Fatima Ghatala, a teacher at East Oakland School of the Arts (Castlemont), tells us about her AP United States history students’ diligent preparation for tomorrow’s National History Day competition. EOSA is the only school representing OUSD in the contest.

“Who would like to present their project at the county-wide National History Day competition on March 20th?” I asked. The group members excitedly looked at each other to confirm, and enthusiastically raised their hands to volunteer. The class had already spent weeks working on research topics, and this particular group of students were researching the United States-Mexico War. They were first inspired to learn more about the war because of the impact the current U.S.-Mexico border has on their communities.

Ms. Natalie Carrillo, 16, Ms. Evelyn Gameros, 17, Mr. Gerardo Martinez, 15, Mr. Ricardo Cruz, 16, and Mr. Roberto Mendoza, 17 — all AP United States History students at East Oakland School of the Arts (EOSA) — spent weeks researching, including talking to teachers in the community, visiting libraries and reading books, interviewing community organizers and activists, and canvassing internet archives. As historians, they explored primary and secondary sources and developed a thesis: The United States-Mexico War was the first in United States history in which the media was used to generate public support for war.

The five students will be presenting their research project at tomorrow’s competition, where this year’s theme of History Day is “Innovation: Impact and Change.” EOSA has the only high school students representing the Oakland Unified School District.

I have been impressed by their dedication to the project from the first day I introduced it in class. They have embodied the roles of historians and researchers, as students and as of teachers, as they dived in, asked questions, taught each other, and taught the adults around them. As an EOSA teacher, I am privileged to be witness to the brightness and beauty my students present everyday, but oftentimes I feel youth — especially black and brown youth from Deep East Oakland — are overlooked, ignored, or cast off as unable, lacking, and unintelligent.

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The Oakland school district has posted an ad on Craigslist, offering $300 a day for “emergency temporary teachers” in the event of an Oakland teacher strike. The district will conduct interviews next week in the hopes of finding enough subs willing to cross the picket line.

As of now, a one-day strike over the yet-unsettled teacher contract is planned for April 22. District Spokesman Troy Flint said the district administration hadn’t decided whether to close schools that day, but that “we didn’t want to be caught flat-footed.”

“We’re still holding out some hope that we will resolve this, but we’re trying to be realistic and have a fallback plan,” Flint said.

I’ve thought about the relationship between school reform and public perception since 2008, when I watched Gov. Schwarzenegger push – and the California Board of Education approve – a middle school Algebra I requirement (which was halted in court, months later), over the protests of the state superintendent of schools.

The same questions came to mind last week, as I reported on the Obama/Duncan administration’s prescriptions for the country’s lowest-performing schools — remedies that lack research to show that they actually work, according to researchers quoted in Education Week.

Is the government more concerned about public perception than about real change? Is it just trying to look like it’s doing something to improve public schools, with less attention to whether the desired outcomes follow? If so, is this an old phenomenon?

Bruce Fuller, an education and public policy professor at UC Berkeley, is studying some related questions, though he frames them in a more sophisticated way and grounds them in more than just a hunch. His theory is that the American public (since the 1980s) has been so cynical about `big government,’ and so unwilling to pay new taxes, that the government “flailing” around, trying to look “efficacious” with fewer and fewer resources. 

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The federal government has pumped $3 billion into grants for schools with really low test scores. At the same time, it plans to eliminate a major source of violence prevention funding — money that, if used effectively, helps schools in the most violent of neighborhoods (often, the same schools with the lowest test scores) provide a safe environment for kids to learn.

Here’s the notice, provided to me by the Oakland school district:

NOTICE OF FORTHCOMING ELIMINATION OF TITLE IV PART A; SAFE AND DRUG-FREE SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES PROGRAM CATEGORICAL APPORTIONMENTS

The No Child Left Behind Act, Title IV, Part A of 2001, has provided entitlement funding to California public schools for the implementation of activities under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program (SDFSC). Under the federal budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year, funding for this program has been eliminated effective June 30, 2010.

California’s legislature, too, has shifted money once earmarked for violence prevention into a general-purpose pot — which financially stressed districts are now free to use for other expenses.

