There were more people than chairs last night in the library of Oakland International High School, the site of a District 1 town hall meeting with Superintendent Tony Smith. 

An air of agitation often accompanies well-attended meetings involving district administrators. But the mood of this event was decidedly optimistic, even warm.

Maybe it was the chocolate chip cookies that school board member Jody London baked for the occasion. That, and Smith’s earnest, reflective delivery, or the fact that the meeting wasn’t called to address a crisis or controversy.  Read the rest of this entry »

California’s 2008-09 API scores – that three-digit number commonly used to rate schools and districts — came out this morning. On a scale of 200 (low) to 1,000 (high), the Oakland school district scored a 695, about 19 points higher than last year.

photo by Hasain Rasheed, courtesy of the Oakland Small Schools Foundation

The good news: I counted 29 Oakland schools whose Academic Performance Index (API) scores went up by 50 points or more in the last year. Futures Elementary School, a small, redesigned school on East Oakland’s Lockwood campus, pictured above, improved by a cool 118 to reach 701. East Oakland Pride on the old Webster campus made a 112-point gain. And Think College Now – a majority-Latino school in Fruitvale with an English learner population of more than 60 percent – saw is API shoot up by 80 points, to 848.

On the other hand: The ”achievement gap” between Oakland schoolchildren of various racial/ethnic groups narrowed ever-so-slightly this year, but it’s still broad enough to comfortably fit a double-wide.  Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Sonia Sotomayor became the first Hispanic justice on the United States Supreme Court.

Sotomayor is Puerto Rican (born in the states), and she grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx. She was later educated in the Ivy League and served as a federal judge for 17 years.

In an Education Week blog, assistant editor Mary Ann Zehr wondered if this first would trigger – as Sec. of Education Arne Duncan put it — a “Sotomayor Effect.”

No doubt, some Latino youths, and other youths as well, will take note and may pay attention to how working hard in school contributed to her success.

Do you agree?

File photo by Cindi Christi/Bay Area News Group

Academics and other experts debate the merits, pitfalls and politics of standardized testing on a New York Times blog. Below are some excerpts; you can access the responses in full through the above link. In your opinion, who has it right? Who has it wrong?

“Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.” — Sandra Stotsky

“Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.” — James Comer

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not yet for sale, but I recently received a book written by the (officially) former director of American Indian Public Charter School, Ben Chavis. It’s titled, “Crazy like a fox: One principal’s triumph in the inner city.”

The book begins like this:

Before I became principal, people called American Indian Public Charter School the zoo. …

The students smoked cigarettes, fought, drank, and broke beer and liquor bottles on Magee Avenue, the road lining the school. There were old, dingy mattresses nearby where they had sex. A staff member allegedly sold drugs to the students, some of whom snuck into a tool shed on campus to smoke pot. Students threw water balloons off the roof and computers out the class windows.

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The New Teacher Project thinks so. The teacher quality research and advocacy group based in Brooklyn, NY, criticizes the way in which teachers are evaluated in a new report titled “The Widget Effect.”

Researchers analyzed the evaluations of teachers in about a dozen districts, from Chicago, Ill., to Little Rock, Ark. They concluded, among other things, that rookie teachers receive little support, that ineffective teachers with tenure are rarely dismissed for poor performance, and that “… on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher…”

You can find the report here.

Here’s an excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Laura A. Oda/Oakland Tribune

It took two years of reporting (and a healthy amount of procrastination) to polish off a retrospective piece on Oakland’s small schools movement. Well, here you have it.

There are three related stories in Wednesday’s Tribune: An analysis of the ins and outs, ups and downs of the effort; a short profile on Elmhurst Community Prep and its principal, a small schools convert; and another short(ish) piece about the schools and the people who haven’t fared so well in this whole experiment. Read the rest of this entry »

In fact, the average 2008 math scores for 9- and 13-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are higher than they have been since 1973, according to data released in The Nation’s Report Card.

The average reading scores of 9-year-old black, white and Latino students across the United States also reached a new high. The reading scores for the other two age groups tested — 13 and 17 — have improved since 2004. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers with Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice found that the graduation rates of girls and non-white students have plummeted as a result of California’s high school exit exam requirement.

Looking at four California school districts, researchers analyzed the graduation rates and other data for kids who tested poorly (in the bottom fourth of all students) on standardized reading and math tests that they took earlier, in the eighth and ninth grades.

The study compared what happened to those low-performing students in the Class of 2005 — before the new graduation requirement took effect — with similar students at the same schools in the classes of 2006 and 2007. 

Read the rest of this entry »

In these tough economic times (or maybe before, for all I know), Oakland school board members are quick to tell us that they can’t make decisions based on what “feels good.” 

Well, a study released today by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis tells us that one program used in Oakland – Experience Corps, a school tutoring program with volunteers older than 55 – does more than that.

Tribune file photo by Diana Diroy

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