By Craig Gordon

[A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine, which was a special issue on small school reform. Subscriptions to Rethinking Schools are available from www.rethinkingschools. org or 800-669-4192]

OAKLAND. In November 2001, the principal at our school, Fremont High in Oakland, Calif., announced that we had received an “almost unbelievable offer,” a grant to break our comprehensive school of nearly 1,900 students into several small autonomous schools. My principal called this “very exciting news,” saying it would help end the cycle of failure for many of Fremont’s students.

On October 26, 2005, Oakland teachers, students, and supporters protested the ongoing cuts in public school programs. Above, student dancers as part of the protests against cuts in art, music, and other programs. Substance photo by Craig Gordon.

The school is located in the heart of East Oakland, one of the lowest-income areas in California. Fremont’s student body was about 45 percent Latino, 34 percent African American, 17 percent Asian, and 1 percent white. Forty-three percent of the students were from families in the state’s welfare-to-work program and 48 percent were English language learners. Fewer than half of the entering ninth graders graduated, and the school’s standardized test scores earned the lowest rating — one out of 10 — on the state’s academic performance index.

These numbers exemplified the educational inequality nationwide. Yet the principal’s announcement sparked mixed emotions for me and other faculty. We weren’t disputing the gaping disparity in educational outcomes in the United States and that our students suffer the consequences. We know that there is an urgent need for fundamental educational change.

But I doubted that “small” would solve Fremont’s problems, especially since small schools don’t necessarily mean small classes. I had long been inspired by the ideas of the small schools movement and had chosen to transfer several years earlier to a small learning community within Fremont High. As a history and TV production teacher in Fremont’s Media Academy, I appreciated its focus on learning-by-doing and the opportunity to get to know a relatively small community of students and teachers. I felt the collegiality of a small learning community made me a better teacher.

On the other hand, I did not see large high schools as the root cause of my school’s many problems. I believe addressing the gap in educational achievement requires supplying the resources needed to address profound social and economic inequality. Genuine progress means multiplying education budgets several-fold to cut class sizes and upgrading facilities. The promised investment in small school reform did not appear to address any of these needs.

Despite my misgivings, I was pleased to learn that the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) affiliate, the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES), would be leading the transformation at Fremont High. BayCES had applied for and would administer the grant for the break-up, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I agreed with CES’s emphasis on teaching for in-depth understanding and mastery of skills instead of mindless coverage of subject matter.

There were just a few problems with this “offer,” though, the first being that it wasn’t an offer at all, but the superintendent’s decree. If the goal was to help fulfill the CES vision that “all children receive the nurturance, guidance, and resources they need to reach their fullest potential,” the method contradicted CES principles developed through years of experience. These principles recognized that successful small schools must reflect the needs and abilities of those who teach and learn in them (www. essentialschools. org). Small schools formed undemocratically could fail just as horribly as big schools.

Our union contract also recognizes that educators working with and caring for students every day are best positioned to lead effective school reform. It authorizes an elected Faculty Council (FC) “to discuss site based reform proposals” and “to bring a proposal which would significantly impact the content and delivery of instruction before the entire faculty for thorough discussion and approval.” As a union rep, I reminded our principal of this right, and he reassured the FC of his commitment to respect the contract.

Later that same day he issued a staff memo stating, “For those who don’t want to be part of the process [of forming small schools], in all candor, I recommend that you begin to consider other options for your future. I am committed to moving in this direction.” The memo also suggested that designs for new schools could extend working hours beyond contract limits and announced a two-day retreat in January. He did not point out that nobody was contractually required to attend the retreat, but did mention that anyone who didn’t go would risk a forced transfer to another school.

This “opportunity” smelled bad from the start.

To be fair, many of our teachers were excited about forming small schools. Some had even developed a proposal before this announcement to form a small school that would break away from Fremont. Another group had successfully done so the previous year. And Fremont High was already a hotbed of educational reform: Teachers had led the breakdown into other kinds of small learning communities – mostly career academies – about ten years earlier. While some teachers in academies questioned the requirement to alter their current structures to satisfy BayCES’ formula for small autonomous schools, others welcomed the apparent opportunity for much greater autonomy. Unlike academies, each of these schools was to have its own principal and control over staffing, budget, curriculum and assessment, governance, calendar and schedule and facilities. The faculty at each school would make decisions in these areas democratically.

