Abstract
School district leaders across the U.S. have turned to the portfolio strategy to manage charter school growth and budget crises disproportionately facing low-income communities of color. The portfolio strategy aims to manage school choice options through increasing central office oversight of charter schools, autonomy for district schools, and accountability around student learning outcomes. This article examines the portfolio district in Oakland, California as a case of network governance, a lineage of “third way” policy strategies that bring together public and private sectors. I argue that district leaders and reform advocates advanced Oakland’s portfolio strategy to resolve fiscal and organizational challenges of school choice policies based on networks of trust, collaboration, and reciprocity between district schools and charter schools. However, new governing arrangements and collaborative initiatives repeated some of the same exclusionary practices and deepened mistrust, revealing new political challenges to improving district-charter coordination.
Introduction
At the Oakland Unified school board meeting on April 25, 2018, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell urged the board directors and community members present to consider how traditional district-run public schools and charter schools can “co-exist”: What is the third way? It’s not anti-charter and it’s not anti-district – it’s looking for another way forward so that we can have greater quality throughout the city. [. . .] If we don’t figure it out, we won’t have a district to argue about. This is serious.
A Black woman from Oakland who attended and taught in its public schools, Superintendent Johnson-Trammell was celebrated as a “homegrown” leader. She inherited a deficit of $15 million, decreasing student enrollment, tense school choice landscape, and high expectations. With the tacit threat of another state takeover looming over the local school board, the new superintendent proceeded to explain to an audience of parents, teachers, and advocates about a “third way” to manage three decades of uneven charter school growth serving low-income students of color: the portfolio strategy.
The portfolio strategy is a policy approach that aims to manage school choice options through central office oversight of charter schools, increasing autonomy for traditional district-run schools, and heightened accountability around student learning outcomes (Bulkley et al., 2010; Hill et al., 2000). Under this policy paradigm, we have seen a shift from districts exclusively operating traditional public schools with administrators hired to oversee their day-to-day administration, to a new landscape in which administrators collaborate with outside consultants to oversee both traditional public and charter schools. Portfolio districts draw from the logic of investment portfolios, where schools are metaphorically like stock options with contracts based on student performance (Saltman, 2010). As working families navigate an increasingly bifurcated school choice system, district and various charter school operators compete to recruit students, and their enrollment revenue, amid the churn of school closures. In bringing finance strategies into the public sector, the portfolio strategy attracted education leaders with its promise of financial and organizational efficiency through the “diversification” of school providers. Portfolio advocates have attempted to unify charter and traditional public schools under one district umbrella—from competition to compromise.
Whereas earlier education reform efforts leveraged media attention, non-profit campaigns, and philanthropic funding to improve specific schools deemed failing, and often turned into charter schools, portfolio strategy advocates and consultants leverage their networks and resources to transform the traditional public school system into a “system of schools.” With the emergence of more than 40 portfolio districts nationwide since the 2000s, research has mainly focused on case studies of large districts like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago to examine local resources, changing policy actors, and education leaders’ ability to leverage civic capacity (Bulkley & Henig, 2015; Hill et al., 2012). As the portfolio idea gains traction across the country despite limited peer-reviewed evidence on improving student achievement (Barnum, 2017; DeBray & Jabbar, 2013), it is critical to complicate the portfolio strategy’s theory of action beyond its stated goals by identifying and analyzing the policy components in practice. While portfolio advocates seek to liberate schools from the “thicket of rules imposed by a central bureaucracy” (Leonhardt, 2018), union organizers have criticized the negative impact of school closures on equity and family engagement during the wave of teachers’ strikes in 2019 that included Oakland and Los Angeles (Barnum, 2019; Caputo-Pearl, 2019). In particular, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD)’s layered history of educational reforms and community activism makes it a key site to study school choice politics and public-private governance.
This article examines the portfolio district in Oakland, California as a case of network governance. Beginning in the 1990s, network governance theory emerged from the political science and sociology fields as a solution to issues stemming from government bureaucracies and market fundamentalism through a “third way” comprised of public-private partnerships. Neoliberal policies enabled governments to contract out public services to the private sector at the global and local scale (Harvey, 2007). In the education sector, market-based policy experiments disproportionately focused on high-poverty Black and Brown cities (and some working-class suburbs) with a history of disinvestment from public services, largely in response to desegregation decrees (McDermott et al., 2014). The plethora of non-governmental actors and organizations has redefined the role of the state, heightening the need for different forms of diplomacy and management to better coordinate these loose, seemingly “autonomous” networks through partnerships and new technologies (Bevir, 2013). Network governance occurs at multiple scales, and an analysis of a local school district complements these national and international projects. There are various frameworks for studying the privatization of education, but network governance highlights the way district leaders attempt to address the challenges of managing school choice policies and their consequences for educational equity. Thus, I situate this widespread district reform within a lineage of “third way” policy strategies that seek to redefine the role of government in an increasingly marketized policy landscape. I am not advancing network governance solutions, but rather mapping network governance concepts onto portfolio strategy practices to reframe public-private partnerships in district education reform.
My findings indicate three distinct, but related, layers of the portfolio strategy: acknowledging neoliberal harms, restructuring bureaucracy, and collaboration between public and private sectors. These three key network governance concepts correlate with my three key findings, as outlined in Table 1. First, portfolio advocates believed that bringing charter schools further into public oversight would address issues like the exclusion of English learners and students with disabilities, a consequence of growing market competition and deregulation. Second, the restructuring of Oakland Unified’s central office tipped decision-making authority from the elected, representative school board to a superintendent and appointed staff rooted in a national reform network. Third, district leaders worked closely with non-profit advocates to share resources between district and charter school “sectors” as a form of compromise. Common enrollment policy was one attempted collaboration that gave charter schools access to district families and resources as school closures continued to destabilize low-income communities of color that have undergone decades of neoliberal experimentation. I argue that together, district leaders and reform advocates advanced Oakland’s portfolio strategy to resolve fiscal and organizational challenges of school choice policies based on networks of trust, collaboration, and reciprocity between district schools and charter schools. However, new governing arrangements and collaborative initiatives repeated some of the same exclusionary practices and deepened mistrust.
Network Governance Theory and the Portfolio Strategy.
The shift toward a portfolio district changed education policy mechanisms and governance structures in ways outside of the model’s stated goals of efficiency, innovation, and in more recent discourse, equity. Understanding decentralized, public-private initiatives is not only important for improving educational policymaking and school board governing practices, but it also advances governance theory by placing it in relation to the racial politics of community engagement. In the two sections that follow, I provide an overview of the literature on the portfolio strategy as well as on network governance.
Research on the Portfolio Strategy and School District Reform
The theory of action behind the portfolio strategy asserts that differentiating schools, primarily through contracting out services to private providers, and holding them accountable to common, rigorous standards will create more innovative, efficient, and high-quality schools (Hill, 2009; Hill et al., 2000). The “portfolio idea” was crafted in the early 1990s by researcher-advocates at the Center on Reinventing Education (CRPE), an independent research center now housed at Arizona State University with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. From the mid-1990s until 2010, studies on portfolio models were almost exclusively conducted by its chief architect, Dr. Paul T. Hill, along with other researchers and political strategists at CRPE. Hill et al. (2001) outline the core components of a “hybrid strategy,” a precursor to the portfolio strategy, as strong performance incentives, recruitment of teachers with “superior education” and from diverse professions, and “freedom of action” that provides flexibility for experimentation to improve student learning (p. viii). Think tank studies profiled specific district cases to improve the policy mechanism and strengthen their advocacy efforts, finding cases where the expansion of “high-quality options” for “low-achieving students” was a success (Hill et al., 2012). The broad and evolving definition of a portfolio district made it appealing to some urban educational leaders and funders, while its ambiguous combination of policies and practices brought confusion about how to identify—and assess—which districts had implemented the model.
