An example of Oakland’s flourishing art scene? No. Seismic activity along the Hayward Fault in August? Nope. The EEG reading of a hyperactive six year old? No, but you’re getting closer.

Number crunchers at the Oakland Unified School District made a nifty interactive graph that lets you plot the improvement - or the opposite - of every school in the district (excluding charters) between 2004 and 2010.

Pick a school and a category - the number of students proficient in reading and writing, for example -  and press play. You can watch the school’s progress on standardized tests over time. Some schools are amazing. Take a look at Peralta Elementary. Others, however, don’t move around much on the graph. When you see a big clump of schools migrate left to right across the graph toward a higher percentage of proficient students, OUSD’s claims of being the most improved big school district in the state become more tangible.

It’s an interesting way to show the numbers, but it’s not the whole story. We hope OUSD adds more parameters to the interactive chart, including race and students eligible for a free lunch.

It’s easy to forget that there’s a contested race for Oakland Unified’s Governing Board this fall. Incumbents Chris Dobbins (District 6) and David Kakishiba (District 2) don’t face opposition, but Ben Visnick, a teacher at Oakland High School, and a former president of the OUSD’s teachers union is challenging Gary Yee (District 4), the board’s president.

With OUSD’s school year beginning next week, we thought it was high time to start asking the candidates their thoughts on certain issues. There was no better place to start than the Los Angeles Times’ groundbreaking investigation into the effectiveness of some 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles Unified. By matching teachers' names with test scores run through a complex (and controversial) algebraic formula, the LA Times produced a district-wide of analysis of teacher effectiveness.

This really made some people angry. The LA Times prompted the union representing LAUSD’s teachers to call for a boycott of the paper. The investigation goes right to the heart of the hottest debate in education: To what extent should teachers be held accountable for the success of their students?

We asked Gary Yee and Ben Visnick what they thought of the LA Times’ investigation, and if they think OUSD should do something similar so parents and guardians have another way of measuring teacher effectiveness. Note: We'll be talking to Kakishiba and Dobbins on other issues in coming weeks.

Ben Visnick

A teacher at Oakland High School with more than 30 years experience working in Oakland Unified, and a former president of the Oakland Education Association, Visnick says that teachers need to be a paid a lot more than they are now. He’s talking about a starting salary closer to the $70,000 rookie cops with the Oakland Police Department earn at the start of their careers. Visnick also proposes bringing Piedmont and Emeryville public schools into Oakland Unified, a special tax for Oaklanders making more than $106,000, a flat tax on every airline ticket in and out of Oakland International, as well as every container in the port.

"On pages 54-55 of the joint OEA/OUSD Contract there is a section (13.12) which references a SIAP (Site Instructional Assistance Program).  This is a negotiated clause which has never been implemented because Oakland site administrators have refused to be evaluated by teachers.

Thus, we have a double standard.  Management, from Arne Duncan to the LAUSD administration, wants to publicly evaluate teachers on an unreliable test-score based formula without listing any mitigating factors facing certain classes, schools and teachers (including horrible school leadership), but they do not want teachers to be able to evaluate the boss!

This goes directly to the core of the issue.  Rather than support and retain good teachers (who are the vast majority in the classrooms of Oakland and LA)  with higher professional salaries and lower class sizes, the opposite is occurring.  Class size is rising and salaries/health care coverage is dropping.  To distract the public from the above, the LA Times makes it appear that very many teachers are incompetent.  A failure to make teaching a rewarding career for the vast majority, and retaining teachers in urban schools is the main issue.  In other words, the constant turnover of teachers and the loss of many excellent ones every year in districts like LA and Oakland.

Due process for all working people must be addressed.  In any occupation, there are ways to make competent workers look bad unless there is a counter process for an employee to respond.  Once the negative info is published publicly, it is difficult to clear the employee's name so the process must be confidential to have real due process especially when children are involved.

Finally, with all the emphasis on standardized testing as a basis for competency, some teachers are now teaching to the test or are even tempted to help their students cheat.
If we ever tied teacher pay to test scores (merit pay), can you imagine what could happen?"

Gary Yee

 A graduate of Castlemont High School, Yee is the current president of Oakland Unified’s governing board. He is a longtime teacher, principal, and teacher of teachers.

"Assuming that the research the Los Angeles Times conducted meets accepted research standards, I don't have any problem with publishing the report. I know that in the past, when this research has been conducted, there have been some sampling and control issues, as there often are with value added studies. I would want to be sure that anyone deemed effective is at least as effective with struggling students as they are with successful ones. But because the sample is the entire LAUSD, I feel more comfortable with the validity of the overall distribution of effectiveness (as measured by CST), and the conclusions derived from the study as a whole, than I would in using this methodology to rank teachers in a school, comparing one to another in terms of effectiveness.

The two parts I appreciated about what I saw in the preliminary report, were first that there was an attempt to understand what "growth" or "value added" might mean (is it just testing outcomes, or is it more) as opposed to static year to year comparisons. Second, the researchers tried to understand the difference between the teaching practice of "effective" and "ineffective" teachers. I think the conclusion is that it is pretty difficult to accurately predict which teacher would generate the most "value added" effect.  In the article, Karen Caruso would seem to be able to add plenty of value, but in fact, her student gains were not impressive.

However, identifying individual teachers, or ranking them, seems extreme right now, because words we all use, like "good teachers," "effective teachers," "strong teachers," "high quality teachers" mean different things to different people (for a brilliant discussion of these differences, see Larry Cuban's blog.  Invariably, for parents, good teaching has to do with the effect of the teacher on their particular child.  In fact, when I have had discussions of "good teachers," either when I was a teacher, a principal, or even now as a board member, the value added question ("What can I expect for my child in terms of increased achievement from attending class this year?") is rarely the center of our discussions, unless it is "my child is gifted and I want to be sure that he/she is challenged this year."  It's also why the same teacher can be called "great" and "awful" by two different sets of parents.

Usually, standards of teacher effectiveness that I have heard have to do with making a classroom inviting, orderly, and engaging, ensuring that the children are safe and have friends, hearing from their children that school was fun, lots of extra activities, confidence that the instruction doesn't repeat the previous year's work, and making sure that the teacher has a reputation for being a good teacher.

In fact, I think that defining effective teaching and seeing that it occurs with regularity for all kids, and directing resources in that direction, are really the most important things we will be trying to do in Oakland this year.  What is effective teaching, in all settings, all grades, and with all children?  We think we know it when we see it, and when we see the evidence, but we don't always know how to get from chaos to clarity, in every setting.  Even the Los Angeles Times article does not pretend to be able to define it with clarity.  We will be doing just that this year with a teacher effectiveness task force, composed of Oakland teachers. Stay tuned. The gains that OUSD has seen in achievement across all elementary grades is a real indication that we are definitely improving in most schools, but we have yet to really understand those teaching practices that are most effective with all of our students.

Finally, I was really impressed by the article’s willingness to reflect on practice that was cited on the part of teachers who did not produce added value. That is the key to whole-district reform; helping all teachers, especially those who are struggling, to improve their practice, quickly. A first step in that process is a serious reflection on practice, followed by strategies that can help them improve.  The alternative - castigating teachers for bad "value added" scores, humiliating them and forcing them out wholesale - means that we increase the need to hire new, untrained teachers and going through the process of evaluation endlessly.  Who believes that this will lead to accelerated gains and real education?  

In the end, those teachers deemed effective are not really the interesting and powerful story; it's the teachers who, when given the data, see to it that they transform their practice, because they care and they have the support to do something differently.  Who was that Sunrise teacher who dramatically improved, and what did she do?  That's the real story!"

Tony Smith has been very clear about what he sees as his mission as the head of Oakland’s public schools: “We’ve figured out how to provide a good education to white and Asian students, now we have to do that for African-American and Latino students.”

Results of standardized tests released Monday by the California Department of Education show that Smith and his colleagues in the Oakland Unified School District have a long way to go to meet the challenge Smith set for himself. By the time black students are in 11th grade, only 14 percent are proficient in reading and writing. That’s compared to 17 percent for Latino students, 47 percent for Asians, and 72 percent for white students. Oakland Unified’s racial achievement gap in English is one of the most pronounced in the state. Go here to look at test scores from every public school (including charters) in the state.

But is it possible that Smith has given himself an impossible goal? Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., said that schools alone cannot bridge the class divisions that are the primary reasons for black and Latino students scoring worse than whites and Asians on standardized tests. Rothstein, who has written extensively on the achievement gap for over 20 years, said that school quality is very important; principals and teachers can make a difference, but not one that overcomes social inequality. “The notion that you can eliminate class distinctions when students are coming from unequal social conditions is foolhardy,” said Rothstein.

Rothstein’s skepticism is at odds with prevailing philosophy in education circles, which argues that schools staffed with good teachers and principals working together can narrow the achievement gap. As disappointing news from New York City showed this week, this remains more of a hope than a proven model. Eric Hanushek, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is an early and leading proponent of the idea that students arriving at school from intellectually and financially impoverished homes are dealt a double disadvantage in the form of average or low-quality teachers. Only very good teachers, according to Hanushek, can begin to make up for social differences.

