Interview: Mike Hutchinson, New Oakland School Board Member & Education Justice Activist

I had the honor and pleasure to interview incoming Oakland Board of Education Commissioner Mike Hutchinson on his nine years of organizing for community control of Oakland's schools, his recent electoral victory and flipping Oakland's school board. Hutchinson's journey began in 2012 when the school he was teaching at was closed by the board; he began to organize against  such school closures and outside interference in his district – leading to two previous runs for office and his recent 2020 victory. As an elected school board commissioner, Hutchinson seeks to build back trust and community engagement in the district's school system, especially now as the board faces schooling in a pandemic. In this interview, we discussed his learnings and insights, particularly relevant to communications, organizing and education justice.

Melissa Daar Carvajal (Melissa):
Hi Mike. It's just so great that you were elected. Can't say I was surprised considering you've been organizing in Oakland for so many years. It must be great to see four of your allies all elected to the school board.

Mike Hutchinson (Mike):
Yes, I'm still amazed. But yeah, it was big, and lots of years of hard work. I've come to realize that Oakland has been on the front of the education justice wave all along. It's too soon to tell if this is starting a new trend or if we just were able to create this in Oakland specifically.

We really focused on reframing the opposition's narrative head-on and organizing around issues and principles. Our highlighting of the multiple school closures, as well as the teacher strike within the last two years, helped politicize more people to our issues.

One of our biggest lessons has been being aggressive around these things. We didn't shy away from the fact that we believe we're right. We've really tried to figure out ways to move folks in the wrong place to first not stand in our way, and then to pick our side.

It feels hopeful now that it's finally happening here in Oakland, where we really did turn a corner with this last election, mostly because of all of the work some of us have put in over years.

Melissa: Such a major shift. How did framing of your issue play into the campaign?

Mike: The framing that I use is "community control" in lifting up community voice. I talk about controlling the public resources being used for public good. I don't really talk about charter schools much directly. Everyone loves their own school. So, instead of it being perceived as an attack on somebody's school, I talk about the system. If we want guarantees of input and control as well as our basic rights, we only get those through public schools.

“We have reclaimed the framing that community control is a civil rights, racial and social justice issue; that we have stop allowing outside voices to come in and dictate to us what should be happening in our public education system. We explicitly reclaimed it in the sense of clarifying that community control allows our communities, who know what we need best, to make decisions for our community. ”

We needed to flip the power structure back to democratic control, based on that concept of control of our local school sites. And then we put together a citywide plan that reflects that.

Supporting local community control doesn't require a certain political stance or societal positioning. We didn't want to talk only to progressives – and found that many others got behind our platform – businesses, conservatives and even seniors up in the hills. Trump being elected and his appointment of Betsy DeVos made this a lot easier. Although their policies are the same Arne Duncan and Obama promoted, people weren't willing to fight against that. Whereas now, you just attach these policies to Trump or to DeVos, and everyone's up in arms.

And really, this is one of the few spots where collectively we should all be on board. Renters and homeowners should want the same thing. Small businesses should want the same thing. We were really trying to build off of those ideas.

Melissa: How will you approach addressing the Covid-19 pandemic as an Oakland School Board Commissioner? You talk about improving engagement and power dynamics – how do these fit in?

Mike Hutchinson: We need to open this district and bring folks in, but honestly, I'm worried. Right now, it would be impossible to get staff to believe that it's safe. To get parents to buy in. To get community to do the steps that they need to do to support it. There's been so little leadership in Oakland that now we have to carve that path forward. We are going to build an engagement process around a reopening plan; people must be a part of it so that they trust it.

This school year is basically lost for Oakland; COVID rates, especially where I am, are extremely high. But along with that, our distance learning plan has been a failure. It was a triage plan, and now it's turned into a long-term plan.  30% of our students don't have access. We need to have a better distance learning programs – based on access to all students – available in multiple languages. I'm hopeful we'll be able to reopen for some sort of in-person summer school.

I know most people feel the same way that I do, which first off, the whole thing is just scary. And of course, everyone recognizes in-person school is the best way to go. We address equity issues in the schoolhouse, but nobody wants school buildings open if it's not safe. And through anecdotal evidence, I've experienced that the folks who are pushing for a return to in-person schooling tend to be upper middle class and white. And it seems to be a veiled attack teachers rather than about a need for reopening schools.