As the portfolio strategy gained traction in the 2010s, a growing body of peer-reviewed academic scholarship emerged, led by political scientists analyzing the implementation of portfolio models in different local contexts. Drawing on a mixed-methods comparative case study design, scholars analyzed governance and power in new contracting arrangements, as well as the political, economic, and demographic factors that shape local civic capacity (Bulkley et al., 2010; Bulkley & Henig, 2015; Shipps, 2012; Wong, 2011). Most notable is the shift in power among policy actors, where traditional interest groups like teachers’ unions lost influence in the 2000s as foundations and intermediary organizations gained influence over education reforms (Henig, 2010). Through these comparative studies, we grasp both the common thread of portfolio logic as well as its different formations, from a centralized, integrated model in Denver to competing, parallel systems in Los Angeles (Bulkley et al., 2020).
Ethnographic research and qualitative studies more broadly have examined the portfolio district outside of its stated goals. These studies interrogate the role of parent and community engagement, or lack thereof, whether via deliberative decision making in Los Angeles or cooptation of local pushback in Oakland (Kissell, 2023; Marsh et al., 2013). Moreover, researchers argue that the design of public-private partnerships and the groups involved play a significant role in the policymaking process. Transparency and accountability are key as “new players bring their own organizational goals and vision to school communities” (DiMartino, 2014, p. 278). The growing school choice landscape has coincided with the de-professionalization of the teaching force (Milner, 2013), where the fragmentation of the labor market reconfigures new policy networks (Jabbar et al., 2020) and heightens the racial politics of teacher union organizing (Kurtz & White, 2022). Scholars caution against sweeping conclusions on the portfolio model overall based solely on research into its constituent elements (e.g., charter school performance, student enrollment, district facilities) because of the complex interactions of these elements within policy implementation (Saltman, 2010). While the murkiness in defining the portfolio strategy makes it difficult to assess the policy outcomes of district reorganization, the initiative does meaningfully capture a new trend in public-private governance that has transformed policy frames and logics surrounding the purpose of schooling (Marsh et al., 2020; Quinn & Ogburn, 2020).
While much of the portfolio strategy research focuses on district academic performance, another strand of policy research on market-based education reforms has traced the links between the racialized disinvestment and privatization of public education with the shifts in education governance structures. Lipman’s landmark book (2011) argued that the mayoral takeover of Chicago’s school board and its subsequent portfolio district was a form of neoliberal restructuring where mass school closures destabilized the relationships between schools and their communities. School closures are often linked to portfolio districts, as seen in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, where public schools remain pillars of African American communities that have faced (and resisted) systematic underfunding tied to race and class segregation. Ewing’s (2018) work interrogates notions of “school failure” and “underutilization” by drawing on the perspectives of students, families, and long-time community members to illustrate the value of public schools through the history of Black education and struggle for power. While these two studies examine other political issues (e.g., school closures, charter schools, community engagement) indirectly related to district reform, they reveal important evidence on racialized governance under austerity that is pertinent to the study of portfolio districts.
Academic researchers worked with a broader range of districts to avoid the selection bias in advocacy research, but many studies still limit their critiques and analysis to Hill’s original theory of action. In assessing policy implementation, educational leaders’ perspectives are often centered at the expense of longer-term implications for impacted communities. Addressing timely questions concerning how portfolio districts change the governance of public schools requires deeper theoretical grounding. The democratic dimensions of private governance and funding, particularly ideas about who has the right to shape decisions about their public schools, is ripe for new scholarly directions. Researchers have traced the emergence and implementation of the portfolio strategy across high-profile urban districts, yet few have investigated why they may fail to meet their intended objectives of efficiency and collaboration, particularly in mid-sized districts. This study extends the research base by analyzing the genealogy of governance theory, how policy experts shape local education politics, and whose experiences are valued when assessing school choice policies.
Network Governance: The Third Way Strategy to Managing Education Markets
Education governance is the process by which stakeholders’ values and understandings of the issues that impact them play out in the public sphere of deliberation and decision-making. The “governance turn” in education policy studies (Ball, 2009) reflects the emergence of new policy interests and actors as well as the blurred lines between public, private, and third spaces reshaped under 1970s neoliberal restructuring. In the U.S., charter schools opened the door to outside non-profit and for-profit providers (and their appointed boards), funders, intermediaries, and other new policy entrepreneurs to reshape schooling in the name of racial equity and economic empowerment (Scott, 2009). While education scholars have traced new policy networks and modes of governing (G. Anderson et al., 2017), most prominently through social network analysis (Au & Ferrare, 2015) and network ethnography (Ball, 2012), I focus on the related yet underutilized network governance theory to examine the role of non-state actors in managing both new forms of public-private service delivery and the privatization of the decision-making process itself (Edwards et al., 2021). My conceptualization of portfolio governance in Table 1 draws on three key concepts from network governance theory, including two critiques and a solution: state bureaucracy is too inefficient, market competition has splintered delivery and relationships, and decentralized networks based on trust and collaboration can move toward better governance by taking the best of both worlds.
Network governance emerged as a response to both state and market failure at the global and national scales, where collaborative, cross-sector networks became the solution to a shifting global political economy (Jessop, 2000). The Keynesian welfare state and its redistributive reforms have been criticized by the political Right for regulating capitalism and by the Left for its exclusion of women and people of color from public programs (Lipman, 2011). Under new public management reforms in the neoliberal era, new patterns of service delivery created a dependency on private sector organizations for delivering policies (Bevir & Trentmann, 2007). It became evident that neoliberalism demands some form of government provision to remedy the historic inequality stemming from unregulated market-based policies (Ball, 2012). Network governance was supposed to be the answer, according to scholars, business leaders, and politicians.
These networked forms of service delivery aim to overturn some of these failures by intervening through a “third space,” which, ideally, would empower communities in the public sphere and cultivate inclusive and deliberative policymaking in increasingly diverse, pluralistic societies (Taylor & Deakin, 2001). Network governance “describes a world in which state power is dispersed across various networks, each of which is composed of various public, voluntary, and private organizations” (Bevir, 2013, p. 56). Wilkins and Olmedo (2019) explain how the recent interest in governance in education is connected to network ideas: Education governance is a movement or trend that seeks to [. . .] create devolved systems of education planning managed through the interaction, cooperation and co-influence of multiple stakeholders (Sørensen and Torfing 2007). The ‘governance turn’ in education (Ball, 2009: 537) therefore designates new modes of government and governing where power is not confined to the state or to the market but is exercised through a plethora of networks, partnerships and policy communities who ‘consensually’ work with stakeholders to produce more flexible, fluid, diverse, and responsive forms of service delivery. (p. 5)
Here, the new education governance is a “movement or trend” seeking decentralized cooperation with diverse stakeholders for more flexible and responsive outcomes. When applied to portfolio districts, the logic of investment portfolios aligns with the logic of network governance in that dispersing funds into different types of investments to maximize profit and minimize risk serves as a model for dispersing state power across public and private sectors to maximize financial and organizational efficiency.
There is evidence of changing discourses and modalities of education policy and service delivery via the introduction of private sector actors, ideas, and practices that shape the flow of knowledge and gain legitimacy in a globalized economy (Ball, 2012). Network governance is a global practice occurring across multiple sectors and scales of policymaking, from England’s academy schools policy to test-based regulatory governance in Chile (Davies, 2011; Verger & Parcerisa, 2019; Wilkins & Gobby, 2021). The global education reform (GER) networks are comprised of multilateral agencies, national governments, NGOs, think tanks and advocacy groups, consultants, social entrepreneurs, and international businesses that blend traditional and new forms of policymaking (Verger et al., 2016). In the U.S. education context, this often comes in the form of “decentralization,” which can carry the connotation of empowering minoritized communities historically excluded from control of their public schools (Fuller & Koon, 2013).
