now im not the smartest peron in the world but i believe it ws a inside job.

What you dismiss as stereotypes I know as experience.

The last time I was at a OUSD class was Oakland Tech in the very early 1970′s – summer session run by UC Berkeley. Since then I have only had dealings with products of the schools. I am not impressed by the progress of family there. I find what they bring back (currently) from OUSD school is afro-centric leftist fantasies which will make them perishable in higher ed and industry, and worse.

As far as my assumptions and stereotypes – sorry Lisa, the math and verbal skills at OUSD are documented every year and published statewide and area wide by the Tribune among other media. Moreover, the dropout rates, and other pathology such as pregnancy, VD and crime stats for Oakland are also widely discussed. I have family and friends in Oakland who work in the courts and hospitals – for generations.

Your students need to re-think the word stereotype. I grew up in the Oakland Area. My family and friends live your stereotype, the ones who haven’t moved away from Oakland to Contra Costa County and States beyond. I’m satisfied I know the continuing decline in Oakland but your particular classroom, no. I certainly hope your own classroom is an exception to the scores coming out of OUSD. But the averages are what they are. So I don’t think I need to see your class right now. They may be great. I hope they are. But I’m not thinking of an individual class – or I would go look.

As far as ghetto kids… well I see them every day. I need no classroom visit although I have sub taught a lifetime ago at High School level.

While your class discusses this thread have them review mortality tables for Blacks and Whites in CA or nationally. If you can, compare those tables from 20 years ago to the current ones. Compare the HIV tables from 1980 to today and watch the progress in the numbers black vs white.

The reason I bring that up is that in my county the typical new HIV diagnosis is a black female age 24 who has been infected nearly 10 years. That group is probably only a few percent of the county population. I’m in Northern Ca and our urban high school (largely black) on top of it’s other problems is a vector of VD (as well as teen pregnancy). Nothing will be done to stop it. I blame the “education” of the public schools for all this, not the parent(s) and not the families. If the schools did their jobs their products would live better.

Oakland has the distinction of being one of the few counties where your TB program had to be taken over by the state to combat a pediatric TB outbreak due to the failure of your civil service local Health Dept to do their jobs…Supposedly the TB Control staff just stopped field work until Children’s Hospital called in State Health Dept in response to TB cases coming in at elevated levels. I have no illusions as to the East Bay political establishment detecting, reporting or fighting declining conditions for urban black youth. They’d just as soon pat everyone on the head and tell them they’re special.

My interests are medical and legal (undergrad emphasis in Econ History). That means nowadays I deal with a lot of black folks in a lot of trouble. Those are disproportionately young people. Over the last 30 years I’ve seen things get worse and believe if the public schools functioned as before, this mess wouldn’t be happening.

I have no intention of going into politics. Like many of my extended family members I will leave CA in time because I believe CA will become unlivable. Fixing the public schools so that it’s products have better average “survival” rates is key. Well it’s just not happening. Your class may be an exception, make it so, but you can’t escape those annual published statistics for OUSD.

My exchange with Doohopper was lost I think on him. I wasn’t saying that black girls need to be housekeepers and nannies, I was saying that they are (practically) no longer allowed in those fields – the entry level jobs for proletariat are being closed to public school blacks and they don’t even see what’s happening when they can’t get a job that they didn’t want anyway. Bad scene.

Good luck to all of you. Thanks for the invite. See you on other threads I hope.

You have been invited multiple times in this thread to visit our school. My students would like to meet you and to explain to you — and actually show you — why they think you are off the mark in many of your assumptions and stereotypes of OUSD and of “ghetto” kids.

But you don’t give us your real name. And we don’t have your e-mail information. My students would be happy to interview you, but they only use real names in their stories.

Lisa Shafer
Media Academy

At some point I want to let go of a thread and wait for another one. And I do provoke. Always have. I need to read more of experiences people have with OUSD and hope that my opinion, the rather low one, is off the mark. One can always hope. I have family in Oakland and family in OUSD. I no longer live in the area.

