Photo of Benjamin Schmookler courtesy of Howard Ruffner

Benjamin Schmookler, principal of Media Academy – a small school on East Oakland’s Fremont Federation campus — agreed to be dunked today during a celebration of the school’s improved test scores. Media Academy’s state test scores went up by 79 points to 600 (on a scale of 200 to 1,000), the biggest gain seen in all of the district’s high schools this year.

Between 2008 and 2009, 80 percent of Oakland’s elementary schools improved their scores in math AND in English language arts, according to a school district analysis. (A list of the most-improved schools is posted below.)

Oakland’s not alone in its upward trend. On the page 4 and 7 of this news release, you’ll see increases in English and math scores, statewide, especially in the early grades.

John Boivin, who administers the STAR Program Office at the California Department of Education, said there were no major changes this year in the test, itself, or in the scoring of it. He said his team hadn’t yet drawn any conclusions about why the scores went up.

Boivin did say, though, that the law only requires the state to change half of the questions on each test from one year to the next. In other words, experienced teachers have a pretty good idea of what’s going to be on it. Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have read by now, President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, plan to encourage school administrators to close and re-open 5,000 of the nation’s worst schools — and hire a new slate of teachers and principals, or convert them into independently run charter schools  — with $5 billion in education stimulus funds as an incentive.

If that’s the secret to improving public education, Oakland is really ahead of the curve. I wonder if the district is even eligible for these funds; it’s already closed and re-opened most of its lowest-performing schools and converted some to charters. Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama probably didn’t make too many teacher union friends this morning after a speech about education at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Obama called for the support of successful charter schools, a new academic calendar that would add more instruction time, and better assessments of student achievement — and of teacher performance.

Here’s an excerpt from a detailed CBS/AP story:

He did not propose any specific legislative goals on education in his speech Tuesday at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Instead, the president talked about how America must work much harder to keep pace with international competitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Teachers at Monarch Academy and at Lighthouse Community Charter School’s secondary program (grades 7-12), will get more than a pat on the back for the academic strides that their students made last year.

They will share $67,000 and $29,000, respectively, thanks to an award from the Effective Practice Incentive Community (rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), a new initiative of New Leaders for New Schools. It amounts to roughly $3,500 per teacher.

The award money, itself, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund. That, if you recall, is the same source of cash bonus money that the Oakland teacher’s union rejected in 2007 Read the rest of this entry »

Tribune file photo by Ray Chavez

California schools don’t have enough funding and they provide “inadequate and unequal learning conditions and opportunities,” according to the latest annual report by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

The report is more of an advocacy piece than a research analysis, but it does raise (and answer, in no uncertain terms) important questions about the state of public education in California — its class sizes, course offerings, college-going rates, graduation rates, among other measures.  Read the rest of this entry »

The principalship at Oakland’s largest high school is notorious for its political challenges. It’s no place for beginners. But from what I’ve heard, Skyline High School’s various factions have embraced Al Sye, a veteran administrator — and the latest in a string of people to inhabit the principal’s office.

Recently, however, Sye became the subject of a central office investigation, and it remains to be seen how long he’ll stay at Skyline, or whether he’ll return for a second year. Chris Dobbins, a school board member who represents the high school, said Sye is off for two weeks, but didn’t say why.

What happened? Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama announced today that he would nominate Russlynn Ali to be the assistant secretary for civil rights at the United States Department of Education.

Ali is vice president of Education Trust, a civil rights and education advocacy group. She also directs its Oakland-based partner, Education Trust-West, so she’s endured a number of interviews with me.

In case you were wondering, Ed Trust supports the “results-based accountability” of No Child Left Behind as a way to narrow the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Elvis’s birthday, too, judging from the plastic bust that appeared in the middle of the newsroom today. But I digress.

With the presidential election behind us, efforts to reauthorize and re-shape the landmark education law might start up again in earnest.

Many of you have watched public education transform because of NCLB. What’s different, and what has stayed the same? What in the act, if anything, would you keep in place, and what would you pitch? 

If nothing else, hasn’t NCLB focused more attention on children who have historically been failed by the system? I guess the real question is whether that attention has helped those kids and the schools they attend, and how progress should be measured.

Here’s what American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten had to say: Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t need to have served on a board of education to know this: Closing schools is a political nightmare. Imagine hundreds of impassioned teenagers marching eight miles from their school in East Oakland’s King Estates neighborhood to protest its fate. I don’t need to describe the indignation, the tears, the news trucks and cameras everywhere.

But phasing schools out, one grade at a time? Allowing them to die a slow death, without forcing out any existing students? Families and kids who don’t yet attend a school are much less likely to rally around it.

I have a feeling that’s the wave of the future here in Oakland.

Tonight, the state administrator is set to approve plans to phase out BEST High School, one of two small schools remaining at West Oakland’s McClymonds campus, by 2011, and to close the nearly phased-out only Peralta Creek Middle School (Calvin Simmons) after its last group of eighth-graders is promoted to high school.

Fremont Federation’s Paul Robeson School of Visual and Performing Arts has suddenly Read the rest of this entry »