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, 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 both 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.
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.
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.
Elementary Schools with the Greatest Gains In Math
You can view all the elementary school results here. But let’s dig in a little on some of the schools showing the greatest positive changes.
Elementary School Growth, K-8 Schools are Below– Kaiser (closed), Brookfield, Fruitvale, Community United, Think College Now, Prescott, Aspire Triumph, Hillcrest, Aspires Eres, Lazear Charter, La Escuelita, and KIPP Bridge showed the most gains in math overall but many schools made impressive gains
K-8 Schools
The five color-coded performance levels in order are: blue (highest performance),green, yellow, orange, and red (lowest performance).
Here are the English Language Arts Scores
Elementary Schools with exemplary progress include Fruitvale, Kaiser, Hoover, La Escuelita, Francophone Charter, Lazear Charter, Brookfield, think College Now, Aspire Eres, REACH, Lincoln and Acorn Woodland among others
Schools Families should consider based on the overall proficiency scores alone (status)
Below are the schools with the highest overall scores. With our current data system it is difficult to know whether students came to these schools already proficient or whether the schools really accelerated their learning. So “status” to me is generally less important than “growth” in measuring school quality, but I did want to include this data as well.
Elementary schools with relatively high English Language Arts Scores
The challenge with these schools is that most all of them are in the Hills (Lincoln, Yu Ming Charter and American Indian Charter II being the exceptions) and oversubscribed, so unless you are in the neighborhood or have an Opportunity Ticket you are very unlikely to get in. And much of the overall test score status is really based on where students come into these schools not necessarily the role the school is playing.
K-8 Schools
Elementary Schools with the Relatively Highest Math Scores
K-8 Schools
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).
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 round1 closes in early February, 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.
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