Tonight, the Oakland school board voted 5-2 to deny the renewal of Cox Academy — an elementary school in East Oakland that underwent a controversial charter conversion in 2005 during the Randy Ward era — despite its 78-point jump on the 1,000-point Academic Performance Index last year and a room full of parents who spoke in its support.

Typically, charters are renewed for five years. But the district’s charter schools office director, David Montes de Oca, recommended the board grant just a two-year, conditional extension. He said the school was making progress and that he had confidence in its new leader and its teaching staff. Still, he said, he had numerous concerns, including the school’s history of “opaque” management and the fact that its African-American students’ test scores have lagged, falling short of federal test score goals.

“The school is largely an underdeveloped program,” Montes de Oca said. “I remain uneasy.”

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Think College Now, a public elementary school in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, is largely Latino — 68 percent in 2008-09. But tomorrow, the high performing, 120 265-student school will be showcased at a one-day institute in Sacramento that will feature “schools where African American students are succeeding.”

The thing is, I can’t tell you exactly how the school’s African-American students have scored on state tests. Its African-American student population was 34 in 2008-09, about 13 percent of the school enrollment. Which means the group was too small for the school to report its average API score.

If you were organizing a conference to share ideas about improving the education of African-American children, which schools would you invite?

Here is the release on the event: Read the rest of this entry »

The California Department of Education announced the names of 238 schools that serve large numbers of low-income children and have made substantial progress on state test scores. (Interesting that this comes right after Steven Weinberg’s post.) They’ll receive their awards April 21 in Disneyland.

And the winners of the Title I Academic Achievement Awards for 2009-10 are… Read the rest of this entry »

Two East Oakland elementary school principals have appealed to the police and the community for help, saying increased gang activity and violence is threatening to erode the progress they have made during the last several years.

In a letter sent this afternoon to Oakland school district’s police chief and dozens of others from the school district, city and county (and local newspaper), ACORN Woodland Principal Kimi Kean and EnCompass Academy Principal Tram Nguyen detailed their concerns — which include daytime shootings and weekend drug sales in the school parking lot — and proposed solutions.

They write: Read the rest of this entry »

Tribune file photo by Sean Donnelly

For well over a year, parents from Oakland’s Tilden School have cajoled, grilled and held district administrators to task about the future of the unique program, which serves children — many of them, with special needs — in preschool through third grade.

Tilden will close in June. Still, those behind the dogged effort to keep elements of the program alive have scored a substantial victory: a new preschool and special needs diagnostic center at the nearby Burbank campus. Most of Tilden’s students are in preschool. Read the rest of this entry »

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Adam Taylor has had it. He’s been principal of Brookfield Elementary School for only a year and a half; during that time, he estimates his school has been broken into — get this — at least 25 times.

Two of those break-ins took place within the last week. First, speakers, microphones and other audio equipment disappeared. Then, over the weekend, burglars forced their way through protective fencing and windows to enter the school, which is located in an isolated part of East Oakland, along the Interstate 880, and stole at least 20 computers.

When the first custodian arrived at the school this morning, Taylor said, half the classroom doors were wide open. Read the rest of this entry »

Tribune file photo by D. Ross Cameron

Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland’s Chinatown has just been nominated for the prestigious National Blue Ribbon Award, which honors schools for high academic achievement.

Lincoln was one of 35 public and private schools statewide to be nominated for the 2010 award by the California Department of Education, and the only one from Oakland. The school has an API of 933 out of a possible 1,000 points, one of the highest in the district.

About 78 percent of Lincoln’s roughly 600 students  Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Craig Gordon says the heat is back on in his classroom.

It’s cold outside — and, for a number of Oakland kids and teachers, it’s cold inside, too.

As the frost advisory continues, some Oakland schools or classrooms are without heat. “My kids are sitting here with blue lips, shivering, freezing,” said Corrin Haskell, a fourth-grade teacher at Brookfield Elementary School.

Craig Gordon, a teacher at Paul Robeson High School (Fremont campus) in East Oakland, sent me some photos of his room, including one of a student warming his hands over an LED projector.

“Don’t be fooled by the toasty 58 degrees showing on my thermometer,” he wrote. “My room is several degrees warmer than most, because I have lots of windows collecting southern and western rays.”

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District staff are recommending that Explore Middle School, a small school that opened in East Oakland in 2004, close at the end of the year.

Also on the 2010 closure list are two schools that were scheduled to close a year or two down the road, following a lengthy phase out: BEST High School (McClymonds campus in West Oakland) and Paul Robeson School of Visual and Performing Arts (Fremont campus in East Oakland).

Staff didn’t come out with a definitive recommendation for Martin Luther King Jr. and Lafayette elementary schools in West Oakland Read the rest of this entry »

Sports4Kids at Manzanita Community School/Tribune file photo

From a lively, uh, discussion tonight between Oakland school board member Alice Spearman and Chief Academic Officer Brad Stam about Sports4Kids (now Playworks) emerged the beginnings of a philosophical debate about what is “necessary” for Oakland schools in the context of severe and ongoing budget cuts.

Earlier in the evening, the board had discussed the superintendent’s proposed priorities — a set of goals that will theoretically help the board and staff know where to cut $27 million-plus from next year’s budget.

Spearman had also singled out, from a long list of vendors, a few Sports4Kids contracts with individual schools. What she didn’t realize was that in June, before the school district emerged (mostly) from state control, State Administrator Vince Matthews approved a $727,500 master contract with the organization, which runs games and activities at 25 elementary schools in the mornings, after school and at recess.

According to Cindy Wilson, Playworks’ communications director, the organization charges each school a flat fee of $23,500. Since the number of participating Oakland schools went from 40 to 25 this year, Playworks will receive $587,500, less than the total amount allowed under the master contract.

(Side note: An old Sports4Kids Web page lists Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith Read the rest of this entry »