There is a set of folks who view every failure of OUSD as a result of charters. To them, charters drain money from the district and drain kids. The argument seems to go that things were great in Oakland before charters. Kids we thriving, the district was financially stable and families of all stripes were…
School Choice
Stop Letting Someone Dictate what Will Happen to Your Kids; Parents Need to Take Control
A guest post from Rachel Willis, parent leader and Oakland native on the struggle for better schools and the role parents need to play. “It’s more than waking up and living, you gotta take control of your life, and take control for your kid’s sake. There is a jail cell being built for your kid…
Stop Asking and Answering Other People’s Questions; Thinking Differently about Choosing a “Good” School
A guest post from Courtney E. Martin Many of us are busy and anxious. We are social animals: We listen for the culturally normative thing to do among our friends and, most often, follow it. This is what Aristotle, and later a lot of Internet evangelists, called the “wisdom of the crowd” and what Hannah…
Are Oakland High School Graduates Going to College? Here’s the Latest and Greatest Data.
A guest post from our partners at the CORE Collaborative, we always welcome guest writers. Up until recently this was not an easy question to answer for a city in California (several other states make this data publicly available). The data has been available to individual schools and districts who seek it out, but the…
I Am a District School Parent and a Charter School Parent, All I Want Is Quality; Underserved Families Need Options
by Hakeem Bey Oakland public schools failed me and now, as the father of four, I’ll be damned if they are going to fail my children, too. I don’t care about the name or type of school my children attend—I do care about quality. I never had the opportunity to attend a high quality school.…