Contract Settlement with Job Cuts - A Feature Not a Bug On February 25, many OEA members were understandably glad to learn that a tentative agreement (TA) for our next contract had been reached without having to strike. The TA, which was soon ratified by 93% of voting members, included a 7% raise for most … Continue reading We Can’t Wait to Change the Paradigm

Over the 24-25 school year, OUSD administrators have increasingly mandated the use of district curriculum and teachers’ administration of multiple interim and reading assessments. Many schools have assigned a TSA to manage i-Ready implementation, a position which could otherwise be used to serve students. In a memo dated May 1, 2024, High School Network central … Continue reading Testing Takeover and Curriculum Control

OUSD is hosting a series of professional development (PD) sessions this Fall, with the stated goal of addressing increasing “hate” in the district. The first session, “Grounding our Anti-hate Work in the Framework of Belonging and Bridging” was led by Reverand Ben McBride, an interfaith leader. The second is focused on addressing Islamophobia, Anti-Arab, and … Continue reading OUSD’S “Anti-Hate” PD Sides with Israel, not Jews

Picture this: educators from San Diego to San Jose, LA to Sacramento, all at once taking to the streets and withholding our labor, demanding the conditions and wages we’ve been denied in contract after contract. Students and families joining the pickets across the state, expressing collective joy for a vision of fully-funded schools. The “We … Continue reading A Statewide Strike in 2025? Here’s How it Could Happen

OEA’s Review Board, a body mandated by our union’s bylaws, remains defunct and has not yet met to process complaints filed last school year for violations of the code of conduct. The process to restart the Review Board has been stalled for over eight months. The OEA Executive Board approved appointments to the Review Board … Continue reading Where is our Integrity? Review Board Remains Defunct

Our union members are caught between a rock and a hard place with this Tentative Agreement (TA). For many of us who were here in 2019, it feels like déjà vu. While the gains of the TA are necessary to immediately retain teachers in OUSD, they’re nothing to write home about. Devastatingly, the compensation, class … Continue reading The Four Years that Led Us Here

Last month we posted “From Wildcat to the Whole OEA,” where we proposed some possible actions to maximize pressure on the District to win our contract demands, since Build Our Power (BOP) union leadership had waited too long to launch a powerful strike this school year and was not conducting a member-driven bargaining campaign. We … Continue reading Why Our Strike Accomplished So Little

Many OEA members have joined in the organizing to prepare for our Unfair Labor Practice strike now set to begin May 4. Some have focused on creating solidarity schools (aka strike schools) to minimize harm to students and families that could occur if schools shut down near the end of the academic year.

Our union is democratic in form but not in content. We have elections, and every member gets a ballot. Yet only about 30% of members participate or are even aware of OEA elections. Democracy requires that the majority of members be informed and actively engaged in what the union is doing. And real democracy means … Continue reading State of the Union: Democracy or Bureaucracy?