Black children in Oakland attend the lowest performing schools, and given more school closures, it is essential that we find and apply to the best schools for our children. You only have until February 8th to submit applications. If you are a Black parent and wonder whether you should look at your options, consider this statistic 1% of Black children in Oakland public schools attend a school above the state average and making progress. 2/3rds attend a school below the state average that is going backwards. For many families in these schools, many of which will close—it is choose of lose time in Oakland. I list schools below that are making progress with or showing high achievement for Black children, take a look and please apply.
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.
Elementary schools are here
The list of K-8 Schools 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.
Middle Schools That Had High Growth for African American Students
UPA led math growth and was third in ELA. Unity led ELA and was 6th in math. American Indian was 2nd and 4th respectively and also was a high performing school for Black students, the only school exceeding performance targets. Frick was second in math growth and 4th in ELA. Roosevelt made impressive gains in math.
Middle Schools that Had High Performance
American Indian had outstanding overall performance, exceeding the performance standard in math and just missing it in ELA, Downtown Academy was the only other school close to meeting the performance standard. This was a depressing set of statistics.
6-12 Schools That Had High Growth
CCPA stands out here as a school with the highest growth for African American students in both math and ELA, Aspire Golden State had the second highest growth and OSA was third in both subjects.
6-12 Schools that Had High Performance
EBIA was first in math and second in ELA, while OSA, had the highest ELA performance and was second in math. Aspire Golden State had the third highest growth in each subject, and CCPA again appeared both in math and ELA performance for Black students.
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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