Opinion: Oakland’s dysfunctional school board is failing our children

Our children are public school students in Oakland. We are public school parents. We have put our faith in this public good, to prepare them for the future, our futures, yet it is failing them.

Only one in three Oakland Unified students are reading at grade level, while just over one in four are proficient in math. For Black and Brown children, who make up over two-thirds of the district, the outcomes are even more alarming.

Instead of relentlessly focusing on this, Oakland’s public schools are in permanent crisis. This is a failure of leadership by those elected to steward our district: our school board.

In the past seven years we have been through three official strikes. We have watched as our beloved teachers fought for fair wages and improved working conditions while we also dealt with the significant resulting disruptions to our children’s learning, family life and community. Yet, somehow, another strike looms.

OUSD spends approximately $27,000 per student each year — among the highest in California. Yet we lurch from one fiscal emergency to another, all the while eroding quality and confidence in our schools.

Governance is difficult. Budgets require trade-offs, labor negotiations are complex, and restructuring how the district operates carries real human costs. What we are now witnessing from the current OUSD board majority, however, is not ordinary gridlock.

Board President Jennifer Brouhard, along with Valarie Bachelor, Rachel Latta, and VanCedric Williams, comprise the current voting majority. They know the magnitude of the deficit and how it threatens to send Oakland back into state receivership only months after finally regaining local control.

But instead of making difficult structural decisions — from top to bottom — required to stabilize the district, the board majority has chosen to kick the can down the road and relegated us to a death by a thousand cuts: firing critical school staff, removing support for struggling students, and canceling electives that enrich and compel families to join our schools — all without a concrete vision for high-quality schools.

In addition, we have heard they have approved, behind closed doors,a 14% increase in teacher pay, while allowing OEA, the teachers union, political cover to continue with yet another destabilizing, harmful strike. Of course, we support paying teachers more; competitive salaries reduce turnover and create stability for our children. But this is playing politics with our kids’ futures.

The pattern of dysfunction has consequences. Perhaps the most consequential example was the board majority’s decision to push out Superintendent Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell. Just months after extending her contract through 2027, the majority forced her departure — without a permanent successor and amid mounting fiscal pressure.

What’s done is done. Now we face a budget gap of roughly $90 million-$130 million and renewed county and state scrutiny. We are being told we have no options, but that’s false: OUSD operates many schools that are, on average, only 59% full, in a district with declining enrollment. Many districts of similar size operate closer to 40 or 50 sites, not 80 as Oakland does. We are preserving facilities built for a prior era instead of investing in our kids.

What if we prioritized learning outcomes over keeping all district buildings? What if every school were fully resourced with targeted intervention, afterschool programs and robust support? What if we paid teachers competitively and helped them focus on their jobs instead of worrying about how to afford to live? What if we had a plan?

Oakland’s students deserve better. They deserve leadership that centers them, supports the adults who teach and care for them, and aligns every dollar with quality education. We must be willing to stop doing what no longer works so we can build on what does. We must act with sober clarity, courage and imagination. Our children, and the future of our community, cannot afford to do with less. And increasingly, and in numbers, we parents will not stand for less.

Grace Park-Bradbury, Kirstin Hernandez and Edmund Chun are parents of children enrolled in the Oakland Unified School District.