On Unification and the Nature of Self-Governance

As I write this, OUSD faces a moment of extreme fragility born out of decades of harm, and the problems at the moment loom so large that it seems impossible to understand what the solution might be, much less to plan around a set of goals leading to an effective set of solutions. Our place as a community in this moment gives rise to frustration, anger, and grief; despite being told that we spend more per student than almost any district in the state, only just over a third of our students can read at or above their grade level. Despite living in a time and place that is among the wealthiest and well-resourced on earth, we cannot seem to provide consistently for our highest-need families and students.

I've written elsewhere about the unique history of Oakland's public schools in terms of politics and funding, and the shortcomings of our system are widely lamented and well-documented. Here I'd like to encourage a shift in how we think about OUSD, drawing focus away from how dire our position is at the moment, and instead giving space to real, sustainable solutions that tell the truth about what is in plain sight while offering a vision that has led to success for other districts with similar problems.

In short, for me that vision is one of unification.

What is a Unified School District?

Imagine that you are tasked with building a large school district from scratch, distributed across Oakland's geography. You are given a specific amount of base funding that is based upon assumptions about how many students district-wide will attend school on a given day over the course of the coming school year. This is all the information given to you.

Within this thought experiment: How do you ensure that all of Oakland's educational needs are served? What structure will enforce the idea that, no matter where in the city a family lives, their children will have the same opportunity to learn and thrive?

You might start with the idea that every student needs access to the same resources, the same care, the same basic services, provided without exception, across the entire city and district. If you're like me, you'll also find that idea to be unrealistic and naive in this age of austerity and worry.

Let's scale back then, to something that might be easier to envision, albeit no easier to accomplish: Imagine your OUSD student is doing very well at their school, but due to uncontrollable circumstances suddenly has to move to a different school on some arbitrary date during the school year, say February 10th. Maybe a building is found to be unsafe, or the school encounters some issue that makes it impossible to serve your child. The hypothetical reason here is unimportant!

What if your child, regardless of their specific demographic, background or needs, could attend a different school within OUSD on February 11th and be assured the same instruction, the same standards of care, and the same opportunity that they had before?

It's likely that no public school system in existence can flawlessly deliver on this promise, but the fact is that there are many unified school districts, even here in California, that come much closer to that reality than OUSD does.

Both the available data about this and common sense actually point to a theme that I want to bring attention to: A truly unified school district prioritizes instructional coherence, and its community engages in rigorous self-governance. When that happens, public school systems vastly outperform, both academically and fiscally, over less unified counterparts.

Instructional Coherence

The idea of instructional coherence has been around for a long time, and it basically means that the major elements of school instruction — curriculum, teaching practices, professional development, and testing — all point in the same direction.

To achieve this, a unified school district must have a common instructional framework, and any resources dedicated to instruction must support that framework, at every school. There are obviously many possible ways for that support to exist, but the point is that the support must exist consistently across the board.

There are studies, going back decades, that reinforce the notion that instructional coherence generally leads to performance gains for all students, whereas uncoordinated initiatives around learning generally fail to produce any improvement whatsoever, and are also necessarily more expensive to implement. For myriad reasons, OUSD has moved more and more towards the latter model, and we are seeing the results of that movement, right now.

It's easy to see the fragmentation across so many facets of our schools, from the uneven performance of various demographics and locations, to the immense costs of contracts that are duplicated across schools instead of centralized. The benefit of instructional coherence is only one of many things that lift up students and educators in a truly unified district.

What is OUSD if not Unified, and Why?

"Unified in name only" is a catchy phrase but there is a very important truth behind it: There's simply nothing in the California Ed Code that prevents a K-12 district from calling itself "unified". In point of fact, there is no process of accountability to adhere to a definition, or really any official guidance at all about how a district is supposed to function in order to be "unified". It's not a meaningless term, as it is a self-description that clearly has intent behind it, but it is the board, the district staff, and the supporting community that have to define what it means and make it real.

Quite simply, OUSD has never made any successful or sustained effort to make itself unified, and if anything has spent 25 years moving in the opposite direction. While there isn't an official designation here either, I (and others with much more credibility) believe Oakland is hosting what is more accurately called a "portfolio" school district model. This simply means that, instead of supporting a unified vision, the district manages a marketplace of competing schools (traditional and charter, of which we have many) like a portfolio of properties or businesses, each with a lot of autonomy within that marketplace.

This type of district model was codified in the late 90s, and almost every school district running this kind of structure has about a quarter century of experience learning what the key tradeoff is here: Schools gain site-level flexibility at the cost of instructional coherence, operational efficiency, democratic governance, and fiscal stability. In Oakland, we see it first hand: a network of parallel systems competing for the same students and dollars in the same communities.

While I have some good reading materials below if you'd like to do a deep-dive, I think the single best source of information that I've found on this subject is the 2020-21 Systemic Instructional Review (SIR) report done for OUSD by California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE). It seems incredibly relevant right now, and though I can't easily summarize all its findings, this quote is a pretty good one by way of recommendations (the last of the items under "Threats" on Page 7):

"Oakland does not lack basic systems; rather, the district lacks consistent and systemic implementation of foundational agreements of what is expected of all schools … and how the central office and the networks support them and hold them, and themselves, accountable for attaining these."

