I am beginning to hate Oakland’s carpetbagger protesters. Idiots who come from Berkeley or Walnut Creek, to break windows, snarl traffic, and now F up the Oakland Unified Board meetings. Enter the Oakland Education Association’s BAMN caucus, a group of largely White people whose recent infamy comes from ramblings about the “New Jim Crow”,…
Month: November 2015
Why Don’t We Have More Paideias
A weird thing happened last night at the OUSD Board meeting. A real, substantive, solution oriented, question was asked by the Oakland Education Association; why don’t we have more Paideias? Paideia is the wildly popular and academically successful Oakland Tech program that students actually return from private middle schools to come back into the OUSD…
The Schools We Need- Coping with Substance Abuse, Shepherding Students
What happens when a child is caught at school high or drunk—they are suspended, they do it multiple times they are expelled. If they ask for help from school staff, their parents are called. If they could talk to their parents they already would have. And if you are student in recovery, where do you…
Who’s Really Choosing in School Choice? Part 1
School choice, for me, was about empowering underserved families to have the same range of quality options that well off parents had, without having to buy a house in the Hills. Montessori, dual language, arts, technology-infusion, even military school, these were the options that families craved and we helped develop. Choice is empowerment. But there’s…
The Schools We Need- Understanding Trauma and Focusing on Recovery
“Johnny” was having a bad day. He has had a lot of bad days. Mom wasn’t there to take him to school. Less than 10, he walked to the bus stop. He tripped, and he thought that some older students laughed. He wanted to fight them. By the time he is at school, he’s angry…