What Do Progressive Parents Owe Their Public Schools?
A lead-poisoning scandal in Oakland underscores a growing sense of hopelessness among families who are committed to school integration.
By Jay Caspian Kang
September 6, 2024
In August, the Oakland Unified School District (O.U.S.D.) informed parents that children at more than twenty of the system’s campuses had been exposed to harmful levels of lead in their drinking water. At Lincoln Elementary in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, tests showed levels as high as nine hundred and thirty parts per billion in the drinking water, or sixty-two times the state and federal government’s threshold of fifteen parts per billion. Crocker Highlands Elementary and HillCrest Elementary, widely regarded as two of the best and wealthiest schools in the district, had as high as four hundred and forty parts per billion and a hundred p.p.b., respectively. The scandal has cut across racial and class lines. Roughly two-thirds of O.U.S.D.’s students are either Black or Latino, but the four campuses with the highest contamination levels have disproportionately large white and Asian enrollments.
The Oaklandside, the local news organization that broke the story, has reported that O.U.S.D. knew about the lead contamination all the way back in April, but waited until the start of this school year to tell families. Last week, the superintendent of Oakland schools apologized for the delay in notification, calling the lack of communication “completely unacceptable,” and said that she would get to the bottom of the lapse.
Over the past week, I’ve spoken to teachers and parents at O.U.S.D. who’ve expressed understandable anger and a profound frustration about what really can be done to insure that a disaster like this doesn’t happen again. Despite some upward trends in the past decade, Oakland public-school students lag far behind the rest of the state in reading and math. Student enrollment is declining, which has led to well-publicized school closures. In late May, three people were shot at Skyline High School, at the end of a graduation ceremony. This was the third mass shooting on O.U.S.D. grounds in the past two years. In July 2022, shots were fired at a Pop Warner football game at Oakland Technical High School, injuring three spectators, including a minor. A few months later, six people, including two students, were shot at the King Estates campus, and one died from his injuries. All three incidents made the news, but quickly filtered out of the local consciousness.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about Yu Ming, a Chinese-language-immersion charter school in Oakland that had been attracting non-Chinese parents who were more interested in the school’s stellar academic record than in having their children learn Mandarin. These parents exemplify the situation faced by many large public-school districts across the country, not only because school funding is dependent upon enrollment and attendance but because families that are willing to go through the hassle of changing their child’s school are also likely to be motivated and engaged members of a school community. In the wake of the lead-poisoning scandal in Oakland, the questions I asked in the Yu Ming piece feel even more relevant: Why do parents pull their children from district schools? How does a troubled district like Oakland convince those families to stay? And when we are assessing blame for a district with falling enrollment, do we blame selfish parents who are willing to subvert the common good of large district public schools to give their kids a leg up? Or do we blame the district for failing at its basic task of providing safe and enriching places for the city’s children?
None of these are easy questions, but they help us to frame what seems to be a slow, still uncertain, middle-class flight away from public schools in the country’s biggest coastal cities. During the pandemic, for example, New York City saw a decline in the number of wealthy white students enrolled in early grades. White students aren’t the only ones leaving; enrollment in public-school districts across the country crashed, but there had been some downward indicators for years. O.U.S.D.’s biggest problem with student retention, for example, comes from its extensive charter-school network, which has roughly the same demographics as O.U.S.D., and has become popular among Black and Latino families.
I spoke with a parent in Oakland, whom I will call Dave, whose daughter will soon be entering one of the schools with the highest lead-contamination figures in the city. “We love Oakland,” Dave said. “We’ve seen periods where it really felt like Oakland was flourishing, and we’re confident the city will get back to that place. Our daughter’s four, and we really want to send her to our local public school. There’s a real community that’s built around the school. That’s a value that’s really important to us as a family.”
Over the past year, some Jewish families in Oakland have transferred their children into different school districts after the O.U.S.D. teacher’s union released a statement in October of last year that condemned Israel’s “genocidal rhetoric.” A number of those families ended up in Piedmont, an extremely wealthy enclave that’s surrounded on all four sides by Oakland but which maintains its own excellent school system. Dave is Jewish and considers himself both a Zionist and a critic of Israel’s government. He was concerned by the teacher’s-union statement, but he could not stomach the thought of abandoning the diverse community and the promise of Oakland, even for all the safety and security that Piedmont money could buy. If he had wanted to raise his kids in Piedmont, he said, he would have just moved there.
