Education

Oakland Needs School Board Candidates Who Have “Courage,” Say Community Leaders

Published

6 years ago

August 24, 2018

Five school community leaders, who have been actively involved in school issues for years, joined representatives of the Oakland Post this week to interview candidates who are running for the Oakland Board of Education.

In interviews with the Post, the school community leaders spoke about the kind of leadership that is needed on the school board and some of the main challenges the Oakland Unified School District is facing.

Monica Scott Green, a parent and program director of Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN), is an Oakland native. She was raised in Denver but has been living in Oakland for the past 30 years.

Green said she originally became active because she was concerned about the quality of education that students are receiving and the need for more engagement of families in the schools.

She said Oakland needs school board leaders “who will advocate for the resources that the children need to thrive.”

Because Oakland depends on funding from the state and federal governments and is largely controlled by the state bureaucracy, Oakland schools need leaders who will “work with coalitions (locally) and throughout the state so communities can have local control,” said Green.

“We need to be able to grow our own local teaching force so that we can have teachers who really reflect the cultures and the languages of our children,” she said.

Because of the impact of charter schools and state regulations, Oakland currently has “all these mini-districts that are unaccountable to the parents and families in the schools, including the parents in the charter schools,” she said.

Renee Swayne, a retired Oakland educator and member of Oakland-based Educators for Democratic Schools (EDS), said the school board members must provide “solid leadership with an awareness of charter schools and their impact on the schools, and an overall understanding and care for students and families.”

“We understand that Oakland schools have to do a better job, (but) charter schools are killing Oakland schools right now,” she said.

“Fiscal solvency is the biggest issue because it impacts everything, coming up with solutions that will keep us out of receivership (state takeover),” said Swayne.

Dr. Kimberly Mayfield, dean of the School of Education at Holy Names University, said the school board needs leaders who “recognize they are political beings, who face political as well as academic challenges.”
“They need to recognize they are collaborative change agents and see that parents and communities are partners,” said Mayfield.

Of course, school board members need to work for quality education, but they have to understand the complexity of what that means, she said.

“It means having a diverse teaching staff that is representative of the school community,” she said. “It also means having a stable teaching force and school board members who actually like children and teachers and are willing to represent and respect them.”

Oakland native Mike Hutchinson is a member of Oakland Public Education Network (OPEN), affiliated with the Journey 4 Justice National Alliance.

“We want to see school board members who are rooted in the community, who are willing to harness the energy we have in Oakland and build on it, rather than to have an adversarial relationship with the community,” he said.

“Our community has a right to control the public education system, and when we do that, we have good outcomes,” he said.

“We need board members who have a vision to really reinvigorate public education in Oakland. That doesn’t include privatization,” he said.

With the rapid growth of charter schools, public education in Oakland is facing an “existential threat,” said Hutchinson. “We’re at a tipping point as a district,” he said. “We have the highest rate of charter schools in California, and (Oakland students) are ground zero for the education experiments.”

Dr. Kitty Kelly Epstein, an education professor at Holy Names University and KPFA talk show host on the program “Education Today,” said:

“We need school board members with courage. I’m looking for candidates who are willing to lead and advocate on behalf of the people of Oakland. We need leaders who are going to acknowledge all the ways the school district has been messed over by the state and the federal government, including the state takeover, when we were forced to take a $100 million loan , but had no control over how the money was spent. Much of it was wasted by state-selected administrators, and now we’re expected to pay the bill.

“It is the state that makes it impossible to have a diverse teaching force, creating a lot of petty requirements that don’t have anything to do with whether people are good teachers or not.

“We have a good superintendent, we have committed teachers, and we have a community that wants good schools. We need to be out from under the burden the state has put on the district for political reasons, starting many years ago.”

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

5 days ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/PostNewsGroup
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/blackpressusatv
X: twitter.com/blackpressusa

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

2 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

2 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.