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 middle schools that showed the highest growth in ELA for African American students were: Alliance Academy (91) and Epic (82). The schools that showed the highest growth in math were: Lighthouse (95); Alliance Academy (88) and Claremont Middle (80).
School offers for families who registered in Round 1 started to go out the second week in March. If you received an offer for a school, you have until today 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 (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 African American middle 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 African American middle school students.
Here are the results for: African American elementary school students and Latinx elementary school students.
You can view all the school results here.
We’ll start with Above Average schools in ELA for African American middle school students.
The Oakland public elementary schools with above average rates for African American middle school students in ELA were: Alliance Academy (91) and Epic (82).
The schools with average rates were: Lighthouse (61); Lodestar (55); Parker (54); Elmhurst (36); Frick (35).
Schools with seats open right now: Lodestar.
Here is what the data looks like for African American middle school students ELA growth: Note that schools with a small number of tested students are not included
Here are the math numbers for African American middle school students:
The Oakland public elementary schools with above average rates for African American middle school students in math: Lighthouse (95); Alliance Academy (88) and Claremont Middle (80).
The schools with average rates were: Frick (66); Elmhurst (62); Roosevelt (61); Epic (57); Lodestar (40); United for Success (35); West Oakland Middle (33); CCPA (31).
Open seats now: Lodestar.
Here is what the data looks like for African American middle school 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.
You have the tools, now use them.If you want more information like this, please follow me on facebook, twitter or the blog.