Mom And I Go To Oakland

Saturday being my next to last day in California, I asked Mom if she'd like to go with me on a little outing. She can still drive, but won't do so on freeways or major highways, so it's not too often that she gets out of the orbit of church, shopping mall and senior center, all of which can be found in about a ten-block radius of her house.

She was up for it, but we had a little trouble deciding where exactly we should go. Downtown San Francisco didn't make sense because of the traffic. I suggested BARTing it instead, but she said, "I can do that anytime; we should go somewhere I can't drive to on my own. She wasn't at all interested in going someplace scenic like the Marin Headlands or the San Francisco Presidio. "I'm not in the mood for the country. I want to go somewhere in town."

"Ever been to San Jose?" I asked half-flippantly. "Yes, a couple of times," she replied, which is at least one more time than I've been there. But no, that wasn't it, either. Finally she decided on Oakland. She and my dad lived there for a while in the early 90s, and they both had happy memories of that time, before he broke his hip and the two of them could still get around by public transit and walking.

So we decided to revisit some of their old haunts. "It must be ten years since I was here," became the afternoon's refrain. First we stopped in Rockridge, which was in walking distance of their old house, and she pointed out the restaurants and cafes they used to stop at, all of which were either packed out with Saturday afternoon shoppers without a free table in sight or had long ago gone out of business. I did my requisite bit of bitching about Oakland a dysfunctional city administered by baboons recently escaped from the insane asylum, this time (it's always something) triggered by the unsynchronized traffic lights and the one-hour parking limit on College Avenue, i.e., enough time to get seated at one of the local restaurants, but not enough to finish your meal before being hit with a $50 parking ticket.

We finally gave up trying to find anywhere to eat in Rockridge and migrated over to Piedmont Avenue. Here we had some better luck, both in parking (several blocks away, but it was free and we had two hours) and in finding something to eat. Nothing fancy, true - just as in Rockridge, the nice restaurants were oversubscribed or unaccountably closed for the day - but certainly adequate. By then we'd covered a couple miles on foot, and Mom was getting a bit tired - she is 89, after all - so we embarked on a driving tour of the less salubrious parts of Oakland, i.e., pretty much everywhere else.

We cruised along Broadway for a while, which she remembered from when my dad and she used to take the bus downtown. I pointed out the many vacant storefronts, the shopping center that more or less isn't there anymore, the spot where Dr. Frank got attacked by racist thugs in broad daylight a year or two ago. Then we were downtown, also littered with vacant or under-utilized buildings and storefronts, but also punctuated by new construction, presumably the residual result of former Mayor Jerry Brown's plan to build apartments for 10,000 new residents, most of whom haven't showed up yet.

"Looks kind of like Detroit before they burned it down," I suggested, but Mom, who grew up in Detroit, wasn't seeing it. In some part of her world, Detroit will always be beautiful regardless of what's happened to it in more recent years, and so, I suspect, will Oakland.

She was especially keen on seeing Jack London Square, which she and Dad frequently visited in the 90s, but that turned out to be the biggest disappointment. I myself hadn't been there in years, and while it's still picturesque, it suffers from the same disease as much of Oakland: half the storefronts are vacant, and those that were occupied were doing little or no business. By the time we'd strolled around a few blocks, it was beginning to get dark and the few shoppers/tourists/hangers-on still on the scene melted away. It was as though everyone had to get off the streets before nightfall and the zombie attacks began.

One thing that puzzled me was the plethora of reasonably decent hotels in the vicinity. Why on earth would someone want to stay there, in a back corner of Oakland not particularly well served by public transport and cut off from civilization by the couple miles of terribleness that are downtown, West Oakland, East Oakland, etc.? I know (or so I've been told) that Jack London Square offers a fair bit of night life, but I'd been led to understand that it too frequently involved gunplay for most conventioneers to find it appealing.

After leaving JLS, we took a rambling route through many of the parts of Oakland you're probably better off avoiding, as State Senator Don Perata found out that same afternoon when he was carjacked at gunpoint on the corner of 51st and Shattuck. I would say that it could have been us instead, but I rather doubt that our '95 Buick would have the same appeal to thugs as the Senator's fancy-pants Dodge Charger. But that reminded me that during our entire time in Oakland, during which we covered quite a few square miles, I never saw a single cop. Well, I did see one, but he was an Alameda County Sheriff's Deputy on official business, not an Oakland cop on patrol. Come to think of it, it's been so long since I've seen an actual Oakland cop that I don't even remember what their cars look like (black and white, I'm thinking, but as I said, it's been a long time).

Mom enjoyed the outing, I think, and I did, too, both because of her company, and also because the nice bits of Oakland were, um, nice, and the rotten bits left us unscathed. But quite apart from that, I found the overall sight and spectacle of Oakland rather deeply depressing. It's a failing city suffering from corrupt and/or incompetent government, and while its resemblance to Detroit - a failed city on a scale similar to several West African states - is mostly superficial, it's not unimaginable that it could follow a similarly dismal trajectory.

It probably won't, thanks to its being surrounded by a somewhat more healthy metropolitan area, and to the force of gentrification, which might - just might - eventually produce a more responsive and responsible city government. But at present I could see it going either way, and my one overriding thought is one of gratitude that Mom doesn't live there anymore and that - with any luck - I will never have to.

Oakland: Going Nowhere Faster As Mayor Remains MIA

Apparently I'm not the only one who sees the parallels between David Dinkins and Ron Dellums: the East Bay Express's Chris Thompson delivers a damning portrait of the new Oakland mayor's disappearing act.

One connection he makes that I'd failed to remark upon was the tendency of both Dinkins and Dellums to flounder about helplessly while looking to state and federal government to come and save their bacon: it's the "look pitiful and hope people will feel sorry for you" tactic which rarely works well for street beggars either, unless they happen to be a lot cuter than the mean and pathetic city of Oakland is ever likely to manage.

While it's always possible to dredge up some forms of financial aid, it will never be enough to effect real change, especially when bureaucracy and corruption will always swallow up the bulk of it. But as Thompson points out, the worst thing about this approach is that it sends a stentorian message to investors and developers that this town has no future, can't guarantee the security of their enterprises, and is best left to the government to run as a semi-permanent underclass reservation.

So I Wasn't Just Imagining There Were More Dumbasses Around These Days

But really, it's no joking matter: the Chronicle reports that California's high school graduation rate has dropped to a ten year low, and that only two thirds of the state's students manage to muddle through the minimal requirements for a diploma. The picture looks much worse in major urban areas: in Los Angeles and Oakland not even half the students manage to graduate (41% and 46%, respectively). San Francisco surprisingly manages to beat the odds, with a 73% pass rate, and I say surprisingly because over the years I've come to expect any and all public institutions run by The City That Used To Know How to be corrupt and incompetent.

Frankly, I'm still inclined to suspect chicanery on the part of SFUSD: could it be that they're using dubious means to help students to beat the new state exit exam? Considering that the city routinely declares itself exempt from federal immigration laws and state laws barring racial quotas, it would hardly be shocking.

The usual suspects can be found proclaiming from their ivory towers in Backwards Land that the problem lies not in poor teachers, lousy administration, screwy curricula or sloppy/nonexistent discipline, but in the exit exam itself. Attorney John Affeldt, who's spent nearly a decade lobbying if favor of high school diplomas for illiterates, argues, "The state has not yet earned the right to impose this exit exam penalty on [students]."

Having to take a test to prove you've acquired the (very) basic skills conferred by a modern high school education is a "penalty?" The state has to "earn" the right to impose standards for a diploma? By that logic how has the state "earned" the right to require people to know how to drive (well, in theory, anyway) before they're awarded a driver's license? Isn't it horribly oppressive to expect idealistic young people to jump through years of hoops and state-mandated exams before being allowed to practice as brain surgeons?

The "all must have prizes" school of educational theory maintains that students are more or less entitled to a high school diploma if they hang around long enough on the grounds that it might damage their self-esteem if they don't receive the same recognition as students who've actually done some work. Never mind that as a result a high school diploma becomes about as significant as the gold stars awarded to kindergarteners for being quiet during nap time, and that students now have to spend four more years and tens of thousands of dollars for a college degree proving essentially what a high school diploma used to, i.e., literacy and numeracy.

New York City doesn't do any better, by the way, with a graduation rate similar to that of Oakland or LA. Considering the steadily dwindling demand for unskilled labor in this country, investors looking for growth opportunities might be well advised to consider the prison sector. California, always a national trendsetter, has already announced its own $7.4 billion expansion.

"These Are Graduate Students? They're Idiots. They Can't Even Write."

So says Ben Chavis, principal of an Oakland charter school that's one of the only educational institutions in that sad, benighted city to show itself capable of some actual educating. Apparently, however, this has been accomplished with little regard for prevailing educational theories and liberal niceties.

Naturally, there's agitation to get rid of him, led by a delegation of what at first glance appear to be dingbats from the ivory tower up the road, the expensive private Mills College, where a professor is up in arms because her delicate charges weren't treated with sufficient sensitivity. Chavis sneers that the letters of complaint he received didn't even contain correct grammar, and I'd be inclined to back him up on that one: I frequently encounter grad students, even Ph.D. candidates, who can't write or spell at what I would consider high school level.

The crux of the complaint is that Chavis uses crude and racially insensitive language in dealing with his students. We're talking of course about students in an educational system that has for decades been producing little more than prison fodder, and who are growing up in a town where violent crime is so common as to barely merit a notice in the local paper unless multiple corpses are involved. I'm inclined to think that if Chavis' methods are working as well as they appear to be, Oakland needs to look into hiring a few drill sergeants to make sure all the kids in the Oakland School District get their fair share of being sworn at.

Dellums Takes Charge

Doddering Ron Dinkins, er, I mean Dellums, is off to a blinding start when it comes to attacking Oakland's myriad problems. After a couple months-long disappearing act, he's now surfaced with a million-dollar makeover on what he apparently considers the most crucial of them: his office. Oh yeah, plus a pay raise for himself and a new driver and bodyguard to accompany him through the streets of his fair city. Oh, and where's he coming up with the money in that perennially broke city? Half of it's being lopped off the budget of one of the new schools launched during Jerry Brown's tenure. Let's see: educating children or pay raise and chauffeured limo for the mayor, which is more important? Don't say I didn't warn you.