The Oakland Ed Week in Review: 2/15-2/21

Last week, the report card is on on OUSD and serving Black families, COVID meal delivery, the performance politics of education, Black Asian solidarity on violence, the NAACP’s complaint against OUSD, the rising depression among youth, a dedication to Huey, research on Black teachers and a panel on getting more of them, all of that and more, please read share and get involved

Oakland:

California:

Other Stories:

Resources/Events:

How You Can Help:

Oakland:

  • Why Is Piedmont a Separate City From Oakland?
    • The city of Piedmont in the East Bay is a bit of a geographical oddity. It’s not even 2 square miles in size and is surrounded on all sides by the city of Oakland.
  • OUSD’s Report Card on Serving Black Families
    • “Accountability” is typically a one ended club wielded against Black families. We need an equity in accountability and a reckoning for the disservice still being done to us. So how is OUSD doing at serving Black families and staff? 
  • I Wish You a Happy Lunar New Year, But at Same Time, I’m Outraged by Anti-Asian Violence Across the Bay Area
    • Regardless of the obstacles we may face, I hope everyone who honors this holiday has a joyous time together celebrating its history and meaning in our Chinese, Vietnamese, Iu-Mien, Hmong, Korean, Indonesian, Mongolian, and Tibetan families’ cultures and homes. Unfortunately, at this joyous moment in time, there’s a depravity that I must also address, an ugliness that’s showing itself in our community. You have likely heard about numerous attacks on older Asian residents around the Bay Area. One 84 year old man was killed in an attack in San Francisco last month, and several others have been seriously injured in similar attacks including in Oakland’s Chinatown. Multiple suspects have been arrested in relation to these incidents, but the Asian community is still very much on edge, in pain, and calling for unity and healing. I echo that sentiment.
  • COVID: Oakland Schools Now Delivering Meals To Students And Their Families
    • The Oakland Unified School District joined the food delivery business this week as district officials announced Friday the district will bring meals to students learning from home.
  • ‘We’ve become parodies of ourselves’: California Democrats bemoan SF school board
    • California Democrats disagree on plenty of issues, but they are increasingly coalescing around a common gripe: What exactly is the San Francisco school board thinking?
  • Black, Asian Communities Show Solidarity With Oakland Rally
    • After several attacks on members of the Asian-American community in the Bay Area, a rally was held in Oakland to promote multicultural healing Saturday. The rally was part of an effort to push back on what leaders in the Black community say is an unfair stereotype which has gained some national attention – the idea that some in the city’s Black community are targeting their Asian neighbors in violent attacks.
  • ‘We will not fail:’ NAACP and Black advocates push for equal education
    • “It was almost like segregation had never ended,” says Oakland’s Oscar Wright. Brown v. the Board of Education ended school segregation in 1954. But in Oakland in the 1980s, Wright says it seems like the landmark case had never happened. 
  • Failing grades. Rising depression. Bay Area children are suffering from shuttered schools
    • Once thriving children, with good grades, extracurricular interests and dreams for their future, started to disappear. They lashed out. Some stopped eating, or they started cutting themselves. Others, bored or without adequate technology, have stopped participating in school, their report cards filled with F’s.
  • Lead Through Crisis Together
    • You’re not going to believe this,” a principal in Oakland told me early last fall. “You remember that mom I was telling you about? The one who declined all of the services our team has suggested for her son every year since I became principal? She just called and asked for help.” This was a breakthrough. This particular transformation occurred after—you might say was made possible by—the closure of schools during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The remote learning it required has dramatically changed the way parents and caregivers engage with and understand their children’s educational requirements and academic needs—and that’s a good thing.
  • Oakland street renamed after Black Panther Party co-founder Dr. Huey Newton
    • Ninth Street at the intersection of Mandela Parkway in Oakland has been renamed after the revolutionary founder of the Black Panther Party: Dr. Huey P. Newton Way. On what would be his 79th birthday, a three-block stretch of 9th street in West Oakland now bears Huey P. Newton’s name.
  • OUSD Overcomes Zoom-bombing Incident During Literacy Summit, Apologizes to Participants
    • Tonight, I need to address an incident that happened in our Early Literacy Summit and Family Workshop this afternoon. It was a large meeting held via Zoom and open to all students, families, and staff. As we opened up the chat function in the Zoom, a small number of participants entered expletives, racial slurs, and violent language, and even displayed obscene video. We quickly shut down the chat function and removed the offending individuals from the meeting. A short time later, we reopened the chat function to invite positive comments from our community, and it happened again. We immediately shut down the chat function for the rest of the meeting.
  • Families in Action for Quality Education and Aspire ERES Families to Host Press Conference and Car Caravan Ahead of Next School Board Meeting
    • Aspire ERES Academy, a high-quality in-demand school in the Fruitvale, is on the brink of closure due to a decade of inaction by the OUSD school board. On top of that, the new OUSD Board is considering a change in OUSD enrollment policy that would make information about enrolling in charter schools inaccessible to Oakland families. Both of these are in direct conflict with what Oakland’s Black and brown parents have been demanding from their school board.  
  • ‘He’d Still Be Here Today’: In Oakland, a Push to Resume School Sports to Stem Rising Violence
    • In early February, the Oakland Unified School District allowed school sports teams to resume workouts for the first time in nearly a year.
  • Oakland Unified School District surveys parents on distance learning, in-person instruction preferences
    • Parents, are you ready to send your kids back to the classroom? That’s the exact question that the Oakland Unified School District is asking, as more and more teachers get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

