My last test score post was about the big picture in Oakland Unified. But the story wouldn’t be complete without looking at how individual schools are doing. Some are making dramatic improvements in their scores — for the most part, at the elementary school level.

These 21 schools made double-digit percentage point gains this year in the number of kids who tested at “proficient” or better in reading and/or math:

ACORN Woodland Elementary - 19 in math, 23 in reading
Allendale Elementary - 14 in math, 11 in reading
ASCEND Elementary - Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since I started covering this beat, people who follow OUSD goings-on (including school board members) have complained that they have only a vague idea of what Expect Success is, other than a punchline for district critics.

They knew the district was spending millions of dollars in private funding on the initiative (or platform, or project, or slogan, or whatever it is), but the specifics remained a mystery.

At a 5 p.m. special meeting tonight, staff plans to unveil the inner-workings of Expect Success for the board, the audience and the government access television-viewing public: What it is; how much remains of its $43 million budget (very little) and where the money has gone; which mega-foundations have donated what; and which consultants are paid from it.

You can read up on it yourself, if you’d like. It is part of a broader report on OUSD goals for the coming school year under the new, interim supe.

And here are some other upcoming happenings of note: Read the rest of this entry »

The “Outstanding Teachers for All Oakland Students” tax, as the name implies, would raise the wages of the school system’s more than 2,000 teachers — but not its custodians, its secretaries, its teachers’ aides, or its attendance clerks.

Which, of course, raises the question of equity: For the school system to improve, shouldn’t all school employees benefit equally?

Most of the speakers at last night’s hearing — which drew a decent sized crowd for Aug. 4 — seemed to think so. But Noel Gallo, the only school board member who supports OUSD’s latest parcel tax initiative, made an intersesting counterpoint.

Gallo said the board and the district have long acknowledged the importance of improving teaching quality in Oakland. If it’s truly a priority, he argued, the district should throw its resources behind it — and not spread its money too thin. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you had plenty to say about Oakland’s Open Court reading program in an earlier post — that it’s not challenging enough for advanced students, that it’s too scripted, etc. Well, not everyone agrees with you naysayers.

While honoring OUSD for its “Achievement in Reading,” Open Court publisher SRA/McGraw-Hill made this commercial (I mean, short film) about how the reading program has helped to turn the district around.

Watch the video here, and then tell us if you haven’t seen the light.

image from woodleywonderworks’ site at flickr.com/creativecommons

Staff at Oakland’s new alternative middle school have learned many things this year, through trial and error. But, perhaps above all, they came away with this: When you put 90 adolescents with educational, emotional and/or behavioral challenges under one roof, you’d better be ready for them. Really ready.

But the Alternative Learning Community wasn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

The graduation estimate by Education Week’s research center for Oakland Unified’s Class of 2005 — 50.5 percent — is actually slightly better than one that came out about three years ago, which used the same formula. (Remember the one by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard that labeled Oakland and Los Angeles “dropout factories?” That one. It put the rate at 48 percent.)

Who knows? Maybe in another three years, when the data for this year’s graduating class comes out, it will show that Oakland is above the state average (70 percent in 2005).

Now for my perennial disclaimer: No one knows exactly how many kids graduate high school on time — or ever — and how many drop out and never return to school. This is just a researcher’s best guess for the percentage who graduate in four years with a regular diploma.

Check out the Diplomas Count report and an interactive, color-coded map showing estimates for every school district in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

African-American students seem to be thriving, academically, at Thornhill, Chabot, Grass Valley and Kaiser elementary schools, but the achievement of black students varies widely from school to school in California, a soon-to-be-released report by the research group EdSource has found.

The report, Raising African American Student Achievement, lists 45 California elementary schools (out of 615 with Academic Performance Index data on black students) in which African-American children had an average API score above a 785 on a scale of 200 to 1,000. Here is the list.

The full report will be posted Thursday on the EdSource Web site. It includes interviews with the Thornhill principal, Sallyann Tomlin Grass Valley Elementary School Principal Rosella Jackson and others.

As of last year, about 36 percent of Oakland’s public school children were African-American. About one in 30 of California’s roughly 500,000 black public school students goes to school in Oakland.

Notably, none of Oakland’s high schools made EdSource’s list of 16 schools in which the average score for black students was above a 736. Oakland’s average API for black students in 2007 was 602.

One issue that I didn’t see mentioned in the executive summary, one that is rarely raised in test score talk, is the inclusion of first- and second-generation African immigrant students in these statistical “subgroups.” Read the rest of this entry »

Reading First, a multibillion-dollar literacy program adopted in Oakland and more than 5,000 schools in the country as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, might not be superior to other reading programs, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education found.

In a study mandated by Congress, researchers found that kids in schools that participated in Reading First scored no better on comprehension tests than those at schools that didn’t take part, the Washington Post reported.

From the Post story (linked above):

“There was no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension scores in grades one, two or three,” Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, said in a briefing with reporters. He said Read the rest of this entry »

There was standing room only in the Havenscourt auditorium tonight.

Parents and teachers crowded into the large room to listen to what the Oakland school board hopefuls had to say, while small children scampered up and down the aisles.

Unlike the painstakingly neutral League of Women Voters events, the organizers of this forum — Oakland Community Organizations — made their case for certain school reform policies at the get-go.

“We cannot afford to go back to the way things were before small schools and charters,” Deanita Lewis, a parent at Havenscourt’s Coliseum College Prep, told the people on the stage.

The climate was so favorable for candidates who embraced independently run, public charters and small schools (loud, mid-sentence cheers, vs. polite silence and half-hearted courtesy applause) that few on the stage dared to say much to the contrary.

Even District 7 incumbent Alice Spearman, Read the rest of this entry »

There must something about the last two weeks in April that makes people want to get together and sympose. As I get ready to leave for the annual Education Writers Association meeting in Chicago, three local conferences have come to my attention:

• On Friday and Saturday the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, a major player in Oakland’s small schools movement, is co-sponsoring a conference with Stanford University’s School Redesign Network and EXCEL High School. On Friday, groups tour Think College Now, ASCEND, EXCEL, and Leadership High School. Saturday, starting at 9 a.m., researchers, teachers, and community groups talk shop at a school whose future we were just debating: McClymonds, at 2607 Myrtle St. (Registration is required and costs $$$. Some spaces were available as of this afternoon. Here is a link to the conference info). Read the rest of this entry »