It was Hanushek’s research into what made a good teacher (it wasn’t necessarily a masters degree or X number of years on the job) that spawned some of the ideas Smith is putting into action in Oakland Unified. Smith will be developing a new way for the district to measure teacher effectiveness, which will certainly include student performance on standardized tests.

But Rothstein said that standardized tests are intrinsically corrupted because teachers naturally teach to the test. Moreover, Rothstein said, the various definitions of proficiency are arbitrary. “Every scientific panel that has looked at them has found them uncredible,” Rothstein said.

To be sure, Smith and his colleagues are not tackling the achievement gap unaware of the competing research or the paucity of success outside of small examples. “We realize that the home life plays an important part in the development of a child,” said OUSD spokesman Troy Flint. “But we also realize that many accomplished people have come from less than ideal home lives, and the obligation of the school district is to try and help students over come obstacles and reach their potential.”

Image from UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access

It’s been a problem for decades. Black K-12 students are suspended at a much higher rate than Latino, white or Asian students in schools across the nation. It’s true in Oakland, as well. Oakland Unified School District recently looked at suspensions in the district for the first six months of last school year. Blacks, who make up one-third of OUSD’s enrollment, account for two out every three suspensions in the district.

The trend is most pronounced in high school where black students represent 613 of the 875 OUSD high school students suspended between August 31, 2009 and February 28, 2010. That’s an even 70 percent of all high school suspensions, which is up from 68 percent during the same period the year before. At Oakland High School, for example, which is 27 percent black, blacks represented 68 percent of all suspensions, up from 66 percent the previous year.

“Clearly there is a disparity and some discrimination with some principals,” said Alice Spearman, a member of Oakland Unified’s Governing Board. The data will be presented at a meeting of the board’s Public Safety Committee Tuesday evening.

While California school districts have to report suspensions and expulsions to the state, the numbers aren’t broken down by race. The OUSD figures also show that Latino students are suspended at a rate that’s lower than their representation in the school district. Of the 2,474 students suspended last school year, 584, or 24 percent, were Latino. OUSD’s Latino population has been growing, and it’s now at 35 percent. Suspensions of Latinos are also increasing. In the 2008-09 school year, Latinos made up 21 percent of the district’s suspensions.

Pedro Noguera, a sociology professor at New York University and a teacher at Lowell Middle School in West Oakland in the 1980s (Now a KIPP school and West Oakland Middle School), said that racism is not always at work. He noted that many principals in Oakland are black. Noguera said the problem is often a lack of creativity on the part of educators. “The discipline strategies are not aligned with the educational goals,” said Noguera. Teachers and principals need to recognize that students are misbehaving because they are disengaged from school. Suspension only serves to widen the distance between the classroom and the badly behaved student.

Still, the disparity is stubborn and nationwide. OUSD’s suspension numbers not only mirror national data gathered by the Department of Education's Office Civil Rights nearly a decade ago, which found that black students in elementary and secondary schools accounted for 36 percent of all suspensions, although they are 17 percent of the nation’s K-12 students.

Fixes of the sort recommended by Noguera are difficult to put in place. Four years ago, a group of parents in Los Angeles looked at suspension data very similar to Oakland’s. At public schools in South Los Angeles black students were 21 percent of enrollment and 47 percent of suspensions. They urged Los Angeles Unified to change its discipline policies to something called School-Wide Positive Behavior Support, which eschewed excluding students from the school community as a form of punishment in favor of modeling good behavior and academic interventions. While studies show such methods work, schools in South Los Angeles have had a hard time putting them into practice. Schools in South Los Angeles continue to suspend black students at an even higher rate than four years ago. 

In OUSD, 45 percent of the suspensions were for defiance, and 28 percent were for fighting. The suspension cost OUSD around $420,000 last year in lost revenue. But studies show that the costs are greater for the suspended students. Publications from the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles cite numerous studies showing that suspensions lead to dropouts while doing almost nothing for school safety.

OUSD Police Chief Peter Sarna Pitching a Whiffle Ball

As the school year began to wind down, kids started to show up. They’d wander in and check out the motorcycles, the Dodge Charger, the big van with School Police blazoned on the side. That’s when Oakland Unified School District police chief Peter Sarna had the idea to open a summer program.

Sarna enlisted volunteers to paint a kickball diamond on the blacktop of the old Cole Middle School, which is now the school police department’s headquarters. They painted two new basketball courts. They cut the overgrown grass in a park that sits between the playground and a cereal mill. They built a sandbox and flowerbeds. On Monday, about 14 kids arrived for the first day of a summer program run by OUSD’s Police Department. It took about three weeks, and only cost taxpayers Sarna’s time.

 When summer arrives, the OUSD police department stops looking for truants and begins protecting school district property. With 16 officers on the force, Sarna can have cops checking up on closed campuses, as well as have at least three officers playing kickball and overseeing the sandbox. “I never thought a sandbox could be so popular, but according to the kids, there isn’t one for miles,” Sarna said.

 On Tuesday morning, two adults stopped by in 15 minute span to ask about the camp. They learned it was free, it ran from 8:30 to 4:30, and the kids got two meals and snacks. Sarna figures he’ll have 20 kids showing up on Wednesday. He’s not sure where it will stop.

Sarna is finishing his first year as chief of OUSD’s police department.  He said he spent the first year making sure the department was responsible and responsive, dealing with things like guns at football games, and a high truancy rate. In addition to overseeing the sworn officers, he directs the roughly 100 security guards on OUSD campuses. Budget cuts will reduce that number by about a third next year.

 In a time when just about every public agency is broke, Sarna is recruiting donations and volunteers to build his program. Broadway Mechanical, a large plumbing contractor in East Oakland improved the blacktop as well as other clean up and construction. The Masons donated t-shirts to serve as uniforms.

Sarna still needs more. He wants to rip up some of the blacktop and plant grass for a kickball outfield. He wants to build covered stands near the basketball court, and add portable classrooms for after-school tutoring and a neighborhood library. He’s the son of an Oakland police officer, and he served 15 years with OPD. But Sarna said he has always wanted to do something that involved outreach to Oakland’s youth. It’s possible to arrest your way out of a truancy problem, Sarna said, but that won’t address what’s causing truancy. He hopes that more programs like the summer camp at Cole represent part of the fix. “Besides,” Sarna said. “What other police chief can mix a little dodge ball into their schedule?”
 

If you're interested in helping out, email Chief Sarna, or call 510-874-7777

Everyone knows that teachers use their own money to pay for all sorts of things that help in the classroom. It’s not unusual for a teacher to spend $1,000 a year on everything from paper to food. However, the teachers at Claremont Middle School pay on average an extra $1,400 a year for the privilege of driving to work.

According to the school district, teachers pay on average $160 per month in parking tickets. There is no parking lot at Claremont, and the nearby street parking is highly prized, situated as it is in the middle of one Oakland’s busiest shopping districts. The City’s parking enforcers swarm the streets around the middle school.

Teachers and staff had hoped that part of a $3 million grant from the California Air Resources Board and Cal Fire aimed at making the school less noisy and polluted during the planned construction of the Caldecott Tunnel’s fourth bore could be used to build a parking lot. However, the Fourth Bore Coalition, an environmental group monitoring the project, opposes a parking lot at Claremont Middle School. According to the Oakland Unified School District, parents' groups also don’t want to see a parking lot built at the school.

The parking limit around Claremont Middle School are two to four hours, which means that teachers and staff are constantly jockeying cars to avoid tickets.
 

Uptown students with their teacher, Maggie Simpson

Each week, a group of 10-20 students from Oakland International High School meet in a corner of Oakland to work on a film. They all happen to be teenagers. They also happen to be from Bhutan, they all are ethnically Nepalese – and have similar life stories. They grew up in refugee camps in Nepal, settled there by the United Nations after they were driven out of Bhutan. It’s their story – and it’s what they’re chronicling in the film, which is a part of an after-school program called Uptown Video.  

It all started with the planning for the 10^th anniversary of the Alameda County Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership last fall. The committee was keen to use promotional videos as part of the PR campaign, and Rose Theresa, a music historian and urban ethnographer who was serving on the planning and implementation committee at the time, came up with the idea that it would be good to involve students in the process of promoting the Alliance during its anniversary celebrations and, eventually, to have them work side-by-side with professionals to make arts learning visible through videography. After all, the alliance was all about the youth and their relationship with the arts.

With the committee’s blessings, she went around forming relationships that could make the project move forward. She partnered with the Oakland School for the
Arts, Youth Movement Records, California College for the Arts, and with the educational theater company, Opera Piccola, which provided funds to pay a filmmaker/instructor. The result was the birth of "Uptown Video," which Rose Theresa describes as a partnership between different organizations dedicated to social justice through the arts. 

At Uptown’s first session, all the kids that showed up happened to be Nepali-Bhutanese. So perhaps it was only natural that when the class moved on to working on a series of art education events with “heroes” as the theme, everyone came up with the same story – the story of their exile and displacement from Bhutan. So their instructor, Maggie Simpson, a film student at the California College of the Arts, decided that instead of making several videos about the same subject, they would all work on one small film on the same subject. The film, which will be under 10 minutes in length, incorporates enactments of what happened to the kids’ families in the past. The kids are involved in every aspect of the film, from building sets and costumes to writing the script. Rose knows that when the funding runs out at the end of this month, if she can’t figure out how to keep the program going, she’s going to be leaving a lot of kids heartbroken.