However, the critiques of the contradictions in network governance are central to this study of portfolio management. The changing relationship between public and private actors in education is not entirely new, but rather it is “their extent, specificity, directness and degree of integration with government and state organisations that is different” (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 10). Davies (2011) argues that networks are performative in that they “often turn out to be the same kinds of institutions as those they were meant to transcend, replicating hierarchies, exclusions and inequalities and arguably aggravating endemic distrust” (p. 7). 1 In network governance, power is supposed to be distributed “outwards” toward parastatal organizations (such as inspection, credentialing, and commissioning bodies) and “downwards” to community stakeholders (Wilkins & Olmedo, 2019). However, the actual fragmented and devolved systems of governmental and non-governmental coordination come with a new set of problems. In practice, governance networks favor decentralized education planning, where the pursuit of transparency comes with increased surveillance through the use of target-setting, performance management, and data tracking instruments. The contradictory nature of trust-based education networks filled with mistrust “captures elements of a neurotic government (distrustful, anxious, maladjusted) unable to fully accept the vagaries of its own reform” (Wilkins & Olmedo, 2019, p. 7). Disintermediation (Lubienski, 2014), the process of withdrawing power and influence from meso-level educational authorities, like district leaders, exemplifies these contradictions between policy theory and practice. Rather than “empowering” historically excluded communities of color in the name of equity and efficiency by decentralizing authority to local stakeholders, new non-state actors, like intermediary organizations and consultants, have filled the role of government workers. Issues in network governance have inspired new concepts like metagovernance, which recenters the state’s role in coordinating various service providers (Jessop, 2000).
Under the political orthodoxy of the portfolio strategy, an antiquated “one best system” (Tyack, 1974) is supposed to be replaced with a flexible “system of schools” that incorporates the best of public and private governance (Bulkley et al., 2020). As outlined in Table 1, I am bringing a deeper engagement with network governance theory in the U.S. education policy and politics scholarship to analyze key tensions in leveraging portfolio governance to reform the school choice market.
Research Design and Methods
This article presents a case study of the politics that shaped Oakland Unified’s portfolio district, specifically the aims and strategies as perceived by policy actors and community stakeholders. This case is part of a larger comparative analysis of district governance in the Bay Area. Case study design allows for an analysis of multiple social, political, and economic processes that intersect to shape a bounded case of local educational policies (Merriam, 1998, p. xiii). I bounded my case study of OUSD between 2014 and 2019, a time between the end of a state receivership and the COVID-19 pandemic when the district regained local control of finances and decision-making to advance and reassess a combination of market-based education initiatives (Stake, 1995).
This analysis draws primarily on interviews, along with participant-observations and documents. From 2014 to 2019, I conducted 38 semi-structured qualitative interviews with a range of policy actors and stakeholders that included school board members, community organizers, district staff, labor leaders, charter school advocates, philanthropists, teachers, and students (see Table 2). Each participant was interviewed once, and interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. The pilot interview questions centered on the composition of financial and political networks in Oakland education reform, and the protocol evolved to include specific portfolio policy initiatives and events as well as participants’ interpretations of the purpose of the portfolio model. Interview participants were primarily selected based on their educational positions or activism to represent the range of political strategies that existed in OUSD, while ensuring a diverse sample of perspectives (e.g., race, class, gender; see Table 3). I reached out to potential participants by email or introduced myself in local education spaces. Using snowball sampling, I asked interview participants about their political coalitions, including funders, and their responses and suggestions helped me identify key supporters and advocates to contact. Educational ideology is more complex than simply “for or against” portfolio districts, as my data illuminates, but I strove to include participants with different education policy stances and political views. All interview participants cited in this article gave their consent to be audio recorded and to share their identity and organizational affiliation.
Respondents by Stakeholder Type.
While many interviewees could be listed in several categories (e.g., a teacher who is also a union leader), I chose the primary affiliation for each person.
Ten of these interviews came from the Structural Racism and Targeted Universalism Study (SRATUS), and were re-analyzed for the purpose of this article.
Racial Demographics of Respondents.
I conducted 80 hours of in-person observations of meetings and events to analyze the interaction between constituencies and interest groups in the public sphere, including school board meetings, district community engagement meetings, bond oversight committee meetings, philanthropic-led panels, and political rallies. Fieldwork was conducted throughout the 5-year span of the study, but participant-observations were particularly concentrated in 2017 and 2018 when the district and advocacy organizations held community engagement meetings regarding district funding, school choice, and school closures. My participation in these meetings, open to the public, began with introducing myself and my research, where I built on previously established connections as a community member that grew over the course of the study. I took low-inference notes during my observations, followed by voice recordings to capture my immediate reflections and feelings. I transcribed and expanded these jottings into analytic written field notes within 48 hours (Schensul et al., 1999). To provide background and data triangulation, I analyzed 163 documents, including policy briefs from advocacy organizations, district reports and other materials, school board minutes, organizations’ informational leaflets, state audit reports, news articles, and blogs and opinion editorials.
My coding strategy blended inductive and deductive approaches and was applied to the interviews, documents, and fieldnotes through two rounds of qualitative coding using Dedoose software (Miles et al., 2013). Deductive codes were developed using network governance concepts such as “lean/efficient bureaucracy” and “critique of markets.” Inductive codes drew on patterns in the data, such as the language used to describe portfolio policies, including “public-private partnerships,” “community of schools,” and “collaboration.” I wrote analytic memos during both the data collection and data analysis processes to develop the key themes that explain this case of district portfolio governance.
It is important to underscore the limitations of generalizing from a single district case. All of the study participants, including the teachers and community advocates interviewed, were very engaged in OUSD politics, yet most families in Oakland are unaware of what a portfolio district is and, therefore, experience these reforms quite differently. My findings are limited to what participants share, to my positionality as an academic researcher and transplant-community member, and to what gets recorded and documented over the years. Nonetheless, the theoretical contributions of district leaders and other local stakeholders navigating decades of privatization can be extended to other contexts. This case offers an opportunity to explore portfolio governance in “more texture and depth” through the lens of network governance as well as to generate metrics of public-private partnerships that can inform our understanding of an evolving policy strategy (Wilson, 2016, p. 933).
Oakland Unified Context
Oakland, California has been ground zero for education reform experiments on the West Coast, as a mid-sized city in the San Francisco Bay Area characterized by its community activism (from the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter) and heavy philanthropic investment in public policies influenced by the neighboring tech industry. OUSD is a diverse district in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and language, with Latine students comprising the majority in recent years (OUSD, 2020). Three-fourths of students in OUSD were eligible for free or reduced-lunch. In the 2019 to 2020 school year, there were 36,000 students enrolled in OUSD, a drop from approximately 54,000 students in 2000 (Oakland Unified School District [OUSD], 2020). Echoing national trends, 2019 test scores pointed to racial gaps in reading levels, with 18.6% of Black students and 23.8% of Latine students reading on grade level compared to 72.5% of White students (and similar gaps in math; Harrington (2019)). At the time of the study, one-third of OUSD was comprised of charter schools, the highest proportion in the state of California (Cano, 2019).
The portfolio idea was first introduced to Oakland Unified under state receivership (2003–2009), where a state administrator (as opposed to an elected school board) facilitated initiatives like “results-based budgeting” and the rapid expansion of charter schools (see Figure 1; Epstein, 2006). During this time, a local reform advocacy coalition emerged with ties to a national market-oriented network: The Rogers Family Foundation, Oakland-based school choice philanthropy; Great Oakland Public Schools (GO), a 501(c)(3) non-profit (coupled with a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm); and the Oakland Public Education Fund, a centralized fundraising base for OUSD, charter networks, and advocacy organizations. Before this study, over two dozen schools were closed in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and almost as many newly designed schools reopened in their place, including teacher-designed “small schools” funded by the Gates Foundation.
