Education

OP-ED: Charter Schools are not the Answer to Oakland’s Public School Crisis

Published

11 years ago

March 2, 2015

By Dan Siegel

The debate over charter schools is waged on misleading and superficial grounds. According to the dominant narrative, the charter school discussion pits incompetent teachers championed by corrupt unions against sincere, committed parents fighting for a decent education for their children in safe, clean schools.

Reality is much more complicated. Public education is in crisis. Many children, especially low-income children of color, are poorly served by public schools. But charter schools are no better. A recent study concludes that about 30 percent of charter schools out-perform public schools with comparable student bodies, while another 30 percent perform less well than the public schools. We can also identify many examples of successful schools, both public and charter.

But to understand the situation, and the likely result of the move to the large-scale creation of charter schools, people need to pay attention to what is occurring nationally in the charter school movement:

The charter school trend is increasingly dominated by the for profit sector and is receiving massive investments from hedge funds and other investors whose focus is profit, not improving public education.

The primary features of the for-profit model are:

1. Poorly paid, lightly trained teachers whose role is simply to present a simplistic, canned curriculum geared to performance on standardized tests. Few of these teachers will make a career of education, and many charters turn over half of their teachers every year.

2. Limited curriculum that neglects the development of higher order, critical thinking skills in favor of rote learning geared to standardized tests. Some charters actually limit instruction to English language and mathematics, with an increasing percentage of the curriculum presented by computers.

3. Elimination of very poor students, second language learners, and children with learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other characteristics that make them “too expensive” to educate.

The ultimate impact of this model is the re-creation of separate and unequal education systems. Affluent families will send their children to high performing suburban, private, and parochial schools with small classes and experienced teachers who will teach them to think critically, write well, and engage with challenging curricula in the arts, mathematics, science, and foreign languages. Graduates of these schools will be prepared for success in the nation’s best colleges and universities. The charter school graduates will be prepared, at best, to enter the military, community colleges, and the fast food industry.

Our focus in Oakland should be on improving our public schools. Fortunately, we have excellent models based on recent Oakland experience. Oakland Tech, now viewed by many as Oakland’s best high school, was recently a violent, dangerous place with little academic success. Frick Middle School, now a candidate for reorganization, was until recently regarded as a safe, successful school in a severely challenged neighborhood.

Here are some of the elements of a successful school:

1. A strong principal focused on instruction, a teacher of teachers rather than a disciplinarian or fund-raiser. Oakland has many excellent principals and many who should be replaced. When Dennis Chaconas was appointed superintendent in 2000, his first priority was the replacement of 60% of the District’s principals. And then he replaced some of the replacements.

2. Well-paid, well-trained teachers. We need to demand that teachers be paid as much as nurses or police officers, so they can support their families and make instruction a career. The relationship between principals and teachers is clear – good principals attract and retain good teachers, while poor teachers readily leave schools where the culture and peer pressure demands their best efforts.

3, Site-based decision making in the context of accountability for school results. Public schools, just like charters, should be encouraged to develop their own identities and specialties. Public schools could be organized around specialities such as environmental science, African culture, or language arts to provide choices for students and parents.

4. Programs that address students’ life circumstances, including physical and mental health, violence prevention, and nutrition.

5. Active, engaged parent involvement that participates in decision-making as well as support activities.

Over the last 20 years Oakland has enjoyed a substantial number of successful schools at all levels and in all neighborhoods. Concentrating on replicating these schools provides our best opportunities for success.

To fight for successful public schools we need a broad parent-teacher-community coalition with a vision for successful schools and a strategy to make this happen.

Dan Siegel is a civil rights attorney in Oakland.

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Black History

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Celebrates New North Atlantic Regional Director

WASHINGTON INFORMER — As the 36th Regional Director, Dr. Ringgold will serve on the Alpha Kappa Alpha 18-member Board of Directors and will assist in the implementation of policies and programs under the leadership of International President and Chief Executive Officer Charletta Wilson Jacks.

Published

4 days ago

August 3, 2026

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Dr. Tonja L. Ringgold, an educator and Life Member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated® (AKA), was installed as North Atlantic Regional Director during the organization’s 72nd Biennial International Convention on July 23 in Las Vegas.

