6 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
OUTFRONTbehind the cheerful faces in these
photos is a bitter reality. The life and
death of Roots International Academy
are in many ways the story of how
Oakland, California, reached what
education historian Diane Ravitch
calls its “inflection point,” a moment
when its school system hovers between
a vision of education as a public good
and one of education as a commod-
ity. “It’s either going to be destroyed
by charters,” Ravitch told me, “or the
parents and teachers there are going to
recover a public school system.”
Born in 2006 during a
nationwide “small schools”
boom, this public middle
school in the East Oakland
flatlands shut its doors for
good at the end of this past
school year, the first clo-
sure in a series of contro-
versial changes planned
for the district. Roots had
been opened in the name
of reform. It would now be
sacrificed in the name of
reform as well.
I spent some time at
Roots in the last few weeks
of its existence. It was
strange to see so much joy and warmth
in a school that had been deemed part
of a failed experiment—Roots didn’t
feel like a failure. At the school’s end-of-
year promotion ceremony, eighth grade
valedictorian Ernesto Galaviz asked his
classmates to remember Roots. “For it is
in these walls that we got what we have
right now: friends, family, brotherhood.
Some of us found love here. I personally
haven’t,” he said to laughter. His parting
words echoed the school’s motto: “Never
forget where you come from.”
In part, Roots had come from parents
and organizers who wanted their black
and brown children to get the person-
alized attention that students receive
in Oakland’s affluent hills. At the same
time, the school reform movement had
seized on small schools as the latest cure
for the country’s educational ills. The Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation spent $
billion to start small schools through-
out the country; Oakland received $
million from Gates, and other private
funders jumped in the ring.The city sorely needed the money.
Its school district was broke, having
racked up tens of millions of dollars in
debt. Charter schools were expanding
while enrollment in traditional public
schools was dropping—meaning less
state money to the district. Oakland
shuttered around a dozen large schools
between 2003 and 2007. Flush with
foundation cash, the city by 2008 had
created 49 small schools—among them
Roots, a school of 223 students on the
reconfigured campus of a middle school
that had once served more than 700.
“Oakland had the perfect storm,” said
Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor
at Michigan State University who stud-
ies philanthropy in education. “It had
a lot of charter schools. It was already
in a fiscally challenging situation. It had
all the small schools. And it had that
bubble of foundation money that made
it seem like they had the extra money
for a period of time.”
This wasn’t a cheap experiment, and
it tied a great deal of Oakland’s school
system to the whims of its private finan-
cial backers. When the Gates Founda-
tion’s attention wandered to “teacher
accountability” and Common Core,
its money followed. By 2009, Oakland
was left with its new schools, many once
funded by Gates, and an unresolved
budget crisis. “Painful decisions” would
have to be made, as an Alameda County
grand jury report later put it.
When Roots’ closure was announced
early this year, it became a rallying cry
for the city’s striking teachers. “These
closures are a tactic to create more op-
portunities to create privatization on
the backs of communities of color,”
Quinn Ranahan, who taught math at
Roots, told reporters.
She had a point. Between 2000
and 2019, enrollment in the city’s
traditional public schools dropped
by more than 17,000 students while
enrollment in charters rose from about
1,000 to 16,900. Twenty-seven percent
of Oakland students now attend char-
ter schools, a higher proportion than
any other California district. What-
ever the intentions of the small-school
reformers, their experiment had opened
the gates even wider to charterization.
“The education reform movement hasEducation
reformers have
“been successful
at disrupting
Oakland without
improving it.”