Oakland Unified’s hard-line charter schools office says the district should renew its contracts with two schools: Oakland School for the Arts, a middle and high school located in the renovated Fox Theater building downtown, and Berkley Maynard, one of six charters in Oakland that are run by Aspire Public Schools, a management organization.

image by Nick Bygon, flickr.com/creativecommons

Also on Wednesday’s school board agenda is a “conditional endorsement” of the March 4 Statewide Day to Defend Public Education, which will include public schools, colleges and universities.

Translation: The district will support a “teach-in” and demonstrations before and after school — as long as the actions don’t “impede student learning,” according to OUSD Spokesman Troy Flint.

Betty Olson-Jones, the teachers union president, says there is not a strike planned for March 4, but that some teachers and students plan to be out of school that day. Others, she said, will picket before school starts or, possibly, take their children on a “walking field trip” to demonstrate.

Read the rest of this entry »

photo courtesy of Bill Watson Payne

Kids at Oakland’s Bret Harte Middle School are showing their love this month by raising money for victims of the earthquake in Haiti. So far, they have raised more than $700 for Oxfam, according to teachers at the school. Each heart represents a student’s contribution.

At Oakland School for the Arts, Graciela Olguin and her classmates organized an online art sale to raise money for the American Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts. They set up this Web site, and generated more than $300 as of late last week.

If your school has undertaken a similar project, tell us about it.

Yesterday afternoon I was putting the finishing touches on a story about security at Oakland’s high school basketball and football games when I got an email from our prep sports writer, Jimmy Durkin: Friday’s basketball game between Oakland High School and McClymonds was postponed, for safety reasons.

Part of the reason for the decision, I learned today, was an incident that happened at lunchtime yesterday, a couple of blocks from McClymonds. A car pulled up to a crowd of people in front of a convenience store on Market Street — it’s a popular lunch spot for students – and someone inside the car fired a shot.

No one was hit, according to OUSD Spokesman Troy Flint. But whoa. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers with the Civil Rights Project, now based at UCLA, released a report today, “Choice Without Equity.” They said they found greater racial segregation in charter schools than in regular public schools.

Seven years after the Civil Rights Project first documented extensive patterns of charter school segregation, the charter sector continues to stratify students by race, class and possibly language.

The report said that in California, charters provide “havens for white re-segregation from public schools,” and that Latino students are underrepresented. Neither of those things is true in Oakland, as far as I can see.

It’s an interesting point, though, because the goal of many local charter schools seems to be to serve low-income students — which, in Oakland, typically means children who aren’t white. In fact, just think about the solution being proposed in Berkeley Unified to help the city’s lower-achieving (and largely black and Latino) high school students: a charter school just for them. Read the rest of this entry »

As I get closer to my colleagues in my school, my district and in my department, I’m finding tremendous strength. I went to my professional development on Monday beleaguered—still with a box full of papers to grade. I’m stressed about my school closing, my shaky financial situation and how to manage my troubled students while increasing the academic rigor.

I’m not the only one. In fact, I found myself in a room heavy with worn faces. In that shared burden there was camaraderie, albeit in an exhausted form.

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Our editorial board weighed in today on the controversy at Berkeley High, where parcel tax money that pays for after-school, college-prep science labs might instead fund extra teachers to work with struggling students.

At the core of the issue is the stubborn achievement gap between the school’s white students and its black and Latino students. In the 1980s, voters approved the parcel tax money in question to help bridge the gap, but it remains as wide as ever. Most of the students who participate in the after-school science program are white.

The Trib editorial argues that eliminating these rigorous labs is the wrong way to address the racial disparity. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out this report released today on California’s education mandates. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office says many of these activities are costly and don’t help kids or teachers.

Currently, the state requires K-12 and community college districts to perform hundreds of mandated activities, the majority of which provide little benefit to students or teachers. Since the state does not pay for K-14 mandates on a regular basis, the result is billions in outstanding costs the state must eventually pay. In this report, we recommend comprehensively reforming K–14 mandates. If a mandate serves a purpose fundamental to the education system, such as protecting student health or providing essential assessment and oversight data, it should be funded. If not, the mandate should be eliminated.

Do you agree? Which ones should go?

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Adam Taylor has had it. He’s been principal of Brookfield Elementary School for only a year and a half; during that time, he estimates his school has been broken into — get this — at least 25 times.

Two of those break-ins took place within the last week. First, speakers, microphones and other audio equipment disappeared. Then, over the weekend, burglars forced their way through protective fencing and windows to enter the school, which is located in an isolated part of East Oakland, along the Interstate 880, and stole at least 20 computers.

When the first custodian arrived at the school this morning, Taylor said, half the classroom doors were wide open. Read the rest of this entry »

Just before 10 a.m. this morning, a 19-year-old was walking along Foothill Boulevard, right next to the Frick Middle School play yard, when he was hit and critically wounded in a drive-by shooting.

As far as we know, no kids were outside at the time for the school’s prized physical education program (pictured below) or recess. If they had been, who knows what might have happened.

Tribune file photo of a P.E. class at Frick Middle School

The shooting happened just a block from where 11-year-old Alana Williams was hit by a car and killed in a crosswalk on her way to school in October; police have yet to identify the driver, who fled the scene. 

Some of you have made the case for including the East Oakland middle school in the district’s new security cameras initiative; maybe, after this, Frick will make the list.

I love to hear (or read) the stories teachers tell about their kids, especially funny ones. Gehry Oatey, a middle school teacher at Oakland’s Melrose Leadership Academy and a blogger for Teacher, Revised, does not disappoint in his latest blog post, “Keepin’ it real in the kitchen with middleschoolers.”

Imagine you are 12 years old. Your body is starting to do new and fascinating things like grow facial hair, smell, and change its voice. Your emotions are bouncing off the walls regularly and perhaps there is no other time in your life when what you put into your body is of greater significance. Read the rest of this entry »