Dr. Ringgold will serve a two-year term overseeing one of the Sorority’s largest and most historic regions. With more than 17,000 members, the Notable North Atlantic is the birthplace of the sorority, which was established on Jan. 15, 1908, at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“I am excited and humbled by the faith placed in me to lead,” said Dr. Ringgold. “I welcome the opportunity to give back to this illustrious Sisterhood that has poured so much into me.”

The North Atlantic Region, one of the sorority’s 10 regions in the United States and abroad, comprises undergraduate and graduate chapters in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, eastern New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

As the 36th Regional Director, Dr. Ringgold will serve on the Alpha Kappa Alpha 18-member Board of Directors and will assist in the implementation of policies and programs under the leadership of International President and Chief Executive Officer Charletta Wilson Jacks.

Her previous sorority leadership includes serving as the North Atlantic Regional Representative to the International Program Committee and as North Atlantic Region Program Chairman. She also served as president of Epsilon Omega Chapter in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dr. Ringgold represents four generations of Alpha Kappa Alpha women, all initiated into the Alpha Delta Chapter at Morgan State University. She was initiated in 1982, following in the footsteps of her cousin and Alpha Delta Charter member, Mary Anita Short Wheatley, and her mother, Mary Jane Briscoe Short, a life member of the Sorority with 67 years of service. Her daughter Ashley R. Davy was initiated into the Alpha Delta Chapter in 2011.

A nationally recognized educator, Dr. Ringgold has spent more than three decades in higher education. She is a retired Vice President of Academic Affairs within the Community College system and is a faculty member in the Morgan State University’s Community College Leadership Doctoral Program. She also serves as president and CEO of En-Sight Educational and Management Consultants.

She holds a doctorate degree in education, master’s degrees in Applied Psychology, Management, Business Administration, and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology.

In addition to her Alpha Kappa Alpha service, Dr. Ringgold is president of the Baltimore County Chapter of The Pierians, Incorporated; a member of the National Council on Black American Affairs; and a member of the Coalition of 100 Black Women.

She resides in Parkville, Maryland.

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Black History

NAACP Announces $20m Voter Registration Drive at National Convention in Chicago

GARY CRUSADER — The NAACP announced a $20 million voter registration campaign at its 117th annual convention in Chicago. The campaign aims to register between six and 10 million voters who did not participate in the last two elections.

Published

2 weeks ago

July 27, 2026

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NAACP Announces $20m Voter Registration Drive at National Convention in Chicago

With just over three months before the midterm elections, the NAACP at its 117th annual convention in Chicago announced an unprecedented $20 million voter registration campaign ahead of the midterm elections.

The announcement kicked off the NAACP’s national convention at McCormick Place where thousands of visitors and delegates participated in workshops and seminars that stressed the organization’s theme of “We the People” and purpose of educating Blacks about their constitutional rights.

Throughout the week-long convention, vendors sold merchandise, media organizations held onsite interviews in “The HUB,” and visitors signed a massive “We the People” mural.

Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson were among the dignitaries who reinforced the NAACP’s message during the convention’s opening plenary.

Black voting rights have been under attack in the last several months when Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida gutted historic Black congressional districts after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such districts were unconstitutional and were no longer needed in modern times despite protections under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, is concerned those decisions will roll back political and economic gains Blacks have made in the last six decades.

NAACP Board Chairman Leon Russell told the opening session that the NAACP would undertake a $20 million voter registration and mobilization drive “to motivate six million to 10 million voters” who did not cast ballots in the last two elections to do so.

As part of the campaign, the NAACP plans to recruit “tens of thousands of volunteers to join the crusade to turn out millions of us this November.”

The plan will target voters in 14 states and 33 congressional districts, with the full list expected to be disclosed later.

“We must move 60 percent or more of all eligible voters to the polls,” Russell said.

The NAACP has a history of leading voter registration drives in Black neighborhoods across America.

In his speech, Pritzker said, “In Washington and across the country, extremists holding high office are working to erase Black history rather than learn from it, to take away voting rights instead of strengthening them, to divide us rather than unite us,” he said.

He added, “These are not simply disagreements over policy. These are challenges to the very idea that democracy belongs to all of us. Challenges to the very idea that we are all created equal.”

Pritzker said the phrase “We the People” reflects America’s ongoing effort to expand equality, noting that the nation’s founding ideals initially excluded enslaved people, women and other groups.

