditorium, Mr. O'Connell
acknowledged that the plan was a long-time coming, but explained the delay. "We
didn't know the tremendous problems facing the district when we took over,"
he said. "The problem was bigger than I thought."
Let us sit around the hotstove and ponder this statement for a moment, friends.
In the years leading up to the 2003 state takeover of Oakland's schools, no school
district in the state was under more of a fiscal microscope than Oakland Unified.
The state-organized Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) was hired in
April of 1999 to look into Oakland Unified's financial problems, and published a
comprehensive fiscal assessment of the district later that year. Oakland's school
financial problems were then being monitored by the Alameda County Office of Education
and the county office's fiscal advisor–Pete Yasitis–who was later loaned to OUSD
to oversee Oakland's fiscal recovery. The next year, in fact, OUSD Superintendent
Dennis Chaconas hired Yasitis away from ACOE to be his deputy superintendent in charge
of fiscal affairs. (It was Yasitis, by the way, who wrote the unbalanced budget that
bankrupted the Oakland school system and led to the state takeover, one of those
"oddities" about this situation that has never been fully explained.)
Then in October of 2002 (this time while her former fiscal deputy, Mr. Yasitis, was
running Oakland Unified's budget show) Alameda County School Superintendent Sheila
Jordan again sent for FCMAT to oversee the Oakland's school finances and the organization
produced another series of comprehensive reports on the situation. And finally,
in June of 2004, following the state takeover, the office of the California State
Controller completed and published a comprehensive audit of Oakland Unified's 2002-03
budget detailing the "problems facing the district" that Mr. O'Connell
talked about at Tech. All of these are on top of the financial audit reports regularly
issued by Oakland Unified's own auditors.
But ten months later, after a long period of state and county and local oversight
and with comprehensive fiscal reports mounting, Mr. O'Connell came to Oakland and
said that, frankly, he couldn't produce a recovery plan sooner because he hadn't
known how bad things were. Didn't he read the reports?
It gets worse.
In April of 2003, Oakland school officials traveled to Sacramento to testify before
the Senate Education Committee to speak on Perata's SB39 bill and the proposed state
loan and school takeover. During the hearing, in answer to questions by Senators,
Superintendent Dennis Chaconas and then-Oakland School Board President Greg Hodge
tried to provide details on how Oakland got into its fiscal problems. Senate Education
Committee Chairperson John Vasconcellos cut them off, saying "we're not here
to talk about that." In fact, there has never been a state investigation–as
opposed to an audit–of how Oakland's school problems came to be, including what might
be interesting testimony from the long-departed Mr. Yasitis (he retired from his
job as OUSD's fiscal director sometime before the residue hit the fan). If Mr. O'Connell
didn't know the true extent of the Oakland problem when the state legislature was
considering handing the Oakland schools over to him in the spring of 2003, why didn't
he just drop by the Senate Education Committee hearings and ask somebody?
Or then again, maybe the two-year delay in the release of the multi-year recovery
plan was simply a stall for something else.
In any event, Mr. O'Connell did come to Oakland last month, and released the long-awaited
plan detailing how he and Mr. Ward will get Oakland Unified in good enough fiscal
shape to turn it back over to Oakland.
Someone from the audience asked him the obvious question: so can you give us a date-certain
as to when local control will return?
"I wish I had a date," Mr. O'Connell replied. "I don't have a date.
There are certain standards that have to be met." And what are those standards?
"The standards will be set by the county office of education and by our
auditing agencies." [The emphasis on the will be set are mine.]
The problem is, try as I might, I can't find the part in SB39 that mentions some
sort of new standards for local control that need to be set in order to OUSD's governing
board to "regain all of its rights, duties, and powers." The only such
standards for return of local control that I can find are outlined in SECTION 5 (e)
(6) of the law, which reads: "The Superintendent of Public Instruction concurs
with the assessment of the administrator and FCMAT that future compliance by the
Oakland Unified School District with the [FCMAT] improvement plan … and the [State
Superintendent's] multiyear financial recovery plan … is probable."
FCMAT's updated Assessment and Recovery Plan mandated under the Oakland takeover
law was completed and released in September of 2003. Mr. O'Connell came to Oakland
last month with his multiyear recovery plan in hand. Yet he still says that "certain
standards" for the return of local control have yet to be set, standards that
don't seem to be called for in the law.
Is Mr. O'Connell really searching around for these elusive "certain standards?"
Or is the real problem that Mr. Ward's overhaul of Oakland's education program–another
little item not called for in SB39–needs more time to be completed?
I don't have any answers to that one, friends. I'm just sitting around here, asking
a couple of questions. Like I said, sorry to be a bother.