Dan Adiletta is a first-year teacher at Explore College Preparatory Middle School in East Oakland.

So there I am, fighting for control of a classroom against students sloshing knee-deep in disrespect towards each other and towards me, and all the while my observing school coach is clacking dourly on her computer. I know what my lesson and my classroom management is lacking; I need to include greater academic rigor and better routines and instructions to minimize disruptive behavior.

Tomorrow will be better, I say, I’ll work my tail off to make tomorrow better.

I come home late because of a flurry of mandatory meetings and student requests. I was at school an hour and a half early to prep. My lunch break was 20 minutes. I taught five back-to-back classes that were all a grueling struggle. I sit on my couch, my shirt untucked and left eye twitching, with my head in my hands feeling miserably guilty for failing the students whose education is in peril. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sobering statistic: Of the 2,890-plus Oakland Unified students who live in West Oakland, 1,270 attend schools in other parts of the city, according to school district data.

That’s 44 percent, and it doesn’t count children who go to public charter schools or private schools — or to Berkeley Unified, for that matter.

What to do? A new group of city, school and county officials and community leaders has formed to revitalize public schools in West Oakland during a time of ongoing budget cuts ($27 million out of next year’s OUSD budget).

The group is called the West Oakland Brain Trust, and it was convened this fall by school board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge, who represents District 3.

Some of OUSD’s top dogs came to its Tuesday morning meeting. Superintendent Tony Smith Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, eight Oakland schools opened with fewer teachers than they had on Friday — and not because of sudden resignations.

There’s a word for the teacher and student reshuffling that happened today: consolidation. It happens when fewer kids enroll at a given school than expected and the school’s budget is in the red. Troy Flint, the district spokesman, said the decision is made centrally, and is done “as a last resort.”

In all, 11 employees were told to pack up their classrooms, and all of their students were sent to other teachers. Last year at this time, five teachers were consolidated. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: OUSD spokesman Troy Flint says that while closure or merger is a possibility for each school, the district is not planning to recommend this outcome for all of the focus schools. Other possibilities include increasing enrollment, support, etc. So, the same as in previous years.

OUSD has released an updated list of schools that have not measured up academically, that have too few students to be financially viable, or both. They’re called “Focus Schools,” but as anyone who’s ever been on the list knows, it really spells the possibility of a merger or closure. Especially now, when the district is looking to cut $27 million from next year’s budget.

The list doesn’t look much different from last year’s, even though the criteria have changed slightly: Read the rest of this entry »

photo courtesy of Shuai Chen, co-founder of Splash

If you know a middle or high school student who has a free day this weekend and might be interested in, say, neuroscience, dancing, artificial intelligence, juggling, or painting, keep reading!

More than 100 Stanford University students are playing teacher for the weekend in a marathon learning session on the Palo Alto campus. It’s called Splash, and it runs Saturday and Sunday. The full price is $40 for both days (and $20 for siblings), but the event organizers say that participants who can’t afford the fee can just say so and they don’t have to pay anything.

You can learn more about Splash, and its (literally) 209 course offerings, here. This is the third time students have organized the event, and they expect up to 1,000 kids to participate. Those who haven’t registered online can just show up on Saturday or Sunday.

Can’t make it this weekend? They’re planning another one in April.

How do teachers inspire powerful learning? A new Web site, Rethink Learning Now, is trying to stimulate debate about this question. It is seeking brief descriptions of effective and influential teachers. Here is my submission. I hope some of you will submit your experiences also and copy your statements here on Katy’s site. -Steven

The teacher who influenced me the most was Josiah Sheilds, my eighth grade American History teacher, whose class I entered 50 years ago this month.

It was not his lectures that I remember, nor his homework assignments or tests. No, what fascinated me were the trials of historical figures he conducted in his class.

Each month students charged and tried an important and controversial person of the time period being studied. Students took the roles of the accused, witnesses, lawyers, and jurors. The student lawyers had the largest roles, researching the time period, preparing opening and closing statements, recruiting and prepping witnesses, and cross-examining the opposition witnesses. Read the rest of this entry »

photo from m_napper’s photostream at flickr.com/creativecommons

This morning, I stopped by one of Oakland’s large, comprehensive middle schools to see what was happening there this year. If you’re not familiar with Westlake, it’s the one across from Whole Foods on Harrison Street, near Lake Merritt. About 600 students go there. Assistant Principal Peter Van Tassell (”VT,” to the kids), an Oakland public schools grad, showed me around.

During passing periods – when Van Tassell wasn’t greeting students by name, rushing stragglers to their next class or telling kids to throw out their gum — we talked about Westlake and about public education in Oakland. (He has some wild stories of OUSD in the 80s, along the lines of what Steve Weinberg described.)

Standardized testing aside, the practice of teaching has also changed quite a bit since either one of us was in school. First off, Westlake teachers are discouraged from lecturing too much and from requiring students to raise their hands before speaking. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Weinberg retired in June after a long career in Oakland’s public middle schools. His wife, Georganne Ferrier, also retired from OUSD; she taught English at Oakland High. (True story: They met in 1967, on their first day of student-teaching at McClymonds). Weinberg will share his insights with us, from time to time, as a guest blogger. -Katy

When someone retires after 40 years of teaching, it is only fair to expect that he be able to offer some insight into the changes that have taken place over that period of time. There seems to be a general feeling that things are getting worse in American schools, but when I look back at the really dramatic changes in the past 40 years, all of them have been positive:

When I began teaching in 1969, there were students in my regular eighth grade English classes who could literally (or illiterately) not read 10 words. These were students who entered school before President Johnson’s War on Poverty had set up the Head Start Preschool program and Title One funding for schools in low income areas. Although we still have many students who read far below grade level, the complete non-reader has disappeared from regular classes at the schools where I have worked.

In my early years of teaching, I would have to send students on a daily basis to the nurse’s office to have essence of cloves put on their gums to give them relief from untreated dental problems. Between the fluoridation of water and the Medi-Cal dental program, these problems no longer interfere with students’ abilities to learn.

In the late 60s and early 70s, our school had to call ambulances regularly (certainly several times a month) to take students to the hospital for drug overdoses. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk about a complex problem. My brain hurt just writing about it. Well I did, finally. You can find the story about the district’s algebra experiment in today’s Tribune.

image by Sean Donnelly/Oakland Tribune

photo by Aric Crabb/Staff

The award-winning music program at Oakland’s Claremont Middle School is a big source of pride; the band started up a few years ago with only eight students, and its ranks quickly swelled to over 100. I wrote about this success story last year.

That’s why some families were dismayed to see “music exploration” printed on their child’s class schedule last week, instead of band or orchestra. Some said they were told at orientation that band would be part of the after-school program from now on, instead of a class, but no one seemed to know what “music exploration” was. The Oakland teachers union got involved.

“Clearly, this is not going to stand,” said Betty Olson-Jones, the union president.

The 400-student middle school is undergoing some big changes this year: a new principal, Kenya Crockett, a new bell schedule, and  “houses,” or groupings of students within each grade-level.

So why mess with something that’s working?

The school’s leadership has apparently decided not to, according to a memo given out at Monday night’s PTA meeting Read the rest of this entry »