But a lot of teachers were wary of this promised liberation suddenly descending upon us from…from where? From whom? Most immediately, of course, it was from the superintendent. But there was also BayCES and the millions of foundation dollars to drive this transformation. And where there are major foundations, there are corporations and the wealthy, powerful people behind them; in this case, it was Bill Gates. The world’s richest man supplies the lion’s share of cash flowing through small high school reform these days.

So, instead of honest reform, some teachers saw administrators chasing the latest gush of green while trying to outrun increasingly harsh state and federal mandates for underperforming schools. As they ran, they shouted orders to teachers: Immediately form design teams with whomever you can, brainstorm, research and write proposals and be ready to open up brand new, high performing schools by next September. Oh, and don’t forget to teach your current students and boost those high-stakes test scores.

Our principal repeatedly lectured us that our school’s high dropout and low attendance rates required this particular makeover. Administration exhorted us onward, acknowledging that it would be excruciatingly difficult, like “rebuilding a jet in mid-flight,” but, we could (must) do it. Otherwise, the community would turn to privately run charters. The principal gleefully filled our mailboxes with news of Edison’s public schools takeover in Philadelphia that year and other examples of the fire raging just beyond our frying pan. He heralded the “educational entrepreneurship” needed to develop and “sell” our proposals. He advised those worried of being left out by the nascent design teams to “package and sell” themselves.

Beyond the cheerleading, our administrators offered few, if any, answers to questions teachers raised at union meetings held at the school: Will the new schools try to run without counselors? How will small schools offer music, drama, foreign language, sports programs? How is the process structured for us to have some say in the change? Where is the time to do this mandated forming of small schools? Will contract procedures for posting positions and transferring faculty be followed? Will small autonomous schools with small autonomous budgets turn seniority upside down, favoring cheap new teachers over expensive old ones? Is this a union busting technique? Is this grant-driven reform a kind of school privatization? How could small faculties offer full programs while respecting our contractual right to teach no more than two subjects? Though the principal never advertised an intention to violate this limit, he said it was a luxury university professors didn’t enjoy and reminisced that when he had taught ELD in a wealthy suburban high school, he relished teaching four or more different subjects.

Students had their own questions and pressed the administration to hold meetings where they could get answers. To prepare for these meetings, student organizers came to classes and solicited written queries. Many students had complained to their teachers that they hated the idea of small schools, and some of their questions reflected apprehension: “Why are you having this small school?” “What is going to happen to sports, yearbook, newspaper, magazine, etc?” “What’s going to happen to lockers?” “How many students will be dropped?” “Will there be off campus lunch? Note: There will be hell if you try to keep us in the school for lunch.” “Why didn’t you talk to our parents first?”

These questions about who had and hadn’t been involved in the initial decision challenged the District’s and BayCES’s claim that “the community demanded small schools,” mainly based on their partnership with one community organization, Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), a federation of religious and neighborhood groups. But none of the OCO representatives showing up at Fremont had students there.

The other two partners in the small school reform were the District and BayCES. The School Board passed a policy supporting the creation of small schools in 2000. Though meant to be autonomous in various respects, these schools would remain accountable to the District and within all union contracts. Soon afterward, some teachers, administrators and parents designed and started up small schools, truly from the bottom up. The first clear departure from this trend came with the announcement that Fremont would break into small schools, no matter what the faculty thought about it. When that occurred, I called BayCES Executive Director Steve Jubb, reasonably confident that he would speak out against this autocratic approach. And since BayCES held the purse strings to the Gates money, surely it had considerable authority to hold the District accountable. So I was disappointed when Jubb told me that, though he agreed that the District’s approach was too heavy handed, BayCES was in a delicate position which prevented it from taking sides in this matter.

But, in fact, BayCES subsequently strongly supported the District and echoed its rhetoric with the mantra that it was “more interested in student issues than adult issues.” To those questioning that under-resourced small schools could promote equity, they often responded with statistics about student failure in existing schools, as if their critics didn’t already know or care enough about it. As consultants, they pictured themselves as advocates for low income students of color, overcoming the resistance of critics, including many who have cared for and taught students daily for decades.