Uptown Video has managed to keep its costs low, working with volunteers for the most part. The instructor is paid a stipend, but the classes are run out of Swarm gallery, which has donated space to the project.

The project has worked to come up with an alternate stream of revenue that can prevent it from being solely reliant on grants. It’s using the hybrid business model that a lot of not-for-profit groups are turning to these days, wherein a part of the organization works as a small business. Uptown offers media production services to clients who share “its commitment to social justice through the arts,” says Rose. Clients include the Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership and the Alameda County Arts Commission. In addition to bringing in revenue, this gives students real life work experience as interns and production assistants; they get to work with professionals and also get paid.

Their work is getting recognized. They were one of the finalists at the Oakland Indie Awards in the Youth Empowerment section. They didn’t win, but they were certainly noticed. 

To be able to run the classes and program it has developed over the past few months, Uptown needs to win some grants that it has applied for and needs to raise money. For now, the kids are looking forward to the first screening of the rough cut of their film at CCA’s Nahl Hall (5212 Broadway @ College Avenue) in June.  

For more on Uptown, visit uptown-video.org 

Oakland Unified officials are hoping that technology and a newly organized school police force will make up for the loss of 30 full-time school safety officers slated to lose their jobs in July because of Oakland Unified School District’s budget crisis.

The school district’s six-person police force will be shouldering more of the responsibility for keeping Oakland’s public school campuses safe after the number of school safety officers is reduced by more than 25 percent across 45 campuses. School district officials say that increased oversight of police and safety officers, combined with video surveillance, and better cooperation with the Oakland Police Department “should help to mitigate some of the safety concerns related to reduced…staffing levels.”

In the 2008-2009 school year, the school board expelled 18 students for “persistently dangerous” violence or drug use, according to records from the California Department of Education. School officials say that a public safety database tracking incidents allows OUSD police officers to track trends and deploy cops and safety officers more wisely. School cops will also be watching video feeds from several campuses 20 hours a day seven days a week. The money for the video cameras comes from a $1.5 million Department of Justice grant that OUSD announced in January.

While violence on school campuses has decreased across the country from a high in the mid-1990s, Oakland schools continue to grapple with serious incidents. In March of last year, armed men robbed students in the hallways of Oakland Technical High School. Last fall, police arrested a juvenile carrying a gun at a football game at the same school. In 2007, around 10 percent of Oakland high school and middle school students reported carrying a gun to school at least once. 
 

On Thursday, Oakland teachers will hold a one-day strike in the face of layoffs, increasing class sizes, and yet another year without a raise. It’s been two years since the last contract between Oakland Unified School District and the Oakland Education Association expired. For its part, OUSD officials say they recognize the need to pay the city’s public school teachers more, but a raise isn’t possible in the midst of a historic budget disaster. The district’s budget has decreased by nearly 20 percent since the 2008-2009 school year. Troy Flint, OUSD’s spokesman, said the best hope for a raise lies in passing a parcel tax in November. But the teacher’s union isn’t backing the measure because charter schools would also receive a share of the revenue.

Meantime, a new report shows the damage declining state revenue and falling enrollment have done to OUSD’s budget. Between this school year and the next, nearly 10 percent of the employees at OUSD’s campuses will have been let go, including 114 teachers. By comparison, the number of full-time employees in the central office will have been reduced by 17 percent. The combined reductions represent a savings to the general fund of almost $28 million. And there’s still another $10 million that will have to be cut, according to Flint.

School district officials are blunt in stating that the personnel cuts will result in less safe schools, longer delays for maintenance, and far fewer opportunities for teachers to hone their craft with mentors and other opportunities for professional development. In 2007, the last year that OEA members received a raise, OUSD received $6356 per student. Next year, that sum will be $4900.

The strike comes after two years of failed negotiations. Last week, the school district’s governing board voted to impose a contract on teachers that offers no raise, but does make OUSD pay for benefits even as costs increase.

Remarkably, there is some good news from OUSD this week. The school district reports that in the last year, the number of high school students completing the courses that make them eligible for the state’s two university systems has increased by 10 percent. There’s also been a 10 percent increase in students deemed “on track” to graduate, and a 10 percent increase in freshmen with a GPA higher than 2.0.
 

The Finance Committee of the Oakland Unified School District’s Governing Board approved a contract Monday night with a local political consulting firm to look at the possibility of placing a parcel tax measure on the November ballot.

If approved by the full board, the contract would pay the Lew Edwards Group $43,000 to conduct a 20-minute survey with 400 Oaklanders as well as provide political advice to the district about passing a parcel tax aimed at raising $20 million to $25 million for OUSD annually. The majority of the tax revenue would go to pay for higher teacher salaries, according to OUSD spokesman Troy Flint.

Passing a parcel tax will not be easy. In 2008, Oakland voters rejected Measure N, which would have raised money for teacher salaries. While the measure received 61 percent of the vote, it did not receive the need two-thirds to pass. The Oakland Education Association, the union that represents Oakland teachers, didn’t support Measure N because a percentage of the tax revenue would have gone to charter schools. The OEA has dropped out of the coalition crafting the new parcel tax for the same reason. “It hasn’t been determined how we’ll go forward without the OEA,” said Flint.

However, the lessons that can be drawn from 2008 are limited. Measure N was placed on the ballot by the State Administrator without much regard for local sentiment. A new parcel tax would be the result of collaboration between a broad range of people and organizations including the Alameda County Central Labor Council and OUSD board members David Kakishiba and Jody London. Local support will be strong even without the backing of the OEA.

It’s also not clear how OEA’s reputation will emerge from a one-day strike, which is scheduled for April 22, if a new contract isn’t signed. Negotiations between OUSD and OEA are reported to be going poorly. A fact-finder’s report, which will be made public next week, will probably agree that while teachers need a raise, the district has no money.

Alice Spearman, who sits on the Governing Board’s Finance Committee, said she voted to send the Lew Edwards Group contract to the full board, but she’s not sure if it will pass the scrutiny of her colleagues. 

OUSD is also asking the Governing Board to approve a $75,000 contract with the Podesta Group to provide "strategic counsel regarding school safety, school climate, and restorative justice programs and funding for such programs." The board's Public Safety Committee will vote on the contract Tuesday. 

Earlier this month, the California Department of Education produced a list of 188 schools across the state that are at the bottom five percent of academic achievement. There were five schools in Oakland that found themselves on this list: Explore, Elmhurst, Alliance, Roots, and United for Success. 

On Wednesday morning, OUSD boss Tony Smith will speak at Elmhurst about what comes next for these schools. OUSD spokesman Troy Flint said that while not much time at the meeting will be reserved for quibbling with the CDE’s calculus, OUSD doesn’t entirely agree with the methods used to arrive at the 188 worst schools. 

Flint said that the five Oakland schools were all “reincubated” three years ago, which in school-speak means they were already closed and reopened with new principals, new missions, and, in most cases, a lot of new faculty. The CDE exempted schools with significant growth on standardized test scores over five years. “Our schools would have to do in three years what others did in five,” said Flint. 

The state is demanding that school districts choose from a four-option menu to deal with the low performers. The first calls for a new principal and 50 percent new staff. Option two would restart the school as a charter school. The third choice would simply shut down the school, sending students to better schools. The fourth possibility is called the Transformation Model and would require the school to “develop teacher and leader effectiveness, use data to drive instruction, make the school day longer, and replace principals who’ve been in the job for more than two years.

In one case, the hard decision has already been made. OUSD’s governing board voted last fall to close Explore. 

Wednesday, March 24, 8 a.m.
1800 98th Avenue, Oakland, CA 94603

 Situated as we are at Ground Zero of the local food revolution, you’d think that by now a public school lunch in the East Bay would be a reasonably healthy affair. That might be the case in some school districts, such as Berkeley. But in nearby Richmond, an elementary school lunch is still a bowl of Trix. That’s right, silly rabbit, Trix are for poor kids. Oakland’s probably somewhere between Alice Waters’ ideal and Trix. 

On Thursday evening, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and the Oakland Unified School District are hosting a farm to school “community conversation.” 

While no one can sanely argue about the importance of good nutrition in schools, Caitlin Flanigan had a good piece in the most recent Atlantic Monthly that takes a counter conventional wisdom look at school gardens. In Oakland, school gardens have become so prevalent that OUSD’s buildings and grounds department felt obliged to issue guidelines about what the department will and will not do to support school gardens. The groundskeepers offered one piece of advice gleaned over long years of experience: Don’t plant fruit trees, the ripe produce is more likely to end up splattered on a wall than in a fresh tart. 

Farm to School Community Conversation 
Thursday, January 28, 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. Hunter Hall, 4th Floor 1025 2nd Avenue, Oakland
Dinner will be served by OUSD Food Service.

  
Workshop Details:

Learn about the district’s initiative to bring more local, fresh produce into school cafeterias and help to guide the district’s Farm to School process.
 
