chapter12

Chapter 12 OAKLAND'S TIME IS NOW: Putting Schools Together Again.

In "target area schools" with a predominance of poorer students, basic skills scores were among the lowest in the state. Many of the schools had extremely high dropout and absenteeism rates.

During the past few years, controversy had raged over the operation of the schools. For more than a year the schools had been directed by an interim superintendent, a well-respected career educator who did not wish to be permanently appointed as superintendent.

The elected seven-member School Board had been having a difficult time finding a person who could lead the schools back. Community people were in-sisting on greater involvement, not only in selecting the new superintendent but also in the general management of the schools. Every faction, and there were plenty of them, was urging the establishment of a master plan for the revitalization of the schools. This plan would cover curriculum, instruction, integration, community involvement, facilities development, and the like.

Emotions were up. Involvement already had had an impact. During the attempted appointment of one man to the superintendency, a physical confrontation had disrupted a Board meeting. The protesters, who said the Board ignored formal procedures, blocked the exits. Police had been called in and the minor violence was followed by the lengthiest trial in Oakland's history. Fundamental issues such as civil disobedience were raised. Those on trial became known as "The Oakland Five."

About the time that the trial was concluding, the Board selected me to be the new superintendent. Once again, some groups within the community protested the selection procedures. One group called my appointment tokenism. It promised to send its investigators to Philadelphia to check me out. They would find out if I were the "mouthematician" that one of their members had colorfully labeled me.

"How do you feel about coming into this kind of activist situation?" a reporter asked me. I answered that I would rather face a militant group and take my chances than have to deal with community apathy. As I hope this book has shown, where there is conflict, there is energy, and where there is energy, there can be change.

The work of helping channel the fantastic energy of the Oakland people has just begun. It is too early to talk definitively about accomplishments or about the things we have failed to do. But the time will come soon enough to stand back and take stock of the efforts here.

Thus, the ending of this book is really a beginning. Perhaps the most useful way to conclude will be to set down the speech I made to the assembled staff of teachers and administrators as we began our first year together, then finish with a preliminary assess-ment of our direction under this blueprint.

SPEECH TO THE STAFF

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome you back to the new year in Oakland's public schools. In the short time I have been here, my days have been filled. I have been talking and listening to teachers, students, parents, and administrators, to religious leaders and businessmen, and to the plain people of the community. What I have heard has moved me profoundly, and filled me with a sense of awe. There is in Oaldand a fresh wind stirring, a movement within men and women from all walks of life, a message so unmistakably clear, so tangible that you can almost reach out and touch it with your hands. And that message isOakland's time is now, our season, our opportunity to seize the main chance, our time to write a new chapter in the history of American education.

Looking out at you today, I see the confirmation of this message. Your aspirations for children and for yourselves, your professional competence, your ideals that brought you into this field, these are all ingredients we need to put everything together in Oakland.

I say this in full realization that the national pieture is not optimistic. Our national priorities are up-side down. The war has scarred and rent our country with controversy, dislocated our economy, distorted our political system, and brought unanticipated challenges to our institutional life. Our failure to solve the American dilemma concerning human rights has brought into question all that we stand for as a democracy. And our schools have often been at the cen-ter of the storm. Operating under a kind of "crisis management," school systems across the country find themselves beset and beleaguered, many on the brink of bankruptcy.

There have been charges and countercharges here in Oakland, as well there might be. We have had dissent and turmoil, and there has been much about which persons of goodwill might disagree. Yes, our own school system, as well as systems elsewhere at every level, has been both the focus and the locus of the social revolution. I say, this is as it should be. No other institution has promised so much, yet the chasm between our promise and our performance, particularly for the urban poor and minority groups, is there for all to see.

And all this is not behind us. Indeed, in our drive to systematize our approaches to teaching and learning, we cannot, we must not, attempt to shut out the world.

So what shall we do here in Oakland?

Our hallmark will be a relentless search for the improvement of basic skills for all our children. We have to utilize all the tools that are available to us.

We are going to have to utilize the new techniques of management. We must subject ourselves to a process of identifying both city-wide and school. wide objectives. We have to use the problem-solving approach. Our management has to be done in terms of our goals.

We have to set up a kind of accountability system in which each person says what he will be responsible for over a given time span. This is almost a trite concept. But unless we hold ourselves account-able all along the linefrom the superintendent, his staff, the teachers, the custodial staff, to the cafeteria staffnot much really happens. All of us will be goal-oriented. We will be holding ourselves accountable.