Meanwhile, OEA was slow to devise an effective response of its own. Historically the union has linked the interests of students and teachers, striking for a month in 1996 for lower class size and competitive pay. Some OEA leaders participated in early discussions about small schools with BayCES and OCO. But as the democratic flavor of the early talks morphed into top-down implementation, OEA’s leadership floundered. Members committed to small schools urged the union to embrace, if not lead, their efforts. Others, skeptical of claims by and motives behind the small schools movement, argued that OEA should aggressively resist the breakup of large schools, which they said could lead to union busting and the balkanization of the district. Small schools advocates claimed their efforts promoted equity one school at a time; opponents argued that small schools would exacerbate segregation and inequality throughout the district.

As design teams began their pilots in the fall, a monstrous fiscal crisis was brewing. In October 2002 the bombshell hit. The District had “discovered” a $20 million budget deficit. Over the next weeks and months, the figure would jump several times until nobody could say for sure if the hole was $60, $80, or even $100 million deep. Contract talks had just begun when this happened. Instead of looking forward to improvements in compensation and working conditions that could support and encourage reform, we would be lucky to avoid massive layoffs.

The crisis exacerbated a schism in OEA between those strongly committeed to new scmall schools and others who were highly skeptical of the claims by small schools advocates and of their real agenda.

An emotional school board meeting that spring dramatized this divide. The Board planned a celebratory rollout of the new schools set to open at Fremont High in the fall on the same evening union and community activists came to protest the Board’s program and some 1200 teacher layoff notices. My design team colleagues sat on one side of the Board meeting room while hundreds of union and community activists denounced the layoffs. I wanted to stand with both groups. But a district administrator (and former BayCES staffer) dismissed the protestors while honoring the new small schools. “At a time when external resources are shrinking,” she said, “we must tap internal resources.”

BayCES and District officials depicted “shrinking external resources”—state and federal funding cuts —as an inevitable fact of life, to which schools had to adapt. They argued that autonomous schools were best positioned to “set priorities” in the midst of cutbacks. But OEA’S High School Caucus issued a statement on small schools rejecting the “inevitability” of austerity. It said the emphasis on adapting to fewer resources fed illusions that we can achieve equity and sustainable school improvement under austerity:

When we strip away the myth that scarce resources are a fact of life, we can demand reform that truly addresses our students’ needs. We need small schools with the resources to offer full programs and to provide educators with respect, reasonable work loads, small classes, and adequate support, materials, facilities and time to plan lessons and to run the school…. OEA also must take a leading role to ensure that new small schools are sustainable environments for teaching and learning. (OEA High School Caucus Small Schools Statement)

Critics of this view say, “Dream on. There’s no money for that.” But OEA argued that there is money, even in a “poor” city like Oakland. OEA commissioned a study by a local nonprofit research group showing that Oakland has the 18th largest Gross Metropolitan Product in the U.S. (more than $100 billion), and Forbes Magazine ranked Oakland as the 8th best city for business in the U.S. In 2002, Oakland-based Clorox Corporation paid its CEO $31 million, enough to pay for about 850 new teachers. Instead Clorox has claimed the mantle of benevolent corporate citizen by contributing $500,000 over the course of eight years, about 1/600 of its profit in a single year (2002). (Data Center Study, April 2004)

OEA launched a campaign to redistribute corporate wealth to fund schools, youth centers and libraries, all targeted by cutbacks and closures. After all, equitable education clearly would remain an unfulfilled promise without permanent and ample additional funding. Oakland residents had done their share over the years, passing a series of residential property tax hikes targeting schools. OEA decided to demand the same from Oakland’s corporate citizens.

We began with a march through downtown on March 12, 2003 and have continued the effort, though slowly and with much internal debate about whether this is the time to press this issue. Meanwhile the district crisis significantly worsened.

While the forced creation of small schools had frustrated many teachers from the beginning, the worst was yet to come. When the state bailed the District out of fiscal disaster with a $100 million line of credit, the largest aid deal for a school district in California history, it exacted a high price. It stripped the school board of its power, demanded the superintendent’s resignation, and sent Randolph Ward to act as Oakland’s all-powerful state administrator.

