There was standing room only in the Havenscourt auditorium tonight.

Parents and teachers crowded into the large room to listen to what the Oakland school board hopefuls had to say, while small children scampered up and down the aisles.

Unlike the painstakingly neutral League of Women Voters events, the organizers of this forum — Oakland Community Organizations — made their case for certain school reform policies at the get-go.

“We cannot afford to go back to the way things were before small schools and charters,” Deanita Lewis, a parent at Havenscourt’s Coliseum College Prep, told the people on the stage.

The climate was so favorable for candidates who embraced independently run, public charters and small schools (loud, mid-sentence cheers, vs. polite silence and half-hearted courtesy applause) that few on the stage dared to say much to the contrary.

Even District 7 incumbent Alice Spearman, Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland school board has endorsed it, and the Assembly’s education committee has kept it alive.
Assembly Bill 2008, which would stop Oakland’s charter movement in its tracks, is another attempt by Sandre Swanson to help the state-run school district get back on its feet and stay there.

Conceived of concern that charters are bleeding the school district of students — and the money that follows them — the bill would prevent any new charters from opening as long as the district has a debt to pay.

In other words, for a looong time.

Oakland’s 32 publicly funded, independently run schools now educate some 8,000 children in the city, and two more are slated to open this fall. One in six public school children in Oakland attend one. (The history of the local charter movement, and all the openings and closings, is well documented here.)

One might argue that it shouldn’t matter how many students leave traditional public schools. If you’re not educating those kids anymore, then why do you need the state dollars alloted to them?  Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t make it to tonight’s special meeting of the school board, but OUSD spokesman Troy Flint was kind enough to keep me posted on the decisions as they came in.

The board voted to

• Wait on the Life Academy decision (to move the small high school, at least temporarily, to the old Carter Middle School campus) until there has been a further review of other options.
• Reject an arrangement that would give the BayTech charter school access to classrooms at Westlake Middle School and McClymonds High School. Staff have until April 21 to come up with another way to accommodate BayTech’s expansion, unless BayTech agrees to a May 1 extension.

And the state administrator, Vincent Matthews, did go with his staff’s recommendation not to allow the Peacemaker Leadership Academy charter to open in Oakland.

Thoughts? Predictions? Observations (from those in attendance)?

The school board holds a special meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday night to vote (my fingers still need to get used to typing that word) on the controversial Life Academy relocation – and (as Peter has noted) a charter school facilities policy that could have implications for non-charter schools.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• A proposal for Life Academy. The state administrator has recommended that the Fruitvale/San Antonio-area school move temporarily — at least for the 2008-09 year — to the old Carter Middle School campus in North Oakland, where International High School is now located.

• A denial. Peacemaker Leadership Academy, Read the rest of this entry »

Not long after Life Academy students and staff learned they’d be uprooted from their Fruitvale-area campus because their school building wasn’t up to snuff with a seismic safety law for California’s public schools, someone paid the small high school a visit.

It was Peter Hanley, director of the Oakland Charter School Collaborative.

Reached this week, Hanley said that he did, in fact, scope out Life Academy’s campus. He liked what he saw. If Life Academy is forced to move, he said, “it would make a nice facility for a charter school.”

Why, you might ask, would it be legal to house one public school in a particular building, but not another? Charters are public schools, after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Saul Drevitch began his tenure at Oakland School for the Arts in November 2006, after the departure of founding director Loni Berry. 

One year later, Drevitch has packed his bags. Yesterday was his last day at the selective downtown charter school championed by Jerry Brown.

At 6:30 p.m. tonight, parents, students and staff meet the new head of school, Donn Harris. Harris was is Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll soon see. The latest progress report for the state-run Oakland school district — conducted by auditors from the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team — will be released at Wednesday’s school board meeting.

If OUSD makes great improvements in its FCMAT ratings, the state superintendent might decide to restore additional powers to the elected school board. Then again, he might not.

You should also come to Wednesday’s school board meeting, or watch it on TV (Channel 27), if you want to know:

• whether school board president David Kakishiba Read the rest of this entry »

If you plan to tell the Oakland school board to share future parcel tax revenues with the city’s 33 charter schools, prepare to be rebuffed in the strongest of terms.

The charter school contingent who tried that tactic at last night’s board meeting ended up on the receiving end of an anti-charter tirade. The charter leaders were even treated to some Halloween-inspired metaphors after announcing they wouldn’t support Oakland’s parcel tax campaign unless their schools were included.

“Dracula blood-suckers,” Read the rest of this entry »

The California Charter Schools Association reports today that California leads the nation in the number of new charter school openings — 89 brand new schools, for a total of 686 statewide.

Oakland came in second only to Los Angeles in the number of new schools. Six new public, independently run charters opened in the city this fall.

As the number of charters grow — and in light of the governance problems and allegations of fraud that came to light this summer at the since-closed Uprep – the Oakland school district seems to be taking a hard look at its authorization and oversight practices.

Tonight, the state administrator considers major changes to the district’s charter school policies. Read the rest of this entry »

Only 15 cities in the country have a larger charter school “market share” than Oakland, according to a report released today from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

With 15 percent of the city’s 47,000 public school students enrolled in charters last year, Oakland tied for eighth place with St. Louis, Mo., Brighton, Colo. and Albany, NY. The report said charter school enrollment in Oakland increased by 8 percent between 2005-06 and 2006-07, while the number of kids in traditional public schools dwindled by 4 percent.

New Orleans was number one, at 57 percent. In Washington, D.C. and Dayton, Ohio, 27 percent of public school children attend the independently run institutions.

Here’s something else: Read the rest of this entry »