This is one of the things that is going to be changing here in Oakland. We have this problem now of privileged white folks in the Hills thinking they're going to tell everyone else what equity is or what we need to do in the name of equity. They cannot tell me what equity is and what we need to do in the name of equity.

This is one of the things that have been out of balance in Oakland: who's had access to the school board to make local policies and decisions. That's all changed. But I am not replicating the mistakes of the past. We're not replacing giving one group of privileged people access with giving a different group access. And I'm hopeful that with new leadership coming in, we can do some things to show that there's a clean break and we're going to be doing things different going forward.

“Community control is something that everyone believes in and applies to every neighborhood. We’ve pushed back against litmus tests that even we put out. You don’t have to be a progressive to agree with our education policies. You can be a fiscal conservative and still want to see well-managed, well-resourced schools.”

This pandemic is life and death. I'm worried because I don't know if I can overcome that lack of trust when it's so needed to move forward and address students' needs.

Melissa: Your campaign drove a new conversation about charters and their role in the Oakland district. What were the most effective ways to, as you put it, "clarify misunderstandings" on the charter industry?

Mike: We've had an active charter industry in Oakland. When we were taken over by the state, we were ground zero for charter expansion. A lot of money poured into Oakland to sell these ideas. Then in 2009, we got back control and an elected school board. This was a board that actively pushed school privatization and charter schools. With our full district oriented towards pushing charters, the board began cut our budget and began to close public schools to facilitate privatization. It was all about that.

In Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, we still have this whole big vein of self-empowerment. Charters early on were sold to the community as a self-empowerment tool. Here's your chance to finally make your own schools the way you want. And it's because there was this lack of understanding. Over the last few years though, we've been able to overcome that. We had to always tailor our work here in Oakland to be aware that families were choosing charter schools or even politicized folks were backing them because it tapped into their worldview and what they already felt. The disconnect was, we were letting other people explain charter schools to our community. And once we were able to be the ones really driving the conversation, we've been able to really move people away from that, where that's not an issue anymore.

I also never bought into the idea that people favored charter schools or believed in charter schools. I always thought it was that folks did not understand the difference and their implications. We've worked really hard to explain it to folks, so they start to learn the difference and they start to see that in Oakland, we have 45 charter schools, but 41 of them have been placed below I580, and only three or four of them in the Hills. They are clearly only been put in certain neighborhoods. Once you start to present this information to people, it starts to resonate more and more.

We have progressively been more and more successful with that. And my framing has always been we're trying to lift up our public schools. My tagline for years was "Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools." And really highlighting the fact that we need strong public schools and that charter schools are not them. That's what I've tried to focus on.

For example, if a charter school opens up across the street from your house, there's no guarantee that your family can even attend that school. And that charter schools are not public schools because they don't admit all students. They take public dollars, and they make their own rules. So if you're concerned about racial and social justice, there is no way that we can even force those schools to implement our new policies. I point out those differences, as opposed to talking about different models of delivering education and some of the wonkier things. The other thing that I really highlight now, that I think we need to do a better job about, is who backs the charter schools, but doing it in a different way that we usually hear about.

I tell this story to explain: We had a Walmart here in Oakland for a couple of years. The minute we raised our local minimum wage to $15 an hour in Oakland, Walmart got up and left. And so, I talk about how these are the same billionaires who made their billions extracting it out of our communities, who have shown that they don't care about us. So why would we trust them to implement a new education model for us. Instead of just saying, oh it's those billionaires, to really give that next level of understanding.

If there is a sprinkling of charter schools that could maybe be an okay thing; it actually was the original intent to spur innovation to capture best practices. But it was never intended to set up a two-tier education system in competition with our public education – this makes no sense. And why are we injecting a profit margin into our public education system? And so, those are some of the things that I've learned in how to talk about it.

“We need to come in with the belief that everyone wants quality public schools. Everyone wants the best and we’re trying to figure out how do we collectively make that happen.
”

Melissa: You have mentioned that an affirmative vision was critical to your strategy. How so? How did that play out?

Mike: I think instead of even playing on others' playground, we need to get better at presenting what we think, not being reactionary or defensive, but putting out that affirmative vision.  

We've really been pushing sustainable community schools as our school redesign model with Journey for Justice. Once we saw that districts were adopting charter schools as a redesign model, we realized we had an alternative to promote that is definitely distinct from a charter's model. We highlight that it's inclusive, with local governance, and it's based on a community visioning process.