Portfolio of Schools Framework, OUSD 2006.
When I began studying the district in 2014, Antwan Wilson was hired by the board to serve as OUSD superintendent and carry out a new generation of the portfolio strategy. Prior to his arrival, the school board had just approved the district’s Quality Schools Development policy which outlined a “continuum of high-quality schools” that encompassed both public schools operated by the district and charter schools authorized by the district. Trained by the Broad Academy for urban district leaders, Superintendent Wilson began his brief tenure by introducing a “common enrollment system” to streamline student enrollment through one application for both district and charter schools. He worked closely with Educate 78, another non-profit education advocacy organization that promotes “strategic giving and leadership,” to repackage the district-charter compact as the 2015 Oakland Public Schools Pledge (formerly the “Equity Pledge”). Following strong community resistance, the policy was rejected by the board in 2016. Wilson left the district after two and half years in a dire financial situation that renewed threats of another state receivership. He was replaced by Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who was not trained by the same market-oriented network as her predecessor yet continued some of the portfolio initiatives. Thus began the Blueprint for Quality Schools plan in 2017, OUSD’s community engagement initiative that provided a needs assessment around “school and central office reconfiguration” (see Kissell, 2023). On the advocacy side, GO led the 1Oakland initiative that mirrored many of the same components. In 2018, the school board passed the “Community of Schools” policy calling for district-charter collaboration for Oakland students.
Findings
My findings illuminate the opportunities and contradictions of third way governance in addressing structural dilemmas of racial inequity and fiscal instability along three pillars (Table 1): acknowledging neoliberal harms, restructuring bureaucracy, and collaboration between public and private sectors. I found that public-private district governance continued financial and organizational mismanagement while introducing new layers of mistrust between community members, board members, and district staff.
Reckoning With Charter School Harms
Researcher-advocates at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) have conceptualized the portfolio model as a market-oriented governance strategy that would create more financial efficiency while improving student outcomes (Hill et al., 2000). A “portfolio district” held multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings among OUSD stakeholders. In my interviews, what distinguished portfolio advocates from the earlier charter movement was their acknowledgment of the harmful consequences of educational marketization. While Oakland community members held mixed views on the purpose and potential of a portfolio district, portfolio advocates were hopeful that a collaborative approach would address inequities and instability stemming from charter reform.
What Defines a Portfolio District?
The portfolio strategy was a new approach to rethinking bureaucracy through central office redesign, choosing select market-based initiatives without fully committing to neoliberal ideals. As the chief architects of the portfolio strategy, Paul T. Hill and colleagues were critical of the multitude of reform efforts from the 1980s and early 1990s that, from their perspective, yielded little improvement and were not sustained beyond the work of a few charismatic leaders. They decided that coordination between these different efforts was key, along with “alternative” (private) sources of funding to build district capacity (Hill et al., 2000). They introduced a governance structure that oversees a combination of policies intended to create more financial efficiency while improving outcomes for low-income students and students of color.
In our interview, Hill theorized that a moderate, centralized approach to managing education markets would take “compromise.” To his surprise, portfolio reform eventually “[swept] the nation”: I knew that there were lots of interests that this would upset. One of the core principles of all the stuff I did from ‘93 on was that [. . .] a school should decide who teaches there, and, in effect, teachers should also decide where they work. From my mind, that was an idea that came out of school coherency, but it certainly intersects with market theory. But I knew, to put it flatly, unions and all their power comes from making one agreement with the school board that governs the placement of every teacher. I knew unions wouldn’t like this idea, even though I thought teachers might.
Despite pushback from unions about teacher protections, Hill had hoped these ideas “would infect the way people thought about it,” and recalled with excitement how the school board members and mayors drawn to his ideas. The blueprint laid out by Hill and colleagues at CRPE has spurred the work of new power players in education reform focused on expanding the portfolio strategy across the country. Since 2018, the nationwide organization The City Fund has worked alongside intermediaries like School Board Partners and Community Engagement Partners to engage local organizations in portfolio district advocacy and implementation (see Buras, 2018). In Oakland, the 2003 state receivership created a policy window for portfolio governance to take root in OUSD with the support of local reform intermediaries that borrowed ideas from CRPE (Kissell, 2023).
After decades of competition between charter and district leaders over attracting families and enrollment revenue to their respective schools, an emergent coalition began reframing education reform as a “compromise” between dueling sides. However, defining what the portfolio strategy in Oakland actually entailed was less clear. Both anti-privatization activists and right-wing philanthropists alike held a shared frustration with central office, but they each viewed yet another education reform with mixed reactions. Union-endorsed OUSD Director Shanthi Gonzales stated directly in her interview, “I don’t support having a portfolio district, but we have a portfolio district for better or for worse.” She criticized the “unrealistic” reform: “a portfolio district pretends that there’s not this fierce competition for resources for students, for everything. That’s a Pollyanna, just completely unrealistic. You can’t play nicely in the sandbox when somebody is stealing from you.” While she was firmly against adding more charter schools to the district portfolio, Gonzales shared her vision of lean education governance at a 2018 candidates forum for parents of special education students: The way I think of our school district, we are like a McDonald’s right now, and we have this huge menu and most of the things on the menu are not very good. We need to become like an In-N-Out: they only make three things, but they do them really, really well.
She explained to the audience that making these changes, particularly budget cuts, will be “painful” but necessary to focus on quality schools and staff retention. As Director of Community Engagement at the advocacy organization GO Public Schools, Mirella Rangel argued that OUSD is already a “de facto” portfolio district: “We’ve had small schools, charter schools, and districts schools. [. . .] Now, are we managing it? No.” Both charter school advocates and critics in Oakland could agree that the current local governance structure was not working. Even those opposed to the portfolio project, like Director Gonzales, took on some of the ideas of lean governance into their vision of OUSD.
Other portfolio advocates viewed the portfolio strategy as a way to institutionalize the common practice that families weave between charter and district “sectors.” Executive director of the Oakland REACH, an education reform parent advocacy organization, Lakisha Young explained why charter families are a part of the public school “ecosystem,” something more amorphous than a public school “district”: There’s some of us that are straddling. I got a daughter in a district school and I’ve got two sons in charter school, and that’s how it works for a lot of people. And if you want to talk about this whole ecosystem, all those people need to be at the table. Not just your little cronies who are anti-charter. Or these people who don’t have no skin in the game, don’t have kids – don’t even freakin’ live in Oakland.
From Young’s experience organizing Black and Latine parents around school choice, families were navigating disjointed educational landscapes that “anti-charter people,” presumably wealthier constituents, did not understand. She was frustrated by the public conversation centered on charter regulation rather than “producing quality educational models for students, especially students of color.” Reform advocates like Young framed the portfolio strategy as organic to Oakland’s struggles; however, it is buoyed by a national network of actors with few ties to local communities.
The immediate challenge facing the district was managing an incoherent school choice system, where some families wove between public and charter schools. The urgency in fixing OUSD’s dire problems through collaboration continued to ignore structural dilemmas. These seemingly apolitical, technical district reforms are rooted in longstanding racialized power struggles around the redistribution of public resources in an education system marked by funding inequality, segregation, and disinvestment (Todd-Breland, 2018). Rather than assessing the effects of neoliberal reforms in working-class communities of color, portfolio advocates and district leaders focused on making the system function better.
Addressing School Choice Competition and Student Push-Out
The issues with charter schools were palpable in Oakland, where protests and upheaval around school closures demonstrated a deepening disillusionment with market strategies even among charter school parents, teachers, and students. During the 5-year span of this study (2024–2019), a market-oriented network consisting of national reform organizations and funders as well as local non-profits and philanthropists had established its power to influence district policy and high-profile school board races (Tsai, 2016). However, right before the pandemic, the local teachers’ union had begun to garner more influence along with a grassroots anti-privatization coalition, culminating in the strikes in 2019 with stronger community support (Ramos, 2023). The changing education landscape in Oakland set the stage to rethink the role of the district—and on a deeper level, the role of the government—in managing the market of OUSD’s school choice options. I argue that this is a form of metagovernance (Jessop, 2000), which in network governance theory redefines the neoliberal state to regulate and manage the performance of new service providers, like charter school operators.
