College-bound California high school students who are in the United States illegally will soon be eligible for taxpayer-funded financial aid if the governor signs AB 131, a bill known as the California Dream Act. (Read the full text of the most recent version of the bill here.)

The New York Times reported that this bill, if passed, would give illegal immigrants more education benefits than any other state. A Sacramento Bee story said the bill is estimated to cost California $23 million to $40 million a year. According to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, California college students receive about $3.34 billion in state-supported financial aid each year.

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Education Testing Service investigators believe some Skyline High School students cheated on their advanced placement tests, Principal Troy Johnston told families in a letter he sent out this week that details some of the findings (see below).

The Skyline Oracle published a story in June about the ETS’s investigation into possible procedural breaches. In its report, Assistant Principal Marisol Arkin, the school’s testing coordinator, and other school staff downplayed the potential consequences of the inquiry.

“The worst-case scenario is that one or two tests may have to be retaken,” said Ms. Arkin.

Or 30.

Troy Flint, a spokesman for the Oakland school district, said ETS canceled 30 scores on various tests it deemed suspicious; the exams in question were in various subjects administered during a two-week period this spring. Flint said the rest of the results — which were withheld for weeks, pending the investigation — have been or will be released soon.

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When Henry Grant and Darielle Davis were high school seniors in 2006-07, we wrote about their college aspirations. Grant, then an Oakland High School student and All-City Council president, was looking at private, out-of-state colleges. Davis, valedictorian of EXCEL High School in West Oakland, was headed for UC Berkeley.

This spring, we learned they were about to graduate from college. We caught up with them to hear about their college experiences. They told us how they kept going, despite unexpected, life-changing events, and how they found college-level work. (Both said writing was a major challenge at first.)

You can find Grant’s story here, and Darielle’s story here.

Inspired by the superintendent’s call to action, Oakland school custodians have decided to do their part to help Oakland’s African-American students achieve.

They’ve sold Raiders tickets, organized a talent show and held a raffle to raise scholarship money. So far, they have collected $10,000, which they will award to 11 African American boys and girls on Saturday in West Oakland’s DeFremery Park, said Mark Russ, a custodian at Barack Obama Academy in East Oakland.

It’s the first year of the scholarship fund.

“We all started thinking, `We’re all big sports fans,’” said Russ, who led the effort with his supervisor, Roland Broach. “We just kind of felt like it was something we could do.”

For more information about the initiative, a partnership between the district’s Custodial Services Department and the AFSCME union, call 510-879-8352.

The kids who enter Oakland high schools this fall will need to complete the UC/CSU `a to g’ course requirements to graduate in 2015. A major shift, considering that less than half of the district’s 2009 grads had done so.

But a survey by Californians For Justice found that nearly 1 in 4 of students at Oakland High School didn’t know about those requirements, and that 30 percent had never met one-on-one with a counselor. A counselor quoted in the report, “No Knowledge, No College: Oakland Students Rising to the Challenge,” said there were four counselors for more than 1,800 students.

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Zeus Yiamouyiannis is an Oakland-based learning consultant and former professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Carroll College. He gives us his take on education reform in general and “Waiting for Superman” in particular — and the film-maker’s assertion that 120 million new high-paying jobs await us in 2020.

American Education has a reality problem and a vision problem. If you listen to policy leaders, rescuing U.S. education simply requires closing the ethnic/social class academic achievement gap and becoming first in the world in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). This ostensibly will allow millions of young people to be channeled into the 120+ million future “high skill, high pay jobs” according to the controversial new education reform documentary, Waiting for Superman.

Anticipating this, the Obama administration is funding a “Race to the Top” focusing heavily on STEM education. KIPP charter schools spend three times as much classroom time as average schools on math and science. The more comprehensive charter schools are likewise working to ensure their students both get into college and graduate. All this is laudable on some level, but whose purposes does this serve, and does it reflect lasting actual (or even desirable) trends in the job market?

The Reality Problem
So all you need as a ticket to the good life is a four-year college degree? Tell this rosy myth to all the current, rightfully skeptical twenty-something graduates, saddled with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars of college debt.   Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Krupnick, my colleague who covers higher education for the Bay Area News Group, requested e-mail correspondence from the public accounts of Linda Handy, Marcie Hodge and William Riley, trustees for the Peralta Community College District who are running for re-election or, in Hodge’s case, for mayor. He tells us what he found.

A stack of e-mails I obtained from the Peralta Community College District gives an interesting look into the inner world of trustees — and some shed light on why they never return my calls.

The e-mails, obtained through the California Public Records Act, were sent to and from the public accounts of trustees Linda Handy, Marcie Hodge and William Riley, all of whom are running for re-election or for another public office in November. Most of the messages provided nothing but tedium, but others contained some surprising reactions to what I thought were standard requests for information.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Handy responded in one message when told of my request for the e-mails. “How racist is that?”

All three of the trustees, who all happen to be African-American, are running for public office — Handy and Riley for re-election and Hodge for Oakland mayor — and none of the three has been willing to answer questions about their performance on the Peralta board. Looking through their e-mail is one of the few ways for a reporter to tell the public about these officials.

The messages show surprising reactions from other trustees as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Krupnick, our higher education reporter, tells us about the entering class at UC Berkeley, from the chancellor’s point of view, on the first day of classes.

A variety of media types gathered at UC Berkeley today – the first day of classes – to get Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s annual take on the university’s state of affairs. It was his seventh such briefing, if my math is correct, and mine as well.

While Birgeneau previously used this event to announce news, they have become more wide-ranging in recent years. He provides a look at the entering class and updates on other items of interest.

The 2010 version featured a lot of discussion about minority and low-income students. Berkeley, always known for its allegiance to the poor, enrolled a record number of low-income freshmen this year, Birgeneau said. More than one-third of the entering class of 5,000 freshmen – 37 percent – is eligible for the federal Pell Grant, a need-based scholarship.

But Birgeneau also mentioned his concern about the low number of underrepresented minority students. Just 3.2 percent of the class of 2014 is black, while 12.2 percent are Latino, 31 percent are white and 45.6 percent are Asian-American.

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Sharon Fingold’s family lives in Los Altos, but by the time her son registered for the June 12 ACT, the only testing center available was McClymonds High School in West Oakland.

Fingold figured the administration of the college entrance exam at McClymonds would be no different than it was for the SATs and ACTs her children had taken in more affluent areas, such as Los Altos and Palo Alto. Afterward, she was so concerned about what her son and other students experienced that she wrote me (and the ACT) about it.

She outlined the problems in greater detail, but here’s how she summarized what happened: Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Eggers is a famous author and publisher, but he’s also a teacher, an advocate and a philanthropist. His 8-year-old writing project, named after its address –  826 Valencia — offers free writing and editing workshops, a great books/”Best American Nonrequired Reading” class, field trips and drop-in tutoring. (And a pirate store, in case you ever need one.)

Eggers’ latest idea is to make donating college scholarships more appealing by making it more personal, a model used by DonorsChoose.

His new site, Scholar Match, launched a couple of weeks ago and features a number of profiles from students at Oakland Unity High School in East Oakland. They’re starting slow, adding new scholarship recipient hopefuls as donors register, but any college-bound (or college) student may apply to have their profiles posted on the site. The organization is giving preference to San Francisco and East Bay students.

I talked to Eggers about the project and wrote a story about it, which should appear in Sunday’s paper.