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A member of the Oakland Unified School District Board of Education is calling the proposed charter takeover of a West Oakland elementary school “illegal” and the justification for the takeover “to put it nicely, untrue.” 

Boardmember Dan Siegel made the comments in response to an announcement by Oakland Schools state-appointed administrator Randolph Ward that OUSD plans to close Golden Gate Elementary this spring, to be turned over to a partnership run jointly by the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland-based Aspire Public Schools non-profit organization. 

As a boardmember, Siegel has no say over the charter conversion. Oakland Unified School District was seized by the State of California two years ago. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell hired Ward to run the schools, with the Oakland school board acting in solely an advisory capacity. 

Genaro Padilla, vice chancellor of student affairs at UC Berkeley, called the charter collaboration “a wonderful opportunity” for UC. And P. David Pearson, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, called it “a chance for us to demonstrate that diversity in all of its faces—racial, linguistic, intellectual, and economic—provides the right context for preparing high school students for the challenges they will face in the colleges and universities of tomorrow.” 

The school is scheduled to initially serve 120 to 160 sixth and seventh grade students in a college preparatory curriculum, with priority given to students living in the school’s neighborhood. 

Aspire currently operates 11 charter schools in urban areas of California, including two in Oakland, two in East Palo Alto, and four in the Stockton-Modesto area. 

In announcing the closure of the San Pablo Avenue school, Ward invoked a provision of President George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for district action after a school operates under a low-performance “Program Improvement” status for four consecutive years. 

But Siegel says that the national education law allows for other possible actions against low-performing schools besides converting them into charters, including a catchall phrase that allows “any other action that reforms the school and gives rise to an expectation of better performance.” 

“Those of us who don’t want these types of charter takeovers believe that Ward could have used Oakland’s previous policy of restructuring Golden Gate in the autonomous, small school model,” Siegel said. “He had the flexibility to do that.” 

In addition, Siegel charged that by announcing the school closure first and then awarding a charter afterwards, as was done in the case of Golden Gate, Ward is breaking a California state law mandating that a majority of teachers at an operating public school have to approve its transformation into a charter school. 

“I think that makes his actions illegal,” said Siegel, who is a practicing civil attorney. “Dr. Ward is using reasons that run from the fanciful to the ludicrous to justify the circumvention of state law and the closing of Oakland schools.” 

Ward did not return telephone calls to answer questions for this article. 

Siegel says he was “somewhat torn” about the UC Berkeley/Aspire charter school. 

“It seems to me that if they can put together a good school for that area, that’s a good thing,” he explained. Citing the fact that he participated in OUSD School Board approval of 12 to 13 charter schools in recent years, including Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s Oakland School For The Arts, Siegel said that he had reservations that charters can do a better job than schools run by a public school district. 

“I’m not dogmatically opposed to charter schools in principle,” he said. “What I am opposed to is charter schools being forced down the throat of the community. That’s what’s happening in this case.” 

A UC press release said the school would be funded through state Average Daily Attendance monies and regular federal school funds. Startup costs have been financed by a $400,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.›