Mother Jones – September 01, 2019

8 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019

OUTFRONT

been a disruption movement,” Ravitch

said. “They’ve been successful at dis-

rupting Oakland without improving it.”

Emma Paulino, an organizer at Oak-

land Community Organizations, doesn’t

regret her group’s push for small schools.

Over a three-year period, students in

Oakland’s small schools outperformed

students in larger schools, and between

2004 and 2009, the district recorded

the state’s biggest jump in Academic

Performance Index scores. Still, the

city had problems that small schools

couldn’t solve. “There’s nothing wrong

with smaller schools,” Paulino said.

“It’s around giving what they need to

sustain what they have done.”

What killed Roots? I put that ques-

tion to the school’s principal, Geoff Vu,

a boyish 32-year-old. “It’s a byproduct

of the same challenges that our district

faces and that education is facing

across the country,” he said. Many

national reformers had seen in Oakland

schools a series of discrete problems

unconnected to the life of the city. Vu’s

perspective was anything but academic.

The culprit behind Roots’ failure, he

said, is “poverty and racism and all the

intersections of injustice and oppres-

sion that we have to face. Our children

are where we interact with it.” Q

Left: Robyn

McWilliams (center)

gets her shirt signed

by Amazing Herbert

(left) and Kaveena

San (right).