Two Bad Doors

A while back I said something at a PSAC meeting that just sort of summed up the way that I feel listening to folks who believe, often with the best intentions, that somehow taking sides is going to solve the issues with our district. What I said was that "If there are no good solutions, then nobody has a good argument."

And so it goes within OUSD. Ashley McBride published an article last week in the Oaklandside that, perhaps inadvertently, illustrates the real struggle we have as a community to come to any shared understanding of the challenges we face and how to face them.

I won't recap the entire article in depth, you should read it if you haven't already, especially if you're going to keep reading this. Either way, here's my summary of what is being reported:

In December, the district's leadership was working hard to try and find a way to cover its $100 million deficit. At the time, the CBO of the district (since 2020) was Lisa Grant Dawson, and the Chief of Staff was Dan Bellino (for less than a year).

In their roles as leaders, they struggled to find a way to reduce this structural deficit entirely by the end of the 2026-27 school year.

According to Dawson and Bellino (in their interviews for this article), their solution amounted to taking a loan to close the deficit, thus giving up local control of the district. They believed this was the best they could come up with, and expected their proposal to be put before the board at an upcoming meeting.

They were both surprised to find that, in addition to their scenario, Superintendent Denise Saddler presented the board with an entirely different proposal that did not suggest taking a loan, and instead maintained local control and called for drastic cuts.

Lisa Grant Dawson resigned almost immediately1, and Dan Bellino was fired.

I was actually at the meeting where Dr. Saddler presented the now well-discussed "Scenario 3"2 and was following things pretty closely at the time. After the abrupt departure of Bellino and Dawson, the media narrative was strongly angled towards the idea of "turmoil", adding to the sense of chaos and despair that OUSD's leadership, already overmatched by the task at hand, was now without a CBO who had spent a very long time conveying to the Board that something drastic needed to happen to actually address the deficit in a meaningful and sustainable way. I was at a few of those meetings, as well!

I've spoken with Ashley McBride on a number of occasions. I think she's genuinely trying to provide clarity and transparency to the public in her job as a reporter, and I think she has generally done a good job at that task. While I don't doubt the events and quotes presented by the article are accurate, I also believe the "gotcha" tone of the article and its lack of balance in sources (as I write this, not a single quote from current OUSD senior leadership or staff is included) is a bummer, as there is some very important context that many readers won't have. This post is an effort to provide some of that context on my own.

Update: While I still think the tone and viewpoint of the article skews in a way I'm not happy about, I want to be fair to Ms. McBride here. She pointed out in our conversation that the district had several opportunities to comment on this article, and that OUSD been extremely slow to fulfill information requests about it. I can't blame her for being suspicious here, and I believe it reinforces the urgency to significantly improve communications that I and others have pointed to.

The Choice Between Worse and Worser

What Ms. McBride describes as a "power play" is much more important and vital than her article lets on. It was a hard and politically unpopular decision made by Dr. Saddler, one that evidently kept the district from taking a loan and losing local control.

The history of what happened in this particular instance is clear and not really in dispute: The OUSD Board of Education has the authority and duty to direct the superintendent of schools to take actions. For all intents and purposes, the board is the superintendent's boss. So Dr. Saddler's boss directed Dr. Saddler in no uncertain terms to find a way to keep the district solvent without losing local control.3

According to the article, Dan Bellino and Lisa Grant Dawson failed in that task, and instead presented their boss (Superintendent Saddler) with a proposal that only made it about halfway there. I have no doubt they worked very hard on it, but they didn't do what was asked, and instead left their boss to explain to the board that they would need to take a loan, again, thus kicking the can down the road to solve the problems we face as a district sometime in the future.

Here's the quote from the article, directly from Bellino: “The narrative was intended to say, ‘Here’s the 40 to 50 [million dollars in cuts], here’s everything we explored, and here’s why we can’t do it,” Bellino said.

To me, this article exposes an incredibly important thing that everyone with students in the district should know: There is a major rift in our community between people who believe OUSD's decisions should be made in collaboration with folks elected by Oaklanders, and those who believe our district is so broken that we should leave those decisions up to Alameda County or the State of California. Honest, passionate, engaged people can be and are on both sides of this fence, and I will wade into the debate in a later section. For now, I want to just establish what was at stake, and specifically what the Superintendent was doing when she, according to the article, "went around" Bellino and Dawson.