While the portfolio model continued implementing earlier school choice policies, its advocates carried new political messages and policy tools that critiqued dominant market ideas, such as the role of competition. Scholars have documented the “creaming and cropping” (Lacireno-Paquet et al., 2002) that charter school operators engage in, by both knowingly and unknowingly counseling out students with behavioral issues, English learners, or students whose caregivers do not meet their school’s expectations of parent participation. OUSD Director Rosie Torres criticized the lack of transparency and regulation that led to the push-out of students with disabilities, noting the difference in costs for OUSD and charter schools: We [in OUSD] have special needs children that are very expensive to educate and some even have to get put in a private placement at 80 thousand dollars a year, and the charter schools have a kid with a little bit of hearing loss or autism on the low end of the spectrum. . . We’ve got no backup plan for the lack of checks and balances and pushing kids out [in charter schools].
Within the context of schools competing for higher test scores, disabled students get labeled as “expensive” to educate because of the specialized, legally mandated support, implying a financial burden. As someone deeply involved in school choice organizing, Rangel, GO’s Community Engagement Director, acknowledged that many families are left out of the school choice process, making them “non-choosers”: We’ve tried competition. Maybe we could say things have gotten better but look who’s suffering. We’re not doing better by kids. Portfolio management mostly is about [. . .] parents who are going to choose the best school. But what happens to the non-choosers? And so we are approaching it, I think, in a different way and using the resources for it to better our kids and not be founded in competition, but collaboration.
Thus, in recognizing the past mistakes of the charter school movement, portfolio advocates’ discourse centered on bringing together different political actors to move forward for the betterment of all of Oakland’s children.
In practice, however, districts do not have the authority to regulate charter schools because California state charter law prohibits financial issues as a reason to deny a charter petition. Some charter schools circumvent closure through a multi-level appeal process, opening schools in the districts that denied them with the support of county or state officials. In 2018, the school board attempted to address these challenges through the “Community of Schools” policy that institutionalized district-charter collaboration—including stronger government oversight. In a revised draft of their “Community of Schools” Policy, the OUSD school board recognized the “legal constraints that limit its formal authority” on “the location, authorization, oversight, and management of charter schools in Oakland.” The board memo (11/14/18) read, “however, the Board is committed to establishing more high-quality school programs and understands that this vision will not come without fiscal, legislative, and political challenges.” Constrained by state law, the board acknowledged that running a successful portfolio district of quality schools would require legislative changes that enable district leaders to regulate charter schools serving its public-school students.
Despite the intention of the “Community of Schools” initiative, some community leaders argued that traditional public schools bore the brunt of school closures to balance the budget. Mike Hutchinson, founder of the Oakland Public Education Network and later OUSD school board director, argued, “You can’t close charter schools, so we know this [Community of Schools] policy will only apply to public schools.” Director Rosie Torres rebuffed the idea of compromise between district and charter schools: “Instead of ‘let’s sing kumbaya,’ fix the law or we will just keep sinking. Because there is no goddamn middle ground.” The contradictions of managing multiple public and private sector school operators and services, or metagovernance, becomes evident when bringing together both advocacy and critical perspectives of portfolio district reform.
District Restructuring Under New Management
While the Oakland campaign for a portfolio model of school choice options aimed for collaboration, it also echoed a critique of bureaucracy emphasized in the earlier charter school movement of the 1990s and 2000s. After a generation of school choice policies, central office was blamed for mismanaging resources between schools, staff, and students. Moreover, attempts at “unity” overshadowed more implicit shifts in power and authority, where the school board increasingly deferred to the superintendent and consultants gradually replaced central office staff.
The New District Bureaucrats: High-Paid Administrators and Consultants
Beyond remaking schools to function like businesses under neoliberal principles, portfolio architects took inspiration from military bureaucracies in times of conflict and tried to replicate public sector theories in the education field. Paul T. Hill’s experience evaluating government agencies at the RAND Corporation, including the Pentagon, influenced his assessment of school improvement. While researching the United States Air Force, he was fascinated by how an “extremely bureaucratic organization” was immediately more effective under crisis: You think of the military as a command organization all of the time, but at peace time, it’s basically the biggest political bureaucracy you can imagine. At war time, by God it really works. And that insight that you could make a really bureaucratic organization do something that it didn’t normally do in normal times at all . . .. I didn’t see any possibility to reporting the analog of a fight well into schools, but I still thought organizations were more tractable than people thought they were.
Hill’s insight from studying the defense sector reveals its underexamined influence on the portfolio idea. Two distinct U.S. government agencies, the military and the public education system, are compared here as systems that function more efficiently under crisis. Bridging neoliberal theories with organizational concepts to improve upon the public sector, early thinkers like Hill were moving beyond market models to form a new bureaucracy that I argue is intended to function like a network.
The portfolio strategy draws on the idea that government, in theory, is supposed to be lean and “tractable,” in Hill’s words. However, in practice, Oakland Unified continued to struggle with financial and organizational issues, where central office changes affected school budgets, staffing, and programing. The proportion of high-level administrators in OUSD, twice as many as neighboring districts of the same size, became a glaring issue under Superintendent Antwan Wilson (2014–2017). Trained at the Broad Institute with previous experience implementing Denver’s portfolio model, Wilson was embedded in a network of foundations, intermediaries, and educational entrepreneurs from which he recruited staff to work on his team in Oakland. Within 3 years, he advanced a number of portfolio policies, including an unsuccessful attempt at common enrollment (see p. 26), but was still very influential in the growth of contracts with consultants and expanding charter schools. Local news reported that OUSD overspent twice its budget on administrators and consultants under Wilson’s leadership. In 2014, the year of Wilson’s appointment, the board had only approved $7.1 million on consultants; however, the district spent $22.6 million. In 2016, the district spent $22.4 million on administrators and supervisors when the board had only authorized $10.4 million (Tucker, 2016). Despite promises to balance the budget, Wilson left OUSD within 2 years to become superintendent of the D.C. Public Schools, and the district was left once again to find another leader—their sixth in a decade.
While OUSD’s financial issues were not new and cannot be blamed on one superintendent, issues with overspending on high-paid administrators and consultants were exacerbated during the transition to a portfolio district. A 2018 grand jury report found that OUSD spends more than six times the statewide average on supervisor and administrator salaries and more than three times the statewide average for consulting services and operating expenditures (Alameda Grand Jury, 2018), while another report found that benefits for top administrators cost 50% more per employee than other districts (Epstein, 2017). There was public backlash, for example, when a local journalist revealed that a facilities consultant for OUSD was earning $30,000 per month amid layoffs and million-dollar budget cuts to school sites (Oakland Post, 2015). State reporting data shows that OUSD spent 15.85% of its budget on consultants in 2018, leading other districts in Alameda County (Appel, 2019, slide 112). This signals not only a changing structure to district bureaucracy, but the role of foundations and other intermediary organizations as the new elite experts defined by status, resources, and institutional legitimacy (Scott & Jabbar, 2014).