5:00 PM    Introductions and overview of the process
 
5:20 PM    School Meal Program Overview -- Jennifer Le Barre
 
5:50 PM    What is Farm to School and who is CAFF?
 
6:10 PM    Current state of Farm to School purchases in OUSD
 
6:20 PM    Dinner Conversation:
 
7:00 PM    Report back from Dinner conversations
 
7:45 PM    Next Steps, Local Food Challenge and Closing
 
RSVP You must register for this event to attend. To RSVP and register, please visit the event website at http://sites.google.com/site/caffousd. If you can’t register online, please email or call Ildi Carlisle-Cummins at ildi@caff.org or (831) 454-6868.

With 1.7 million students, 67,000 full-time employees and a combined budget of $6 billion spread across 109 campuses governed by 72 local districts, California’s community colleges are a vast and complex piece of the state’s public education system. However, the crisis the state’s community colleges face is often overlooked amid the collapse of California’s K-12 and 4-year college systems.

The trustees of the Peralta Community College District, which includes Laney and Merritt Colleges in Oakland, recently voted Abel Guillen as president of the board. He’s the youngest person, and the first Latino, to have the position. OakBook talked to Guillen about the district’s challenges.

OakBook: How bad is the budget picture for next year?

Abel Guillen: I don’t think people understand what’s happening to community colleges. They are supposed to be open access, but that’s not true anymore. Last year we had 19,800 full-time students, but the state paid us for 18,700. We cut 400 class sections last year. There will be more this year.

OB: This is happening when more people than ever are turning to community colleges, right?

AG: Yes. The four-year universities are sending students to community colleges. You have people looking for job training, and returning vets. This is all happening at the same time that the message we are getting from the state is that it’s no longer a reliable source of funding. The cost of a unit is now $26, and the Legislature is talking about doubling that. More alarms have to go off. We are in a crisis.

OB: What are some of the things you are considering to maintain some semblance of open access for students in Oakland and Berkeley?

AG: We have to look at who we serve. What’s our primary mission? We enrolled 5,000 students with a BA or higher. We also have to look at textbooks. We have to find a way for students, who are already paying increased tuition, not to have to pay $150 for a textbook?

OB: What are some other long-term measures you are thinking about?

AG: We have to figure out how to provide more distance learning, and hybrid classes. We have a foundation with around $1 million. We will have to rely more on our philanthropic efforts. There are some challenges. But I like the saying that goes, “A calm sea does not make a good sailor.”

Guillen didn’t speak on the record about the problems the district’s chancellor has had with a series of articles by Matt Krupnick and Thomas Peele of the Bay Area News Group showing that Harris spent thousands of dollars on travel and failed to disclose relationships with people who received contracts with the district.  Guillen did say that Harris’ contract finishes in June of next year, and the trustees will be looking at it.

The biographical information below is from the press release announcing Guillen’s election.

Guillén, who represents Oakland’s Temescal, West Oakland, Chinatown, Downtown and Adam’s Point neighborhoods, is vice president of Caldwell Flores Winters Inc., where he has helped raise more than $2 billion in bond funding for public schools and colleges throughout California over the past 9 years.

Guillén previously served as a research associate for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. Guillén earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Berkeley, and his master’s degree in public policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. He was also a Coro Fellow and Jesse M. Unruh Assembly Fellow. Guillén served as the Peralta board’s vice president last year.

 

Would Oakland Unified be entering these dire financial times in better condition, or worse, had it not passed the years of the housing boom under the control of a state administrator? While a powerless governing board struck many as a blow to local democracy, others – myself included – regarded state control as a good thing. Test scores improved. And Oakland Unified has a better grip on its finances than neighboring school districts like West Contra Costa, which has gone to ruin under the eye of a school board.

There’s a case to be made that school boards are part of what’s wrong with schools. However, since there’s no chance at all that Oakland voters would ever do away with OUSD’s governing board, we should give board members the tools to do their jobs at the highest level. If we can’t get rid of the school board, we should make it more powerful. 

As a depressed and angry electorate seeks to limit the power of California’s elected officials with insane proposals to make the State Legislature part time, or block experts from a proposed Constitutional Convention, Oaklanders should take a wiser course, and invest in the expertise of our school board. We could start by making the position full-time, and providing a salary equal to the one received by Oakland’s City Council members.

Most school board members are already working 40-hour weeks on school district issues. They do this for $750 a month. Allowing school board members to ditch their day jobs would give them time to tackle OUSD’s problems at precisely the moment when we need their full attention. Making the job of school board member full-time would also make the position a possibility for parents, who now couldn’t afford to sacrifice an income for public service.

To be sure, a salary increase of $60,000, or around 1,000 percent, is not something that a sane public official would ever suggest. The California School Boards Association says that slightly over half of California’s school boards provide some sort of payment to their members. Almost all of those are small stipends on the order of the $7,200 Oakland’s governing board receives annually. A few years ago, a proposal to pay school board members in Los Angeles as much as $90,000 faced ridicule before a citizen’s commission agreed to a salary of $46,000. 

There will be people who say that serving on a school board is not a full-time lawmaking role, that it’s more akin to sitting on a police commission review board or mayor’s task force, positions that don’t draw salaries. That may have been true when the district was under state control. It’s not true now. Oakland Unified’s governing board will have the final say of what the district will look like after the Great Recession has done its damage.

There’s the possibility Oakland voters will be asked to approve a parcel tax in order to increase teacher salaries. A full-time salary to OUSD’s governing board should be part of the measure.
 

It would be simpler if Oakland Unified could start over from scratch. Instead, school district officials will have to spend the coming years altering the school district to match post-Great Recession financial realities. As bad as they were, the most recent rounds of budget cuts were seen as temporary measures to deal with a crisis. What comes now isn’t temporary. When Superintendent Tony Smith talks about structural changes, he’s talking about teacher salary, school size, and classroom size.

For months now, Oakland Unified’s public information officer has been clear that painful and unpopular budget fixes like raising the average number of students in classrooms will be considered. What’s not been clear is how many full-time teaching positions will disappear if school officials opt to raise class sizes. A new report from OUSD’s financial officer puts the numbers into the discussion.

If Oakland Unified raised class sizes by three pupils per student in elementary and secondary schools, 189 full-time teaching positions would disappear. That’s more than 6 percent of full-time teachers now working for OUSD. The district would save around $11 million. Elementary classrooms would have an average of 24 students per class. Secondary classrooms would have 29 students per class.

As California Watch has reported, class sizes are increasing across the state. Sacramento public schools already have an average of 24 pupils per class at the elementary level. According to Troy Flint, OUSD’s public information officer, the district has the smallest average class sizes of any neighboring district.

OUSD is also well-known in education circles for its small schools, which some experts see as part of the reason test scores in OUSD have improved over the past five years. Closing or merging some of these small schools to save money is up for discussion. According to OUSD’s financial officer, nearly half of all elementary schools, 71 percent of middle schools, and 83 percent of high schools are too small to “break even.” The “break even” enrollment for an elementary school is 317, for a middle school it’s 476, and for a high school it’s 602.

If you’re interested in learning more about the district’s finances, School board member Chris Dobbins is hosting a forum Tuesday evening at Frick Middle School (2845 64th Avenue) from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Superintendent Tony Smith will be attending the forum. Spanish translation and childcare will be provided.

If you'd like to learn more about Tony Smith, watch OakBook editor Alex Gronke's video interview with him by clicking here. 
 
 

A couple of years ago, we ran a piece on Sobrante Park Elementary School in East Oakland that looked at how a dedicated principal and his teachers were turning around a school despite many constraints and limited resources.

The school’s leadership hasn’t lost its drive or commitment to the community. The school’s next project is a garden that grows organic food for student lunches, fruits and vegetables for a nutrition class, and produce to be used in an after-school cooking class for parents and members of the community.

The school has partnered with Ella Baker Center’s Soul of the City program, the City of Oakland's City Neighborhood Initiative, and the Eagles Soar After-School Program for this month's Serve Our City service day: Friday, December 4.

Volunteers will build and repair garden beds and benches, plant flowers, and educate youth and adults why it’s important to create an inclusive green economy. Feeling inspired? Grab a bottle of water, a friend and head over to Sobrante Park on Friday.

Sobrante Park Elementary School, 470 El Paseo Drive
Friday, December 4, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.


To RSVP, click here.

The $50 Million View from Skyline High School. Photo by Richard Spitler

Tony Smith, the superintendent of Oakland’s public schools, says that he expects the district will have to cut its annual budget by $100 million over the next three years. District officials are already broaching the possibility of bigger classes and fewer teachers. But if Smith’s bleak forecasts materialize, those measures won’t be enough.

As one of the largest property owners in the city, Oakland Unified School District is looking at its 487 acres as a potential moneymaker. According to a report prepared by OUSD’s facilities director, the district is sitting on a lot of unused land. While OUSD enrollment now stands at 36,750, Oakland Unified has enough classrooms for 69,632 students. District spokesman Troy Flint said OUSD wants to find ways to either make the property generate revenue, or at least not drain resources.

