Reading, Writing, and Reparations
What if I offered you a retroactive 10% pay raise covering this year, a $5,000 signing bonus, and a 22% pay raise starting next year? Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? It’s not enough for the Oakland Education Association, the teachers union in Oakland, California, however. In addition to extremely generous financial concessions, the OEA is also demanding “common good” goals be included in the union contract, including measures on climate change, shared governance with the school board, and reparations for black students.
“They’ve been telling us all week they couldn’t negotiate common good, and last night, we broke through,” OEA President Ismael Armendariz said after three days of the teachers’ strike. “They told us they could bargain a memorandum of understanding.”
California already has some of the worst public school systems in the country. The no-show rate for students statewide was at a ridiculously high 15% pre-COVID, and it has soared to 30% post-COVID. All that missed schooling has had predictably terrible results on student learning. Over half of students statewide are below grade level in English, and two-thirds of students are below grade level in math. The results are predictably worse for black students, with almost 85% of them failing to meet
⋆⋆⋆ Instead of being taught how to read and add, California students are taught about “empire-building and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression,” in line with the state’s ethnic studies curriculum standards.