The process of disintermediation (Lubienski, 2014) formed a new type of bureaucracy, where lower-level central office administrators were replaced by consultants and reform advocates. As the number of highly paid consultants increased, middle-income unionized jobs primarily held by Black, Asian, and Latine Oaklanders were contracted out. More than three-fourths of the Building and Ground workers (plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and gardeners) voted against their 2015 contract for lack of protections and increasing employment precarity. According to one OUSD employee’s claims, “Superintendent [Wilson]’s ultimate goal is to do away with the Building and Grounds Department and contract everything out to contractors, who do not have the best track record of accountability” (Oakland Post, 2015). Former board director and president David Kakishiba echoed these concerns to local media nearly a decade prior about an earlier portfolio initiative, where state-appointed officials made sweeping firings of district personnel: You start seeing purges of whole groups of people. You look at the central administrative offices and it’s hard to find many people who were there even three years ago. We’ve lost a lot of institutional memory. We’ve driven out a lot of talent. (Allen-Taylor, 2006, para. 21)
The unions representing classified and non-classified workers were most resistant to private contracting. The Oakland Education Association made the case during their contract negotiations that in order to attract and retain the best educators, “OUSD must redirect resources from administration and outside service providers and use them to provide additional compensation to certificated staff, lower class sizes particularly for our most vulnerable students, and fund additional support services to students” (Appel, 2019, slide 127). According to labor leaders, high-paid consultants were diverting tax dollars from properly serving students.
Tipping the Scale: The School Board Versus The Superintendent
While the growth of consultants and intermediaries in schools has been the subject of education research (Honig, 2004; Scott & Jabbar, 2014; Trujillo, 2014) and public backlash (Fernandez, 2017; Ultican, 2019), less studied are the governance shifts that facilitate this growth. I found that the reorganization of Oakland Unified’s central office shifted decision-making authority from the elected, representative school board to a superintendent connected to a broader neoliberal reform network. School board members perceived that their authority was limited, mirroring the “strong mayor” model of many large cities in the 1990s and 2000s (DelVecchio & Holtz, 1998).
There were conflicting messages about who has authority over district matters, which came to light during school board meetings. A 2017 Alameda County Grand Jury report required board governance training stressing directors’ roles as “policy-makers, not day-to-day administrators,” a point echoed by market-oriented board directors in alignment with the superintendent. However, I observed a community member scold his board representative during public comment at a board meeting: “It’s the school board that governs central office, not vice versa.” Similarly, Kim Davis, a public school advocate and union researcher, took issue with board members not speaking up to the superintendent: There’s a lot of blame that goes around that has nothing to do with our current school board. But the things that I hold the current board responsible for, and some members were more responsive than others, but all of them failed to raise the necessary alarm and do the necessary push back. They were, frankly, I think, intimidated by Superintendent Wilson.
The intimidation by Wilson’s team was echoed by Chris Learned, the state trustee assigned to the district to oversee its financial decisions. He shared his critiques with a local newspaper: I don’t agree with a lot of what I saw him do. I think he was very insistent on getting his way. The role of the trustee is to be sure that the board and the superintendent are not making decisions that are putting the district in financial risk. (Tucker, 2016, para. 14).
However, the state trustee did not raise the alarm either.
At the school board meeting on November 27, 2017, Director Rosie Torres was overcome with emotions as she admitted to feeling like a “sheep,” in that she was pressured into approving the superintendent’s budgets without properly interrogating its consequences on school communities. At this meeting, Director Torres echoed the calls from some community activists to “cut from the top,” focusing cuts on district administrator salaries instead of school sites. Apologizing to her constituents, she accepted blame for not pushing back enough in the past: I’m very sorry for what we’re sitting here dealing with because in many ways, I failed even my own child. At times being up here, you become a sheep. You vote on things because you feel pressured and you don’t have more information. And it’s a complicated situation with regard to the governance of a large district and a large budget that is so mysterious. [. . .] For a parent to say, “there are people making millions of dollars off the district”. . . we have to keep asking for more back into our community.
This school board director expressed feeling overwhelmed and underprepared to navigate the politics of OUSD, where austerity coupled with profit motives of the growing educational industry made standard governing practices more complicated. Board members became increasingly dependent on outside experts to lead in a changing education landscape. In stressing the importance of training for board directors, Director Shanthi Gonzales sought support from mentors and public education networks outside of the district to learn how to navigate contentious board politics, including racial politics. She was called a racist for pushing back on a Black superintendent’s school choice policies as a Latina-Desi woman, within a context of anti-Black violence and displacement. She also found some of Wilson’s staff unreliable, even impeding her ability to fulfill her role as a board member: The superintendent [Wilson] had instructed staff not to talk to us, not to provide any information to us. Your constituents don’t know all this stuff that’s happening behind the scenes and they just expect you to get stuff done, even without any staff, without it being your full time job, and when the superintendent is actively trying to obstruct.
Both Directors Torres and Gonzales pointed out that serving on the Oakland school board requires much more attention than expected in a part-time position. While network governance theory conceptualizes a more flexible or “decentralized” state, in practice what this meant for OUSD was miscommunication around clashing visions of efficiency and equity between elected officials and appointed leaders.
In this section, we have seen how districts are re-emerging as key partners for policy entrepreneurs as educational leaders evolve into managers of public-private contracts. While intermediaries and coalitions are driving the expansion of portfolio districts with technical support, the idea has been taken up by local actors as well in what can seem like an organic solution. As the district and charter leaders above highlight, the privatization of public services is justified not only in terms of “efficiency,” the conventional aim, but increasingly advanced alongside other tenuous ideals like “unity” and “equity.” In practice, however, the policy decisions that impact people’s livelihoods and educational experiences are rooted in a managerialist perspective: experts know best about how to handle “other people’s” problems.
Competition Hinders District-Charter Collaboration
As illustrated in the opening to this article, OUSD leaders urged communities to unite as publicly-funded schools for the sake of improving the district’s budget deficit. This fiscal crisis framing was the backdrop of the Equity Pledge Campaign, an effort to bring together district and charter leaders and stakeholders to agree on “citywide” goals and strategies to improve Oakland’s public schools. Parents argued at board meetings and through local media that charter schools did not have easy access to district facilities while the district was operating “too many schools” relative to its size—a recurring criticism from state, county, and now local political leaders. The very autonomy from public oversight that charter school advocates fought for decades prior was reframed as “exclusion.” The solution: a common enrollment system where parents could more easily enroll in charter schools through a shared platform run by the district. However, cultivating a culture of trust, collaboration, and reciprocity was difficult in a political economic context of school surveillance, austerity, and accountability.
The Equity Pledge: Managing a “System of Schools.”
The Equity Pledge, later renamed the Oakland Public Schools Pledge, was a critical piece to reintroducing the portfolio strategy to a new generation of families and education leaders in 2016. What was a standard district-charter compact turned into a campaign led by GO Public Schools to collaboratively develop a set of agreements between OUSD and charter schools regarding “how Oakland public schools will work together in service of all of the city’s students and families” (OUSD, 2016). At the national level, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $500,000 in 2015 to five school districts for “bold collaboration” between charter and district public schools, and CRPE published 29 reports between 2012 and 2017 that provided strategic research. These think tanks and foundations supported local organizations championing the idea, including Oakland reform leaders.
Despite the glossy campaign, venture philanthropist Brian Rogers was less convinced that district staff would actualize the portfolio philosophy: I don’t think that Oakland is a portfolio district. A portfolio district is when your school board takes on the attitude of “Every school in Oakland is our school”: we’re going to provide schools regardless of governance, and that it can bring in different students and serve those students in unique and individual ways.
Rogers, who was a major funder of small schools reform and individual charter schools in Oakland in the 2000s, claimed to be agnostic about public or private governance. He located the district’s financial challenges as a matter of personal attitudes and organizational culture, and proceeded to emphasize OUSD leaders’ values: I really do think the school district still has an attitude of “Charter schools are not our schools. We have to make sure no more of our students go to charter schools because it’s having a financial impact on our district.” There’s not this sense of, “Okay, we got 127 schools here to serve 60,000 kids.” That’s what a portfolio school district is. It’s not a school system, it’s a system of schools.
