This Oakland teacher is walking out today. She’s fighting something bigger than OUSD.

An Oakland teacher tells us why she’ll strike, legally and illegally, to defend her students from billionaire privatizers.

Today, Oakland educators cap off a week of historic labor militancy with widespread illegal walk-outs across the city. Kehinde Salter, a teacher and labor activist from Fremont High, talked to us about the fight to save public education from attacks by billionaire privatizers and about the nuts-and-bolts organizing that went into making Fremont High strike-ready.

In the the last seven days, California has seen some of the most exciting labor action in a generation. Workers across the state are flexing their muscles, from Los Angeles, where 30,000 teachers are on strike, to the Bay Area, where teachers organized a march of thousands through the streets of Oakland on Saturday followed by sick-outs at multiple schools today.

“It’s all the same, the teacher strikes in Oakland, L.A., Arizona, and West Virginia,” Kehinde Salter told Majority this week. “We have all these wealthy people trying to purchase the education system in this country. And it’s no coincidence that it’s L.A. and OUSD, where we have the highest percentage of low-income students of color, that we also have the highest percentage of charters.”

Salter is a performing arts teacher at Fremont High, a parent of two Oakland Unified School Distrit (OUSD) students, and an OUSD alumna.

Fighting charterization

Teachers are engaged in a single fight across California and across the country, she says. They are fighting against the billionaires who fund charter schools to subvert democracy and bankrupt districts across the nation.

Charter schools, backed by the ultra-wealthy and their foundations, have moved aggressively into Oakland over the last decade. Thirty percent of Oakland students are enrolled in charters, three times the state average. Charters cost OUSD an estimated $57 million each year in lost funding, according to a 2018 research report from In the Public Interest.

“If Oakland weren’t losing $57 million per year, it would be possible to reduce class sizes to 18 students per class in all its elementary schools and also double the number of nurses and guidance counselors in its schools,” the report found.

As these findings make clear, charter schools are incompatible with a system of free and universal public schools that provide all children with the support they need to learn and provide teachers with the basics they need to work and live.

The top charters use an “audition” process, Salter said, to screen out students from Oakland and those who need special learning supports, opening their doors instead to students from wealthier cities while siphoning resources from OUSD. When charters do take low-income students of color, they often provide these children with a substandard education, denying them intellectual resources that could be used to challenge the system as adults.

“Privatizing education is a very dangerous thing,” Salter said. “These billionaire families can shut down schools and make sure only certain children are getting an education.”

Billionaires like charter schools because they are privately managed and not democratically accountable to the public or families. When charters fail students or do harm to them, as they do at alarming rates, there’s no way for the community to stop them. They are also poorly regulated by the state, allowing for widespread creative accounting and corruption to flourish while profits to flow to the top.

But Oakland teachers have had enough. They are organizing to make sure students receive the education they deserve and teachers are paid.

“We’re demanding a living wage,” Salter said. “Because of the rise of Silicon Valley, Oakland is now one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and OUSD refuses to recognize that.”

Organizing to win

Salter, along with the thousands of teachers who came out Saturday’s #RedforEd march and the hundreds who walked off the job today, are demanding more for themselves and their students. Organizing to fight the school board and its billionaire backers hasn’t been easy.

The teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association (OEA), is mired in a lengthy contract fight that began in early 2017. Because the union is legally barred from striking before the slow-moving and bureaucratic bargaining process plays out, teachers like Salter organized their own legal and illegal labor actions to show their strength and test their own strike readiness.

Salter said she’s told her co-workers that she knows striking is inconvenient. They’ll lose pay, and they’re already facing threats from the district, which is telling them to wait for the bargaining process to play out.

“But we live in capitalist America,” she tells other teachers. “Anytime there’s been great change in this country — ending slavery, gaining civil rights — anytime there’s a change in this country, it’s because the people started a movement instead of waiting around.”

From L.A. to Oakland to West Virginia, the battle pits billionaires and their lackeys versus children, and teachers will continue to stand up as workers and use the power of strikes to fight for their students, their communities, and themselves