The Oakland Education Week in Review: 9/1-9/8

Last week, some conflicting opinions on the Kaiser closure proposal, the latest on the budget process, Met West’s Ericka Huggins campus opens, an accusation of grade tampering at an OUSD high school, a look at the progress from last year, charter law and prop 13 reform, all that and much more, please read, share, and get involved.

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Oakland:

  • Student Organizers Secure $3.6 Million for Healthy Food for OUSD Youth
    • Student organizers with Oakland Kids First (OKF) secured $3.6 million over the next two years to improve healthy food options for Oak­land public school students.
  • Beautiful Places in Mexico; Jovani’s Final Blog
    • Jovani Maldonado was a 10th grader at Latitude High School in Oakland, he was killed in an automobile accident last weekend. His family is trying to raise money for his burial, please help if you can, this is his story. I am so sorry I did not publish it when he could have seen it.
  • STEM Like a Girl: Hands-on learning can be key for young women seeking to get into science
    • About 500 miles north of San Diego, a similar after-school program for girls from low-income communities in the Oakland Unified School District is underway. Run by Techbridge Girls—an organization that works to train teachers and girls in California, the Pacific Northwest, and Washington, DC—the program offers “hands-on minds-on projects” with real-world applications. It has OUSD girls soldering (right), woodworking, building lockers, and even developing an app to reduce bullying. Techbridge’s overarching aim? To inspire a love for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in participants—and to keep girls motivated to stay in the field. 
  • Markham Elementary Suffers Through Another Costly Break-in, Joins Other Schools Burglarized This School Year
    • The 2019-20 school year has been a costly one for Oakland Unified School District. Over the Labor Day weekend, someone broke into Markham Elementary School and stole about 60 Google Chromebooks and other items and caused serious damage to several classrooms. This is a loss of thousands of dollars worth of equipment that is critical to the learning process of our students. And this is hardly the first time something like this has happened at an OUSD school this year. Several other schools have been broken into with overall losses totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Thieves steal 60 laptops from East Oakland elementary school
    • Sometime during the holiday weekend, thieves broke in. Summerlin showed KTVU one of seven classrooms where windows were broken, but since repaired. 
  • Kaplan Calls for Audit of Schaaf’s Education Initiative 
    • Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan wants the city auditor to look into allegations that Mayor Libby Schaaf gave away office space at City Hall to Oakland Promise, her signature program for childhood education, free of charge.
  • Why the Latest Charter School Compromise Won’t Fix Charter Authorizing, And Actually Makes the Situation Worse
    • News broke last week that one of Sacramento’s most vexing legislative issues had reached a compromise.  The teachers’ union and charter association had agreed on a compromise bill on revising the charter law.  I’m not clapping for a broken process, that was all about what choices California’s most underserved families will have—and had none of those actual parents at the table. 
  • Oakland Educators Accused of Falsifying Transcripts to Boost Students’ Grades and Graduation Rates
    • Educators at an East Oakland high school are accused of falsifying transcripts as part of intricate cheating scandal involving top school administrators, teachers, and at least one guidance counselor.  The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit spoke exclusively to three teachers who say failing grades they assigned to students over the past few years were altered just days prior to graduation.
  • AICRC Pow Wow
    • Pow Wows are the Native American people’s way of meeting together, to join in dancing, singing, visiting, renewing old friendships, and making new ones.  Pow Wows are one of the best ways to experience Native American culture. At a Pow Wow you can experience dancing, singing, foods, and crafts.
  • Looking to avoid “chaos” Oakland’s school board discusses budget process
