by Craig Gordon

How the 1995-96 OEA strike inspired a campaign to Redistribute Corporate Wealth (RCW), and why RCW needed a vision for high-quality public education

Part 1 of this series discussed the necessity for a concrete vision for what we mean by “schools students deserve,” so that we can develop a strategy to win such schools. It also reported that OEA already has such a vision! It identifies conditions for high-quality education for all, such as class-size maximums of 15, sufficient non-instructional time in each teacher’s workday, qualified teachers and aides in every classroom, support staff for academic and extracurricular needs, and resources to meet the problems of poverty and racism students face. The OEA Vision was posted on the OEA website from about 2007 until 2018.  

In Part 2, we will look at how and why OEA members developed and published a vision.

The Strike of 1995-96: “Chop from the Top”

In 1995, OEA launched the Classrooms First campaign, building strong member and community support for our contract demands for better teacher pay and smaller class size. We argued that Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) could pay for our demands by reallocating funds wasted on its notoriously top-heavy central administration to classrooms.  As a true believer at that time in OEA’s “chop from the top” strategy, I promoted it in an Oakland Tribune op-ed piece.  

In retrospect, we were partly right: OUSD did misappropriate millions of dollars annually that should have gone to students and classrooms on overpaid central administrators.  The problem is even worse today, with much additional waste on a myriad of OUSD contracts for consultants and other private operators. 

But most OEA members, including me, didn’t adequately grasp the potential danger our call to cut central office posed to classified workers’ jobs, although our intention was to target overpaid, unnecessary top administrators. Rep Council passed a motion opposing cuts to classified workers to meet our demands and inviting reps of their unions to attend our bargaining sessions. But when OEA leadership and CTA staff overseeing bargaining failed to issue such explicit messages of solidarity, the leaders of the two main classified workers’ union—AFSCME 257 and SEIU 1021—publicly denounced OEA for going after the jobs of predominantly Black workers.  OEA’s failure to publicly make clear that we were opposed to any layoffs of classified workers played into the district’s race-baiting strategy of charging Oakland teachers—about 48% of whom were educators of color—with hurting students and communities of color.

Our 26-day strike ended with a good pay increase but only a vague contractual commitment to class-size reduction that was conditioned upon additional state and/or federal funding. Union leaders moved from declarations that “the money is there” to “the district can’t afford any more.” Even worse, our settlement increased the student-counselor ratio from 325:1 to 500:1!  So Classrooms First not only excluded classified workers, but also non-teachers in OEA, while reducing students’ access to counselors. 

Three months later, the California legislature and governor approved funding to shrink kindergarten through third grade classes to 20 students statewide in every school able to find the additional classroom space. It’s likely that our strike helped push that legislation over the finish line. 

Redistribute Corporate Wealth Campaign

In 2003, rank-and-file militants in OEA initiated a new campaign to go after the money needed for quality public schools. We had learned the hard way that forcing OUSD to “chop from the top” would not have been enough even to achieve our relatively modest pay and class-size demands (23 in K-3, 25 in 4-5, 29 in 6-12), let alone genuinely high-quality educational conditions for all. In addition, the District was crying “broke” even more aggressively than in previous years at the beginning of a new contract bargaining round, suddenly announcing a “budget hole” of $30-40 million. (The crisis led to a six-year state takeover of the District that tripled the district’s initial debt. OUSD is still paying it off today.) 

Given the district’s “bankruptcy” and our understanding that high-quality public education requires far more money than any district has, we targeted the real money in Oakland with a campaign called Redistribute Corporate Wealth (RCW). We reminded the public that “Oakland is not a poor city” at demonstrations and media events in front of offices of Oakland’s biggest corporate deadbeats: Clorox, Bank of the West, Kaiser Permanente, American President Line shipping, Shorenstein Properties at City Center, and the Port of Oakland. We demanded that locally based corporations be taxed to fund public schools and services. 

We continued to insist that district funds not be squandered on excessive numbers of overpaid top administrators and private contractors. But expanding the funding basis for our demands had at least three major advantages over “chop from the top”: (1) It was more honest and realistic about the money required for quality public education, and (2) it spotlighted the vast wealth that exists and can provide quality public education and services, if we have the courage and political will to fight for it, and (3) it rejected the framework of capitalist scarcity (“there’s not enough to go around”) and neoliberal austerity (“Cut! Cut! Cut!) that pit different groups of workers and school communities against each other in a fight for crumbs. 

 How the RCW Campaign Led to the OEA Vision

Few people expressed disagreement with the premise of the Redistribute Corporate Wealth (RCW) campaign—for example, that at least a portion of the $34 billion flowing through the Port of Oakland in 2003 should be used to support public schools and services. Or that Clorox should be required to contribute to the city where its CEO made enough to hire 857 new teachers.  But passive agreement that something “would be a good idea” isn’t the same as understanding that it is a necessary condition for high quality public education for all. Many people still seemed to believe that forcing the district to use its existing funding more wisely and efficiently would be enough to achieve that goal. Surely, reallocating a few tens of millions currently being wasted by the District would do the job, right?

We had won over a good number of OEA activists to the RCW campaign, but to mobilize broad, active support, we needed to demonstrate that it was an imperative, because high-quality conditions of teaching and learning would cost far more than what was already available in the school district’s budget. And to achieve that, we had to paint a picture of the specific material conditions required. 

So RCW activists in OEA began to draft a vision for quality public education. Key points in this vision—a maximum class size of 15 (requiring many more teachers and classrooms), far more teacher prep time, a major increase in individual student support personnel, and early childhood and adult education classes at every site—identified specific “expensive” improvements far beyond the reach of the existing OUSD budget. Some progressive education activists might consider such an approach too “discouraging” and therefore counterproductive.  But if we cannot honestly describe what quality educational conditions look like, how can we even begin to fight for them?

From March 2005 through the fall of 2006, we brought successive drafts of an OEA Vision to Rep Council, engaged in discussion and incorporated proposed revisions.  In February 2007, the Executive Board approved a graphic design, printed thousands of copies of the vision, posted it to the OEA website.  

Now was the time to launch an aggressive campaign to promote the OEA Vision, making OEA members and the public aware of it and engaging in conversations about what it would take to make the vision a reality.  Or was it? Four years into the state takeover of OUSD and its flood of budget cuts, school closures and new charters, union and education activists understandably remained on the defensive against public school closures and program cuts. It was just “the wrong time” to fight for dramatic and costly improvements in educational conditions.  But given that we are perpetually having to defend public schools, when would the right time arrive to fight for qualitative improvement? 

Coming Next: 

Part 3: What has OEA done with its vision?

Did OEA use its vision for high-quality public schools to develop and implement a strategy to fight?  Why have so few OEA members and supporters today ever heard of this vision?

Part 4:  Where do we go from here?

What steps are needed to finally turn the tide in the fight against school privatization and begin to make real progress toward the public schools students deserv