We are going to need data about student progress, and this brings me to the need for testing. You heard me say in talldng to some groups last week that test-ing is an essential part of teaching. I like to use the analogy of the doctor and the teacher. When you go to the doctor, you don't stand in front of him and say: "Here I am. Guess what's wrong with me." You subject yourself to a diagnostic procedure. The teacher in dealing with the student cannot simply say, "Tell me what you need to learn." We have to use certain diagnostic techniques to find out where he is. And that is testing, diagnostic testing. Even the Boy Scout wandering in the woods has to know where he has been, where he is, and have some notion of where he is going, else he is lost. And if a Boy Scout in the woods needs this kind of infor-mation, certainly a teacher, who is playing a critical part in the life of a child, has to make some assessment of where a child is at a given moment.

Returning to the medical analogy, we note that after the doctor begins the treatment, he tests again to see if the patient is improving. You might call this a kind of achievement test to see what progress is being made. The teacher, too, having assessed needs and starting treatment the instructional program at some point turns around and asks: "Now, how well are we doing? Has my teaching been effective?" This is testing. In the light of the new data the teacher be-gins to revise her practices if they have not been ef-fective.

But what if the treatment still fails? The competent doctor is not embarrassed to call in a consultant, someone who has specffic knowledge in this area of difficulty. And so the teacher, after she has gone through her instructional program, tested, and found out that her teaching is not getting through, should not hesitate to call in the psychologist, the counselor, the parent, anyone to give additional information in order to develop a successful program.

Yes, there will be testing. We cannot argue that there has been some abuse in the use of testing. Testing has been used to label children and set up the negative kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: students who test poorly are placed in "slower" classes and, when retested, appear slower still. This is test abuse. We will not stand for it.

On the other hand, some people say that only "culture free" tests would be fair. Even if we could devise such tests, I would question how useful they would be. We do not live in a culture-free society. We need to give tests that tell us how well children are doing those things which society prizes and rewards with better jobs and with full participation in a highly technological society. Some people call skills such as taking 'standard English or counting "middle class and question their value for children of the lower class. But really, these skills are fundamental if an individual is to reach his highest self-fulfillment and at the same time be able to participate ef-fectively in our present-day society.

Thus, we will be testing for these skills with the best and fairest tests we can devise. And to make sure that abuses are avoided, I propose that we establish a Superintendent's Committee on testing and include some of the teachers who raised this question so forcefully and with such concern.

Another thing we want to do in Oakland is to send out a different signal about the reward system. In most bureaucracies, those who can keep their departments cool and running smoothly usually win the praise. Such systems work for those who get along with their immediate superiors. The watchword is: don't let anything exciting happen, don't do anything that might lead to negative publicity. We are going to do it another way in Oakland. The reward system will work for those who dare to take risks. There may be failures, but if everything we do meets with success, we may not be reaching far enough beyond our grasp. We need to take risks even if turmoil sometimes is the resultas may happen when some of you try to establish meaningful rela-tionships with your community. But given the insipidness of so many institutions, perhaps a little turmoil is not a bad thing. We want to avoid the state of affairs of the British Empire in the '30s as described by Winston Churchill: "Decide only to be undecided, resolved only to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent."

Oakland's reward system will challenge you to be just the opposite of all that: dare to be fluid, dare to be potent, dare to be powerful in bringing about the changes we need.

I have alluded to the importance of community in-volvement. I am not talking about window dressing. A school insulated from its community never was a good idea. Nowadays, it is impossible. The people must have meaningful roles in making decisions in order for them to have legitimate means of expressing their power. For instance, a community that has helped to place a principal in his job is committed by that very act to helping the principal succeed. I used to say to some of my principal friends back East that they didn't have to worry so much about establishing a union to protect their jobs and their working con-ditions. The best kind of job insurance any principal can have is a faculty, student body, and community at his back saying, "You're doing the job, brother, keep on.

In this context, we are developing a multiple-option approach to community involvement. This is based on the notion that communities and schools vary in their readiness to enter into strong partnerships. Some will wish to continue the parent-teacher association format. Others may prefer a more formal arrangement, perhaps an advisory board arrangement where community people sit down and hear what the principal has to say and offer advice and sugges-tions. Finally, there will be those communities ready to say, "Let us have a part in the formal decision -making process."

Notice, I keep talking about community participa-tion in the decision making process. I am not talking about community control because .there is no such thing as community control. Schools are state institutions. We are bound by state statutes; many of our powers simply cannot be given to the communities. But we can share, in increasingly effective ways, our decision-making prerogatives. While the school site will be the place where such transactions will take place, the central office will be committed to assisting you and making necessary resources available. It will be our responsibility to see that the notion of community involvement stretches beyond the single schools and encompasses the entire city.

