Joanna ------------------------------
Good Evening Oakland Parents,
First of all, lets be clear. We wouldn't even be talking about school closures if (pick 2 from the following) (1) the corporations and super-rich that make a huge amount of money off of our society paid anything like their share to sustain it. OR (2) Bill Gates hadn't strolled into the Town about ten years ago to put millions of Gatesland Funbucks behind small schools and then later skipped out leaving us with 101 schools for 38,000 kids OR (3) the state administration of OUSD hadn't glibly approved over 20 charter schools without any local democratic accountability. Those are the key facts we all need to keep in mind before we pick at each other.
Second of all, just a few minor points: (1) We all know that socioeconomic status is an excellent indicator of standardized test performance. It's not an accident that teachers often jokingly refer to API as "Affluent Parent Index." However, I'm not sure the following statement holds up: "Kaiser has only 24% socio-economically disadvantaged students; this means that 76% at Kaiser are middle class or higher." Just because a student is not below, at, or near the poverty line, that doesn't mean they are "middle class?" (2) Kaiser was taken off the list not because we are middle class, we were taken off the list because we are organized and because we fight back. We fight back and we fight from all angles.
We must all fight every way we know how, and we must all fight together. We must all fight at the local level against school cosures when OUSD is spending money for a staff of at least ten (and believe me, they're paid more than a teacher) to decide on and facilitate which schools will be closed (as well as outside contracts, new assessment programs, etc.). We must fight at the state level while schools are being closed when California is the only state to allow oil to be mined out of the ground without any tax. We must fight at the national level when we have troops on the ground and billions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. while our schools are starved of funds.
But the last thing we should do is fight one another.