Oakland Unified’s physical infrastructure is designed for a much larger school district. The district’s enrollment peaked at around 50,000 students in 2000, and has dropped by close to a third in the last decade. As a result, 85 percent of OUSD sites are underutilized. The average campus is using only 70 percent of its space. There are ten schools, which are utilizing 15 percent or less.

But that doesn’t mean OUSD should start selling property. No one is forecasting that Oakland Unified will return to an enrollment of 50,000. However there are 68,000 school age students in Oakland. There are 19,000 Oakland students currently attending private school, a figure that’s doubled since 2000. Part of the district’s strategy is to win back some of these students. If the district succeeds, it will need space.

This is not the first time OUSD has considered selling land. In 2006, the state administrator running Oakland schools made a ham-fisted attempt to sell the property around OUSD’s administration building in a deal that would have netted the district between $30 million and $50 million. An outraged school board successfully fought the deal.

Oakland’s real estate market is considerably different three years later, but the estimated land value for some OUSD property is still high. Skyline is estimated to be worth $54 million and Claremont Middle School is pegged at $30 million.

Oakland’s new police chief and school superintendent share more than relative youth and a first name. Anthony Batts and Anthony Smith both say that success in their respective spheres will only come if the community becomes more involved in public safety and public education. But what that involvement should look like is vague.

On Monday, you can have a chance to ask Smith and Batts what it is they expect in terms of community support. They will join Mayor Ron Dellums at a community meeting at Prescott Elementary School to discuss public safety, a topic that’s all too often considered without addressing Oakland’s schools. Smith's name is not on the program, but Troy Flint, spokesperson for the Oakland Unified School District, has confirmed that he will be attending the meeting.

Last month, OakBook interviewed Smith. He repeated some of the same promises and identified some of the same problems with Oakland schools (black and brown students performing worse than whites and Asians on standardized tests), but he veered from the script on a couple of subjects, particularly when he talked about resolving differences with the teacher’s union. You can see the video here.

If you have questions for him or any of the big three, visit Prescott this evening.

Monday, November 2, 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.
932 Campbell Street
 

Oakland’s new school chief said that he would be as transparent as possible as the district faced another round of brutalizing budget cuts for 2010-2011. The shortfall, which will almost certainly have grown by January, is now $27 million from $252 million of OUSD’s unrestricted general fund.

Superintendent Tony Smith delivered transparency this week with a web page summarizing OUSD’s $616 million budget and the scope of the financial problems caused by declining enrollment and the recession. The site is an excellent introduction for anyone seeking to better understand how OUSD’s budget breaks down, but it also continues to make the case for particular budget cuts that will be controversial.

OUSD officials contend that raising classroom size by three students per class would save the district $15 million to $28 million. The web site notes that with a student to teacher ratio of 18:1, and an average class size of 21 students, Oakland Unified has smaller classes than most other schools in California. Much of the savings would come from paying fewer teacher salaries.

The website also points out that the size of an average Oakland secondary school is 421 students compared to a state average of 904 students. According to OUSD figures, closing or merging an elementary school saves $320,000, a closed middle school nets $500,000, and a high school translates into $405,000 saved.

Closing schools frightens advocates of the district’s small school initiative, which they claim has contributed significantly to OUSD’s improved performance on standardized tests.

Other savings could come from reducing utilities ($500,000), furloughs, and further reductions in the central office, which, according to OUSD officials, endured the majority of the $70 million cut the previous two years.

The school district’s public information office is also countering claims advanced by the Oakland Educator’s Association. The teacher’s union is particularly rankled by some $80 million that the union leaders say the school district paid consultants last year. OUSD officials say that they had control over spending only $14 million of the $70 million budgeted for consulting expenses, and $4 million of that was managed by principals and teachers at the school level.

Union leaders have also said that OUSD broke state law last year by spending less than 55 percent of its educational expenses on salaries for teachers and instructional assistants. While OUSD spent 56.2 percent in 2009-2010 on classroom salaries, Troy Flint, OUSD’s spokesperson, allows that the district failed to meet the 55 percent threshold for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. 
 

This is Tony Smith's honeymoon. The full scale of the state's budget crisis is not yet in the headlines, but the new superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District will have to make some brutal decisions his first year on the job. OUSD will be forced to cut at least another $25 million from its budget before the school year is over. Following two years of serious blows to the district's budget, these further reductions will be painful, controversial, and will not be eased by Federal stimulus money. 

So we thought now would be a good time to speak to Smith about his new job. We'll be interviewing Smith in his office on Wednesday and we want to know what you want to know. Do you have a question about his stance on charter schools, or the decision process the district uses to close schools? Are you curious about class size, and school overcrowding? Send your questions to editors@theOakBook.com and we'll pose them to the supe. 

What’s the obvious next career move for a principal who has been drummed out of high schools in Pasadena and Modesto? A virtual charter school in Oakland.

Oakland Unified School District’s Governing Board will hear a charter petition Wednesday evening for California Connections Academy @ VIMS, a proposed online “learning community” that’s similar to a petition Sacramento’s Board of Education nixed earlier this year.

The petition calls for a non-classroom based K-12 school serving students in Alameda and nearby counties. The school’s president is Melda Gaskins, a school administrator with a history of being shunted into district office positions after running afoul of parents and teachers at schools where she was the principal.

In 2005, she quit as principal of Modesto High School following a no-confidence vote from the school’s faculty. Gaskins arrived in Modesto from Pasadena where she had been principal of Muir High School until pressure from dissatisfied parents and teachers forced her to take a job in the district office.

The proposed charter school will contract with Connections Academy LLC, a Maryland company that provides tools for online learning to schools in 13 states, including two in California. According to test score data, students at the Central California Connections Academy perform better than their peers at the chartering Alpaugh Unified School District in the Central Valley. However, students at Capistrano Connections Academy perform worse on standardized tests than students in Capistrano Unified’s traditional schools.

In March, Sacramento City Unified School District’s Governing Board denied a petition to the Visionary Institute Math and Science Academy on the grounds that VIMS’  charter petition “presents an unsound educational program for the pupils to be enrolled in the charter school.” First submitted in November 2008, the VIMS charter petition was for a traditional charter middle school in Sacramento.

The California Connection Academy @ VIMS petition to Oakland comes as the school district is granting fewer charters. There was a time when things were faster and looser, making Oakland a great place for someone looking to get a fresh start. That's not true anymore. For the past year, the Oakland charter office has been taking a close and hard look at existing charters and new proposals.

 

After five years of failing to make a dent in high school truancy rates, Oakland Unified officials are pledging to crack down on absent high school students this year. The focus on high school truancy comes as the school district reports success in reducing elementary and middle school absences.

While middle school truancy rates in 2008-09 dropped by 24 percent from the previous year, nearly 3,500 Oakland high school students remain chronically truant. That’s up from around 3,300 in 2007-08. More than 20 percent of OUSD’s high school students were chronically truant last year. Budget cuts led to the closure of a truancy center in West Oakland in the spring, but school district officials hope that more outreach to truant students and the adults in their homes will be more effective.



OUSD officials also hope that a larger school district police force with a new chief and a new deployment plan will make schools safer. OUSD Police Chief Pete Sarna will oversee 10 rank and file officers, one sergeant, and a lieutenant. Last year, the school district’s police department counted a total of six officers. This school year the district’s six big high schools will each have a dedicated police officer on campus, and three “mobile tactical units” will patrol the other campuses. To reduce confusion when there’s an incident, school safety personnel will call OUSD police officers before contacting anyone else.

It’s been more than two years since Ben Chavis retired as the principal of American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS). Post-Chavis test scores for the network of middle schools and high schools show that the model he created doesn’t depend on his large and sometimes confrontational personality for success.

Last year, the original AIPCS in the Laurel District recorded better test scores than the year before, placing the school in the state’s top 10. The current principal of the original middle school is the former front office administrator.

On Monday, Penguin will release Chavis’ book, “Crazy Like a Fox,” which he wrote with Carey Blakely, a former AIPCS principal. Advance buzz has put Chavis in that very rare category of Oaklanders who are sought after guests on conservative talk radio.

Despite the oppositional stance he frequently took against Oakland Unified, Chavis has high hopes for Tony Smith, the school district’s new superintendent. “He’s an athlete. He’s competitive. He is going to want to win. He knows the district has to change or it won’t be around in 20 to 30 years,” Chavis said.

For all the shots he’s taken at the public education bureaucracy over the years, Chavis has received his own share of criticism. One of the chief complaints against AIPCS is that the schools conspire to select the best students. Critics have charged that he even expelled students he knew wouldn’t perform well on standardized tests. Chavis challenged someone to prove this accusation. “I’ll offer anyone in the city $100 who can find one kid that I kicked out and expelled before the (California Standards Tests).”

Chavis said part of the schools’ secret (if there is one) is retaining kids, not giving them the boot. “We hold back 12 to 15 percent of our sixth grade class,” he said. If OUSD held back more students, rather than sticking to a policy of promoting students who are not at grade level, dropout rates in secondary schools would decline, in his opinion. OUSD would have higher enrollment, and more money.

More money is not something California school districts need, according to Chavis. By his own estimates, large school districts like Oakland and Los Angeles Unified squander tens of thousands of dollars per pupil per year on excessive administration and consultants.