Morris Tatum, President of AFSME 790 representing district custodians, food service and aides to the handicapped, argues that the California’s political establishment choice of an African American administrator was cynically calculated. Tatum, who also is African American, charges that it amounts to “using a black face to push their message…because we would not allow anybody else to come into our community and destroy it the way this is going on.” (Speech at Town Hall meeting, March 8, 2005)

Upon arrival in June 2004 the energetic, Harvard-educated Dr. Ward charmed audiences with jokes, proficient Spanish and promises to make the district both fiscally sound and academically excellent. He did not talk about his affiliation with the Broad Foundation, a major corporate think tank promoting charters and other forms of school privatization. Among Broad’s leading lights is President Bush’s first term Secretary of Education Rod Paige.

Ward moved quickly to pressure teachers into a 4% salary cut and to lay off dozens of custodians, whom he then blamed for increased filth in schools. “Most of this has nothing to do with the cutbacks,” Ward told the Oakland Tribune. “It has to do with work-ethic issues.”

Then he announced that all schools in Oakland would follow the site-based budgeting rules already being piloted by new small schools: Each school operates on a budget based on state payment for its average daily attendance and makes its own spending decisions. This regime dubbed Results Based Budgeting (RBB) seems certain to increase inequity, since schools with the most low income students historically have the lowest attendance rates. It also makes schools choose between keeping class size at reasonable levels or going without a counselor or a custodian. Ward celebrated RBB as the imposition of a corporate model on public schools. Under RBB, he said, every principal is an entrepreneur and schools must maximize “profit” by increasing “revenue” (average daily attendance) and cutting costs (e.g., pay). Ward also quelled any notions of democracy that may have lingered in the new small schools (or in old large ones) by declaring the principal as the site’s “CEO” with the final say in all decisions.

During the summer, the District and a nonprofit group called Cross City Campaign held workshops to promote RBB to school staff and community members. Cross City champions the spread of school district decentralization across the nation in order to “reconnect schools with their communities...[so that they] challenge and inspire all students to achieve high standards.”

Some of us asked how the District would ensure equity under RBB, given the higher attendance rates (and attendance dollars) and deeper parental pockets supplementing site budgets in richer neighborhoods. We were told the district would do “resource targeting” by helping the neediest schools to apply for grants tailored to their needs.

By now we were getting a taste of the next stage of small school formation in Oakland, because Castlemont High had broken into three small schools set to open in the fall of 2004. Castlemont is in an even poorer part of East Oakland than Fremont High, so its staff and community received all of the same promises of small schools equity we did. But at the Cross City workshop, a Castlemont teacher told facilitators and District leaders that his campus – all three new schools – had gotten rid of the French teacher, the librarian and two campus supervisors (though Castlemont has the district’s highest rate of violence). This teacher asked, “What can people under RBB do to prevent the destruction of education in deep East Oakland?”

A district administrator overseeing small school formation responded compassionately, “It hurts to do that, the people making the decision have tears in their eyes. These are tough times and those are the tough choices that have to be made.”

A Cross City facilitator added, “We all know that the federal government and the state government are not funding education as it should be, but meanwhile we have to make these tough decisions.” She added that at least the cuts were not being made by a central office bureaucrat. “At the site you know the needs of your students, so it’s better that way.” (All quotes from Cross City Campaign workshop July 6 and 7, 2004)

Such responses underscored the contradictions of “going small” on the basis of austerity. In theory, small school reform is about delivering higher quality education in more personal and human environments. When it’s done on the cheap, however, it puts “intermediaries” like Cross City and BayCES into the role of apologists for a string of hollow promises to teachers, students and parents. Such organizations generally set out intending to bring valuable information, skills and strategies that can contribute to district and school reform processes. But without a significant infusion of new resources – let alone under massive budget cuts – they become instruments of policies that undermine their own professed goals and guiding principles.

For example, grassroots support for decentralization and school-based budgeting originates with a legitimate interest in reducing central office bureaucracy. But RBB has been used as a cover for underinvestment in and privatization of public services.