Now we have been pushing Biden's transition team to include national funding for sustainable community schools under this model. We are really trying to figure out how do we not just stop what's happened, but how do we really start creating a plan to do these long-term, improvements that we need.

The other thing that I've really seen that's happened in Oakland is there have been outsiders coming in and dictating to us, and everyone has been kept out of the decision-making process. Instead, I believe in creating a process where folks will be a part of the conversation. We can harness their wisdom and energy and come up with much better solutions. It's the main thing I'm going to have to do on the school board. I said this to the superintendent when I had a talk with her last week. We have to restore trust; the days of state takeover and Oakland district staff running the district are over.

Last year before, even the election season in June, our school board voted to have police-free schools. It was spurred by a campaign led by the Black Organizing Project. They have been working on that campaign for 9 years. We saw the world change around us and all of a sudden on an issue that three months before nobody would help them ­– it was suddenly being approved unanimously by the school board. I saw 9 years of hard work suddenly pay off for them. I think that's also what I've seen now in my election. And so yes, we need to be smart and we need to find ways to accelerate it, but it's also believing in the grind – one person by one person –building these arguments and really believing in our collective power.

Melissa: Can you share some of your top takeaways?

Mike: Dream Big.  Every step of the way people have told us, there's nothing you could do, or it's just the way it is. And we've proven that wrong every step of the way. So, that's really been, my biggest takeaway, is there's just this feeling or this attitude, that it's the law, or it has to be this way. But it doesn't!

Journey for Justice's national work encourages me to dream big. One of my biggest takeaways starts two years ago, when I came up with a crazy plan, a two-prong strategy, as the way to gain back local control in Oakland. Prong #1 was going to be to change state law and prong #2 was to flip the Oakland school board.

It was "impossible." You know, there'd never been a revision to the charter law. And in two years, we've figured out a way to pull off the impossible. So, I think now's the time for folks to really start thinking about what could be the big things that we do to really move forward. I don't think we have to nibble around the edges anymore. I think we can really go directly for the policies we the community needs.

We don't need to justify what we're doing. We should go right at the policies or the issues that we're going for. In addition, people need to spend some time thinking about their tone and their word choice and to make sure that it's something that it really resonates with the community. I have this advantage in Oakland that I'm born and raised here. I can never be framed as an outsider and I make sure to speak where people know that I'm not an outsider.

“Every step of the way people have told us, there’s nothing you could do, or it’s just the way it is. And we’ve proven that wrong every step of the way. So, that’s really been, my biggest takeaway, is there’s just this feeling or this attitude, that it’s the law, or it has to be this way. But it doesn’t!

”

Trust your gut and be strong in your convictions. The easiest thing to do for somebody like me is to try to marginalize me. Try to make it seem like I'm the crazy one or the radical, or the this, or the that. But really, trust your gut and be strong in your convictions. Usually, we're right. I mean, it's not the easiest thing to go this route and organize and lift up these issues, so folks need to believe in themselves.

Melissa: Can you talk about national work and strategies?

Mike: Nationally, many groups on the federal scene are coming together. Journey for Justice, we're the ones who pushed the NAACP nationally to issue their moratorium on charter schools and privatization two years ago. We've also gotten Movement for Black Lives to include anti-privatization language in their platform. And we've linked up the leading Black organizations on the side with us to for community control and to fight privatization. We've also had a much better working relationship, at least nationally with the teacher unions, which are now looking to support community organizing instead of looking to organize the community.

But then also nationally, we had this coalition that all signed on together. We've had Journey for Justice, the AFT, NDA, DSA on board. We're starting to put together this broad-based coalition groups led by folks of color unions and progressives to collectively work on these issues. Very exciting to see these groups so aligned.

My campaign was somehow able to unite all of these groups and get endorsements from everyone around our stated platform. Our teachers' union did a PAC, which they've never done to this extent before that raised $250k, which was huge. SEIU 1021 was giving directly to the teacher's union PAC, which was amazing. And then we had the Central Labor Council on board with it. We had all the progressive groups on board, so not just DSA, but our revolution got endorsed by the Democratic Party and the Green Party! And then, we were on our way!

Melissa: And on your way, you were! Thank you, Mike for these insights. Look forward to touching base in 2021!