Chavis said that AIPCS spends around $8,000 per year on each student, and that includes paying for all their tests like the PSAT, the SAT, and college application fees.

But Chavis is a fan of the OUSD office overseeing charter schools, which has been taking a hard line with charter schools recently. “I would like to see Oakland (Unified) close down some of these bad charter schools,” Chavis said. “There’s some crazy people in the charter movement.” Not all of them are crazy like foxes.

It’s not the least bit unusual for teachers to spend $1,000 a year of their own money on classroom supplies. And now that public school budgets in California have plunged by around 30 percent over the last two years, teachers will be digging deeper into their own bank accounts for basics like paper, pencils, crayons, and other essentials – a category that often includes clothes and food.

Oakland schools with large numbers of wealthy – or at least comfortable – parents augment this shortfall with ample amounts of money and time. The PTA at Crocker Highlands, for example, aims to raise $200,000 this school year. That’s $550 a student. At other schools, parents’ groups are lucky to raise $1,500 a year.

Holly Kernan, a parent at Crocker Highlands, has an idea about how to help distribute community resources around the district in this time of serious economic want. Kernan started a Facebook page called Support Oakland Teachers/Schools. It’s a place where teachers can post things they need for their classrooms and community members can step up with what’s wanted.

“The hope is to ease the burden. If there’s a teacher that needs fresh snacks for a week, maybe there’ll be someone in the community who can help,” said Kernan.

If you’ve been resisting Facebook, Support Oakland Teachers/Schools is a good reason for signing up and making sure as many people with a stake in Oakland’s public schools find out about it.
 

There are 32 charter school operating in Oakland today. Charter school students account for 16 percent of the public school enrollment in Oakland. It's one of the highest percentages in the state, but charter school advocates say the numbers could be higher if they only had more space. On Tuesday, the State School's Chief announced a change to a state grant program that could help charter schools in Oakland grow.

For the first time, a $56.9 million fund to help charter schools pay the rent will be made available for the current school year instead of reimbursement for the previous year. Finding and paying for space is one of the main obstacles keeping charter schools from growing. By making the money available for the current year, charter schools will have an easier time planning for expansion in the coming year. 

Oakland Unified is loathe to relinquish unused space to charter schools. Although OUSD leases space to charter schools at market rates, this can cost a charter school hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Thus the sometimes less than inspiring storefront charter schools that dot the city. However, in a survey of charter school administrators conducted last school year, a majority said they would not be interested in sharing facilities with an Oakland Unified school.

Oakland Unified will pay a company $1.7 million this coming school year for a program aimed at improving math scores in elementary and middle schools.

Using a Power Point presentation prepared by Swun Math LLC, school district officials contend that the contractor has significantly raised Oakland students’ math scores in pilot programs over the past two years. According to Swun Math, after controlling for race, gender, socioeconomic status and parental education level, students in 5th grade Swun Math classrooms scored five points higher on the state’s standardized math test than students in classrooms not using Swun Math.

Developed in Long Beach, Oakland Unified has been the chief proving ground for Swun Math, which describes itself as “a comprehensive, vertically integrated approach to mathematics instruction, with a unique lesson design structure at its core, that promotes student engagement, academic language acquisition, inquiry, and accelerated learning.”

The contract comes as school districts across the state face a 20 percent reduction from last year’s reduced budget, and Oakland school officials try to rein in payments to consultants. The money to pay Swun Math - “an amount not to exceed $1,776,700” - will come from Federal money slated for poor schools and schools struggling to meet benchmarks on standardized tests.

Does Swun Math work? Math scores in Oakland Unified are rising independent of special instructional and assessment techniques. In 2008, the number of students scoring proficient or advanced on standardized math tests rose four percentage points from 38 to 42. Sankofa, the Oakland school that posted some of the most impressive gains on math tests in 2008, did not use Swun Math’s method. Teachers at that school, which is almost 100 percent black, and where 85 percent of the student body qualifies for a free lunch, raised math scores by 38 percentage points.

Swun Math points to two schools in the West Contra Costa Unified School District that boosted math scores following the company’s prescriptions. However, elementary math scores in West Contra Costa are on the rise across thee school district.

The $1.7 million will expand Swun Math’s Oakland presence to 35 elementary schools and 18 middle schools.
 

Oakland Unified’s Board of Education assumes full control of the district Monday afternoon, but the signing ceremony won’t happen before the union representing Oakland’s teachers holds a press conference denouncing the district’s declaration of an impasse in contract negotiations.

Like every public agency in the state, OUSD is confronting deep budget cuts. OUSD’s CFO pegs the current shortfall at around $18 million. They’ll scrape it together this time, but OUSD will immediately have to start looking for new savings. As they have in the past, district officials will look at expensive and low-performing schools.

Test scores and budget numbers from the district’s 100-plus schools demonstrate that the more parents have spent on educating themselves, the less public schools pay to educate their children. At schools where the majority of parents have at least a college degree, high test scores are achieved with some of the lowest costs per student in the district. The lesson here is old news. It’s simpler to teach children who arrive at school fortified by the resources of prosperous households. But money is not an automatic equalizer.

The elementary schools with the 10 highest API scores in 2008 spent an average of around $5,700 per student during the 2007-2008 school year. The elementary schools with the lowest API scores in 2008 spent an average of $7,900 per student. Schools with large numbers of poor students receive extra money, so do schools with large numbers of English language learners. This money doesn’t always deliver results in achievement.

Consider the unfortunately named Preparatory Literary Academy of Cultural Excellence. In 2008, the school spent $8,300 on each of its 243 elementary students, only to have test scores plummet by 43 points. That same year, Manzanita SEED spent $7,500 per student and watched API scores drop 23 points to 652.

To be sure, some schools that spent a lot of money also raised student achievement. In 2008, Sankofa spent $11,400 per student for an impressive 156 point gain. But the amount spent was actually more because Sankofa’s average daily attendance that year was only 88 percent. OUSD’s governing board is considering closing the school. 
 

HIGHEST PERFORMING ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

Hillcrest API Score: 965; Average Daily Attendance: 97.1 percent; Budget: $5847.17

Thornhill API Score: 924;  ADA: 96.2 percent;  Budget: $5361.61

Montclair API Score: 922; ADA: 96.9 percent; Budget: $5404.18

Lincoln API Score 906; ADA: 98.9 percent; Budget: $7325.08

Chabot API Score: 905; ADA: 96.5 percent; Budget: $5287.56

Redwood Heights API Score: 890; ADA: 96.4 percent; Budget: $5519.40

Crocker Highlands API Score: 868; ADA: 97.5 percent; Budget: $5502.58

Joaquin Miller API Score: 868; ADA: 97.2 percent; Budget $5301.78

Peralta API Score: 866 ADA 98.1 percent Budget $6746.84

Cleveland API Score: 865 ADA 96.4 percent Budget $6806.83

LOWEST PERFORMING ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

Jefferson API Score: 522 - ADA 94.4 percent - Budget $7689.45 +46 API points

Global Family API Score: 523 - ADA 94 percent - Budget $7785.57 N/A (No 2007 data)

Lockwood API Score 533 - ADA 93.6 percent - Budget $9130.33 -6 API points

East Oakland Pride API Score 545 - ADA 93.7 percent - Budget $7747.94 N/A

Community United API Score: 552 - ADA 94.2 percent - Budget $7911.89 N/A

Webster Academy API Score: 556 - ADA 93.4 percent - Budget $8975.26 +37 API points

Reach Academy API Score: 575 - ADA 93.7 percent - Budget $7927.49 +79 API points

Futures API Score: 583 - ADA 94.2 percent - Budget $7641.41 N/A

Fred T Korematsu Discovery Academy API Score: 592 - ADA 94.7 percent  - Budget $7448.91 +22 API points

Maxwell Park API Score 594 - ADA 93.5 percent - Budget $8190.78 -10 API points

There’s hopeful early evidence that Oakland Unified School District’s long steep decline in enrollment may finally be coming to an end. Data from Oakland Unified School District shows that Kindergarten enrollment for 2009 is holding steady from last year at around 3,500 students signing up for district schools. For the first time in nearly 10 years, the district is predicting a zero percent decline in enrollment.

While the budget busting drop in enrollment may be over, Oakland Unified still has one of the worst Average Daily Attendance rates in the state, and loses millions of dollars a year due to absent students. On any given day, 6.2 percent of OUSD’s student population is absent with an ADA of 93.7 percent. The state average is 96 percent. Every day a student is absent, it costs the school around $42.

The difference between OUSD and the state average may not seem like much, but if the district could raise its ADA by one percentage point, it could realize a savings of $2.2 million. For an individual school, a one percent rise would translate to $14,000, nearly enough to help cover the cost of the teacher prep time that is about to be lost in budget cuts.

Oakland Unified’s Governing Board approved a resolution Wednesday night that would align the district’s high school graduation requirements with the more demanding A-G requirements for admission to UC and CSU schools. The idea is to have the new rules in place for the graduating class of 2014.