The breakup of Castlemont High, provides a case in point. One of Castlemont’s new small school has a lot of money. It has provided high tech equipment for every teacher and classroom, expensive room renovations, new textbooks and smaller class size than the other two schools. Meanwhile, one of the other schools is severely underfunded. Its facilities are unsanitary and unsafe, it has cut positions and about five of its fifteen teachers throughout much of 2004-05 were substitutes.

The inequity at Castlemont came up at a special session of the Coalition for Essential Schools annual conference held in San Francisco in November 2004. A teacher asked BayCES Executive Director Steve Jubb to address the inequity that results when public schools have to rely on soft money. Jubb explained that BayCES had helped schools at Castlemont link up with foundations. “So what we did was we made the marriage, and then it was a matter of the school leadership making that connection… Now it is a serious problem, the inequities that sometimes get formed, because some people are very entrepreneurial and get those things and some people are not. Our position has always been it’s better to get and then try to backfill and get from somewhere else, than to say, well if everybody can’t have it, then nobody can have it…” (CES National Conference, San Francisco, 11/13/04)

Obviously, questions about funding are central to small schools, as they are to all schools. And the answers we hear are strikingly consistent, whether they come from the State Administrator or from the private nonprofits pushing small schools and decentralized budgets as the key to fixing education. Dr. Ward says be a good entrepreneur by cutting costs and raising revenues. Cross City Campaign sings the virtues of people at the school sites having the power to cut their own budgets. And the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools regrets the inequities that somehow result from some principals being better entrepreneurs than others.

In Spring 2004, Ward closed five schools. More than 1000 parents, students and community members went to a special meeting on the closings to protest. Ward told them that declining enrollment had rendered the schools too small to be cost effective. Then he opened new small schools on the same sites. In these new schools he is demanding that OEA facilitate the waiver of contract language on class size, case loads, hours of work, number of subject preparations per teacher, policies on transferring and assigning teachers, and special services and assignments.

In 2001 then-Superintendent Dennis Chaconas described new small autonomous schools as being “like internal charter schools.” He was suggesting that they were actually an alternative and antidote a proliferation of charter schools. Ultimately, however, new small schools served as a Trojan horse for charters; the district used them to pilot the attendance-driven, site-based budgeting that Ward later imposed throughout the district under the label of RBB, in which each school is an independent “profit center.” And if Ward gets his way in the still unsettled contract, each school will operate under widely varying, contractually-waived, conditions, with little connection to each other or to a central support system. Instead of inoculating the district against a tidal wave of charters, top-down small school “reform” opened the floodgates inside of the district itself. The system Ward envisions would strongly resemble a network of charter schools.

In fact, last fall Ward announced he would close more “underperforming” schools and open new nonunion “internal charters,” ironically taking the former-superintendent’s earlier characterization of new small schools one step closer to full-fledged charters. These “internal charters” are operated by a company started up and staffed by the district itself! And Ward has approved new (non “internal”) charter schools at such a rapid rate that, among urban districts, Oakland now has the highest percentage of students in charters in California. And eight new charter schools have applications pending. Meanwhile, enrollment in regular district schools has plummeted, taking attendance-based state funding to new lows as well, feeding a downward spiral: decreasing funding and capacity, decreased performance, decreasing numbers of schools meeting their Adequate Yearly Performance requirements, increasing numbers of “failing” schools being closed and being replaced by charters.

To hasten the privatization trend, the state superintendent has enlisted BayCES and major corporations in a project to “recreate” the district as a private business network. Oakland’s largest companies—Clorox, Kaiser and Dreyer’s—recently joined representatives of Gates, Broad and Dell, Inc., to announce an investment of $24 million to remake the district’s central office as a “business service” and new small schools into “customers” who “invest in services.” At the press conference celebrating this announcement, donors revealed that corporate executives will now call the shots in the district. The head of the East Bay Community Foundation said his private organization will disburse funds and “communicate the bottom line” to educators.

Kaiser called its million-dollar donation “a big deal,” ignoring the fact that its 18 to 24 percent planned health premium rate increase over two years will cost the district many times that amount annually. OEA has demanded that Kaiser and Health Net freeze rates to the district as a first step to support fiscal recovery. But Ward is still trying to pass increased health costs along to district workers, who have already taken a four percent pay cut. By a five-to-one margin last April, teachers rejected an agreement that would impose caps on health benefits and seriously erode teachers’ rights and working conditions. As 2005 draws to an end, contract negotiations are still at impasse.