These shifts could have a very real effect on Oakland’s schoolkids (and the people around them). The school district’s violence prevention unit — which is largely funded by the city’s violence prevention funds under Measure Y — faces possible extinction, and programs such as Second Step, middle school conflict resolution and bully prevention stand to lose most (or all) of their funding, at least at the central administration level.

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Some writers can stand on stage, all alone and before rows and rows of people, and recite original poetry. Others prefer to keep a lower profile.

At this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Fest, a new competition gave stage-shy students a chance to shine. About 50 students in Oakland’s public and private middle schools entered an essay contest. They submitted short persuasive pieces on people, living or dead, who have benefitted humanity.

I was one of the judges for the final competition, and I’ve posted links to their essays so you can read them too. (Note: We determined the winners before learning the writers’ names or where they went to school.)

The first-place winner was Sophia Denison-Johnston (right), an eighth-grader at the private Redwood Day School. She wrote a piece titled ”Martin Delaney – AIDS Activist and Lifesaver.”

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The Oakland school district administration has sent preliminary layoff notices to up to 60 58 of its 2,300 teachers and counselors – in addition to including five part-time counselors, nine adult education teachers and 44 teachers who apparently have not received a mandated state certification to teach English learners, Troy Christmas, the director of labor relations just told me.

Note: These are tenured employees, and the layoff notices are not final. They mean that the teachers might not be employed by OUSD in the fall.

(This number has changed throughout the day; it was exceedingly difficult to pin down, for some reason. My apologies.)

This is the first time since I’ve covered Oakland schools that the district has sent out these “Reduction in Force” slips, a sign of just how tough the going is. OUSD plans to cut $85 million from its total budget (and $36.5 million from its general purpose fund) next year.

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This week, people in districts throughout California were left wondering why some schools escaped the state’s “persistently lowest-achieving” list, while others — some of them, with higher scores and greater gains — were deemed failing.

It all boils down to size. If a school reported fewer than 100 test scores in any of the last three years, it was taken off the list, regardless of its scores. I’m not sure why, though it would seem the state wants to target larger, more traditional schools rather than alternative schools, which tend to be smaller (and, often, to have lower test scores).

Without this small-school rule, Oakland would have more schools on the list, according to another long list of low-performing schools Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, the Oakland school board voted 5-2 to deny the renewal of Cox Academy — an elementary school in East Oakland that underwent a controversial charter conversion in 2005 during the Randy Ward era — despite its 78-point jump on the 1,000-point Academic Performance Index last year and a room full of parents who spoke in its support.

Typically, charters are renewed for five years. But the district’s charter schools office director, David Montes de Oca, recommended the board grant just a two-year, conditional extension. He said the school was making progress and that he had confidence in its new leader and its teaching staff. Still, he said, he had numerous concerns, including the school’s history of “opaque” management and the fact that its African-American students’ test scores have lagged, falling short of federal test score goals.

“The school is largely an underdeveloped program,” Montes de Oca said. “I remain uneasy.”

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You may have heard about a movement to create more uniformity in what public school kids in the United States are taught — and on what they are tested. A common criticism of No Child Left Behind is that the content and the difficulty of standardized tests vary greatly from state to state.

So far, I believe, all states but Texas and Alaska are on board with what’s known as Common Core State Standards. Steven Weinberg wrote about the issue earlier this year, saying too few teachers were involved in the drafting process.

Today, a draft of its common K-12 standards was released. I wouldn’t recommend it for your next book club, but maybe teachers will be able to glean more from the document than I could. You may submit your comments to the curriculum-powers-that-be until Friday, April 2.

I hope you submit your comments here as well. Do you think common standards would be good for kids? For the country?

Cancel that babysitter! Oakland schools won’t shut down on March 24, as planned. The one-day teacher strike has been reset to Thursday, April 22.

Why the change? The Oakland teachers union president, Betty Olson-Jones, has announced that the fact-finding recommendations aren’t likely to be completed before the end of March or beginning of April. The union can’t legally strike until that report is out, and spring break is the week of April 4.

“Because this situation remains fluid — i.e. we are not strike legal until the fact-finding report is released, we urge you to keep checking the OEA website for the most up-to-date information,” she wrote in an e-mail to her members.