At the moment only 32 percent of OUSD’s high school seniors meet the A-G requirement while the graduation rate for Oakland Unified is just over 50 percent.  Some Oakland schools are better than others at readying students for enrollment in the state’s public universities. Below are the A-G passing rates for a few Oakland high schools.

Oakland High School: 47 percent

Oakland Technical High School: 47 percent

Skyline High School: 42 percent

Excel: 71 percent

Robeson: 20 percent

Search for the word "accountability" on the Oakland Unified website and you'll find that in all of the school district's many documents, it appeared only once in 2002, never in 2003, and around 220 times over the next three years. In 2007, the word was used 484 times in various district reports and school report cards. Accountability was the watchword of the Expect Success program, which launched in 2005 with $26 million of philanthropy, but has now run out of money and will be greatly diminished as the district plans to eliminate some 309 positions next year.

On Wednesday, Oakland Unified School District's Governing Board will review a $450 million general fund budget proposed for 2009-2010 that aims to spend $40 million less than the current year. The cuts include 29 positions in OUSD's central office, including the three full-time and one half-time employees in the office of the Chief of Community Accountability. While disastrous by any historical measure, OUSD's proposed budget for the next school year could be thought of as a hopeful document at this time. Things could still get worse. Like every other school district in California, OUSD must make unprecedented budget cuts to close a $24.3 billion statewide deficit. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed $1.3 billion in cuts to K-14 education this year and $4 billion next (school) year.

In addition to the reductions in the central office, the district proposes to close Attend and Achieve, a not particularly successful anti-truancy program. It will lose 10 of its 15 employees with the shuttering of the district's Truancy Center. Never known for its tidy campuses, OUSD will eliminate 17 vacant custodial jobs for a savings of $1.6 million. The budget also calls for slashing 5.3 counseling positions in the college and career readiness office.

OakBook's education coverage is funded in part by the Rogers Family Foundation.

Tony Smith must be wondering what he has gotten himself into. Now that the Oakland School board has picked Mr. Smith to be the Oakland Unified School District's next superintendent, he will confront a budget deficit reckoned at $49 million. Drastic measures that no one would have seriously considered just a few months ago are now frighteningly possible.

Class Size Reduction, a 13 year-old law that pays to keep K-3 classes under 20 students at a statewide cost of nearly $2 billion, could become a memory. "Everything's on the table," said school board member Alice Spearman.

In addition to bigger classes, OUSD is calculating the potential savings from closing and merging a number of small schools. At the top of the list is Sankofa Elementary.

OUSD's self-inflicted fiscal crisis of five years ago may help it out of the current mess. The district can still draw down $29 million from the emergency line of credit extended when the state took over. Ms. Spearman says there's considerable resistance on the board to this option. "What happens in 2010 and 2011 when we've used up all of our reserves?" she says. 
 

Teachers can't do their jobs in schools where students carry weapons, flaunt gang affiliation, menace classmates, and spout obscenities. If there's no discipline, there's no learning. Such is the case in too many Oakland schools, where OUSD officials report that the superintendent is failing to make sure that students feel safe on campus. If this problem could be fixed, Oakland Unified might stop losing students and the money that follows them. The increasingly unruly climate at many Oakland Unified schools is one of the chief reasons parents choose to put their kids in charter schools.

In a report to OUSD's state administrator, district officials write that the superintendent (or the CEO in the corporate-speak of Expect Success) is not meeting the "operational expectation" of creating and enforcing "discipline policies to maintain safe and effective environments for all students and to promote civil behavior." Citing data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, OUSD's Use Your Voice Survey, and district data the report shows a school district where bad behavior is on the rise.

The California Healthy Kids Survey found that there was an 18 percent increase in gang affiliation among 7th graders between the 2005-06 and 2007-08 school years. The same survey found an 8 percent decrease of school connectedness, which is defined by the California Department of Education as the degree to which students believe the school protects and cares for them.

The drop is not surprising. During the same time frame, weapons related suspensions at OUSD schools rose from 206 to 232. As OakBook reported last year, 9 percent of Oakland's 7th graders claim to have carried a gun to school at least once.

The surveys don't ask kids if they are afraid of being shot, but in 2008, 33 percent of 7th graders reported that they were afraid they would be beaten up at school, a figure that represents an 18 percent increase over the year before. More than one in three Oakland 7th graders said that they had been bullied at school. And on a 2007-08 survey conducted by Oakland Unified 32 percent of middle school students and 35 percent of high school students said they didn't feel safe at school. The California Healthy Kids Survey found that 5 percent of students statewide felt unsafe at school.

District officials put it bluntly: "Although bullying is only one type of safety threat, the high rate of incidence in OUSD represents a significant barrier to learning for too many students. If adults fail to institute adequate systems and procedures for addressing the problem, these harmful threats and actions will increase, impacting attendance and academic performance."

Sometimes the crimes committed by students exceeds the purview of school district discipline. "The data on the placement of students entering the District from the juvenile justice system indicates that of the 1,216 potential OUSD students arrested and released about 38 percent never reported to school after their release. The whereabouts of about 24 percent were unknown. Of the remaining 37 percent, greater than 8 percent leave school again before graduation."

However, the numbers do show some successes. For example, suspensions for profanity, vulgarity and obscenity dropped from 563 to 458 between the 2006-07 and 2007-08 school years. 
 

OakBook's education coverage is funded in part by the Rogers Family Foundation.


 

OUSD's Alice Spearman

On Tuesday, the headhunting firm hired to help recruit a new school superintendent will deliver a list of five or six semi-finalists to Oakland Unified's Governing Board. The candidate that emerges at the end of May with an offer for the $275,000 position will have survived three weeks of grueling interviews that if nothing else will serve as an edifying glimpse into what daily life would be like in the district's top job. Call it Survivor: OUSD. Following interviews with the board, a community advisory panel, and a public meeting where the last two candidates standing will field questions from anyone who shows up, it will be hard to claim later that the new superintendent was chosen behind closed doors. It might also be hard to find someone who wants the job after all that. 

School Board President Alice Spearman says that Ray and Associates, the Iowa-based firm contracted to narrow the search, has remained impervious to lobbying from the various interest groups that would like to see a particular candidate on the list of semi-finalists. She says that she has no idea whose names she and her fellow board members will receive on Tuesday: "There have been no leaks." 

Ray and Associates may have kept mum and selected only those applications that reflect the qualities the community and the board have said they want in a new supe, but some names are under discussion. The Oakland Tribune outed these candidates on Monday. Here are two more:

Tony Smith, the current Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, Innovation, and Social Justice at San Francisco Unified School District, and the former boss of the Emery Unified School District, is a favorite among the constituency that could be called the reform community. According to a press release put out by SFUSD when he joined that district in November 2007, Smith worked for the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools after earning his doctorate in education at UC Berkeley. Smith earned high marks in Emeryville. His biggest mistake was hiring his successor, who lied on his resume. Sources say his boss in San Francisco Unified is loathe to let him go. 

Another name mentioned is that of Densie Sadler, the former principal of Chabot Elementary School. 

The board will interview semi-finalists next week, paring the field down to two contenders. Each board member chose someone from their district to serve on an advisory board that will have its turn questioning the two applicants before they face the public at a meeting scheduled for May 20. Spearman said the board will make its decision the next day. 

Even during the best of times, a school district budget is a bewildering document, full of funds earmarked for special purposes, and governed by decades of legislation designed to mitigate inequality. It’s so complex, in fact, that even the people paid to understand it have trouble. For example, OUSD’s budget office just turned up a potential shortfall that could be nearly $15 million. They’re not sure. Perhaps the team should drop by Santa Fe Elementary School Tuesday night.

School board member Jody London is hosting a forum designed to illuminate OUSD’s budget during this historic financial crisis.

Of course, a recession is only one more item of bad news to a school district that misplaces millions, owes more millions to the state, and is enduring a long, steady, revenue-sapping slide in enrollment.
 
The OUSD budget is even more complicated than just about every other California school districts’ budgets. Oakland Unified uses something called Results Based Budgeting, which places more control over funding decisions at school sites, but further complicates the budget process by allocating money on actual enrollment rather than projected enrollment. RBB, as it’s known, also gives money to schools based on the actual salaries of the teachers at the school. Nearly every other school district in the country uses a formula that calculates the average salary for a teacher in the district, and “charges” schools that amount. Schools with experienced and more expensive teachers pay the same as a school with a less seasoned and less costly faculty.

What: District 1 Schools Town Hall Meeting

When: Tuesday, April 14, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Where: Santa Fe Elementary School, 915 54th Stree
 
There's another forum Tuesday night on the subject of Oakland schools. Hosted by the Montclair Community Action's Education Group the forum is broader in scope than the one on the budget at Santa Fe. School board member David Kakishiba, Oakland Educators Association president Betty Olson-Jones, and others will discuss "critical issues facing Oakland schools."

What: Montclair Community Action's Education Group Forum

When: Tuesday, April 14, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Where: Montclair Women's Cultural Arts Club, 1650 Mountain Boulevard

Danielle Neves, the principal of Sankofa Academy, says that the competition for elementary students in the North Oakland flats is fierce. The area has four traditional public schools, two charter schools, and an untold number of students who live in Oakland but attend school in Berkeley or Emeryville. Although chronic underenrollment could imperil the future of her four year-old school, Ms. Neves says that vying for students is not her chief aim right now.

