Alice Spearman, Oakland’s new school board president, won’t hold that title for much longer.

Spearman just called me up to say she was about to resign her presidency, a post she has held for just four months. She said she came to this decision on her own, and that no one else pressured her to do so. She will remain on the school board.

“I just don’t think I was effective,” she said. “My management style is just different than most.” Read the rest of this entry »

Denise Saddler, a former Chabot Elementary School principal who now supervises elementary schools in North and West Oakland, tells me that the rumors are true: She, too, is vying for the Oakland superintendency.

Like Michael Moore Sr., Saddler is an Oakland native with a long history with the school district, beginning as a teacher in 1979 (She attended the Anna Head School for Girls, which is now Head-Royce, for 12 years).

While chatting with her briefly today, I learned that she was the teachers union president between 1986 and 1992 Read the rest of this entry »

At a closed session special meeting tomorrow night, the Oakland school board receives a short list of semifinalists from Ray and Associates, Inc., the firm hired to help with the district’s superintendent search. The rumor mill is churning, of course, and I’m working to confirm some of the names I’ve been hearing again and again…

For now, I present you with two would-be leaders of the Oakland Unified School District: Michael Moore Sr. and Hae-Sin Thomas. They won’t know until tomorrow night whether they are among the candidates that the school board and its advisory committee will interview. Read the rest of this entry »

photo of a final communications class at Lifelong Medical Care’s adult day care center by D. Ross Cameron/Bay Area News Group

Today marks the end of hundreds of adult education programs for seniors and the disabled — in Oakland, alone. Across the state, classes that once provided a source of needed stimulation for the elderly are falling by the wayside. Read the rest of this entry »

In this Washington Post interview, our new United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, talks about how the Obama administration plans to further its school reform agenda.

Of the $100 billion earmarked for schools in the federal stimulus package, Duncan says, the government has about $5 billion in discretionary funds. With that “unprecedented” amount of money, he said, “We’re gonna work exclusively with those states and those districts that are really willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better.”

I forgot to mention earlier that Read the rest of this entry »

The air in the board meeting room was so thick and humid Wednesday night it was almost sticky, and it wasn’t because of the weather. People jammed the place — and the overflow room upstairs — to speak on one of many, many matters.

I didn’t stay until after 2 a.m., when the meeting finally wrapped up, but one of the things that struck me from the first five hours of the meeting was the principal theme that emerged.

Dozens of people — parents, teachers, neighbors, and even City Councilwoman Desley Brooks — urged the board to keep Al Sye, the popular new Skyline High School principal who received a layoff notice this month after an investigation into the complaints of several staff members. There was also a supportive contingent from Maxwell Park, a newly redesigned/reopened elementary school whose principal, Mary-Louise Newling, got the same dreaded release letter, to staff’s dismay.

And then there was something you don’t see too often: a whole crew of teachers speaking out publicly against their principal. Read the rest of this entry »

Jorge Lopez, a former school dropout who directs the high-performing Oakland Charter Academy (shown here at his middle school in Fruitvale), has been appointed to the California Board of Education.

Lopez is not your typical educrat, if there is such a thing. He’s all about the hard work and humilation approach to schooling, a la Ben Chavis – at least, when it comes to educating poor kids. He says this method would never fly in a more affluent community, nor would it be necessary; in fact, he went the Montessori route for his own preschool-age children.

When I visited the charter academy last fall, Lopez readily acknowledged that the school played mind games with its students in order to motivate them – and that he imposed a daily detention quota on at least one of his teachers (A former teacher had told me that he sometimes had to arbitrarily pick on kids to meet his quota. Lopez confirmed it was true). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long day, so I’ll let an old-fashioned newspaper story tell you what I learned about the allegations against Skyline High School Principal Al Sye — from Sye, himself.

Well, indirectly.

It’ll be in the paper tomorrow, but you can read it here.

photo courtesy of The Skyline Oracle

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that the debate has been postponed — not sure why.

Tribune file photos of Ben Chavis and Yvette Felarca

Let’s just say that when I chose my furlough dates last month, I had no idea that the below event would be happening in the middle of my time away.

Ben Chavis, the infamously temperamental, “Bay Area liberals”-loathing former director of the American Indian Public Charter Schools is taking on Yvette Felarca, a likewise outspoken leader of BAMN (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights And Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary) and her colleague, Shanta Driver, in a debate about charter schools.

I wonder if OUSD is taking any additional security precautions. Read the rest of this entry »

At his Tribune retirement party the other month, Bill Brand told me he’d start posting comments on this blog, now that he was no longer a colleague, but I don’t think he ever did. He said he actually found the site interesting, which I took as high praise.

Bill was a reporter and a beer blogger and, when I first started at the paper, he edited copy on Friday nights. He used to go out of his way to let me know when he liked something I had written. Then he’d shake his head and say how boring he found most articles about education.

Yesterday, I dug up an email Bill wrote me about a year ago. He had just read one of my pieces, which shall remain unnamed. “Fascinating, horrible, depressing,” he wrote. “Keep up the good work.”

He died early yesterday morning, almost two weeks after he was hit by a Muni train in San Francisco. Angela Hill wrote a humorous and touching obituary about him, which I thought I’d post. You can read it here.