I'll pull this out and capitalize a few letters because it's so important: Systemic Implementation of Foundational Agreements of What Is Expected of All Schools.

It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue but I think we can just start with this: What even are OUSD's Foundational Agreements? What actually is expected of all schools?

Start Here: Self-Governance

Like all public school districts, OUSD has a system in place for self-governance, and in our case I think it's actually a good one; Our city has been given all that it truly needs, in terms of formal organization, to make its own decisions about what is best for its students. To be clear, the major structure is this:

We have more or less fair elections of seven school board members representing seven districts in the city.
Since exiting receivership last year, those board members have complete autonomy and oversight of the district, and they answer only to the voters.
Every school at OUSD has a School Site Council, which is a set of volunteers elected by their school sites to represent the interests specific to their school.
There are several advisory committees (including the Parent Student Advisory Committee, or PSAC), also elected by districts from their SSCs that are tasked with providing district-wide community oversight and advising the school board as it relates to, among many other things, the prioritization of goals in given domains.
There are currently multiple (sometimes as many as four!) public meetings with these various entities almost every single week. At most of those, any community member can say or ask whatever they like.

As someone who has been closely involved in this system for months now, I can say that this is the design of a healthy democratic system, and we do not lack the resources or structure to properly govern our district. What we lack is anything resembling a consensus or vision around that question from before: What is expected of all schools?

It's very easy to go to an OUSD public engagement session and feel like the system itself is broken, but consider this: How can any community effectively self-govern if it has no agreed upon framework to build around? How can you hold anyone accountable to a vision that doesn't exist? All the structure and space for self-governance is worthless if there is nothing to talk about except the problems that stem from entropy. Yeah, I'm talking about school board meetings.

Unified Schools Can Be a Real Thing in Oakland

I truly hope that our current state of being is the actual low-water mark for public education in Oakland. What is happening now is causing grief in many quarters, as the district takes the (ultimately necessary) step of dismantling what it was and tries to maintain its ability to self-govern despite the distrust and disgust it has brought upon itself over years and decades.

I should try to make it clear that the small schools movement that we blame for so much today arose out of a desire to solve serious problems, but the structure that emerged was a patchwork of autonomous and charter schools in a district that today cannot sustain itself. Our city needs and deserves a framework for public education that can actually hold.

I believe the biggest danger right now is that our community will not be able to see past our anger, trauma and hurt, and therefore will miss this moment; What looks like a catastrophic collapse to many of us is actually the only opportunity Oakland has had to rebuild its public school system the right way in three decades. It has been done elsewhere in California, even somewhat recently, by districts such as Long Beach Unified, Garden Grove Unified, and Sanger Unified; All of these districts made decisions to coalesce around instruction and operational coherence, and over years they have achieved relative stability and equity in a way that Oaklanders can surely aspire to.

While I have only grazed the tip of the iceberg in reading about this, I do believe the ingredients for a successful unification of OUSD are easy to see in these examples, where we learn that:

A common, agreed upon framework for instruction and operation, supported by every action taken by the district at every school, has significant benefits in terms of student performance, fiscal stability, and transparency of results.
Real accountability can be created within an environment of effective, rigorous self-governance maintained over a long period of time.
Truly successful examples of the unified model are created with patience, diligence, and district-wide efforts supported by collaboration between the community, the board and the district over a period of years.

What I'm trying to lay out here is simply this: Making OUSD truly unified will be very challenging, will require a lot of compromise and patience by pretty much everyone, and it is absolutely possible.

What I Believe

If I have a clear goal in writing this, it is to convey not only that I believe this vision of a unified school district is possible, but also that I believe it is imperative that we do everything we can to try to achieve it.

During the long hours I've spent trying to learn more and more about what is fundamentally wrong with OUSD, I've come to realize how many elements of our district are fragmented, segregated, and divided. Most of the decisions leading us to this state were made long ago, but we can't seem to stop litigating that history long enough to ask the question that I'll pose for a third time: What is expected of all schools?

A unified OUSD would have a common, high-quality core curriculum at every school. Its processes for assessment would focus on determining and reinforcing what parts of the curriculum are working the way they should. Professional development would be connected directly to this common curriculum, and centralized operational functions like procurement, facilities, and HR would properly leverage economies of scale to maintain cost-efficiency and fiscal flexibility.

This doesn't mean stripping schools of all autonomy. The districts that have made this work give their schools real flexibility within a shared framework. A school can choose how to deliver lessons and enrichment, but what students will learn and how progress is measured is a constant across the district.

Getting there requires us to start this work, right now:

First, we must create a durable, effective process for community engagement. This work is going on right now, as a small group of stakeholders attempts to shape what that engagement looks like.

Second, our community must engage in respectful, good-faith discussions centered around the common good of all students, in all neighborhoods, and propose evidence-based ideas and approaches to our district's future.

Finally, we must agree upon a unified vision for our district that prioritizes instructional and operational coherence, stability for teachers and staff, and true partnership with our entities of self-governance.

From there we simply must have the patience to sustain it; for the districts that have made this model work, the common thread was not brilliance or perfection, it was diligence and consistency.

I believe this vision, of a truly unified school district in Oakland, represents our best opportunity to serve the future of our kids, our educators, and our city.

Oakland vs. the WorldOakvs.