While there were many competing and overlapping details in the scenarios as they came out, I think we can simplify the two choices available to the district in terms of an approach back in December, faced with a $100 million+ structural deficit — Take a loan, or don't take a loan:

If OUSD took out a loan for tens of millions of dollars, it would allow the district to preserve many services and staff in the short term, though cuts would still have to be made. The tradeoff would be a loss of local control over some or all of our state revenue, instead handing over that control to the county and/or state.4 It would also continue a pattern of delaying and offloading difficult decisions about the future of the district. (Bad Door #1)

If OUSD wanted to remain solvent without taking a loan, it would allow the board to operate independently and to hold the district accountable to decisions made by those elected by the parents and caregivers of its students. The tradeoff would be more drastic reductions across the district, and a number of potentially risky decisions about reclassifying expenses to stabilize the budget in the short term. (Bad Door #2)

What would you have done if you were Dr. Saddler? At that point she was faced with two bad recommendations, and all the responsibility and risk for the one she would take. I believe her decision to go with Bad Door #2 was strategic, and at odds with what she was hearing from her Chief of Staff and CBO. She's the boss, trying to do what her boss told her to do, and so Bellino and Dawson don't work for OUSD anymore.

I can understand folks being upset about how all this was handled. The sudden upheaval of the staff working on such a huge problem surely stressed me out. I should, however, point out that, even though both Bellino and Dawson threw napalm5 at Dr. Saddler on the way out the door, questioning her leadership and saying the word "malfeasance" out loud in a newspaper interview, the district has not tried to throw either of them under the bus, and Dr. Saddler has owned all of her decisions, taking responsibility in public for what she is doing at every turn. This is, dare I say it, a cornerstone of strong leadership.

I think a lot of the bad press both then and now could have been solved with better, more confident communication from OUSD. I mean, quite honestly if Dr. Saddler had, instead of just remaining silent, said publicly that Dawson and Bellino were not able to keep the district solvent without losing local control, and that she was bringing in someone else to try and do that, would it be that hard to defend her actions?

I keep coming back to this but there were, according to the article, eight members of senior leadership working on this. Dawson and Bellino are two of them. If the district had given a comment from anyone else in the room, like Tara Gard or Preston Thomas or Dr. Saddler herself, it could have been like "Well, I woke up and realized the scenario would mean a return to receivership. We wanted to avoid that at all costs so I quickly came up with an alternative." I really don't see that as being a tough thing to defend, and so I think it wasn't a good idea to just not comment at all!

It's All About Control

I have a lot of respect for, and try to give as much space as I can to, those who have lived with the dysfunction of the OUSD Board and district for so many years. I'm sure I sound real naive to at least some of them when I say there's actual progress being made, at long last. Add in the perennially negative media narrative that I'm writing about here and I can understand anyone feeling like maybe Oakland isn't good enough at choosing its leaders to solve this on its own, and could really use some outside help.

The problem I have here is that this viewpoint isn't a benign one in a representative democracy. Californians (and Oaklanders) obviously love themselves a good recall vote, and as someone who personally regrets several voting choices I've made, I do see the need for a mulligan-type process when we screw things up extra bad. The thing is, I don't believe there is a political solution to OUSD's problems, I don't think we can wait for another election cycle, and I think it's important to support the people that are actually doing the work, right now.

If you've followed what I (and many others) have written about the history of receivership, you know you don't have to look far to try to get the track record of its success: It happened right here in Oakland already6, and none of the problems that the district faced were solved, even after two decades and ~$20 million in interest7 (not a single penny of which went towards actual student outcomes). If anything, it made all our structural problems worse.

What Was Behind Bad Door #2?

I just published an update based upon the budget that the district passed on June 24th. It outlines the actual progress that has taken place since Dr. Saddler reportedly "brought down the axe" and decided to take Bad Door #2: The No Loan Adventure. More importantly, it sketches out the long-distance travel that OUSD must embark upon to make that progress a real thing.

Since Lisa Grant Dawson and Dan Bellino left OUSD, here's what has happened with the budget:

The budget deficit for 2026-27 has been reduced from ~$100 million to ~$22 million, which ACOE has accepted on its face.

Agreements were reached with OEA and SEIU, a teacher's strike was averted, and the costs of those agreements were priced into budget projections.8

The substantial gap was reduced by making drastic, unpopular, and possibly unsustainable cuts to the central office, school sites, and staff district-wide. It was also reduced by reclassifying expenses in ways that are and will continue to be debated for a number of reasons.9

A final budget for 2026-27 was presented along with a multi-year plan to reach fiscal sustainability, both approved by the board, and both contingent on tens of millions of additional cuts being passed by the board mid-year.