This is the time of year when parents, guardians, and students in Oakland Unified who didn't get a spot at their first choice school in the district's open-enrollment process are jockeying for a second chance. In the North Oakland flats, the coveted elementary school is Peralta. Despite evidence of instructional success including a 156 point gain in the school's API scores last year, Sankofa Academy is hardly in the position of having to create a waiting list, or tell dejected parents to try again next year. With 120 students, Sankofa Academy is officially underenrolled. Like its neighbor to the west, Santa Fe Elementary School, Sankofa Academy operates under an almost constant threat of closure.

In this competitive milieu, an elementary school needs a niche. With a student population that is almost entirely African-American, Ms. Neves hopes to show that Sankofa can address one of OUSD's most stubborn problems: the achievement gap that separates the academic performance of African-American students from their white and Asian peers. An API score of 691 reflects a hard-won, if still fragile, stability at Sankofa. It's not clear if Sankofa Academy has developed a model for boosting the performance of black students on standardized tests.

In Oakland Unified, assessments show that less than one-third of African-American students are proficient in math, reading, and writing. At Sankofa Academy, 44 percent of students are proficient in math, but less than 27 percent are proficient in reading and writing. Compare that to Peralta where 69 percent of African-American students are proficient in math, and 50 percent are proficient in language arts. About a mile away from Sankofa at the Berkeley Maynard Academy, a charter school on San Pablo Avenue, 41 percent of African-American students are proficient in reading and writing, and 55 percent are proficient in math.

Ms. Neves is part of a cadre of OUSD principals trained by an outfit called New Leaders for New Schools, which counts among its core precepts the conviction that the achievement gap can be closed by a relentless focus on data and instruction. She arrived at Sankofa after five years of teaching at a middle school with 2,500 students in Watts. She came to the Los Angeles Unified School District via Teach for America. It was her first job after doing her undergraduate work at Yale University and Southern Connecticut State University.

Ms. Neves says that Sankofa Academy had no teacher turnover last fall, and she hopes to be working with the same team of teachers next year. A teacher attrition rate of zero percent two years running would be another sign that Sankofa Academy is finding stability after a rocky launch. 

An excellent series in the San Francisco Chronicle documented the school's early years. Shortly after launching as a school with middle school students, OUSD decided to make Sankofa a traditional K-5 elementary school. Ms. Neves said that not all of the faculty during the school's first year were well-matched to the chaotic atmosphere of a school in its start-up phase. Because Sankofa Academy replaced Washington Elementary, which the district closed due to low-enrollment and low test scores, the new school was not universally embraced by the community. In 2007, district officials toyed with closing Sankofa at the end of the 2007-2008 school year. The decision was postponed, and Sankofa's fate remains uncertain.

These articles are part of the OakBook Innovation in Education Reporting Project, funded in part by the Rogers Family Foundation.

"Mr. Sye’s philosophy of school leadership emphasizes significant school site participation in the selection of school administrators, a vibrant teacher voice, teacher buy-in, professional development guided by our own faculty, shared governance, and nurturance of teacher leadership. These values are exemplified through his work with Skyline’s department chairs who make up our Instructional Council." 

WHAT: Charter school debate moderated by Chris Dobbins, Oakland Board of Education, District 6

WHO:

Charter School Proponents:

• Dr. Ben Chavis, Executive Director and former Principal, American Indian Public Charter School, Oakland
• Ms. Kristin Gallagher, Principal, Millsmont Charter School
• Mr. Hugo Arabia, Principal, Oasis High School Charter School

District School Proponents:

• Ms. Shanta Driver, National Chairperson of BAMN (By Any Means Necessary)
• Ms. Yvette Felarca, Teacher, Berkeley Public Schools, BAMN Organizer
• Ms. Kim Shipp, Educator, Parent Activist

When opponents of charter schools claim that education reform is a stalking horse for corporate interests with an eye on public money, there's often a crude paternalism buried under the paranoia. The ugliness is usually unspoken, but a recent comment by a parent on the Oakland Tribune's education report offers a rare sighting of the racism and classism that distorts the education conversation in Oakland.

In a comment on the Tribune's website, and in an email to Oakland Unified's Governing Board, the parent of a student at Skyline follows the money from the Rogers Foundation to non-profit organizations like the California Charter School Association and New Leaders for New Schools. (The editors of OakBook invited Rogers to write a letter in support of charter schools, and the Rogers Family Foundation has given money to support education coverage on the OakBook website.) But rather than see the donations for what they are - money going to Oakland's students, the idea is to outline a conspiracy of cash that aims to hijack public schools and the money that comes with them. It's tired stuff.

Jeremy Vidito wants to open a charter school. It's not easy.

Here's how you don't start a charter school in Oakland: Don't take the text from the brochure of your Christian school and submit it to Oakland Unified School District as your petition for a new charter. You can't blame the folks at East Oakland's Dr. Herbert Guice Christian Academy who tried unsuccessfully to do exactly that last month. There was a time when aspiring charter schools didn't have to argue too hard to win approval from Oakland Unified's State Administrator. While the illegal conversion of a private religious institution to a taxpayer funded public school probably wouldn't have flown even in 2005, a year when seven new charter schools opened in Oakland, having a charter approved has never been more difficult. Just ask Jeremy Vidito.

Vidito, 29, has a teaching credential and an MBA. He's been involved in schools -- teaching, building databases for school districts, analyzing data --  since he graduated from the University of Missouri eight years ago. Last week he submitted a 200-page petition for a new charter school called Oakland Collegiate. If everything goes smoothly, the planned middle school is scheduled to open in 2010. Vidito has been in Oakland long enough to know that things won't go smoothly. Here is his five point plan for starting a charter school from scratch.

Sightsee: You can only learn so much by looking at test scores on the Internet. Go visit charter schools that you've heard are successful. Talk to the directors and teachers to learn what's working. Stay alert to clues about the real quality of the school, which might not jibe with the school's marketing. Vidito calls this the "Disheveled Bookshelf Theory."

It's a riff on the Broken Windows theory of community policing. If the bookcase in a school office is disorganized, with books haphazardly strewn across the shelves, watch out, says Vidito. A messy bookshelf suggests an underlying chaos in the entire school.

Build a Braintrust: Make sure the charter school's board brings a wide range of talent to the endeavor. To succeed, a charter school must be managed like a business. You'll need bean counters and you'll have to lawyer up. The Oakland Collegiate board includes two lawyers, three MBAs, four teachers, and one expert in school facility and finance management. A savvy board is critical in Oakland because OUSD's Office of Charter School Management has taken the position that it shouldn't offer would-be charter schools specific advice about crafting petitions, says Vidito. You're going to need that braintrust to write an effective petition.

Be Real About Money: You can't start a charter school without a minimum of 100 students, says Vidito. The economics don't allow for fewer students. You're going to have to make financial decisions that reflect your priorities and goals. Will the teachers work longer, and get paid more? Will you spend any money on technology? How many administrators will you have? Vidito says that the teachers at Oakland Collegiate will earn $47,000, and will teach six out of seven periods. Vidito says that the first year of a charter school is when school culture is forged. His charter petition calls for two administrators. While one administrator will be on campus full-time working with teachers and students to see the school through its first year, the other director will go to the myriad meetings and see to all the paperwork required of a school principal.

Location, Location, Location: Where is your charter school going to be? And how much are you going to pay for the space? Facilities represent one of the trickier aspects of starting a charter school in Oakland. Vidito says that a rule of thumb is that you'll need 65 to 80 square feet per student, and that a charter school with 100 students can expect to pay $115,000 per year for a suitable space including utilities and janitorial costs. The OUSD officials in charge of recommending the approval or denial of your charter petition will want to know that the school will be housed in a suitable building.

It's Politics: OUSD's governing board is just one press conference away from having all of its power restored following six years of state receivership. This means successful charter school petitions will require a majority of votes from the governing board. While the education code is clear that school diistricts must approve charter schools that meet certain basic criteria, there's still enough room for politics, power and personality to play a role in the approval process. Not all of the people on OUSD's governing board have favorable opinions of charter schools. Someone connected with your charter school plan will have to do some schmoozing. Vidito estimates he's met with 300 people trying to assemble support for Oakland Collegiate.

Will it all work? Eventually. Vidito expects OUSD will deny his charter petition in late April. Then he'll appeal to the Alameda County Office of  Education, which will follow OUSD's lead. Sometime in the fall of this year, he'll take his petition to the State Board of Education where it will be approved, and he'll be ready to open his doors to the first class of sixth graders in the fall of 2010.

In spite of the obstacles, Vidito is determined to open Oakland Collegiate. He says he grew up poor in Branson, Missouri, but he still had a chance to get to college. Too many poor kids in Oakland don't have that chance, and good charter schools are a way to address that inequity.  

Online resources you may find useful:

http://www.myschool.org
http://www.ousdcharters.net
http://www.cacharterschools.org

These articles are part of the OakBook Innovation in Education Reporting Project, funded in part by the Rogers Family Foundation.