I’m hoping there will be more posts about day to day life in OUSD schools. My ire is based on the rather awful published annual stats, my own experience in Oakland and with Oakland Public Schools “graduates”. And my belief that a decision has (long since) been made to write off the blacks OUSD serves as uneducatable and undisciplinable. I say they are not. I think toughlove works.

I remember training a new hire in downtown Oakland in 1974, a young woman of maybe 20 years old. She was unable to operate a standard multiline telephone. She couldn’t figure out how to tell which line was ringing, answer, and put someone on hold. I have a host of other experiences working in Oakland in the early ’70′s with public school products unable to speak English, read and write, whose intellectual curiosity seems to be dead by 19. I don’t believe things have improved at all. My experiences around Oakland now and the stats I see say things are even worse.

I’m able to remember the 1960′s and this was not the case then. Adults in their 30s today don’t know what it was like when people (meaning the underclass) were better educated (they could read and write), had driver’s licenses, and had jobs and could get one whenever they wanted to change. Everybody was expected to do better than their parents and they actually did. And the BBQ was really good too.

I’m not clinging to the past, the go-go years are still here – if you are Vietnamese. But I think OUSD needs to come under increasing fire for the poor prospects of the kids they have “taught” for 12 years.

I was hoping to read a real answer and meaningful explanation, not a (seemingly rude) dismissal of the questioner.

That will leave a whole lot of the teachers like those above unemployed. I can hardly wait. Life could improve for all.

Internet=Creative Distruction.

Oh, Cranky: If you work under conditions like you mentioned you are part of the problem. No teacher should live like that. If that’s what things are like for teachers at OUSD, you should have changed careers a long time ago.

What the progressive teacher colleges are preaching these days is Love + High Expectations + Accountability (but not necessarily through standardized testing). Implementing such a regimen with large roomfuls of mostly damaged young people every day, however, is a herculean task. I don’t doubt Michael Jackson and Mr. G are successful teachers with very different philosophies. Looking around the district, however, it would seem that *average* teachers can do little more than keep the conveyor belt bumping forward.

We need a system where average teachers and administrators and even less-than-average students can succeed. Where success isn’t dependent on billionaire’s grant or superstar superintendent. That means more money, more discipline, higher expectations for parents and students, significantly more time for planning and cooperation, better training, etc. etc.

Currently it seems we are just hoping to create an army of perfect cyborgs who will march into a classroom, close the door for the year and, without management or support, be strict, fair, charismatic, egoless, frugal, completely self-sacrificing, empathetic, sturdy, healthy wunderkinds who will lead these broken children to health and wealth. These gems do exist — we all remember one or two from our own education — but they are RARE by definition.

Good luck with building that army. Every year we are told this army is being developed! And every year the district turns over about a third of its teachers.

I am a second year teacher in Oakland. I *do* care about my kids. I desperately want them to succeed. I try very hard to hold them accountable, to build curriculum that will both intrigue them AND support career and educational futures. I hope to make this my career and stay here in Oakland.

However, every night I arrive home, as a parent of two, drained and exhausted. My adrenal glands are spent, my brain is a rag and I am obessing over which students are failing, how to make tomorrow better than today, and so on.

Of course, as a new teacher, this is my lot. However, when I look around and see veterans suffering nearly as much — frustration, exhaustion, despair, so many students failing to learn, to care — I wonder at how I think I can do better? Am I so special?

It may be that: To be a truly good teacher in this district, you need to either be an efficient genius or work 60-70 hours a week. You will spend significant amounts of your own paycheck on school supplies. You may be harrassed or mistrusted by administrators who have never watched you teach for more than 30 minutes. You may be threatened by kids or parents. You will hear things from your students that will break your heart. You will go home fried, with little left to give your family.

Is this too dark? Maybe. Certainly there are veterans who keep coming back and giving it their all. I think they are workaholic caregiver types and, again, a minority of the potential job pool. They are terribly exploited, but have accepted that as the burden of doing good and getting to work with kids — many of whom did thrive and return to give thanks.

Kind of ironic, huh?