OUSD

Anti- or Pro-Choice?

The past months I've been working on the possibility of choosing a school for our kindergarten bound daughter in the schools of Oakland Unified School District. In the midst of the searching, numerous school visitations, and way-too-often sleepless nights of anxiety there was an article published in the Oakland Tribue about the School Choice Process and how things are looking up for the district as more and more families are deciding that the right school for their children is a public school as opposed to continuing the cycle of a massive exodus of Oakland families to the Private Independent Schools of the East Bay. Read the article here.

While the article was thoughtful and seeking to empower folks to choose OUSD schools I found it to simplisitc and naive. Do we really have a choice? Or is it merely just a mirage to make OUSD folks feel good? Who has a choice... is it only those families that have the money to comfortably choose between private and public education, or who can either afford or managed to buy early into expensive gentfiying neighborhoods in which the public schools are transforming and improving in relationship to the explosively escalataing house values in the past post-dot com years in which numerous families moved into many Oakland neighborhoods? I sure don't feel like my family really has a choice...and yet we have much more of a choice than many other families of preschoolers we're journeying with....

Here's the letter I sent to the author as my response to the article......
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I read with anticipation and trepidation your article on the front page of the Oakland Tribune this morning about the search for a right school as my wife and I are also currently traversing the same journey of school choice for our 4 year old daughter.

As I read, I felt increasingly disappointed. The Larson-Moore family do indeed have a difficult choice to make, private school for $14-19,000 a year or a local OUSD school. But what you overlooked in your article is the reality that they have a choice, as opposed to the many middle class families that live in the part of East Oakland below HWY 13 strectching from the Glenview to the Millsmont Neighborhood. Many are the families there, like my own, that don't have such a choice, let alone any choice, in terms of where their children will go to school. Our half-a-million dollar homes sentence us to the enslaving necessity of dual incomes, which preclude any fantasy of affording an independent school. Simultaneously we're also stuck in neighborhoods where the local school options top out, at best, with the elementary schools succeeding in increasing the rate of proficiency in language arts and mathematics among their students to the incredibly low ceiling of 30%.

I myself have visited Glenview, along with nearly a dozen others OUSD schools these past several months, scrambling to see what the odds are that the OUSD School Options gods might entertain my prayers and grant my daughter a preciously rare spot in a school that seeks to and is actually achieving academic proficiency in more than just a third of their student population. The other reality is that many of these families, in this part of East Oakland, are increasingly multi-racial couples who fled San Francisco as Housing Refugees clinging to the dream of buying a home in Oakland. Having survived the roller-coaster nightmare of bidding for a home in Ivy Leagu-esque competitions of the past six years, they no longer question if they should leave Oakland because of the mortgage possiblities, they now do so because for all their financial stretching, their children are doomed to an inadequate education in neighborhoods where the average home price far exceeds the national mean.

I applaud your efforts to bring such important stories to light, but would have prefered to read an article going beyond the stereotypical story of the single-wage-owner caucasian family risking the choice of sending their child to an OUSD school to explore the stories of the dual-wage middle class multiracial families of teachers, social workers, police officers and small business owners, who have no choice but the luck of the draw in this month's school options lottery.


Respectfully yours,
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