The East Oakland school of the Arts at Castlemont is losing 22 percent of its positions next year, according to a new district report. Westlake Middle School, United for Success Academy, Sankofa Academy and Fred T. Korematsu Discovery Academy — to name a few — also plan to make deep staffing cuts that exceed their enrollment declines.

For the first time since Oakland adopted its controversial school-based budgeting system, the school district’s financial department has made public school-by-school reports. The one-page documents include projected changes in enrollment, revenues, spending and staffing levels. In other words, they show the effects of the state budget cuts and enrollment decline at the school level.

Photo Caption: “Due to budget constraints, ALL employees are expected to grow their own pencils.”

A word of caution when looking through these documents: Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Kwok can breathe a sigh of relief. We’ll no longer be text-messaging him, “dropping by” to observe his classroom, or interviewing his students about how he’s doing.

Kwok, 23, was a first-year teacher at West Oakland’s EXCEL High School who graciously allowed us to document his experience, “recording my every blunder,” as he wrote in a piece that ran in today’s Tribune. (Read the last installment and watch the latest video here.)

Kwok was candid about his shortcomings and his struggles — including his decision last fall to assign easier work to his students because so many of them were failing. 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

When it comes to filling teaching vacancies, the Oakland school district relies heavily on “interns,” college graduates who are still working to complete their certification. About 40 percent of new OUSD hires in recent years fall into this category; they come through “alternate route” programs such as Teach for America and Oakland Teaching Fellows.

Andy Kwok, the teacher we’ve been following at EXCEL High School, is one of them. He majored in biology, the subject he teaches, but jumped straight into the classroom after a short summer preparation program. He took education classes at night.

Kwok and other intern teachers are considered “highly qualified” by the U.S. Department of Education. But Public Advocates, a civil rights law firm, challenged that definition in a lawsuit last year. They argued it violates the spirit of the No Child Left Behind law, and that it lets school systems get away with hiring less experienced teachers. Read the rest of this entry »

A law that would protect high school and college journalism teachers from being reassigned, fired or otherwise retaliated against because of student speech has passed the Assembly.

This reminds me of one of my first blog posts, last June.

Anyway, here’s the release, sent out Monday:

SACRAMENTO – On a bipartisan 66-5 vote, the California State Assembly today approved legislation to protect high school and college teachers and other employees from retaliation by administrators as a result of student speech, which most often happens when a journalism advisor or professor is disciplined for content in a student newspaper. The bill, which was approved by the Senate in April on a 35-2 vote, only requires a procedural concurrence vote in the Senate before consideration by the Governor.

Senate Bill 1370 by Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo) follows a 2006 law also authored by Yee which prohibits censorship of student press by administrators and protects students from being disciplined for engaging in speech or press activities.

There have been a number of documented cases throughout the state of journalism advisors being dismissed or reassigned due to student speech. In fact, Senator Yee’s office has learned of cases in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Claremont, Fremont, Novato, Oxnard, Rialto, and Garden Grove. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have seen today’s story by Doug Oakley, my Bay Area News Group colleague, about accusations of racism at Berkeley’s Oxford Elementary School. Oxford is located in a predominately white area of Berkeley, and a number of children are bused in from other areas as part of the school district’s racial integration policy (See the school’s demographic breakdown here).

Two families have yanked their children from the school since January, apparently because they felt their kids were in a hostile environment:

“I recently pulled my kid out of Oxford right before spring break,” said Kim Oliver. “There has been so much blatant inequity on campus and in the classroom that I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Oliver and other parents told Oakley that they believe black children are disciplined more harshly Read the rest of this entry »

Now I know of at least two new teachers who plan to return to their Oakland schools in the fall.

Nicole A. Pierce, a first-year teacher at West Oakland Middle School, writes on the Tribune’s My First Year blog about her decision to come back. She also tells us about a growing sense of can-doism among the teaching staff as the year went on, about why she didn’t end up blogging much this year, and about one thing she plans to do this summer.

Yes, the idea of having first-year teachers post regularly (and not anonymously) about their experience — on top of everything else they have to contend with — might have been unrealistic from the start. But when they have written, I’ve enjoyed their honest, sometimes funny and always well-crafted prose. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Kwok, a 23-year-old biology teacher whose progress we’ve followed this year, has decided to return to EXCEL High School in the fall, despite his struggles.

For the most part, we told the earlier stories in the My First Year series from Kwok’s point of view. This time, we decided to feature three of his students: Sunshine Mapp Parker, Brandon Stewart and Travon Adkins.

Read the stories and watch the videos here.

I usually steer clear of schools when they’re taking their annual spring exams, so I don’t have a good sense of what the atmosphere is like during these high-stakes periods.

Some schools, I hear, organize i-Pod giveaways and other gimmicks to motivate kids to show up and take the tests seriously. Last year, Mt. Diablo High School in Concord held a controversial assembly in which kids were grouped by ethnicity (and pumped up accordingly).

What’s the scoop this year? Has anyone spotted 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 »