We shall soon establish the Master Plan Citizens Committee. This broadly representative body will devote itself to plans for delivering uniformly excellent school facilities for our students and staff. It is, of course, true that many of our buildings do not meet earthquake standards, that certain groupings do not facilitate integration, that we may in some cases be operating uneconomically small units. But more than anything else it is a source of anguish to me that so many of our buildings are simply a disgrace. Those buildings are saying something to our children. They are saying, "This is good enough for you." We do not want to be part of this. One of the heavy charges that we will lay on this Citizens Committee will be to bring a uniform standard of excellence to the facilities in every part of our city.'

Some of you know that before arriving here, I asked the Board of Education to authorize a study by a blue-ribbon management analysis firm Price Waterhouse to assist us in assessing and making plans for the improvement of management effective-ness. I can now share with you some of the findings of that report.

MORE EFFECTIVE RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND MAN-AGEMENT: GOALS, PRIORITIES, AND OBJECTIVES

In order to make significant improvements in the use of resources, it is absolutely essential that a clear statement of goals and objectives be developed along with a statement of the priorities among them.

II. RECASTING THE 1970-1971 BUDGET

In order that the Board and superintendent can see how the resources of the system are now being allocated to programs, we propose to develop a plan by which the present budget can be recast into a programmatic format.

Let us consider what this means. In one school system where I worked, the stated priorities were:

first, reading, and second, early childhood education. A line-by-line study of the budget showed where the money was actually going. Reading was in fourth place. Most of the money was going into physical education, art, and music. I have nothing against those programs. They are beautiful activities as witnessed by the performances of our own students here today.

But if we say our first priority is reading, then we have to allocate our resources to match our goals. This is what we intend to do.

We are talking about change in Oakland. Change to catch the gathering wind, not after two years of study or a year of introspection. Change now! Let's begin the process today. First, I'll set down some steps to which I am committing myself and the cen-tral administration. Then, I'll outline the challenges that involve you as well. I'm starting with personal objectives because I don't intend to ask teachers and school staffs to do what I don't dare to do myself.

1 will submit to the Board by its October 13 meeting a draft statement of the overall goals of the Oakland Unified School District. These "departure goals" will have been developed out of my experience with urban education, out of the experience of senior staff members, out of the conversations I have bad around the city with a variety of groups, and from points made in our special study and from documents that show what this system is doing performance-wise for children. In other words, the goals will not be picked out of thin air.

We will take immediate steps to appoint three regional associate superintendents. By January 1, we hope to be well into the process of moving re-sources closer to the people who need them. This ef-fort in decentralization will, it is hoped, make our bureacracy more responsive and more accountable.

Our staff shall recast our budget in program terms by February 1. This is just a way of looking at where our money is going. Study figures on vandal-ism, for example. It comes to a considerable amount in some schools. We are prepared to say that if you can eliminate your vandalism, perhaps by using volunteers or by creating a program that makes the children proud of their school, then you can take the money you save and apply it to reading or one of your other priorities. This will be possible once we see how money is currently being spent.

We will have our multiple-option plan for parental involvement in your hands by November 1.

We will have our Master Plan Citizens Committee in operation by November 1.

The District must now move to professionalize and regularize its total pattern of procedures and agreements relating to the Negotiating Council and with various staff components. We need to rationalize the relationship between management and staff. The person we appoint will work with teachers in devel-oping the kinds of concerns that will resolve some of our learning problems. He will help us deal with sources of friction so that we can have the highest esprit de corps throughout the system.

The Bay Area is uniquely rich in resources that can and must be tapped for the strengthening of our schools. Universities, industries, and business firms need to be systematically given opportunities to deepen their roles in the school community. By No-vember 15 we hope to create an office of Resource Development to coordinate this effort.

For instance, we want more than just tutorial programs from our universities. Berkeley has a department that deals with landscape architecture. Why shouldn't their professors and students practice on some of our schools that need to be refurbished? Why shouldn't the business schools share their expertise in staff development? Why shouldn't local businesses help us make our curricula more real and more relevant? We could, for instance, send our biology students to work in hospitals and research laboratories.

We want something more than the old field trips, or the visits where some chap comes in and says: "I made it. You can make it too." That is a good beginning. But beyond that, let's make our community into a living laboratory.

I am completely committed to the idea that our ultimate success or failure will take place in your school, in your classroom. The central office must function as a service center and a foundation. To give meaning to this idea, we will establish by October 15 a New Notions for Excellence Fund of $100,000.

We will commit funds to those proposals which turn schools to meet their priorities. About $60,000 will support total-school proposals. There will be $30,000 set aside for individual teacher grants for projects up to $500, Finally, there will be $10,000 for activities designed, organized, and carried out by stu-dents. Awards will be made by a Fund Committee consisting of principals, teachers, and students.

