A Brief History of the Political Forces Shaping OUSD

Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has been a battleground for competing visions of public education for more than two decades. The forces shaping the district today — a teachers' union (OEA) that has struck four times since 2019; a charter school sector that enrolls nearly a third of the city's public school students; a $100+ million structural deficit; and 22 years of state receivership — are not an unintended consequence of competing ideas. They are the product of deliberate policy decisions made under the influence of moneyed interests during democratic disenfranchisement, and a struggle for control of public education in a city where 82% of students qualify as low-income, English learners, or foster youth.

This document is an attempt to approach this issue honestly and with only the bias that comes from being a concerned parent. Both the Oakland Education Association (OEA, the teachers' union) and a community-based, pro-charter advocacy ecosystem have legitimate constituencies with legitimate interests in the common good. Both have also made choices that deserve scrutiny by the wider Oakland community. What should concern every Oaklander, regardless of where they stand on charter schools or the teachers' union, is the degree to which decisions about their children's education have been shaped by money and power originating far outside the city's borders.

The State Takeover Already Happened

In May 2003, OUSD accepted a $100 million emergency loan from the State of California — the largest school district bailout in state history — to address a deficit estimated between $35 and $100 million. The loan came with a devastating condition: the elected school board was stripped of governing authority and replaced by a state-appointed administrator. The communities that depend on Oakland's public school system lost democratic control of their schools overnight.

This takeover was not a neutral, fair process by well-meaning administrators. Powerful state Democrats, including a state senator, the mayor, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, orchestrated the receivership. The state administrators who followed came from the Eli Broad Academy, a training ground founded by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad to prepare administrators sympathetic to charter expansion and market-based education reform. The first administrator, Randolph Ward, shut down 14 traditional public schools and opened 13 charter schools. He expanded a "small schools" policy funded by the Gates Foundation that placed multiple small academies on shared campuses — each requiring separate administration — creating an infrastructure the district could not sustain once philanthropic dollars dried up after 2009.

The real cost of these changes was borne by specific communities: school closures during receivership occurred almost entirely in Oakland's poorest neighborhoods in East and West Oakland. By 2009, the $100 million loan had been fully spent and the district had accumulated an additional $89 million deficit. The loan ultimately cost approximately $120 million to repay. The 2019 Alameda County Grand Jury report found OUSD spent $55.7 million on consultants and contractors in 2017–18 — arguably a result of Oakland having no oversight over its school board, as the board itself was powerless to stop it.

OUSD exited receivership still facing a structural deficit exceeding $30 million, which is a common result of these kinds of takeovers over the history of our state. The pattern is clear: receivership addresses immediate cash flow but does not solve structural problems, and it will certainly cost the democratic power of the communities least able to absorb it.

OUSD's Unprecedented Charter Expansion

It's fashionable and easy to use charter schools as a focus of structural problems for OUSD. While I believe there is more nuance than that, readers should know that the charter school sector in Oakland did not grow organically from community demand. Charter school expansion here was accelerated by deliberate policy choices made during a period when the community had no democratic voice: state administrators opened charter schools while closing OUSD schools. By the sector's peak around 2019, 45 charter schools enrolled roughly 32% of Oakland's public school students — the highest share in California.

This is not to say that charter schools in Oakland are uniformly bad. Really. Yu Ming Charter School ranks among California's highest-performing schools. Lighthouse Community Public Schools operates in deep East Oakland with 95% economically disadvantaged enrollment. Education for Change runs six campuses serving over 3,000 students. These schools serve real Oakland families who made real choices, and any discussion of reform or structural change must include compassion and equity for those students and their families. Full stop.

But history and data complicate the picture. A 2017 analysis found that charters enrolled students entering transition grades with significantly higher prior achievement — 40% of charter-entering 6th graders met ELA standards compared to 27% for OUSD schools. OUSD schools serve five times more late enrollees and enroll nearly double the percentage of special education students (12% versus 7%) compared to charter schools serving the same communities. The comparison between the two sectors is not apples to apples, even if the demographics look similar on paper.

