Regarding Kweaver’s comment #6, OUSD has a Quality School Review that they are piloting this year. EnCompass was one of the first schools, and if the program is launched district wide, schools will participate every 3 years. During the course of a 3 day visit, the team interviewed faculty, staff, and families. They also conducted classroom and school observations and reviewed many documents. I’m not sure how the information will be disseminated, but it does seem like an opportunity to shine the light on effective practices and identify areas of concern.

This award is a testament to their hard work and leadership – AW has overcome transition and tragedy the last 2 years of such impact that the school could have easily fallen apart. Much respect to the teachers, admin assistant, admin, custodians, food service, aides, parents and volunteers; all must have worked diligently as part of the Woodland’s team.

A few thoughts:

1. What impact has the new facility and library made?

2. I found this listing of AW’s program to be very informative: http://www.acornwoodland.com/learning-at-awe.html

3. Would the staff, students, and parents be willing to do some reflecting and documenting of their work. We’d all benefit from creating a video library of best practices to be made accessible via the district intranet… whereby people can see successful ways of teaching each subject, arts integration, data meetings, work exhibitions, collaborative grading of student writing using your 3-point rubric, etc. Given your students’ use of technology, they could have a “Media Team” that’s commissioned to plan, record, edit, and present these things to the school’s leadership team for final review. Is there money to pay a willing staffer to lead that work? Would the district finance it since it benefits the organization? Would LCI (Leadership, Curriculum, and Instruction) lead that work?

4. Is Acorn willing to disclose how it chooses to allocate funds? In the era if site-based budgeting, it may be beneficial to emphasize/recommend/share/document approaches that have produced results. Their transparency could become a road map for schools to begin their budget conversations.

5. Would Acorn’s leadership team create a list of school habits, systems, foci, initiatives, etc and then have teachers rank each one according to impact on student achievement, fidelity with which it is adhered to, and desire to continue it going forward? More importantly, would you be willing to list the things that Acorn Woodland DOESN’T do – which, by omission, have a positive impact on student achievement.

6. Encompass’ presence on the same campus as Acorn Woodland (along with all shared campus situations) presents a great opportunity for OUSD to do some research – assuming the demographics of both schools are similar. What is the relationship between schools that share a campus? Are there programmatic things they share? What do they have in common and how do they differ – and what are the outcomes related to those things. Maybe our district could have its R&D team do some field research. An opportunity to research, identify, document, and potentially lead staff into codifying best practices would be powerful “D” in R&D.

7. There should come a time when, if a school team, principal, or a teacher needs support in an area, they can just click on the link from the OUSD intranet to see that area being done well by OUSD colleagues. Teacher and Principal evaluations will/should also have hot links so people can immediately see how to improve on their growth areas.
(In the meantime, we could do some due diligence on tools like this: http://programs.pearsonpd.com/teachercompass/observe-video.cfm).

8. Congrats to Kimi Kean and former Woodland teachers, and staff students, who worked to set the foundation for what we see today.

9. Principal Gaines, maybe this will make-up for the Super Bowl. Congrats, man.

Actually most Kaiser families do go on to public, OUSD middle school and high school. And I think the same is certainly true at ACORN Woodland. I’m not sure the exact numbers, but I would love to know. These schools are very much ‘like the rest of OUSD’. I’m a Kaiser parent, but I’m familiar with the phenomenal work happening at ACORN. Congratulations to both schools, as well as to Korematsu for the nomination. I encourage readers of this blog to learn more about some of the amazing positive things happening in Oakland schools. There has been a lot of negativity this year, but I also see some really inspiring things happening in Oakland.

Otherwise I’ll pay for private school or move.

South Berkeley has strong schools these days, no doubt: Emerson, John Muir, Malcolm X all earn raves from parents. LeConte still struggles, but dual-immersion is strong. Longfellow is a respected middle school and even long-suffering Willard is seemingly OK.

It wasn’t always that way, so kudos to BUSD for getting some things right.

It’s great things are going so well at the Primary schools – and good for Kaiser.

Sorry people. Things are not getting better in Oakland, CA, or the nation. Not for Blacks and not for the public as a whole. In fact in Oakland and the other urban areas it’s getting worse. My posts are probably well known for this point. We need to get the children prepared to make it in the Brave New World. It is already far tougher to get into the middle class and stay there than when I was in East Bay Schools. I anticipate things are about to get much worse, not better.

The products of the urban public schools by and large are missing out on what should be done for them. Especially the black students. This is reflected in the math and verbal scores, the unemployment of these students, their economic prospects and the general health and mortality rates for them. I think these numbers are worse than in the 1960s. I attribute the avoidable problems to both the lack of discipline and the lack of appropriate education & training.

So back to the thread. Time and time again I see OUSD promoting some photo opportunity at a primary school where all is wonderful. I know that is someone wants to deceive people into thinking that all is well in education, they push the primary schools in their PR. Here it is again.

Where is the OUSD promotions about the high school aged student population and how they are doing well – doing better – anywhere (in any measure)?? Where are the stories about recent graduate statistics? Listen to the overwrought language of those praising this tidbit of good news. Have we learned nothing about propaganda and PR? And as far as those saying the place may be falling apart by my Johnnie had a good time.. just keep saying that. It’ll get you by.

Good for Kaiser. Now the black kids leaving OUSD can’t read and write – and when they can they typically choose not to. They also have occupational problems not seen with other groups. Need to work on that. All is not well at OUSD and these PR releases don’t do it for me.

It’s not a big deal that good students do well. We expect that. I want to see something being done with the average OUSD students that is visible beyond puberty.

Quit thinking I’m casting stones at your babies or not appreciating how really wonderful it is at the party at Kaiser. Show me a surprising accomplishment not a self congratulatory party for the winners who are too young to evaluate anyway.

Brave New World