Every Oakland parent has the right to apply to basically any Oakland public school during the open enrollment period which ends on February 8th. Where you send your child to school is one of the most important decisions you can make. The new school quality data was released by the state recently, 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 you can also take a look at the schoolfinder tool to find local schools.
But before I get to the public schools showing the most progress, and those having the highest scores, let me give a warning. These numbers may be imperfect, 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.
It is also critical to look at mix between how well students at a school are doing (overall performance) combined with how much progress students are making (growth from year to year). And the nature of testing is that it is harder to make large gains when a school is already high performing, and “easier” when a school is low performing.
6-12 schools are below but you can see our prior articles, and more detailed info on the schools and lists are on the OUSD site.
Elementary schools are here
The list of K-8 Schools is here.
The list of middle schools to consider is here.
Digging into the new data
Everything I am showing here is publicly available on the OUSD website, though you need to poke around some. And now is the time to research and apply to schools in open enrollment. We have never had more options, easier ways to enroll, or more information about schools, so we need make the best choices we can. Families should also take a look at the Oakland school finder.
Graduation Rates
Overall graduation rates for 6-12 schools are relatively impressive. CCPA excelled with a 96.9% graduation rate. While Aspire Golden State, LIFE, OSA, and Madison Park 6-12 were at 90% or above with OMI just below that threshold at 88%. Sojourner Truth made huge gains and CCPA, LIFE and Aspire Golden State all made gains as well.
6-12 Schools where students made the most gains
You can view all the 6-12 school results here. But let’s dig in a little. And ideally you can find schools that are making progress and also yellow, green, or blue. Which means that their overall status is not “very low.” Congratulations to all the schools making progress and I hope families will take a hard look and apply to schools that fit. If you click the link above you can also see more information about individual schools by clicking on them.
CCPA, OSA, Aspire Golden State and LIFE again stand out here for solid work in both ELA and math.
Note that gray lines mean that less than 30 students were tested, and the other colors relate to how high the average scores were. The five color-coded performance levels in order are: blue (highest performance),green, yellow, orange, and red (lowest performance).
6-12 Schools that had the highest performance
It is a familiar list with OSA leading in overall test results, EBIA showed the second highest overall results in both ELA and math, Apire Lionel Wilson and Golden State follow and then CCPA and LIFE. Note that graduation and meeting the A-G requirements are probably the most important indicators for schools that end in 12th grade.
Knowledge is power
So please, take advantage of your options and the information at your disposal. There are enrollment fairs coming up from OUSD and Enroll Oakland over the next several weeks. 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.
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