Mayor Brandon Johnson said, “For 117 years this incredible organization has helped bend the arc of history towards justice. And not because progress was inevitable, but because ordinary people made the extraordinary decision to organize, advocate and refuse to accept injustice as the reigning form of governance. That work has never been easy, and today it remains as urgent as it has ever been.

“Across this country we are witnessing wicked efforts to undermine fundamental rights, weaken Democratic institutions, and to turn neighbors against one another.

“We see attempts to silence the truth and erase our history and convince people that somehow division is stronger than solidarity. But history has taught us something very different. Every time people have been told to accept injustice, they have risen together to reject it. “

During Trump’s second term in office, the NAACP has filed more than 70 lawsuits to stop his grasping and often unconstitutional moves to grab total power.

Pritzker said “Illinois has been at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and equality” ever since Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a non-white, was the first permanent resident of what is now Chicago, Pritzker noted.

Pritzker also said Illinois also gave the nation the crusading African American journalist Ida B. Wells, and it elected more African American members of Congress than any other state. He said Illinois gave the nation the late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and “a young community organizer” who eventually went from Chicago to the White House, Barack Obama.

“But such progress is not inevitable,” the governor warned. “It requires people willing to sacrifice. None of this is by accident. It is because Black America shows up, reminding us of the painful part of our history while giving us hope for the future.”

Based on reporting by Gary Crusader.

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Black History

Opinion: When Politicians Start Sanitizing One Chapter of History, They’re Coming After The Whole Book

OAKLAND POST — The White House recently released a report criticizing the Smithsonian for supposedly promoting “anti-White activism” and other ideological sins. Buried inside is something even more troubling. The report argues Americans shouldn’t think of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 primarily as a racist law. Instead, we’re told it was about national security.

Published

2 weeks ago

July 26, 2026

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AI-generated illustration created by Open AI.

By Emil Amok Guillermo

I came to Winnipeg to perform my one-man show, 69, Emil Amok: Anchorman—The News Made Me Do It.

I didn’t expect to leave with another lesson about America.

It came over dim sum.

After the show, Shirley—a Chinese Canadian—and her friend Chris, a Sri Lankan-Mauritian Canadian—insisted on taking me to a restaurant in Winnipeg’s Chinatown.

A Filipino American. A Chinese Canadian. A Sri Lankan-Mauritian Canadian.

The United Nations, if it served dumplings.

Then Shirley told me about her father.

He arrived from China at 14 years old, speaking no English. The school put him in second grade just to learn the language. Once he caught up, they skipped him to ninth grade.

Two years later, he was working.

He opened a restaurant.

It burned down.

He opened another.

Eventually he bought a café in rural Manitoba serving chop suey, burgers, steaks and fries.

The Good Way Café became the place everybody gathered. Rock and roll played from the jukebox until midnight.

Her father, Arthur Mar, built a business, employed people and became part of his community.

Sound familiar?

It should.

It’s the same immigrant story Americans love to celebrate.

Until politics gets involved.

Because before Arthur Mar could build anything, Canada made him pay a $500 Chinese head tax—a fortune in the 1920s.

When that didn’t keep enough Chinese out, Canada passed its own Chinese Exclusion Act.

Different country.

Same racism.

Canada has spent decades admitting what it did.

The Trump administration wants America to do the opposite.

The White House recently released a report criticizing the Smithsonian for supposedly promoting “anti-White activism” and other ideological sins.

Buried inside is something even more troubling.

The report argues Americans shouldn’t think of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 primarily as a racist law.

Instead, we’re told it was about national security.

Funny how those two words have always been available whenever politicians want to discriminate against somebody.

Black Americans have heard that song before.

Slave patrols became public safety.

Jim Crow became states’ rights.

Mass incarceration became law and order.

Same melody.

Different verse.

History has a way of putting racism in a respectable suit.

When politicians begin sanitizing one chapter of history, they’re coming after the whole book.

Communities of color don’t have identical histories.

But we recognize familiar tactics.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, commentator and comic monologist. He performs “69, Emil Amok: Anchorman—The News Made Me Do It” at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, July 16–26.

Get Tix: https://www.winnipegfringe.com/performer-detail.aspx?kw=Emil+Amok+Productions

Follow him at YouTube.com/@emilamok1.