Ward’s aggressive stance toward the community and district workers in Oakland, and in Compton before that has boosted his national political stock among privatizers. In November, Louisiana politicians invited him to speak at a conference to “bring back New Orleans,” where he was hailed by the local press as one of the “movers and shakers behind one of the most successful national and international education reform efforts.” Not coincidentally, Eli Broad and his foundation have announced plans to a launch a network of charter schools as part of the city’s “recovery effort” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite the abysmal way small school reform is playing out in Oakland, the fiasco has spawned some positive visions for authentic reform. In March, 2005, the union adopted a draft of its vision for educational change. It includes a point supporting small schools, with “sufficient autonomy to address local needs,” and “which at the secondary level, must be interconnected enough to control and provide resources such as libraries, counselors, AP classes, special education classes, and a wide range of electives, and extracurricular activities.” OEA is embracing the advantages small schools offer and still trying to ensure that high school students have the range of options available to students in high quality large schools.

The union also believes several prerequisites are crucial for attaining educational excellence and equality, including small class sizes (15:1), qualified, experienced teachers and instructional aides in every classroom, sufficient material resources, clean and comfortable facilities, sufficient support and intervention personnel, adequate time for teachers to plan individually and to collaborate. We also believe we need preschool and adult school services available at each site and collaboration among all stakeholders. Accomplishing this will cost billions of additional dollars, so the final point of the vision statement calls for “redistribution of the corporate wealth of the Oakland metropolitan region.” (OEA Draft Vision for Education, passed 3/7/2005)

It should be clear from these evolving proposals that union activists have not rejected small schools, despite the misuse of this reform in Oakland. They respect the amazing efforts by staff, students, and parents at small schools to create functional and caring learning communities. For example, at Mandela High, where I taught, most students seem to have grown more deeply attached to the school than I usually have seen happen in large high schools. But so far we have not seen much evidence of significant academic gains. Most of the old issues of low student achievement, behavioral problems and teacher burnout persist.

The problems associated with small school conversions in Oakland are not inherent in the idea of small schools. But they are inherent in the wildly mistaken belief that small schools or any other reform will go very far for very long without adequate resources and in the unexamined belief that austerity in the midst of plenty is a natural event. These assumptions induce caring educators to make damaging “trade offs,” such as cutting electives, counselors and libraries. “Inevitable” budget inequities require “hard choices,” such as whether to further overcrowd classrooms or overload teachers with additional course preparations

These injustices are only inevitable if we fail to resist them locally and nationally. Resistance, though, is tough to organize while struggling to teach day to day, and especially so while immersed in small learning communities. There we tend to focus on “the small picture” — as we often should — but stay isolated from potential allies elsewhere. Many of my colleagues are giving their all to make small schools work and have little energy or time left to fight larger political battles. Some even believe those battles are counterproductive, because they make teachers appear to blame larger forces for our failure to effectively educate.

Oakland Education Association (OEA) members (above, often in green shirts) are joined by ACORN (red shirts) at a protest during an Oakland school board meeting . Under the current regime, school board members were not allowed to vote, but teachers, parents and community leaders finally forced the board members to speak out against proposed cuts. Substance photo by Craig Gordon. 

But real reform costs real money. Class size reduction has been linked more consistently than any other reform to improved student achievement, and that requires sustained revenue to hire and keep new teachers and build new classrooms. California began funding smaller classes in K-3 following a public campaign by California Teachers Association and a month-long strike by Oakland’s teachers in 1996 to cut class size. It can be done, but we had to fight for it. Teachers demanding the redistribution of corporate wealth is a tradition going back at least a century. During the early 1900s, the Chicago Teachers Federation and its leader Margaret Haley successfully fought corporate tax deductions depriving public schools of needed funding.

Skeptics may say, “Dream on.” And they might attack the dreamers for “resisting realistic reform.” But fundamental change begins with visions and dreams and the willingness to fight for them.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” I think we need to dream — and demand — something better for our students