The Sleeping Giant in Oakland: On "Solidarity Sites" and Resisting Corporate Reform

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: 2019 Teacher Strikes: Lessons on Worker Consciousness, Community Advocacy, and Coalition-Building

Abstract

Context and Purpose
In 2018, the Oakland Education Association (OEA) voted in new leadership. The union was in many ways a sleeping giant: Oakland teachers live under the city’s historic legacy, including some of the most innovative efforts advocating for ethnic studies and restorative justice in education (Sung, 2015). Its union, however, had not been working closely with the numerous advocacy and community organizing groups in the city, and rarely connected other struggles in Oakland with the plight of schools. This has been particularly important, in a context of longstanding contention and corruption in Oakland Unified schools. Financial mismanagement and priorities favoring administrative bureaucracy, coupled with a meager budget from the state legislature led multiple crises, including a 2003 state takeover of schools (see Noguera, 2003).

New OEA leadership arrived with an urgent strategic goal: to transform the OEA from a service union into an organizing union. Drawing from preexisting struggles in Chicago (Nuñez, Michie & Konkol, 2015), new leaders strengthened existing relationships with community members and built new ones. In just six months, new leaders emerged from the OEA rank-and-file, and teachers at each of the district’s 87 sites worked to build action teams in seven geographic clusters around the city. In this new formation, the union was able to align its demands with community concerns. Significantly, rather than framing the strike as primarily an issue of pay, teachers created a more nuanced narrative about the teacher retention crisis, which creates challenges for OUSD’s most vulnerable populations: African American and Latinx students, newcomers, English language learners and Special Education students.

To provide fuller context of Oakland’s 2019 strike, this paper will further ground the city’s history of schooling and corporate reforms, and include the voices of participating strike leaders who can bear witness to the strike’s successes and limitations.

Theoretical Framing
Paris (2011) asserts that “Humanizing research is a methodological stance which requires that our inquiries involve dialogic consciousness-raising and the building of relationships of dignity and care for both researchers and participants” (p. 9). Those at the forefront of this study will be strike leaders who intimately know Oakland’s context and history, and were central to community advocacy during the strike. Throughout the seven-day strike, teachers worked with community members to create “solidarity sites” so parents would have somewhere to send their children (J4OS, 2019). Such experiences are critical to the kind of humanizing research Paris (2011) has advocated for, as community-led efforts are central to the scope of this study, through which a participatory relationship with the strike helped create a broader range of consciousness-raising.

Scholarly Significance
A wide-range of corporate education reforms have troubled the field of educational research, and the landscape for practicing teachers, for years (Au & Ferrare, 2015). As Oakland has been a heightened locale for the proliferation of charter schools and with millions of dollars of outside money, the 2019 strike serves as important documentation for calling attention to these maneuvers, and an advanced understanding of how privatization continues to threaten public education.

Authors

• Richard Ayers, University of San Francisco

• Chela Delgado, Coliseum College Prep Academy (CCPA)