School Board Election Autopsy

 To the Tattler Readership-

Our copy editor today accidentally deleted and erased this story (we're going to have to dock his pay!).  We will re-build the story from our contemporaneous notes over the next day or two so please check back in later.  The story might be slightly changed but we will strive for an accurate re-post.  The comments will be loaded after the story is re-done.  All the comments were saved luckily.   Our new Councilman made a couple of news breaking comments so it is imperative we re-load the comments. 

This is the first time in our almost 13 year history this has happened but I'm going to have a word with Mr X about being more careful when he mucks about in the posting area.   Sorry for the inconvenience and please bear with us.

The Editor

What are we to make of the just passed November 6th elections in Emeryville?   

The City Council election was normal; candidates all said the same things they always say.  We need more parks, less traffic, safer bicycling opportunities they said….everything you would expect to say and what candidates do say every election season.  But what about the School Board election?  That was most unusual.  In fact it was bizarre. 

To start with, it was very unusual that we even had an election for School Board at all.  Normally at Emery Unified School District, there are no contenders for School Board races every two years and as a result, the incumbents are able to walk right back in without an election.  In fact, the only reason Emeryville voters got a chance to vote at all this time is because I ran against the three incumbents.  If I hadn’t run for election, there would have been no election at all and the people of Emeryville, those who pay for the schools, would have not have had a say in how their money gets spent. 

The ‘incumbent advantage’ is very powerful in Emeryville, be it at the School Board or at the City Council.  The elected officials know this of course and Emery School Board members usually quit before their terms are complete to allow their Board colleges to appoint a replacement, usually one of their friends.  Then the appointment is an incumbent and able to leverage Emeryville legendary incumbent advantage at the next election.  Most Emery School Board members start out as appointees and some never even have to face the voters.  Right now, four out of the five sitting School Board members started out as appointees.

It’s been like this for decades.  The culture of ‘quitting early to allow for appointed replacements’ is why Emery Unified School District never changes in any substantial way.  New voices are shut out in this way.  ‘Group think’ sets into an ossified system like this.  And as far as academics and pedagogical performance is concerned, it shows at Emery.

As I showed during my campaign for School Board, Emery’s performance is not commensurate with the amount of money the people of Emeryville throw at the district.  And the children suffer for it.  

Emery is by far the richest school district in the entire East Bay.  We fund our schools at over $27,000 per student per year (and this doesn’t include the $400 million new ECCL campus we paid for).  The next highest paid district is Berkeley Unified School District where they fund at a rate of about $18,000 per student per year.  But Berkeley also gets extremely high academic performance for its children compared with Emery.  Emery, for all the money we spend gets terrible academic results.  In fact Emery is on the bottom among all the school districts in Alameda County.

These facts prompted consternation on the campaign trail and Emeryville voters were witness to a spectacle about the District’s low academic performance during the campaign season.  The three incumbents were desperate to NOT talk about their record.  But I kept talking about it.  So they mostly ignored and prevaricated when they couldn’t ignore.   One incumbent, Board president Susan Donaldson took issue with Emery’s last place academic record.  She cherry picked data to make it look like Emery isn’t the worst but only the third from worst.  ‘Take heart Emeryville voters’, Susan said, ‘Brian is wrong; Emery is only third from last place despite all the money we spend’.   It was a specious argument people with an expectation of excellence wouldn’t normally make.  But Emery actually is in last place among all 18 Alameda County school districts, all the sanctimonious hyperbole from the incumbents notwithstanding.

The worst academic record with the most money spent.  That’s the three incumbent’s record and that’s not something people would vote for.  So why did Emeryville voters vote for it? 

My campaign focused on teacher pay.  Right now Emery pays about average for the Bay Area.  I said we need to pay teachers more.  Because we’re the wealthiest school district in the East Bay, we can and should pay our teachers more because that’s how to build an equitable city and how to build a better school district with better academic results for the children.  At the League of Woman Voters Candidate’s Forum, the three incumbents had a ready response to my challenge: NO they said, we can’t afford to pay our teachers more they insisted.

As I went door to door during the campaign, every single person I talked with and I talked with hundreds, every one agreed: paying teachers more should be a priority at Emery. 

But what about the incumbents?  Did the voters they talked with tell them paying teachers more should be a priority?  No.  Because the incumbents didn’t give them a chance.  Because they don’t want to pay our teachers more.  So the incumbents don’t want to hear that.

But why should it be that the likely majority of voters, who think we should be paying teachers more, shouldn’t get their way at the ballot box?  Why didn’t the only candidate running that clearly said teacher pay should be raised, why didn’t that candidate win the election?  The only reason that seems plausible is the lack of information.  I raised and spent only about a thousand dollars.  The incubates raised much more.  The used their massive campaign dollars to tell voters Emery is doing great with them in command.  They didn’t talk about test scores, academic achievement, dollars per student spent or teacher pay.  They talked about nebulous things like racial and gender diversity of the school board, stability (status quo)  and keeping Emery “on track”.  

Emeryville has no newspaper.  That simple fact allows elected officials to demagog issues and get away with it.