Brown Act? What's the Brown Act?

Run by the state the last five years, since going bankrupt and taking a $100-million bailout loan, the school board of Oakland Unified this week regained a wee bit of power, and promptly, apparently, abused it. Nice!

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting today that Oakland trustees, on Tuesday given back the authority to hire and fire, turned around Wednesday and named an interim superintendent "without public participation or discussion."

"The school board also came up with the job description behind closed doors," staffer Jill Tucker writes.

All such decisions "should have been made in public," California First Amendment Coalition executive director Peter Scheer is quoted as saying, further noting that the board may have violated the state's open-meeting law known as the Brown Act.