I’m one of those people who, frankly, doesn’t believe self-reported data from “social equity” programs, especially those that make their money off parcel taxes.
For one thing, parcel taxes are the most inequitable form of taxation there is. Since Oakland arbitrarily taxes all parcels, regardless of size or value, the same amount, that means that small condo owners (like me) pay as much as rich mansion owners in the Hills.
For another thing, it’s impossible for regular people, like you and me, to find out what these programs accomplish, as opposed to what they claim to accomplish. For instance, Measure H is going to be on the November ballot. It would extend, through 2039, a $120 per year parcel tax, “to continue funding for the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) college and career readiness program for high school students.” Measure H is actually an extension of Measure N, passed by the voters in 2014, whose ten-year period expires this year, hence the need for Measure H, which continues it.
Back in 2014, when the Oakland Unified School District was campaigning for Measure N, they claimed its goals were to:
Reduce the drop-out rate
Provide high school students with real-world work and learning opportunities
Prepare students for admission to the University of California and other four-year colleges
Expand mentoring, tutoring, counseling, support services, and transition to job training programs
Now, in OUSD’s campaign to pass Measure H, they say its goals are to:
1. Reduce the dropout rate.
2. Increase the four-year graduation rate.
3. Improve college and career readiness.
4. Support middle school students’ successful transition to high school.
5. Reduce disparities in student achievement and student access to career pathways based on race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, English learner status, special needs status and place of residency.
We can see that there have been some major changes from Measure N, in 2014, to Measure H, in 2024. The language about providing “real world work” to students has disappeared. The language about preparing students for admission to the University of California is gone. In their place is the brave new world language of “reducing disparities” based on race and other factors. To what can we attribute these rather glaring changes?
Since we have no idea whether or not Prop. N actually succeeded in any of its goals, we also aren’t being told by OUSD why these omissions and changes were imposed. So we’re left to make inferences, and they’re not flattering to OUSD. Some questions for the school district:
1. How successful or unsuccessful was Measure N in getting students into the University of California? Let us see statistics.
2. Did Measure N actually provide “real world work” to students? Let’s see the numbers, and followup studies.
3. Why was the language about racial disparities added to the 2024 version? My hunch is because, over the last ten years, woke politicians and bureaucrats have completely seized power in Oakland, racializing every aspect of governance. It’s impossible for a city program to exist these days without some City Council member with a racial grievance, like Carroll Fife, hijacking the program’s original intention and front-loading it with racial preferences. This has been detrimental to everything Oakland does, discriminatory to many other races—and it also is red-handed theft of taxpayer dollars to support race-based actions the general public is not in favor of.
OUSD makes much of the fact that graduation rates seem to be ticking upward. If that’s true, it represents a snapshot of the city as a whole—a picture that distort local exceptions. For instance, while the overall graduation rate in the city is supposedly 81.60 percent (meaning the dropout rate is 18.4%), East Oakland’s school dropout rate is an astoundingly high 40%. This corresponds to a part of the city with the highest crime rates and, presumably, the greatest “racial disparities.”
The OUSD figures also mask a more troubling fact: reading and math test scores for Oakland high schoolers continue to be abysmally low. In fact, English and math test scores for Black Oakland students in 2023 fell to their lowest levels since 2016. All this suggests that the improved graduation rates are a Potemkin Village illusion, raising questions of whether OUSD has encouraged high schools to lower graduation standards, or resort to even more unsavory practices, in order to be able to report improved graduation rates.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In 2019, OUSD was embroiled in a major scandal in which teachers, staff members and administrators allegedly falsified student transcripts, in “an effort to boost graduation rates and mask educational deficiencies within the district.” In 2021, another report on “Oakland’s dirty little secret” revealed how mandated changes in OUSD’s grading policies resulted in greater numbers of graduates through the simple expedient of grade inflation. Turns out that the “D” grade, which was considered “failing” by the University of California, could be avoided altogether by replacing it with a “C.” Thus, the report concluded, “you [i.e. the student] can pass your class in OUSD, but it will not count for college admissions.” So what’s the point of “graduating” if it was based on manipulation, and won’t even let the “graduate” get into college?
Is this kind of phony stuff still going on at OUSD--falsifying test results, giving minority students an affirmative-action grade, outright lying? I don’t expect OUSD itself or the City Council to investigate because all they care about are self-serving outcomes. But I can ask questions.
Steve Heimoff