The district has not taken a loan, and by ACOE's own acknowledgement, is no longer at risk of insolvency and can afford the new labor contracts if it makes the cuts the district is proposing.

The board is still in control of the district's financial decisions, and answers to no one but the voters.

It's not victory-lap time or anything, but if you accept that the previous things are true (as ACOE has), are you going to tell me that isn't progress? Horribly messy and confusing progress? Imagine instead that Dr. Saddler had gone against the direction of the board, assuming in that case she accepted Lisa Grant Dawson and Dan Bellino's assertion that staying fiscally solvent wasn't possible. What say would our community have in what comes next? What record is there of that path ever working out in favor of students here in Oakland?

It's important to acknowledge here that nobody knows if this is going to come out well in the end. Many of the cuts made by the district to remain solvent in the short term are definitely not going to be acceptable in the long term. Several reclassifications may run into challenges, and a lot of what the district is doing looks like a calculated gamble. It's up to us as individuals to decide if that is a better deal than losing local control of our budget.

It is also important to acknowledge that Dr. Saddler's administration isn't trying to hide what's going on with the budget, though it could be way more transparent and better at communications. They are saying there's a lot of work to do, that the board will need to approve difficult measures, and that it has to happen mid-year. They are also supporting the grassroots efforts of MSEG (the public engagement group I am part of) to create real opportunities for the community to have a voice while those difficult choices are being made.

I truly hope that, despite its failure thus far to clearly communicate both its plan and its progress to the media and our community, Dr. Saddler and her senior leadership team can rally and find a way to show their progress, and the distance left to travel, in a way that builds a collaborative trust and confidence in their leadership.

Footnotes

This is what the Oaklandside is reporting, but it is common knowledge that Lisa Grant Dawson had already accepted a position as the CBO of Sacramento's school district, so she was technically already aware she wouldn't be returning. ↩

Technically speaking, there was also a Scenario 4 that did call for borrowing to close the gap. The board rejected that option, but it's weird that the Oaklandside article doesn't mention that this scenario was in fact presented (Update Report: Budget Scenarios — OUSD Structural Deficit, FY 2025-26 & 2026-27). ↩

This direction came from the board's Resolution 2526-0177, adopted October 8, 2025 (File ID. 25-2351), which directed staff to prepare budget scenarios to close the structural deficit for FY 2025-26 and 2026-27 and bring options back to the board. The language of the resolution reads "WHEREAS, it is the responsibility of the Board to approve a budget that keeps the District solvent and maintains local control of its finances;" ↩

Here's the mechanism: when a district takes a state emergency apportionment loan, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction assumes the rights, duties, and powers of the local board and installs a state administrator, with the county superintendent overseeing repayment. Control over the district's revenue shifts from Oakland's elected board to the state and county. The dollars are still "Oakland's" on paper, but Oaklanders stop deciding how they're spent. See EdSource, "State bailout for California school districts comes with long strings attached". ↩

Dawson told KQED, "Reading the tea leaves, what I said to the district was, 'You asked me to help support leading you out of receivership, but I don't lead people back in.'" (KQED, "Oakland Schools in Turmoil After 2 Key Officials Depart Over Budget Crisis"). Yet per the Oaklandside's article: "The group fractured over the solution, Bellino said. Some members, including him and Grant-Dawson, wanted to prepare for the possibility of taking out a loan from the state and re-entering receivership if they couldn’t find a way to balance the budget, while others wanted to reach the $100 million target by any means necessary." ↩

The academic research on district takeovers is not kind to the practice. See Domingo Morel, Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), which finds that takeovers are frequently driven by political and racial dynamics rather than educational need, do not on average improve academic outcomes, and fall disproportionately on Black and Latino communities. ↩

The 2003 emergency loan was $100 million, the largest in California history, at 1.778% interest on a 20-year repayment plan. Serviced at roughly $6 million a year, the total repayment was about $120 million (on the order of ~$20 million in interest). ↩

Per OUSD's AB 1200 public disclosures, the OEA agreement raises General Fund costs by roughly $12.9M in 2025-26, $31.7M in 2026-27, and $60.2M by 2027-28; the SEIU agreement adds about $40M over three years (~$9.9M in the first year). The OEA deal was reached in late February 2026, under imminent threat of a strike. ↩

The "reclassifying" here means shifting costs off the unrestricted General Fund and onto restricted funds, as well as the Local Control Funding Formula's Supplemental and Concentration (S&C) grants. Under Education Code §42238.07, those dollars must be used to increase or improve services for high-need students in proportion to the funding they generate. ↩