Rogers’ conceptualized the “school system” as stagnant with siloed practices, in contrast to a “system of schools” where educators and staff would share best tips for raising test score, best teaching practices, and facilities. In contrast, OUSD graduate, former educator, and now principal Nidya Baez expressed disillusion with the portfolio policies: The common enrollment policy, the equity [pledge]. . . None of that ever tells me what they’re actually going to do or what we need to do to actually create a quality school. Like I hear all that but I don’t hear about improving professional development for teachers, or raising salaries . . . I’m only hearing some people needing more “choice.”
Baez’s comprehensive public high school bore the brunt of policy experiments in the 2000s with the move to small autonomous schools in Oakland (see Trujillo et al., 2014). Having once been a student activist and educator involved in redesigning her school, Baez did not perceive “choice” in line with substantive change and opportunities.
The Third Way Contradictions of “Common Enrollment.”
The key issue identified by portfolio advocates was the inefficient and inequitable use of resources across district and charter sectors. In December 2015, then-Superintendent Antwan Wilson introduced the common enrollment initiative to give families “more equitable” access to school choice options. In a presentation put together by district staff, survey findings illustrated the confusion from parents: “Our enrollment process is too difficult to navigate. . .especially for families who don’t have access.” The data made the case for a transparent process and expectations with a common timeline for all schools and families. In doing so, OUSD leadership made the case for including charter schools in the “citywide” application. By agreeing to participate in a common system, charter schools would be held accountable to the same enrollment “rules and etiquette” as district-run schools. The raging common enrollment debate, and ensuing pushback from some parents and teachers, made it into a New York Times profile on the superintendent (Rich, 2016). The common enrollment policy was struck down in Fall 2016 after community members organized against it.
Dirk Tillotson, CEO of Great School Voices, an education blog, and Great School Choices, a school choice advocacy organization based in Oakland and New York City, summed up common enrollment as a project “that fell apart because of the politics.” Despite the lack of follow-through, he explained that the formation of parallel enrollment systems that emerged from this policy conversation were better than the decentralized system that preceded it, where families had to go to each charter school to enroll their child: One enrollment application for the district and one for the charters – that is an improvement for families. [. . .] Both of them will keep getting better and more responsive. And we’re talking about having special-ed settings on the charter one this year so families can understand what school has what settings. And are you going to be the one [charter school] with “We have no settings” for kids [with disabilities]? You’re going to look bad. Now, schools are thinking “Okay, let’s talk more about how we share the burden.” So, it has made us sit around the table, which I think makes us talk about common problems and try to rake through them in a better way.
As both a school choice advocate and a civil rights attorney who had represented youth with disabilities, Tillotson was uniquely positioned to understand the legal and ethical ramifications of charter schools not serving disabled students. While expanded special education services remained absent in most charter schools, Tillotson believed that the public conversation around common enrollment provided some pressure for charter school principals to respond to disabled students and their families.
In practice, however, the common enrollment policy revealed a key dilemma: should the district facilitate access to charter schools given their role in fostering competition over student enrollment and the ensuing district school closures? The proliferation of charter schools located next to—or sometimes within—public neighborhood schools was one factor in the constant churn of school openings and closures, spurring disruption and instability for students and communities. OUSD Director of Parent Engagement Cintya Molina had many stories of schools long closed. From her dual perspective as a central office administrator and as an Afro-Puerto Rican mother of a child with special needs, Molina understood intimately the painful experience of being shuffled from school to school in search of a community where her son could have a quality education. One such school was Marshall Elementary, a school surrounded by high-poverty, majority Black neighborhoods at the edge of East Oakland: I feel that Marshall [Elementary] was a huge missed opportunity. It was almost 90% African American, super majority, and there was 30 some percent of students with IEPs [individualized education plans]. The thing is, this is a school that had the longest track record of stability for SpEd [special ed] programming. It was super SpEd and general ed integrated. It was very African American. It was a golden, beautiful school with an amazing culture. And it gets closed.
Her voice revealed her exasperation with the inconsistent and contradictory metrics for opening and closing schools. She was upset that the replacement charter school was marketed to the Black community when Marshall Elementary had already been serving Black students, and doing so quite successfully with high test scores. Molina continued to tell these forgotten narratives of neighborhood schools because they were often erased in the school reform narrative that painted all public schools as failing.
Situating the portfolio strategy within network governance theory illuminates how local democratic governance was redefined in an attempt to better manage the political and economic restructuring that occurred under neoliberalism. Yet the disjointed public services and local mistrust of elite experts challenges the idea that lean, marketized governance will improve efficiency, a key assumption driving the portfolio model. As Molina explained, the churn of public school closures in Black neighborhoods heightened racialized mistrust of district leadership and consultants tasked with “right-sizing” OUSD’s portfolio of school options.
Advocacy Networks Promote District Unity
Despite a public campaign promoting common enrollment and district unity, dubbed “1Oakland,” stakeholders pointed to the organizational incoherence of nearly two dozen different school operators across 129 schools. GO Public Schools led an online petition, just shy of their goal of 1,000 signatures, that outlined what would eventually become district policy: “This system of competing and disconnected schools, separated primarily by modes of school governance, is inefficient, is not delivering quality education for all students, and is not oriented in service of family and student needs.”
In line with the network governance critique of bureaucracy, the 1Oakland campaign envisioned that a third-way network of trust would ultimately rest on the district’s responsibility to become a better manager of non-profit providers. Drawing on a crisis framing, the petition read: “As Oakland Unified reels from another budget crisis and student achievement falls far short of our young people’s potential, a coherent and effective system of schools is more important than ever.” Oakland’s portfolio coalition included many of the established market-based reform organizations and funders driving the small schools and charter school movement, while it also encompassed more school district staff and school board directors who accepted that there needed to be a better way to manage school choice.
In May 2018, the new “homegrown” superintendent, Dr. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, presented the district’s updated “community of schools citywide plan” to the school board, drawn from other districts’ models. District staff worked with consultants to create a 5-year citywide map that would project enrollment patterns, facilities capacity, charter partnerships, and quality school standards. It served as a “footprint” of how students could best navigate OUSD’s evolving neighborhood and school choice options. The policy discourse of the “key principles” illustrated Oakland’s spin on the portfolio model: fiscal vitality and sustainability (“we need fewer, better resourced schools with larger enrollment”), and equity and access (“access to quality schools closer to home” and “regional feeder patterns from pre-K through high school”). The board policy was passed 6 months later in the fall of 2018, which formalized the portfolio approach to managing Oakland’s public schools.
Oakland’s portfolio model gave legitimacy to austerity measures by institutionalizing new tools. OUSD was directed to close many of its schools: first, externally through state officials and the audit agency, and then internally through superintendents’ strategic plans (Kissell, 2023). However, community organizing against school closures had garnered media attention and some public sympathy. Even portfolio designer Hill acknowledged that there had been cases where district administrators were unresponsive to the community: In the old days, you might have brought in GreenDot [charter network]. It is a sort of closure and restart, but it isn’t like the neighborhood is going to lose its school. And that has its issues, and it has been done badly in some cases. There’s a way, I’m sure, that parents could be made privy to the issues, be listened to, and be shown that the choice of provider in that school is actually responsive to what they said.
Departing from his earlier research that had not addressed the long-term implications for communities of color, Hill’s updated vision of parent engagement detailed how parents should be better informed about the turnaround process. From his perspective, school turnarounds through contracts with charter school operators are different than completely shutting down a school, providing the opportunity for a “restart” that can “upgrade” a school. He explained in the interview that in districts with failing schools, “churn” was inevitable in the pursuit of an “optimum” set of school options. Hill defended the portfolio idea against the community backlash to school closures as factors that CRPE researchers and consultants could not have foreseen in formulating the portfolio model, explaining, Were we good at writing about [potential negative consequences] at the time? No, I don’t think so. I think we never would’ve imagined that people would go in and be Donald Trump to parents, but they did. [. . .] But we haven’t changed our minds. . .