California:

Other Stories:

  • Rhode Island Kept Its Schools Open. This Is What Happened.
    • At one of her regular televised Covid briefings in early December, Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island addressed the residents of her state to deliver a round of bad news. “I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” Raimondo said. “It’s getting scary in Rhode Island.” In the previous week, a daily average of 123.5 out of every 100,000 people in the state tested positive, which suggested, by that measure, that Rhode Island was the most Covid-infected region per capita in the country, which was to say the world. Stern and matter-of-fact, Raimondo urged viewers to do their part by not socializing; encouraged residents to take advantage of the state’s plentiful testing facilities; gave a thank-you to school leaders and teachers for all their hard work; and then paused for what seemed like the first time in 30 minutes, as if she considered all she had said so far to be preamble and she was only now getting to the heart of her message.
  • Lucy Diggs Slowe, Black Educator Hall of Fame
    • Lucy Diggs Slowe was a trailblazer for women and Black youth. Born in Virginia is 1885, Slowe lost both parents by the age of six. Lucy, fortunately, was taken in by her paternal aunt, Martha Price. Not long after moving to Lexington, VA with her aunt, Lucy experienced another trauma that too many elementary Black students experience today; she was expelled, as a six-year old, from school because of her academic struggles and her behavior. However, her aunt decided to move to Baltimore, in pursuit of better schools, and once in Baltimore’s segregated (read, all-Black) public schools, she excelled. Slowe graduated second in her class and was the first woman graduate of the Baltimore Colored School to receive a scholarship to attend Howard University.
  • Tech Policy Has a Diversity Problem. A New Report Indicates Few Know the Actual Extent of It
    • In a new report from Public Knowledge released Monday, the tech policy nonprofit is making an ambitious attempt at addressing diversity problems plaguing the industry by asking questions few have raised before: What does the early-career tech policy workforce look like? And how could those organizations diversify their talent pipeline? 

Resources/Events:

  • Register Now for the COVID-19 Vaccine
    • The County’s Community Vaccination POD site at Fremont High launched successfully last week. The Fremont High POD is intended to serve our communities that have been hardest hit by COVID and its impacts, including individuals from ZIP codes 94601, 94603, 94606, 94607 and 94621. Eligible individuals who live in those ZIP codes AND are work in one of the eligible tiers has the opportunity to get vaccinated.
  • Honoring African American Women Mathematicians: Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer
    • In this interactive event, Dr. Shelly M Jones will share the story of Dr. Gloria Ford Gilmer. Come to learn, connect and be inspired!
  • UPSET THE SETUP 2 “Change in Motion” Black Middle & High School Youth Forum
    • UPSET THE SETUP 2: “Change in Motion” is a series of Black Youth Safe Space Forums. Black Youth can share their school experience w/ peers.
  • The Critical Importance of Black Male Educators, Research, Realities, and Effective Practices
    • Black male teachers matter, and we need more of them. Join the esteemed Dr. Travis Bristol (UC Berkeley), Sharif El Mekki (CEO, The Center for Black Educator Development), Jason Terrell (ED, Profound Gentlemen), Coron Brinson (The Black Teacher Project) and Dirk Tillotson, to look at the research and effective practices for increasing the number of Black Teachers, and Black male teachers in particular. We will hear from the experts, take your questions, and have some practical steps that folks everywhere can take to support Black teachers.
  • Unapologetically Black Education Now
    • Here’s an exciting opportunity coming up again for open enrollment to Unapologetically Black Education Now! Students, check it out!

How You Can Help:

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