Pub­lic school teach­ers with the Oak­land Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion (OEA) vot­ed last week to autho­rize strike action if the union’s exec­u­tive board can­not come to an agree­ment with the Oak­land Uni­fied School Dis­trict (OUSD) in its year-long bar­gain­ing for a new contract.

A cen­tral stick­ing point in the nego­ti­a­tions is over salary increas­es, which teach­ers say are so low that they hurt the district’s fac­ul­ty reten­tion rate. A 2013 report by an Alame­da Coun­ty Grand Jury cites that ​“approx­i­mate­ly 13% of Oakland’s teach­ers leave the dis­trict each year, which is about twice the state aver­age, and 70% leave with­in the first five years.” The union says that this low reten­tion rate stems from an aver­age pay rate that sees OUSD teach­ers earn $12,000 less than peers else­where in Alame­da County.

“Every teacher that I’ve talked to, every men­tor that I’ve had, has urged me to find a job out­side of Oak­land, or at least sug­gest­ed I con­sid­er oth­er dis­trict, because of the pay issue,” says Valerie Lines, a third-year first-grade teacher at Mont­clair Ele­men­tary. ​“They talk about what is best for a teacher as an indi­vid­ual — buy­ing a home, set­tling down, start­ing a fam­i­ly. The advice that is com­ing through most fre­quent­ly is, ​‘Oak­land Uni­fied is not the best place [for that] in the long term.

“Teach­ing needs to be a long-term pro­fes­sion every­where, and not some­thing where you get your three years of train­ing and then move on to some dis­trict that pays bet­ter,” Lines says.

OEA union pres­i­dent Trish Gorham said last year that OUSD dis­trict offi­cials have only agreed to a total pay increase of 3.25% since 2003. Accord­ing to 2014 find­ings by the Nation­al Coun­cil on Teacher Qual­i­ty , out of the 125 largest school dis­tricts in the coun­try, OUSD ranks 120th in a com­par­i­son of starting/​ending salaries and life­time salary, adjust­ed for cost of liv­ing. The report claims that it would take over 30 years for an Oak­land teacher to reach a salary of $70,000.

Approx­i­mate­ly 700 of the union’s 2,400 mem­bers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the vote, with 93% vot­ing in favor of the act. California’s col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing process ensures that a poten­tial strike will not occur until at least the start of the 2015 – 2016 school year.

Gorham said in a state­ment, ​“The mem­bers have clear­ly stat­ed that, while we hope for the best, we need to start prepar­ing for the worst now and not wait to the very end of the school year.”

As of the lat­est bar­gain­ing ses­sion last week, both par­ties had agreed on firm coun­selor-to-stu­dent ratios and improved ben­e­fits for sub­sti­tutes, but still remain in con­flict over dis­trict pro­pos­als to han­dle its own hir­ing, void of any senior­i­ty rules, when trans­fer­ring dis­placed teach­ers. Addi­tion­al­ly, the union has made clear its desire for class size caps in spe­cial edu­ca­tion: Gorham claims ​“some [teach­ers] are teach­ing as many as 18” students.

But a large por­tion of con­tract nego­ti­a­tions have cen­tered on teacher pay. While the two sides have con­cep­tu­al­ly agreed on high­er salaries for teach­ers who take on stu­dents over reg­u­lar class size caps, the two sides remain sig­nif­i­cant­ly far away from one anoth­er on the issue of salary increas­es: the union wants 14 – 17% while the dis­trict has pro­posed 10.5%.

While deal­ing with the pres­sure of teach­ers’ strike autho­riza­tion, the dis­trict is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly fac­ing so-called ​“work-to-rule” actions at over 40 of Oakland’s 86 school sites, where teach­ers are lim­it­ing their work to instruc­tion only , leav­ing all after-school activ­i­ty such as grad­ing and extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties aside until they receive what they con­sid­er accept­able con­tract proposals.

Teach­ers have also held ​“grade-ins” , con­duct­ing their grad­ing ses­sions togeth­er out­side to pub­licly dis­play how much of work is done out­side of school hours — time for which their con­tracts don’t account. Between grad­ing, cur­ricu­lum plan­ning and oth­er activ­i­ties, teach­ers say their work often goes into evenings and week­ends. The union says these protests have not been orga­nized as offi­cial union actions, but were a way for teach­ers to dis­play sol­i­dar­i­ty with one another.

The protests will be nec­es­sary with the kind of super­in­ten­dent that the union is deal­ing with in set­tling this contract.

Accord­ing to union pres­i­dent Gorham, OUSD super­in­ten­dent Antwan Wil­son is a grad­u­ate of the Broad Super­in­ten­dent Acad­e­my , an aca­d­e­m­ic lead­er­ship train­ing acad­e­my cre­at­ed by bil­lion­aire edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers Eli and Edythe Broad that has churned out super­in­ten­dents trained under the Boards’ pre­ferred cor­po­rate-tinged mod­el of pro-char­ter school pol­i­cy that many teacher activists say has proven detri­men­tal to the work­ing lives of teach­ers across the coun­try. Such reform has meant a decrease in work sta­bil­i­ty mea­sures for teach­ers like tenure, attempts to break teach­ers’ unions, an increase in stan­dard­ized test­ing for stu­dents, dis­rup­tive mea­sures like school clos­ings for schools that ​“under­per­form” on those tests and oth­er mea­sures. The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor report­ed in 2011 that 21 of the nation’s 75 largest dis­tricts had Broad Acad­e­my grad­u­ates at the helm or near the top, giv­ing the Broads, as well as oth­er notable cor­po­rate reform­ers such as Bill Gates and the Wal­ton fam­i­ly (the own­ers of Wal­mart), a foothold for con­sid­er­able influ­ence over pub­lic edu­ca­tion reform.

“Oak­land has been a tar­get for the Broad-Gates pri­va­ti­za­tion move­ment for years,” Gorham claims. “[Super­in­ten­dent Wil­son] is propos­ing many famil­iar ​‘reforms’ that rein­force insta­bil­i­ty and a lack of con­fi­dence in our schools that make our par­ents vul­ner­a­ble to char­ters’ snake oil pitch.”

Although OUSD’s char­ter school pop­u­la­tion is California’s high­est per capi­ta as of 2013, OEA’s most recent win came in March when, after an active pres­ence in the streets and at school board meet­ings, they suc­cess­ful­ly pushed back against the dis­trict superintendent’s sug­ges­tions to offer five dis­trict schools with low test scores and high sus­pen­sion rates, includ­ing three of its five high schools, up to char­ter school oper­a­tors .

“The mas­sive out­cry by the school com­mu­ni­ties and OEA mem­bers scared away the char­ters from sub­mit­ting pro­pos­als — this time,” Gorham says. ​“But the pol­i­cy still exists and OEA sees this as our largest strug­gle going forward.”

OEA says they aim to con­tin­ue such activism, but are now focused on the poten­tial strike to con­front pub­lic edu­ca­tion’s cor­po­rate reform­ers like Wil­son and win a fair con­tract. The union says they hope to gain for teach­ers across Oak­land what they feel has been long over­due: mak­ing teach­ing into the kind of decent­ly paid pro­fes­sion that will keep teach­ers around long enough to give Oak­land chil­dren the sta­bil­i­ty they deserve.