Beyond all of this, it's the fiscal impact of our outsized number of charters that caused the tension to become structural. When students leave OUSD for charter schools, California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) sends per-pupil funding — roughly $9,100 to $10,800 per student — to the charter. But the district can only reduce 27–50% of its actual costs, because buildings, administration, debt service, and other infrastructure costs remain. A 2018 "Breaking Point" study estimated that charter-related "stranded costs" totaled $57.3 million annually — roughly $1,500 per student remaining in district schools. This is only one study and its accuracy is widely debated, but the dynamic is real: after a lot of thought and research I personally believe that charter-related stranded costs likely account for 30–50% of the current deficit.

Follow the Money

I believe that every Oaklander, regardless of their position on charter schools, really needs to be aware of the following history, which is not a secret and as far as I know not in dispute.

Oakland school board races used to be pretty blasé — funded with a few thousand dollars per candidate. Starting in the mid-2010s, that changed suddenly, and the money flowing towards candidates came overwhelmingly from outside Oakland.

GO Public Schools was the primary vehicle for pro-charter political spending in Oakland. Over roughly a decade, GO's independent expenditure committee spent over $920,000 to elect favored candidates. At its peak influence, six of seven sitting board members were GO-endorsed. But the grassroots branding was a deliberate distraction from the reality of where the funding came from: just 2% of contributions to the two major pro-charter PACs came from small donors. The rest came from a handful of billionaires who do not live in Oakland and whose children do not attend Oakland schools.

The donor list is a who's who of national education "reform" philanthropy:

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, has been the single largest individual contributor to Oakland school board races, personally spending nearly $1 million across three election cycles since 2016. In 2020 alone, Bloomberg gave $200,000 to a PAC called Power2Families.
Arthur Rock (Silicon Valley investor) contributed $37,500 to that same PAC.
Stacy Schusterman (oil company heiress) contributed $75,000.
The Walton Family Foundation — the Walmart heirs — committed $1 billion nationally between 2015 and 2020 for charter expansion, with Oakland among its 13 focus cities.
Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO) contributed $550,000 to the California Charter Schools Association's political arm in a single cycle.
Doris Fisher (Gap co-founder) gave $400,000.
Eli Broad contributed $1.1 million.

The investment by outsider billionaires in Oakland is part of a national pattern. Bloomberg also spent $290,000 on political action committees in Louisiana state school board races, $1.4 million on a PAC called Empower Louisiana supporting pro-charter candidates, $400,000 backing a former charter school executive running for mayor of Newark, and six-figure sums in Denver and Minneapolis school board races. As New York City mayor, he oversaw unilateral control of schools, closure of 150 schools (many replaced by charters), and implementation of testing standards that drove teachers from under-resourced schools. Former board members such as Roseann Torres have stated openly that a lack of support for charters led Bloomberg to fund candidates in Oakland who ran against them.

Empower Oakland and Families in Action

By 2022, GO Public Schools and its allies had pulled back from heavy spending in Oakland. In that landscape, new organizations emerged. Empower Oakland, founded in 2023 by former Oakland City Councilmember Loren Taylor, presents itself as a volunteer-led, pragmatic organization focused on local issues.

Families in Action for Quality Education is an Oakland parent advocacy nonprofit co-founded by Kimi Kean, who grew up in Oakland and has worked as a teacher, principal, and administrator in both OUSD and charter schools. Its political arm, Families in Action for Justice, was formed in 2021 as a 501(c)(4) — a nonprofit structure that can engage in political campaigns without disclosing its donors.

The Oaklandside reported that Families in Action evolved out of Power2Families — the independent expenditure committee that received $200,000 from Bloomberg and other outside contributions during the 2020 school board races. In 2024, Families in Action for Justice endorsed Patrice Berry in District 5 and Clifford Thompson in District 7 — the identical slate endorsed by Empower Oakland.

This does not prove, nor am I suggesting, that Empower Oakland is a front for outside billionaire money. But the alignment of its endorsements with the pro-charter political network warrants transparency and scrutiny. Oaklanders deserve to know whether these advocacy organizations represent genuinely new, forward-thinking ideas or a rebranding of outside interests.