    • At a special meeting on Wednesday, Oakland’s school board members heard from the district’s newly-formed budget development team who are attempting to overhaul their financial planning process for the coming fiscal year. The team will redefine the process for the school board, which nearly did not pass a 2019-20 budget this June over fears about its accuracy.
  • OUSD responds to allegations that teachers manipulated grades at Castlemont High
    • Officials with the Oakland Unified School District will hold a news conference on Thursday afternoon to discuss “potential issues” discovered through an investigation into how some staff administered a high school credit recovery program known as APEX. 
  • Yes, It’s about Race, Race and the Schools Oakland Students Deserve; A Kaiser Parent’s Story
    • The Oakland Unified School District is recommending merging my child’s school, Henry J. Kaiser Elementary and Sankofa Elementary into a single school on the Sankofa campus in North Oakland. Kaiser, nestled in the Oakland hills, has high test scores, wealthier families, and more White students. Sankofa is on its fourth principal in three years, is mostly African American, and 90 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced price lunch.
  • Parents Push Back Against School District Plan to Close and Merge Schools
    • Running into a wall of outrage from school families and community groups, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) administration and the Oakland Board of Education are struggling to come up with a coherent rationale and reasonable plans to close Oakland neighborhood schools that they hope Oaklanders would be willing to accept.
  • Oakland school district says it found ‘no evidence’ to back up grade inflation allegations
    • Oakland Unified School District said Thursday it found no evidence to support complaints filed by two former teachers that Castlemont High School staff manipulated grades and gave students answers to inflate graduation rates. The allegations are related to the use of an online program called Apex, which helps high school students pass courses that they have struggled to complete in traditional classrooms.
  • Oakland Ericka Huggins New MetWest High School Named For Former Black Panther
    • Westlake Middle School is no longer alone on its Harrison Street campus. It now shares space with the MetWest High School ninth grade expansion which is named for former leading Black Panther, Ericka Huggins. During the second week of school, the campus near Lake Merritt held a ceremony to declare that the campus is named for Ericka Huggins, who is a college professor, former member of the Alameda County Board of Education and former director of the Oakland Community School which was created by the Black Panther Party in 1973.
  • Opinion: Black East Oakland and Green Spaces
    • Black folks’ love East Oakland’s naturally green environment almost as much as its ancestral rebel spirit. But locally and nationally, there is heightened concern about Black culture being unwelcome in outdoor green spaces. This is another type of displacement Black folks are being subjected to since the boom of market rate developers and other private entities entered Oakland’s economy.
  • CRUNCHED: A Look at OUSD’s Progress from Last Year
    • As the new school year gets going, with so many hopes and aspirations (as well as, sadly, some serious concerns), I find myself wondering how Oakland schools did last year and what progress they might be making. Last year was a hard one: budget challenges, midterm elections, and teacher strikes. In starting back up CRUNCHED, I wanted to highlight some bright spots and growth areas to start the data year off with some warmer, fuzzier feelings (because let’s face it, we could all use some in this these times).
  • The Geography of Opportunity in Oakland; And How Kaiser and Sankofa Became So Different
    • “An African-American born in West Oakland can expect to die almost 15 years earlier than a White person born in the Hills” –Alameda County Public Health Department Report. The disparities in our schools are by design, not accident. When we have schools like Kaiser and Sankofa, geographically not far apart, but in other ways demonstrating chasms of difference. A Kaiser parent did a great job of pulling some of these issues out. But let’s dig in some on now we got here and why it matters.

