Oakland Unified underfunds classroom instruction by over $30 million, says Alameda County Office of Education.

Alameda County Superintendent of Public Instruction Sheila Jordan sent a letter to Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Tony Smith earlier this week, informing Smith that OUSD's adopted budget for the 2009-10 school year falls about $35 million short of complying with the California Education Code's requirement (Section 41372) that unified school district spend at least 55% of their educational expenses on classroom instruction.

Oakland teachers salaries are the lowest in Alameda County. Over the past six years OUSD received more than 21% in cost of living adjustment revenues from the state, but Oakland teachers saw almost none of it (Oakland teacher salaries this year are less than 2% above where they were in 2002-3). As always, OUSD administration pleads poverty, and in contract negotiations tells teachers that it just can't afford to give them a pay increase. Yet every other school district in the state manages to conform to the Ed Code requirement to put at least 55% of the district budget into classroom instruction. Why can't Oakland?

This isn't a question of poverty, it's a question of priorities. OUSD insists on outsourcing tens of millions of dollars a year in contracts to private vendors for professional development; for mentoring new teachers; for coaching math and English teachers; for the latest fads in scripted learning; for software that takes years to work (and that's invariably replaced almost as soon as it does); etc. This contract money could and should go to teachers and other district employees, who could do the work far more effectively. But although neoliberal privatization crashed and burned the global economy, it's still alive and feeding in OUSD. For this, we can thank billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates -- but that's the subject of a subsequent blog posting.