OEA's Power and Its Limits

The Oakland Education Association (OEA) has been the most potent counterforce to charter-aligned political interest groups. OEA represents roughly 2,600 teachers, counselors, nurses, social workers, and substitute teachers in OUSD. Its political action committee raised over $179,000 in the 2024 cycle alone — including a large donation from the California Teachers Association ($97,000) — and dominated both the 2022 and 2024 board campaigns. The current board majority, including President Jennifer Brouhard, Vice President Valarie Bachelor, and VanCedric Williams, is union-endorsed and charter-skeptical.

Three OEA strikes over the last six years both galvanized community support and reshaped Oakland's political landscape around education. The 2019 strike, which lasted seven days with 95% participation and only 2% student attendance by the final day, won an 11% salary increase and a board commitment to pursue a charter moratorium. That moratorium was legally impossible to implement — only the state legislature can authorize one — but the political momentum was real. A strike in 2023 garnered further salary increases, totaling $110 million in new labor costs over three years.

I'll say it openly, at my own peril: between OEA and private companies running charters and their political interests, I'll take OEA. But honesty in public discourse requires acknowledging complexity.

I believe OEA's advocacy for its members is legitimate and necessary. Oakland teachers are paid less than counterparts in surrounding districts, in one of the wealthiest regions in the country. I don't believe that anyone should begrudge public school teachers fighting for a living wage.

However — at the same time — the $110 million in labor cost increases is now one of the primary drivers of the $100+ million structural deficit. The 2023 contract was ratified by a board that the state trustee and Alameda County Office of Education warned could not sustain the costs. OEA pushed hard, the board agreed, and the bill is now coming due. OEA is right to point out that the current budget crisis is driven by structural factors outside of its control, but I believe it must also acknowledge that there is a structural crisis, and that it must work with the district to come to a measured understanding of remedies.

On OEA's political spending: while it is substantial, it is fundamentally different from most of the money being spent to advocate for charters in at least one critical respect — it comes from Oakland workers who teach Oakland children. There is no Oakland teacher equivalent of Bloomberg dropping $300,000 into a single race. That distinction matters.

All the same, OEA must be held accountable for its role in the current crisis. A union that fights successfully for better wages bears some responsibility for ensuring the fiscal sustainability of the entity that pays those wages. Teachers deserve fair compensation. Students deserve adequately funded schools. When those two goals are in tension — as they are right now in Oakland — both the union and the board owe the community honest answers about trade-offs rather than pretending the money will simply appear.

Finally

The political history of OUSD, as it is with many public school districts serving a disproportionate number of Black and brown students, is a story about whose money shapes what we see as our priorities. For nearly two decades, that power rested with state-appointed administrators focused on "market-based" education reform, supported by a political infrastructure funded by billionaires who had no stake in Oakland beyond ideology and investment returns. This community organized, struck, voted, and clawed back democratic control. As broken as things seem right now, that was a genuine achievement.

The forces that created this crisis are multiple and cannot be honestly reduced to a single villain. State receivership planted the seeds of charter expansion and tripled district debt. Charter-related stranded costs drain tens of millions annually from the district's general fund. Labor cost increases negotiated in good faith now exceed available revenue. Declining enrollment driven by the cost of living, demographic shifts, and pandemic disruption affects everything.

What Oakland cannot afford is another round of political theater and virtue signaling masquerading as real action. Charter advocates cannot pretend that the stranded costs problem is a myth invented by unions. OEA cannot pretend that the fiscal consequences of the contracts it fought for are easy to pay for. Most importantly: organizations funded by moneyed interests beyond our community — whether they call themselves GO Public Schools, Power2Families, or Empower Oakland — owe Oakland families transparency about who is paying for their advocacy and what those funders expect in return.

The students of Oakland Unified School District deserve better than a proxy war between national education reform money and institutional labor interests. They deserve a board and district who will tell the truth about what is broken, what it will cost to fix, and who stands to lose and benefit from the process. This conversation starts and ends with truth and honesty that makes everyone uncomfortable, but leads to a true understanding and the peace that comes from a unified community.

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