Oakland Teachers Are Striking for More Pay, Smaller Classes, and an End to School Closures Like This One

“They should have a fair contract. They’re just fighting for us, their kids.”

Rosa Furneaux/Mother Jones

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On Thursday morning, on the first day of Oakland’s teachers’ strike, a dozen or so teachers from Roots International Academy gathered around a branch-and-grass mandala in front of their school in East Oakland. Bundled up in school jackets, puffy coats, and gloves, they carried signs reading “On Strike for a Living Wage” and chanted lines like “No knowledge, no peace! No justice, no peace!” and “¡Escucha, escucha, estamos en la lucha!” 

Off to the side, seventh-grader Adriana Ortega watched with a friend. In a show of solidarity with her teachers, the 13-year-old refused to cross the picket line and enter the small middle school. “It makes me sad. They should have a fair contract,” Adriana told me, holding her small pink backpack in her arms. “They’re just fighting for us, their kids.”

Her teachers joined the more than 3,000 other Oakland educators who went on strike Thursday in a call for higher pay, smaller class sizes, more charter school accountability, and more school support staffers, like nurses and counselors, for their students. The strike came after two years of negotiations between the local teachers’ union and the Oakland Unified School District, which is facing a $30 million budget deficit this year as a result of dwindling enrollment thanks to, among other factors, the rapid growth of charter schools in the city. The strike also comes on the heels of a similar work stoppage in Los Angeles, where teachers in the country’s second-largest school district demanded and won a 6 percent pay raise, more funding for support staffers, and intentions to reduce class sizes across the district over time.

In Oakland, district officials have already signaled to the California Legislature that it will need help from the state to come close to meeting the teachers’ demands. On Wednesday, a group of Oakland principals lobbied in Sacramento for more funding, noting in an op-ed, “Only by increasing funding can teachers in Oakland and across the state truly realize the salaries they deserve for providing our students with the experience of a quality education.”

An independent fact-finding report released last week agreed, concluding that the state’s funding system was “complicated and flawed in a number of ways” and made it “very difficult” for district officials in Oakland and elsewhere in California to meet the teachers’ demands. Ultimately, the two sides “should be able to work together to advocate for increased state spending on public education,” wrote labor arbitrator Najeeb Khoury.

Quinn Ranahan, a second-year teacher at Roots International Academy

Rosa Furneaux/Mother Jones

In a last-minute offer Wednesday, the district offered union members a 7 percent retroactive pay raise. The union, which has called for a 12 percent raise, rejected the offer, and on Thursday morning teachers across the city protested in front of their schools and marched to the district’s offices in downtown Oakland. 

But for teachers at Roots, the first day of the strike was also a moment to challenge the district’s controversial plan to “right-size” the district. Earlier this month, Oakland’s school board announced that Roots would be closed at the end of the year, the first of up to two dozen schools it’s considering shuttering or merging to close a massive budget shortfall. (Another small middle school a couple of miles east, Elmhurst Community Prep, will merge with Alliance Academy next year; across town, in north Oakland, the district has proposed combining Kaiser Elementary and Sankofa Academy, two schools with stark racial and socioeconomic differences.) 

As teachers protested Thursday morning, a few students trickled into the school here and there. Quinn Ranahan, a second-year math teacher and the union’s site representative, told me that teachers like herself couldn’t afford to live in Oakland given their current pay. Besides, her class size of 33 students was “way too big”; she didn’t want her students to spend another year trying to learn in that environment. “It’s unfair working conditions,” Ranahan says. 

She saw the union’s recent call for a halt on school closures during contract negotiations as an important step given that other schools could soon be on the chopping block. “If it happens to us, then it will keep happening to everyone after us,” she said. “So we have to stop it now.” 

Adriana agreed with Ranahan, telling me that the huge classes made it difficult for students to get “the attention we need” from teachers. But Adriana was also worried about where she’d go to school as an eighth-grader next year, particularly because she thought she might get even less attention if she were to attend a bigger school. “It’s not fair that this school is closing,” Ortega said. “I feel like [the strike] is going to help make the district understand that teachers need better pay, we need smaller class, and students need more support like nurses and counselors.” 

As the morning wore on, Roots principal Geoff Vu walked out of the school in a green school jacket. He carried a container of hot tea and poured some into a cup for a small child standing along the road. Vu told me he wasn’t sure how many students would show up on Thursday morning, especially given that parents had been staging “sickouts” at the school since the school board finalized its decision. 

It felt weird to be outside watching his colleagues protest, he told me. In 2010, the last time Oakland teachers went on strike for a day, Vu had been early in his teaching career at Roots. “It’s necessary. It’s unfortunate,” Vu said. “To me, this is a job of dignity. To see our teachers out here have to do this for a living wage, it’s dishonorable.

“I’m hopeful we’ll find a resolution here.” 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate