A couple weeks back Amanda recommended this movie to us as a bit of food for thought to consider in light of our collaborative work with Nike. Highlighting the motives and actions of major corporations and their influence on the spread of globalization, author Naomi Klein posits that the free public space is being diminished by the spread of mass marketing tactics by major corporations. Analyzing the development of “lifestyle” branding as a means to sell products, Klein uses a variety of popular examples to illustrate the stratosphere of the super brand. An interesting film, Klein’s work helps to shed light on the current media landscape we live in.

What I found even more interesting about this film after the fact is that it was released in the year 2000. Which provides a bit of context to better analyze our current media landscape. 10 years later, are Naomi’s points right on? What was she off on? How have things changed in the past 10 years since the film was made? I feel like mass media tactics are becoming more and more deceptive, so now more than ever it is important for us to remain a critical audience.

Sometimes simplicity is the best way to point across. Reminders is a collection of just that. Simple photographic messages meant to remind of us of the everyday shit we tend to space on. Austin-based artist Erin Hanson is a self-described Recovering Lazyholic, using the term to title her collection of work, on display here. She describes her art as “something I do for myself to keep me from not doing”, but also as something that can entertain others, or a resource for folks that struggle with the same issues.

Personally, I flop on organization all the time, and I think we all tend to let things slip that we intend to get done. Maybe it’s getting around to that book you’ve been meaning to read. Maybe it’s just letting the most important folks know you care. Or maybe it’s remembering to take a break, and live it up. So maybe we don’t all need to stick colorful letters around the house, but I gotta say, I dig the idea behind it. Staying conscious about how you spend your time. Because it’s as valuable as you make it.

I’m not gonna lie, when I heard the title Ghetto Physics I was skeptical. The title and the aesthetic had me questioning if I really wanted to spend a couple hours taking this movie in. However, upon our invitation to the premiere this past week, I was astonished by the tact and poignancy of this film. Highlighting the role of politics in our daily lives, Ghetto Physics uses the relational dynamics of the pimp and the ho to create a framework to analyze some of the more manipulative power dynamics in American culture. From healthcare, to religion, to marriage, the film covers a variety of topics that provoked many conversations after the final credits. Ghetto Physics is one of those movies that makes you think differently after you watch it. And that’s powerful. In addition to L.A., Ghetto Physics will be premiering in select cities across the nation, including Oakland. So stay tuned.

Having come of age in the midst of one of the most senseless wars in recent history, it’s hard for me not to be biased about our government’s foreign policy. I’d say I was “skeptical” about the claims that oil played no role in our decision to go to war with Iraq, if I wasn’t actually certain beyond a doubt that it was one of the primary issues at stake. If you haven’t seen Blood & Oil, I’d highly recommend checking it out. If not, I’d recommend taking a look at the article below from Foreign Policy.

The main point Peter Maass raises is that the amount of military spending that goes towards obtaining and protecting oil exceeds our wildest dreams. Not to mention, despite the drop in media coverage, we’re still there, spending billions monthly. How we go about changing a century-old tradition in American politics is a tough thing to figure out. Lifestyle changes on the part of the consumer? Political action, or protesting against our tax dollars funding the war machine and big business? At the very least, I figure it’s better not to keep our heads in the sand, so to speak.

By Peter Maass for Foreign Policy:

Shortly after the Marines rolled into Baghdad and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein, I visited the Ministry of Oil. American troops surrounded the sand-colored building, protecting it like a strategic jewel. But not far away, looters were relieving the National Museum of its actual jewels. Baghdad had become a carnival of looting. A few dozen Iraqis who worked at the Oil Ministry were gathered outside the American cordon, and one of them, noting the protection afforded his workplace and the lack of protection everywhere else, remarked to me, “It is all about oil.”

The issue he raised is central to figuring out what we truly pay for a gallon of gas. The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico has reminded Americans that the price at the pump is only a down payment; an honest calculation must include the contamination of our waters, land, and air. Yet the calculation remains incomplete if we don’t consider other factors too, especially what might be the largest externalized cost of all: the military one. To what extent is oil linked to the wars we fight and the more than half-trillion dollars we spend on our military every year? We are in an era of massive deficits, so it pays to know what we are paying for and how much it costs.

The debate often hovers at a sandbox level of did-so/did-not. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, insisted the invasion of Iraq had “nothing to do with oil.” But even Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, rejected that line. “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows,” Greenspan wrote in his memoir. “The Iraq war is largely about oil.” If it is even partly true that we invade for oil and maintain a navy and army for oil, how much is that costing? This is one of the tricky things about oil, the hidden costs, and one of the reasons we are addicted to the substance — we don’t acknowledge its full price.

If we wish to know, we can. An innovative approach comes from Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University who in April published a peer-reviewed study on the cost of keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007. Because carriers patrol the gulf for the explicit mission of securing oil shipments, Stern was on solid ground in attributing that cost to oil. He had found an excellent metric. He combed through the Defense Department’s data — which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission — and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion.

And that’s just a partial accounting of peacetime spending. It’s far trickier to figure out the extent to which America’s wars are linked to oil and then put a price tag on it. But let’s assume that Rumsfeld, in an off-the-record moment of retirement candor, might be persuaded to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq was somewhat related to oil. A 2008 study by Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes put the cost of that war — everything spent up to that point and likely to be spent in the years ahead — at a minimum of $3 trillion (and probably much more). Again, trillion.

Of course we would have to wait a long time before finding a PowerPoint presentation in the Pentagon or White House (no matter the party in power) on defense spending for oil. Just as cuts to Social Security are a third rail, an accounting of oil-related military spending is nearly unheard of in the halls of power. For politicians and generals, it is a slippery slope: Speak too loudly on the subject, and they risk undercutting the we-only-want-to-make-the-world-a-better-place notion of U.S. foreign policy. It’s easier to let the debate idle at vague rhetoric rather than hard numbers.

You would have to go back nearly 20 years to get anything on the subject from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. government that in 1991 estimated that between 1980 and 1990 the United States spent a total of $366 billion to defend oil supplies in the Middle East. The GAO report was just a snapshot of one region in a limited time frame a long time ago when America was not fighting a major war there or elsewhere. The study would have been a good start if it had been followed by other studies that went deeper and further, but that didn’t happen (see Hot Potato, Department of).

So it has fallen to a cottage industry of out-of-government experts like Stiglitz and Stern to examine metrics that measure oil’s connections to not just war but corruption and poverty. These experts include Paul Collier of Oxford University, who wrote The Bottom Billion, as well as Michael Ross at UCLA, Michael Watts at UC Berkeley, Ian Gary at Oxfam, and Sarah Wykes, formerly with the NGO Global Witness. Their areas of expertise — economics, geography, political science, corruption — as well as the metrics on which they focus, are similar to the unconventional backgrounds and ideas of the experts whom Gen. David Petraeus called on to rethink the metrics and practice of counterinsurgency.

Oil has yet to find its Petraeus; it remains a badly quantified problem. The abstraction of global warming, the pity of oil-soaked pelicans, even battlefield deaths in Iraq — these have not occasioned real changes in our addiction to all things petroleum. The United States consumes more gasoline today than on the day Iraq was invaded and the day of the BP accident. If I had a dollar for every time a politician said, as President Barack Obama did in his Oval Office energy speech in June, “The time to embrace a clean energy future is now,” I could build a wind farm. An honest accounting would do a lot more than tired platitudes because it would force us to confront the hidden costs that we don’t see at the pump. And after all, the best way to get the attention of consumers is through their pocketbooks.

Challenging the notion that humans are motivated by monetary rewards, Dan Pink presents a variety of studies that have tested this question to find out what truly motivates humans. I know, 10 minutes is kind of crucial, but this is one of those, “and after that I never thought the same again” videos. A paradigm shift according to Ruud. Even better the entire discussion is illustrated, which is dope on so many levels, and it makes it a lot easier for the visual folks.

Amanda said, “science never ceases to amaze me.” And quite frankly I couldn’t agree more. Shit’s just hella fascinating. I think in our busy busy lives we (or at least I) don’t give science/the world/people the amount of time they deserve to really be understood. Recently, oceanic reef fossils were discovered in Australia, “proving” that life existed 650 million years ago. 650 million years ago! Think about that! I always say we gotta give love to the first humans who were out here, because they were fighting sabertooth tigers, giant insects and all kinds of crazy shit to bring us to where we are now. While today, all we have to fight is the media… But in all seriousness, this is a tremendous discovery that you can learn more about below.

Written by Brad Lendon

Fossils from Australia show life on Earth began at least 650 million years ago, 70 million years earlier than previous estimates, Princeton University scientists report.

Princeton geosciences professor Adam Maloof and graduate student Catherine Rose came upon the fossils while researching a massive ice age, known as the “snowball effect,” that left much of the planet covered in ice 635 million years ago. Scientists had thought animal life could not have survived that ice age. But as they inspected a glacial deposit in south Australia, they found the fossils of the sponge-like ocean reef animals.

“No one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the ‘snowball Earth,’” Maloof said.

“We were accustomed to finding rocks with embedded mud chips, and at first this is what we thought we were seeing,” Maloof said. “But then we noticed these repeated shapes that we were finding everywhere – wishbones, rings, perforated slabs and anvils. … we realized we had stumbled upon some sort of organism.”

The researchers call the animals sponge-like because the fossil record shows them to have a network of internal canals, likely for filtering food from seawater as sponges do. The earliest fossilized record of sponges had been 520 million years ago. The earliest fossils of hard-bodies animals date to 550 million years ago.

The scientists published their findings in the August 17 issue of the journal Nature Geosciences. Their research was sponsored by National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences.

By Matthew McDermott

Once we’ve gotten our priorities straight regarding reducing the massive amount of oil we use in transportation – largely because we’ve built our communities into places where most people need to drive rather than walk, bike or take public transit -there’s another conceptually big issue that needs to tackled: What to do with plastic?

Now, plastics alone don’t amount to much out of a single barrel of oil compared to liquid fuels, but their utter ubiquity in our lives combined with the resultant massive waste management and water pollution issues means we’ve got some serious contemplation to do.

Removing Plastics From Our Lives Will Be Tough

As when I wrote about oil and transportation, I don’t claim to have all the answers to solving our great plastic problem, but just want to encourage readers to start thinking about solutions seriously. Simply avoiding using all plastic is both impractical personally and impossible communally at the moment–as initially empowering it feels to say.

Not to mention, as much as all-natural material loving people (including myself in that category) often don’t want to admit it, plastic is an amazing substance that has plenty of important uses–even if we radically reduced its usage and our oil consumption in general. Make no bones about it, removing plastics from our lives is going to be tough. So, let’s deal with the pointless use of plastic first.

Disposable Plastics Must Go, Period…

The first way we need to address our plastic usage is acknowledging that disposable plastic products (with perhaps a few exceptions, medical usage pops to mind) are the most inane and inappropriate use of the material. To expend all that energy into extracting oil, or even raising plants for bioplastics, and then turning it into a material that never biodegrades, clogs waterways, and fills landfills, and yet using it in one-time use applications is absolutely ludicrous. Only by entirely ignoring what happens to the material once its intended lifetime is over is there any sense in it.

Some of the solution to this is habitual–getting out of the habit of using disposable plastics products, be they cups or pens or cling wrap, and favoring product reuse and heirloom design–while some of it is bigger. If we place even a modicum of effort into it, more environmentally friendly, yet durable solutions to very nearly every current use of disposable plastic can be developed. From packaging to end product, this is a problem that design and technology can indeed fully solve. We don’t need massive policy changes to accomplish it.

But Plastic May Still Be The Right Material For The Job, Sometimes

The second way is to recognize that when we want a product to last for generations and/or absolutely requires the uniquely durable and malleable characteristics of the material, then plastics may well be the best solution–provided we close the loop from manufacturing to disposal so that plastic pollution can be reigned in.

It may go against the conventional wisdom of the green community–especially in the middle of the gulf oil spill, plus one in the Yellow Sea off the coast of China–but in certain situations the benefits of using plastic probably outweigh the risks.

The hippo water roller pictured above at left may be one of the most appropriate uses of plastic out there–lasting forever and radically reducing the workload of people using it to fetch water.

Plastic Needn’t & Shouldn’t Be The Default Material Choice

Which isn’t to say that for many, many uses where plastic use is now the norm we couldn’t or shouldn’t use all-natural materials, we absolutely should. But there still may be times when plastic is appropriate. If we radically reduce our use of oil in other areas of our society, and abolish through habit and design the use of nearly all disposable plastics, then the plastic use which remains will far less of a waste disposal or pollution issue.

A rough way to think about it (exceptions occur always): If it’s disposable = nearly never use plastic and ensure recycling of waste. If it’s non-disposable = is there a non-oil based material that will work as well and doesn’t have the disposal issues or some other outweighing energy use or environmental concern? If so then use it. If not, and the product is both intended to last a lifetime or longer and needs the material characteristics of plastic, then perhaps use it–provided disposal is taken fully into consideration.

This shit’s hilarious. Animals will forever amaze me. Meet the Darwin Beetle. After climbing a tree and dueling with other suitors the Beetle climbs his way into “bed” with his female counterpart, only to flop her after it’s all said and done. But imagine. What if it was like this for humans. What if you had to spend like 15 years getting hub in the gym, all to one day, go to the club where you had to fight hella bruhs in one-on-one battle royals, only to beat everyone, find the girl of your dreams, get her number, take her home, get in bed, and as you’re about to lay your first kiss, she tells you she’s not in the mood… I’d be a little salty too.

I was kinda on the fence about this one. Lightweight made my stomach churn, but hella interesting at the same time. It’s crazy to me how the different stages of food welcome different life forms to it. When they’re ripe, we can fuck with it. And when they “go bad” they “go good,” for bugs and bacteria. It’s also hella interesting to see what foods go first. While the strawberries are the first to go, it seems like that squash put up the best fight. That is a squash right? And why did the apple on the left go before the apple on the right? And at the end of it all, the onions were out there acting like nothing happened. Pops could probably tell you what’s going on here better than I can, but an interesting sight nonetheless. Stay ripe.

“In order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must:

Be a resident of Oakland, CA. Be at least 7 years or older. Retain A 3.0 Grade Point Average, Create your own Scraper Bike…(It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.) A single-file line when riding. After 10 rides The Scraper Bike King and his Captains will decide if your bike is up to standards and if you can follow simple guidelines. After your evaluation we will consider you a member and honor you with an Original Scraper Bike Team Shirt. Only worn when Mobbin…”

This is one of the more promising pieces of news I’ve heard in a long time. A few months ago, we featured an article from Fortune about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s $600 Billion Challenge (now called The Giving Pledge), an initiative with an incredibly ambitious goal: to convince the world’s wealthiest figures to give away half of their existing fortunes to philanthropic causes. Well, for the time being, I guess the skeptics are going to have to fall back.

Earlier this week, The Giving Pledge‘s website revealed the first 40 billionaires to volunteer, including Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Larry Ellison and George Lucas, just to name a few. Of course, how the funds will be allocated, and money is by no means a direct solution to the problems we face as a global society. But when you’re talking hundreds of billions, it’s a major part of the equation. Hats off to Bill and Warren. This is impressive, to say the least.

From The New York Times:

More than three dozen billionaires, including well-known philanthropists like David Rockefeller and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and less familiar big donors like Lorry I. Lokey, founder of Business Wire, have promised at least half of their fortunes to charity, joining a program that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett started in June to encourage other wealthy people to give.

“During even the Depression’s worst years, my parents gave money — about 8 percent of their annual income of $2,200,” Mr. Lokey wrote in a letter posted on the Web site of the program, the Giving Pledge. “I remember saying to my mother that we can’t afford that. But she said we have to share with others. I learned from that to share.”

The pledge has been a matter of some debate in philanthropic and nonprofit circles, with some experts dismissing it as a publicity stunt and others predicting that it would produce a flood of new money to support nonprofit groups.

The program has predicted that it will draw $600 billion into philanthropy — or about twice the estimated total amount given by Americans last year — although in a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Buffett acknowledged that some of the money would have been donated anyway.

“It’s not like all or half of the money represented is added money,” he said, “but some of it is added.”

He said he thought the real value of the pledge was found in the example that it set and in the sentiments expressed in the letters posted on the Web site.

Perhaps the biggest surprise on the list was Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who became the bad boy of philanthropy after he withdrew a $115 million gift from Harvard in protest over the resignation of Lawrence H. Summers as president.

In a brief note addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” Mr. Ellison disclosed that he had already assigned 95 percent of his wealth to a trust and noted that he had already given hundreds of millions of dollars away for medical research and education.

“Until now, I have done this giving quietly — because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter,” Mr. Ellison wrote. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to write this letter because he said I would be ‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

Mr. Buffett said that the number of people who had agreed to sign on was at the high end of his expectations. He said some people who did not agree to sign the pledge were planning to give away most of their wealth but did not want to draw attention to those plans.

Some went on “a tirade” about the government and rising taxes, Mr. Buffett said — declining, of course, to name them.

“A few got into that, and there are some that have a dynastic attitude toward wealth,” he said. “That tends to be the case where they themselves inherited this money and maybe feel some sort of intergenerational compact about it.”

Read the full article here

Damn, there really are folks that can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Known to the world as Parkour, the discipline stands for the art of movement, and specifically relates to one’s ability to adapt to their present environment. Originating in France, the non-competitive “sport” challenges its participants to get from one place to another using only their body and their surrounding environment. Pretty impressive if you ask me. Humans are hella clean.

Written By Muammar Reed

What do vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassette tapes, the VCR, and the CD have in common? In a few years they will all be antiques, destined for private showings at museums. They will be replaced by the thumb drive, the iPod, the Android, the Blackberry, and all other types of media holding devices. Alas, it is now time to move on to an age where an Android phone is a boom box, where Pandora and Grooveshark.com are radio, where iTunes is Virgin Records, and where laptops are recording studios.

The year 2000 marked the end of a grand era for major music labels where net revenues peaked at $13.2 billion in CD album sales. In 2009, that number decreased to $4.2 billion, continuing a decade long trend by decreasing 21% from the previous year. Downloaded album sales increased 20% from 2008-09 and totaled $1.2 billion, showing the expanding digital market. However, the increase in digital downloads does not make up for the volume lost in CD sales.

The tremendous increase in downloads shows why CD salesmen are dying along with the CD. For, the CD salesmen persisted in selling apples when everyone wanted oranges. Napster rose to popularity in 1999, while I-tunes did not come into existence until 2003. It’s hard to sell ice in the winter or sell nosebleed seats to someone with front row tickets. [But they say that common sense is not all too common any more]

And remember back in the day when you used to dub a tape from a friend and you would get a horrible copy of the tape in return? Now, pirated copies of music are better quality than what’s being sold on I-tunes (the leader of online distributing)(so I’ve heard…). Apple doesn’t make a ton of money because you can’t get a computer or mp3 player from any where else, it makes a ton of money because its products are just flat out better than everyone else’s.

Has anyone ever wondered why major music labels thrived during the transition from vinyl records to 8-tracks to cassette tapes to CDs? It is strange that major labels are struggling during this transition. People haven’t stopped consuming music. I listen to music, you listen to music, everyone at your workplace listens to music. In fact, people are consuming music, more than ever, all around the world, because of the Internet.

So why do we see this new phenomenon with the transition to digital music?

During the transition from vinyl records to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs the major music labels maintained and controlled all the major distribution channels. These past forms of storage were tangible pieces of property and it took large pockets to coordinate the distribution of music throughout the world. They were able to slowly test the new market for these technologies without the worry of smaller competitors.

Digital media and the Internet were new phenomenon that changed the way we communicate and consume music. It took 4 years for major music labels to begin selling music online after it was already made available through programs like Napster, Morpheus, and Kazaa. With the advent of digital media, P2P networks, and more recently Bit-torrent sites, the major music labels’ spending power has been equalized with technology.

Creators of P2P networks do not have to pay huge storage costs, shipping costs, or marketing costs to distribute music. The labels waited too long to enter a booming market where their strengths were no longer a factor a la Blockbuster (who still goes to Blockbuster??? Your grandma)… They failed to exploit these new technologies before smaller competitors entered the marketplace and the Consumer (darn college kids) became accustomed to getting music online for free.

The day that thumb drives cost less than $5 and when every car company manufactures cars that read thumb drives, the CD will become obsolete. Thus, the record labels need to stop focusing on CD sales for most of their developing artists. It’s a large inefficient waste of money to print so many CDs for upcoming artists when the market is no longer there.

Digital media has changed the music industry. Because consumers can now buy your songs individually your whole CD has to be hot or you will make less money than artists of the past. You can no longer force people to buy your whole CD for 2 or 3 hot singles.

What are your thoughts on the music industry? Where do you see it headed and how can it be improved?

From The Oakland Tribune:

The math is simple: California schools have less money than most other states, but their teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.

Per pupil spending, on the other hand, trails the national average by about $2,500.

Until the financially troubled state government finds more money to invest in its public schools, which make up more than half of its general fund spending, something has to give.

School budgeting has become a zero-sum game.

California school districts spend more than half of their dollars on teacher pay and benefits. In better times, when education funding rose each year to keep pace with the cost of living, so did salaries. But the state now gives schools less money for each student than it did in 2005-06, when the average teacher made 11 percent less.

To make payroll, districts are laying off teachers and loading more children into each classroom. They are cutting secretaries, assistant principals, custodians, aides, instructional coaches and security. They are closing schools and slashing supplies. They are shrinking the length of the school year.

In the East Bay alone, more than 130,000 students from 14 districts will have their school years cut short, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis. Students in Alameda, Newark and Knightsen will be in school for 175 days, a week less than the national average, at a time when the president is calling for a longer school year.

Such reductions could take a toll on a public education system that already trails the nation in graduation rates, student test scores and funding. California ranks 44th in the nation in per pupil spending, giving $8,826 for each student in grades K-12, versus $11,372 nationally, according to a recent report by the California Budget Project. The United States Department of Education estimates 71 percent of California high school students in the class of 2008 graduated on time, compared to 75 percent of their peers nationwide. Just 59 percent of the state’s eighth graders showed they had at least “basic” skills on a 2009 national math assessment, compared to 71 percent of their peers in other states.

Even before the state’s fiscal crisis came to a head, staff were scarce in California schools. In 2007-08, the Golden State had the fewest school employees per student in the nation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

As school boards grapple with further state cutbacks and the end of federal stimulus aid, students can expect to see even fewer employees when they return to school in the fall. As a result, they might find dirtier hallways and bathrooms, crowded classrooms and distracted teachers.

A Devil’s Bargain

David Plank, a Stanford University education professor and the director of the nonpartisan research center Policy Analysis for California Education, said if current state funding trends hold, one of two possibilities will play out: Teachers accept cuts in pay and benefits to preserve jobs, or they protect their wages and benefits, resulting in layoffs and reduced services to schoolchildren.

“We pay teachers less or we have many fewer teachers,” he said.

Or both.

No East Bay districts have made an outright cut in the pay scale, and only one reported freezing built-in salary bumps, or “steps.” But teachers in about 20 districts have made other sacrifices, mostly by agreeing to work — and be paid for — fewer days. Teachers in the West Contra Costa, Martinez and Acalanes Union districts will pay a greater share of their rising health insurance premiums.

To bridge the rest of the gap, all but a handful of districts have thinned their teaching ranks and placed more children in each class. Not long ago, first-grade teachers in Hayward, Antioch and Mt. Diablo schools taught 20 children at a time. Now they will have 30 or more.

Even if districts protect employee compensation by making reductions elsewhere, teachers are likely to feel their working conditions deteriorate, said Judith Warren Little, a professor of education at UC Berkeley.

“It’s a devil’s bargain, in a way, because we do have good evidence that working conditions have tremendous impact, in the end, over whether teachers leave or stay,” she said.

On the other hand, Warren Little said, districts with higher salaries are better able to attract strong teachers, who play a big role in the quality of a student’s education.

Oakland, for example, is one of the lowest-paying school districts in the county. Its new teachers earn about $39,000, plus benefits, and the average base salary is $53,800. When Juliana Jones, the 2007 Alameda County Teacher of the Year, left Oakland for the Berkeley school district, the middle school algebra teacher received an instant raise of about $10,000.

“I find tons of teachers who have left Oakland and moved to Berkeley,” Jones said in an e-mail. She added, “It was a very good move for me — and as you can see, profitable!”

Labor Tension

Painful budget decisions have led to picketing, grievances and deadlocked negotiations in a number of East Bay districts. Talks reached impasse in John Swett, Moraga and Liberty Union this spring, bringing those districts closer to the prospect of a strike. Teachers in Livermore and San Lorenzo filed grievances after their district administrations shortened the work year unilaterally, though San Lorenzo teachers reached an agreement in June. Newark teachers cast a vote of no confidence in the district’s chief business officer. West Contra Costa teachers nearly went on strike last fall.

In May, the Oakland teachers union rejected a 2 percent raise offer and voted to authorize a longer strike, which — if called — could keep children out of the classroom for days or weeks this fall.

“If present trends continue, it would be astonishing if we didn’t see more strikes, more job actions by teachers,” Plank said. “They’ve been asked to bear the brunt of the crisis. Patience has its limits, and it’s not clear what the endgame looks like.”

Given the lack of trust Californians have in the state government, Plank says he expects to see unions protect the wages and benefits they have won for their members, rather than take pay cuts. Even if they make huge concessions to spare services and jobs, he said, who’s to say the state won’t reduce funding the following year by an even greater amount?

Either way, students lose, Plank said.

“California is doing very badly with its students now,” he said. “They lag behind their counterparts in other states now.”

Jessica Solano, 16, a student at Oakland High, said her school feels different than it used to. The music department shut down in the spring, she said, and access to one of the school’s new computers is limited. It’s crowded, and the bathrooms aren’t clean, she said. She worries more of her classmates will drop out of school as the conditions slide.

“You don’t see students as engaged as before,” Solano said.

But Solano, a youth leader for grass roots social justice group Californians for Justice, says she will support her teachers if they decide to strike. They should be paid more for what they do, she said, and such an action would call attention to the fiscal crisis facing public schools in the state.

Brian Rodriguez isn’t so sure. The 2008 Alameda Teacher of the Year began his career in Oakland. He said he left the district for Alameda after a five-week teacher strike in 1996, an effort he helped lead, after concluding the district was “rotten to the core.”

Rodriguez said he felt compelled to take a stand against the district, which he felt was mismanaging its resources and shortchanging its students. At the same time, he knew the kids were missing weeks of precious class time.

“It killed me to see our students out of the classroom for that long,” he said. He added, “It left a lot of bitterness.”

Rodriguez said he hoped the Oakland school district won’t have to endure the same, destabilizing struggle this year.

“I admire (the teachers) for sticking to their guns, but my gosh, this isn’t the right time to go on strike, in my opinion,” he said.

Rigid Boxes

Rick Hess, an education policy analyst and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said public schools have put themselves into “rigid boxes” by setting uniform class sizes and paying teachers based largely on seniority, on a salary scale that includes raises for additional years worked and course credits earned.

The state’s average teacher salary in 2007-08 — $64,000 — was about $12,000 above the national average, according to the National Education Association.

“We’ve created a sector rooted in the assumption that every single year there would be more money than there was the year before,” he said. “It’s as if nobody ever imagined that they’d ever have to cut spending.”

Hess said he considered employee furloughs, which are temporary, an ineffective solution for a fiscal crisis that promises to continue for years. It’s a bad sign, he said, that districts have resorted to cutting their school year to stay solvent.

“It’s amazing how in education, we keep telling ourselves we’re about the kids. But then we have to shorten the school year because we can’t imagine, heaven forbid, how to trim salaries,” Hess said. “It just strikes me as irresponsible management.”

Sometimes school district officials find themselves with little alternative. Mt. Diablo’s administrators say they need $26.2 million in employee pay and benefit concessions during the next three years to remain solvent. Its teachers, however, have so far refused to bargain with the administration, and negotiations with the district’s support staff have stalled.

The future of the Hayward school district — on the brink of insolvency and state takeover — might also hinge on a deal with its teachers union. When they return to the bargaining table this week, union leaders might be reluctant to make concessions; Hayward teachers won a two-year, 11 percent raise after a two-week strike in 2007.

To stave off state takeover, Hayward has adopted one of the largest elementary school class sizes in the Bay Area. Teachers and parents at Eden Gardens Elementary, whose students speak more than a dozen languages at home, are bracing for the change.

Tracy Diaz, the former PTA president at Eden Gardens, said she doesn’t know how children in kindergarten to grade 3 — particularly English learners and those with little academic help at home — will be able to learn with 31 other kids in the classroom and just one teacher.

“Who’s going to help them?” she asked.