Where you send your child to school is one of the most important decisions you can make. We haven’t had new school quality data from the state due to distance learning, so the data is from the 2018-19 school year and I wanted to highlight some of the schools making progress with Oakland children, and encourage families to visit. Every child is different, and I will break it down into subgroups (schools showing progress with Black, Brown and low income students) in the next few weeks and highlight these schools that have open seats for next school year. You can also take a look at the schoolfinder tool to find local schools.
The schools that showed the highest growth in ELA were La Escuelita, Melrose Leadership Academy, Madison Park Academy and ASCEND. The schools that showed the highest growth in math were Esperanza, Lincoln, MLK, PLACE, and Achieve Academy.
School offers for families who registered in Round 1 started to go out last week. If you received an offer for a school, you have until March 25 to accept. In this blog, we’ll also let you know if any of the average or above average charter schools currently have open seats for next year (OUSD does not share that data though we would happily share it if they did).
But before I get to all the public schools with the highest growth in math and ELA for Latinx elementary school students, let me give a warning. These numbers may be imperfect. The numbers don’t reflect if more high needs students came into a school, and no number can capture a school, or the variation within it. So please take these lists as starting points and do your homework. I have written before about the perils of using tests exclusively to judge schools. I include data on graduation rates, change (how much scores went up or down from year to year) and status (overall scores), which together provide a more balanced look at school quality.
Digging into the Data
The data source we’re using for this is the CORE Growth Dashboard from OUSD, which includes information from both district and charter schools. The CORE Growth Percentile is a number from 0-100 that measures a school’s impact on students through the SBAC Math and ELA tests. A growth percentile over 70 is above average (highlighted in green); a growth percentile of below 30 is below average impact (highlighted in red), while average scores are highlighted in yellow. Different schools often produce different results with different students so I will also produce blogs looking at schools showing results for Black, Latinx, API and other subgroups. So keep tuned. The results I analyze here are for Latino elementary school students.
Here are the results for African American elementary school students.
You can view all the school results here.
We’ll start with Above Average schools in ELA for Latinx students.
The Oakland public elementary schools with above average rates for Latinx students in ELA were La Escuelita (97); Melrose Leadership Academy (97); Madison Park Academy (95); ASCEND (90); Aspire Monarch (89); Fruitvale (86); Think College Now (84); Achieve Academy (83); Hoover (83); Acorn Woodland (79); Aspire Triumph Technology (79); Community United (77); Aspire ERES (71); Global Family (71).
The schools with average rates for Latinx elementary students in ELA were Esperanza (69); Lazear (66); Laurel (64); Brookfield (61); International Community (61); Piedmont (60); Futures (59); Montclair (57); Garfield (53); Bridges Academy (40); Lodestar (40); Chabot (37); East Oakland Pride (35); EnCompass Academy (34); Korematsu Discovery (34); Sequoia (32).
Above average schools with seats open right now: Achieve Academy; Aspire Triumph Technology.
Here is what the data looks like for Latinx elementary students ELA growth: Note that schools with a small number of tested students are not included.
Here are the math numbers for Latinx elementary school students:
The Oakland public elementary schools with above average rates for Latinx students in math: Esperanza (100); Lincoln (100); MLK (99); PLACE (98); Achieve Academy (97); Hillcrest (95); Community United (94); International Community (94); Melrose Leadership (92); Think College Now (92); Kaiser (since merged with Sankofa — 91) Aspire Triumph Technology (90); Lodestar (87); Crocker Highlands (81); Cleveland (78); Parker (77); Peralta (76); Aspire Monarch Academy (74); La Escuelita (73); ASCEND (71); Lazear (63).
The schools with average rates for Latinx elementary students in math were Global Family (67); Hoover (67); Montclair (66); Madison Park (64); Thornhill (64); Brookfield (59); Joaquin Miller (59); Burckhalter (58); MLK/Lafayette (58); Futures (57); Fruitvale (55); Aspire Berkley Maynard (53); Bridges (53); Garfield (53); New Highland (53); Laurel (49); Rise (48); Lighthouse (47); Chabot (44); Aspire ERES Academy (40);
Greenleaf (39); Redwood Heights (38); ACORN Woodland (34); Sankofa (32); Franklin (34); Horace Mann (34).
Open seats now: Achieve Academy, Aspire Triumph Technology, Lazear.
Here is what the data looks like for Latinx elementary students math growth:
Knowledge is power
Please, take advantage of your options and the information at your disposal. There are enrollment portals for OUSD and Enroll Oakland and the window for round2 is open now, so get your applications in. Your children are counting on you to do the best by them, and that starts with making informed choices.
Let me know if I can help, and I will be doing future posting on middles and high schools, as well as subgroups.