But the lead contamination at his daughter’s future school had given him real pause. “Even people with deep levels of commitment, either to a city or a school district, have limits,” Dave said. “On the city level, there are limits to how much nonsense we’ll put up with and for how long, in terms of public safety, corruption, and inept government, and the same applies to the school-district level.” Other parents I spoke to echoed similar sentiments. Most of them had moved to Oakland by choice, and understood that any stated progressive dream for the city started with people like them—upper-middle-class taxpayers—investing in the public-school system. It’s easy to be skeptical about these nice white (and Asian) parents, but it’s important to point out that these parents all send their kids to O.U.S.D. schools when they could afford private options, or could just move to one of the better and safer school districts in the suburbs.
The past ten years have seen a much-needed cultural shift—one that might not show up in huge numbers in census reports but which has still had an outsized effect on how parents like Dave think about their children’s education. Many middle-class and upper-middle-class families did not just immediately flee to the suburbs once their children reached school age, nor did they immediately put them into private schools. Young parents like Dave have chosen, instead, to stay in cities and send their kids to their local public schools. This movement has many champions, including Nikole Hannah-Jones, who, back in 2014 and 2016, wrote forcefully about the need for white families to desegregate public districts. The presence of white students led to better outcomes for all students and was the only way to insure that the promise of Brown v. Board of Education would be realized.
There’s quite a bit of debate about the sincerity or the size of this movement, but even skeptics agree that there has been an undeniable shift in sentiment: many parents explicitly want their children to attend economically and racially integrated schools, and even support direct measures to bolster economic and racial diversity within their districts, even if they might not always act upon those stated desires. One can point out, rightfully, that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually admitting in a survey that they want more school segregation. One can also bring up demographic data showing that, while the number of students who go to school with someone of a different race has nearly doubled over the past thirty years, this trend has sadly not happened in big cities. (Ironically enough, if you want your kid to go to an integrated school, you might have a better shot in the suburbs, which have become increasingly diverse, both economically and racially, over the past twenty years.)
The vision of large, integrated city schools where children from all backgrounds learn together, form communities across class and racial lines, and share in a common trust requires buy-in from everyone, especially those with other options. But it is difficult in America to sell a gospel of self-sacrifice when it comes to children, especially when the district has problems as severe as repeated mass shootings and lead poisoning—both of which are far more consequential than any of the cultural curriculum battles that dominate headlines. The vital question for urban districts like O.U.S.D. isn’t whether their teachers or leadership or lessons are too woke; it’s whether the woke middle class, regardless of their ethnic background, will actually stay in the district. I worry that what’s happening in Oakland might signal a shift back toward the self-interested and ultimately segregationist liberal politics of the baby-boom generation. I do not think such a shift will take place quickly—these progressive family politics are more durable than cynics might believe. But, when I was talking to O.U.S.D. parents about the lead contamination, I was struck by their lack of surprise and their sense of hopelessness that anything could be done. What would be the point of suing the district when it’s already struggling? Would calling for resignations actually fix the stubborn problem of aging buildings and poor management?
It is unacceptable that O.U.S.D. waited several months to inform teachers, parents, and students about dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water. (A representative from the district confirmed that an “investigation” into the lapse in communication is “still underway.”) But, as I wrote in my series on parenting earlier this summer, alienation is endemic among middle-class parents, especially those who believe in building progressive, diverse communities in cities like Oakland. Aren’t there bigger problems in Oakland that concern families who do not have the option to just pick up and move over the hill to the suburbs? The answer is yes, but that sort of rhetorical retreat, which has become standard fare within large city school districts, actively disincentivizes parents from actually trying to solve the problems—and this, in turn, prompts them to leave.
At a school-board meeting last week, teachers and parents held up signs reading “LEAD FREE OUSD” and demanded why, if unsafe levels of lead had been detected at some campuses back in April, some contaminated water fountains had not been removed until August. They delivered speeches, and their engagement speaks to the severity of the crisis and also lays out a template for what a healthy school district looks like. The project of a diverse, revitalized Oakland will survive this disaster, but the people in charge of the city and the school system—not just in Oakland but in all cities with coalitions of families that are committed to true integration—should realize how fragile these ideas can be. ♦