The point of all this is that the collective wisdom of all our people will give us a better chance to meet the needs of the community rather than relying upon the decisions of one person.

I have listed eight things which you can hold us accountable for, I know that you will have it all in writing because I see two of our distinguished jour-nalists taking it all down. If we do not make good on our promises, you will have the right to say, "What happened?" And I will have to stand before you and let you know.

But if the central administration is willing to lay that kind of responsibility on itself, I do not think it is too much to ask you to join us in taking certain re-sponsibilities. Here are some of the things which you might wish to commit yourself to:

Each teacher should take on the heavy personal and professional responsibility for setting his own in-structional objectives for this year:

It should be possible to define what you want to do in terms of measurable units. I'm talking about a teacher who would dare to say, "I'm committed to producing one month's growth for each month of in-struction in the basic skills." Some real brave teachers may say, "I'll give you two for one in the basic skills."

If you have a class where cutting is a problem, you can talk about improving attendanceand mea-sure how well you actually do. You may have to get on the phone at night and say: "Johnny, where were you? How dare you cut me? You're ruining my whole objective." Who knows what it will take to make our big, anonymous institutions more personal and at-tractive?

If you look down at your watch and see that by the time you get down to teaching, you have blown fifteen minutes of the period, your first objective ought to be to get a better system. But check yourself with your watch. See if you are doing better. If things are not improving, call for help.

Each school shall state its objectives, in similar terms, for the year, with a target date for a brief working statement by November 15.

As each classroom teacher outlines what he is planning to do for and with his children, these ob-jectives collectively become the objectives of the en-tire school. Even as we establish long-range and dif-ficult goals that make us reach beyond what we are now, we should choose objectives that we can fin-mediately use as indicators of progress. Certainly, aim for developing a program that ensures grade-level reading scores, but if one third of your students are running out on the streets, your first objective should be to improve your attendance recordsay by 50 percent within three months.

Each school shall set down its plan for deepening community involvement by February 15.

We anticipate that our New Notions for Excel-lence Fund Committee will be ready to review pro-posals early in November. But they won't have anything to review if you don't start planning your pro-posals now.

This is where we are and where we are going. Per-haps I have made it sound unnecessarily complicated, but it is quite simple. Our children are going to per-form at grade level or betteror we are going to know the reason why. That is what it all boils down to.

I was somewhat shocked once when Mario Fantini, of the Ford Foundation, said to me: "You know, Marc, the only measure of quality education that makes sense to parents, especially poor parents, is 'grade level.' Parents want their children to read, write, and count at the level appropriate to their age."

At that time I was thinldng about all the other thingslearning to live together, learning to be a good citizen, all that stuff. But parents first ask about academic achievement. And that is what we are going to have to achieve first, and then build on it.

The time has come to be up and doing. I mean what I say about our time, our moment in the sweep of events in America. I want you to come with me. I earnestly seek your help, your ideas, your zeal, in building a vision of what urban education can be. We will be writing an unprecedented chapter in educa-tional history. We can make Oakland not a place of tumult and turmoil, but a place where people draw on each other, build on the best, put it all together, and show the nation the way in urban education.

I hope I can count on you!

EPILOGUE

The response on the part of teachers and students, parents and administrators has been tremendous. Working together, all these initial commitments have been met.

The goals for the district and objectives for each school have been adopted and are in operation. Regional associate superintendents are giving leadership to the building of a decentralized system. Each school has selected a method for sharing in decision-making and program-planning. The offices of staff relations and resource development are providing new and effective service. Some 150 projects are now underway, funded by the New Notions for Excellence program. Of perhaps the most profound significance, the Master Plan Citizens Committee has launched into its awesome task of charting the future of education in Oakland. Two hundred fifty persons serve on five different task forces at the city-wide level, and there are working replicas of this organization in each of our ninety-one schools. Foundation support has been received to provide technical assistance.

In drawing these observations to a close, I am acutely aware that there are indeed no ending points in urban education. I have attempted to offer some personal perspectives on practical issues. With the stunning acceleration of change, I'm confident that many readers of this record will have found their own approaches to the problems under review.

In a recent message to our staff, I observed that "when the pieces are in place, when we are done with the temporary preoccupations and the catchphrases, when we feel the power and exhilaration of real movement toward our objectives, then will come an important realization. Our success will come not be-cause of Board directives, or the Superintendent's notions, or the staff's creativity or the community's yearning. We will make it because we have the common sense to draw on each other, and the audacity to believe that in concert, we are equal to the great task."