However, portfolio advocates’ technocratic view of school turnaround does not take into consideration how firing staff and leadership, changing the school’s name, and other measures might alter the school’s community and culture. The disruptive consequences of school closures, whether intentional or not, conflict with reformers’ logic that technical expertise exists outside of the political sphere (see Hill et al., 2000).
While network governance, in theory, is supposed to bypass bureaucracy with direct relationships between different stakeholders, the churn of school closures and openings came at the expense of communities’ institutional memory and authentic engagement. What gets lost in technical policy language like facility underutilization, school optimization, and location allocation analysis is the idea that schools are central hubs for community building. Despite attempts to address inequity, school closures continued to destabilize working-class Black and Brown communities. Without centering democratic engagement and responsive, community-oriented leadership, many of the same communities were marginalized through yet another wave of school reform.
Discussion
School district leaders across major U.S. cities have turned to the portfolio strategy as a “third way” approach to managing the changing education market amid fiscal challenges, some of which emerged from inefficiencies in privatization (P. Burch, 2009; Saltman, 2010; Sclar, 2001). Over the course of 15 years, Oakland district and non-district leaders attempted to make the transition from a state takeover to a “system of schools that work,” as described in an external evaluation (Coburn & Riley, 2000). While the foundation of the portfolio strategy centers on managing school choice options efficiently and equitably, Oakland Unified’s reconfiguration of central office facilitated new financial and organizational problems, such as rising costs for central office administrators and consultants, and community upheaval from school closures and cuts to programs. Portfolio governance parallels network governance as a post-bureaucratic vision of politics that has failed to realize due to its proponents misconstruing the blurred boundaries between public and private sectors as a transformation of the state in education. I argue that reframing portfolio districts as a case of network governance can better address the challenges of managing a generation of under-regulated charter schools serving low-income students and students of color.
District leaders are under pressure to bring together increasingly bifurcated school systems through the portfolio strategy. Advocates’ attempts to address the problems with charter schools appealed to funders and disillusioned families alike. However, Oakland’s portfolio district did not live up to its promise of increased transparency and equity, in response to the failures of the market (economy) and bureaucracy (government; Davies, 2011). The revolving door of superintendents, the seven-member school board, and consultants claimed that Oakland has “too many schools” for its shrinking student population and sought to close schools, despite evidence that closures do not inherently improve revenue (Howley et al., 2011) or student achievement (Sunderman et al., 2017). The remaining neighborhood schools were marketed to fit in to, and compete with, the diverse array of school choice options. Advocates of Oakland’s “Community of Schools” policy were aware of the longstanding equity issues with charter schools. Redesigning central office was one attempt to rein in the many problems that ensued from decades of private contracting with inconsistent public provision. Many OUSD leaders simply viewed this policy as the most realistic solution to improving public schools.
In taking seriously the financial challenges and political pressures that school district leaders are faced with, there are a few key implications of this research for educational policy and practice. First, decentralization is not inherently efficient. Bringing in external partners from the non-profit and for-profit sector, including advocacy organizations, without regulation did not save time or resources. Instead, it recreated new forms of bureaucracy. Second, if the goal is to regulate charter schools, then that falls outside of local district purview. Amending state laws on charter schools and school finance is a more impactful strategy. Third, many district administrators and leaders try to use any reform, including portfolio districts, as an opportunity to improve equity. For practitioners committed to authentic forms of community engagement and quality learning, there are policy tools to plan for potential consequences, such as an impact assessment of school closures. More broadly, the findings of this study point to the importance of studying political economic barriers to “trust.” Addressing organizational culture has often been the solution to local governance challenges because it does not require funding, which is difficult to secure in most urban political contexts. District leadership in times of crisis and austerity may require preparation in advocacy leadership, which challenges the managerial expectation to carry out neoliberal reforms (G. L. Anderson, 2009). Lastly, the portfolio model remains an ambiguous project that strings together various initiatives, and therefore researchers should interrogate the metrics set by think tanks, like CRPE, advocating for its expansion.
An inherently political dynamic, governance involves questions of power, both relational and systemic, in shaping the course of social change (Parenti, 1978; Stone, 2009, p. 227). Underpinning education governance reforms is the belief that school leaders should be agnostic in their decisions, as opposed to “political,” and rely on technical experts for school improvement. However, power is a constant presence and struggle in public schools, and therefore requires leaders to confront the politics of inequality without the guise of neutrality. In the portfolio theory of action, community voice and mobilization are limited to informing the implementation of policy ideas taken up by national think tanks. This led to a process of disintermediation (Lubienski, 2014) where the “middle man,” or bureaucrats, was replaced by consultants rather than fostering a lean, rational government, let alone a community-responsive approach. Some of these issues are not unique to portfolio districts, but rather a consistent thread of managerialism that undergirds bureaucracies, markets, and networks around notions of elite expertise and concentration of power. This local case study builds on international scholarship demonstrating that, in practice, network governance institutions are replicating the government and market hierarchy and power imbalances that they were intended to replace (Davies, 2011).
Network governance is critical to contextualizing portfolio governance within different theories of the state. Contracting out public services has been a part of the institutional legacy of neoliberal reforms in education and other public institutions, which consequently “fragmented the state by increasing both the range of public agencies involved in public service delivery and the dependence of these agencies on a growing number of private- and voluntary-sector actors” (Bevir, 2013, p. 56). This fragmentation of government entities has created new crises which practices of educational marketization seek to fix, while simultaneously creating different problems in the process. A network of district administrators, portfolio consultants, school choice advocates, and philanthropists largely ignored the structural roots of charter school policy and other market-based reforms and instead pointed to short-term solutions.
Network governance theory, particularly its critiques, illuminates the understudied political dimensions of portfolio governance, such as superintendents consolidating authority or the conflicting goals of common enrollment policies. While portfolio advocates criticized Oakland Unified for constraining innovation in pedagogy and school organization similar to past charter school advocacy, there are important nuances to the unfinished portfolio project that distinguish it from previous market-based reforms. I found that some district and non-profit leaders sought to address the problems with educational privatization even as they continued to advance the same policies. Metagovernance (Jessop, 2000) is one way to rethink the role of the district in addressing the fragmented services and relationships spurred by marketization. While related to neoliberalism, network governance concepts more specifically (and in this case, more accurately) identify these nuanced attempts to redress privatization by changing values, rather than addressing root inequalities that define power imbalances in the governing process and access to educational opportunities.
The state, therefore, continues to play an important political and cultural role in shaping how citizens understand not only education policies, but the purpose of schooling more broadly. Understanding governance as a cultural formation illuminates why particular forms of power are viewed as legitimate within certain places and eras, and how ideologies shape policy problems and solutions (Bevir & Rhodes, 2010). Whereas the architects of the portfolio strategy undertheorized the role of community stakeholders 20 years prior, advocacy organizations and think tanks today are focused on mobilizing parents, students, and teachers around reforming district-charter relations. District reorganization involves more than saving money, or organizational efficiency, or getting better, equitable outcomes for marginalized students. As schools are privatized, the mechanisms that facilitate democratic engagement are also changing.
In introducing the debates in network governance to interrogate the “third way” in urban district reform, I argue that the contradictions in the Oakland case have deepened financial and organizational mismanagement while fueling mistrust and inequality. While the trajectory of education governance is “a manifestation of broader political governance trends,” it also carries the potential to change these patterns through “the production of counter-hegemonic social relations and formations” (Saltman, 2019, p. xxi). Scholars should continue to probe for “the unwarranted assertions and silences of dominant paradigms” in research and education politics to leverage critique for systemic change (Davies, 2011, p. 2). By heightening the policy nuances and contradictions, critical analysis of district governance may cultivate more democratic, just, and emancipatory societies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Elise Castillo, Huriya Jabbar, and Talia Leibovitz for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. I also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