California:

  • Charter schools, unions call a truce in an epic battle as Newsom brokers a deal
    • Gov. Gavin Newsom brokered an agreement Wednesday on a high-profile charter-school regulation proposal at the center of this year’s contentious battle between teachers unions and charter advocates, removing a key hurdle for its passage this session.
  • What Teachers and the Public Think About Race and School Discipline
    • School discipline has long been at or near the top of the list of public concerns about education. Indeed, polls show that student discipline was the public’s top concern 50 years ago, in 1969, and for 15 of the next 16 years. More recently, education reformers’ concerns have focused more on how students are disciplined than how disciplined they are. Arguments that suspensions are unproductive, harmful to recipients, and unfairly administered by race led the Obama administration to tackle the issue through 2014 federal guidance encouraging leaders to seek alternatives to exclusionary discipline and reduce racial disparities in suspensions. This was criticized as a top-down overreach, and subsequently scrapped by the Trump administration without any further substantive action. Despite the federal walk-back, pressure for centralized solutions remains, as evidenced by the pending California legislation that would ban all suspensions for disruptive behavior.
  • Prop 13 Reform: Schools & Communities First
    • Restores over $11 billion a year for services that all Californians rely on like schools and community colleges. $4.5 billion will support K-12 education and community colleges. The remainder will be shared by counties, cities and special districts to support community services, including health clinics, trauma care and emergency rooms, parks, libraries and public safety.
  • Gov. Newsom, legislative leaders agree on certification for all charter school teachers
    • As a result of an agreement reached last week between Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders, California charter school teachers will have to get the same background checks and the same credentials, certificates or permits as teachers in regular public schools.
  • I Send My Privileged Children to a Mostly Latino School to Stop the “Hoarding of Opportunity” 
    • Schools in the U.S. are arguably more segregated now than before the Civil Rights movement. California has the dubious distinction of having the third-most-segregated schools in the nation for black students and the most segregated schools for Latinx students. Children of color are predominantly isolated into schools of poverty, while their white and/or privileged peers enjoy greater access to highly resourced schools. In L.A., schools separated by a mile can have vastly unequal access to resources and opportunities.
  • Push for single rating of LA schools challenges state’s multi-dimensional accountability system
    • There is a deeply rooted impulse in American society — perhaps any society — to rank everything from restaurants and refrigerators to athletes and colleges. That may help explain why pressures continue in California to rank its schools based on a single score of some kind, despite a major thrust in the state to move in the opposite direction.
  • Opinion: Setting up a needless barrier to a Cal State education
    • The California State University is considering a requirement that high school seniors applying to the Cal State system complete an additional math or quantitative reasoning course on top of the academic courses that are currently required by both the Cal State and the University of California for admission. The Cal State board of trustees is set to hear a formal proposal of this change at its meeting later this month, with a vote on the measure planned in November.
  • Achieving fair funding for school modernization in California: a case study [VIDEO]
    • EdSource examines the challenges that an urban, low-wealth school district in California faces modernizing its schools. Fresno Unified, the state’s 4th largest district, is struggling to repair aging buildings while student and community needs for air-conditioned lunch rooms, health centers and gymnasiums go unfunded. Fresno Unified ‘s assessed value per student is about a fifth of the statewide average. That puts it at a disadvantage with wealthier districts in floating larger construction bonds that are eligible for matching state funding. Finance and research experts suggest ways to reform the system.
  • Latest Version of Sweeping California Charter School Bill Waters Down Original Draft, Is ‘Setting the Clock of Progress Way Back,’ Opponent Says
    • California has more charter schools than any other state and has long served as a reliable source of growth for that sector of public education. But a sweeping bill, hammered out in a compromise last week between the governor and leaders of both legislative bodies, is likely to slow down expansion in the years ahead.
  • Q&A with Michael Kirst: Single rating for schools ‘just too simplistic’
    • Stanford education professor Michael Kirst was a leading architect of California’s new accountability system based on multiple measures and the California School Dashboard that represents visually how schools are doing on numerous indicators. Kirst, a close advisor on education to Gov. Jerry Brown for several decades, was president of the State Board of Education when Brown became governor in 2010,  and occupied a similar position during Brown’s first term as governor in the 1970s. Kirst has argued strongly against trying to rate a school or school district on a single measure. John Fensterwald and Louis Freedberg talked with Kirst to get his views on why he is opposed to a single rating. 
  • California vaccine bill exemption rules agreed to by Newsom and lawmakers
    • The author of a bill to clamp down on school vaccine exemptions agreed to scale back parts of it under a deal reached Friday with Gov. Gavin Newsom following a chaotic week of negotiations. But their pact was quickly met with fierce opposition from protesters who had hoped the governor’s apprehension signaled trouble for Senate Bill 276.
  • Opinion: California foster youth need support well into their 20s
    • Cutting off financial assistance to foster youth prevents them from earning college degrees and supporting themselves

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