Our Education related research and analysis have been developed over many years of collaboration with the Oakland Unified School District, various county agencies and nonprofits working to improve outcomes for children in our communities. You can browse our latest work or narrow down your interest by selecting one of the subject areas below:
- Absenteeism Articles
- African American Male Achievement Initiative
- School Perfomance Articles
- Full Service Community Schools Planning
With school closures and consolidation, keeping up with changes to public schools can be tricky. The California Department of Education publishes a list of schools for each county on their FTP site ftp://ftp.cde.ca.gov/demo/schlname/. But, who knows this exists. If it wasn't for a really knowledgeable person, I would have continued scraping district websites.
So, here is a .csv file of the school list from the mentioned FTP site.
Check out the API section of the website to see instructions on how to use our School API that incorporates the data from this file.
These tables were generated from three datasets:
- OUSD public school student database
- First American Real Estate Services (FARES) notices of default for Alameda County database
- FARES Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM) Loan database
The OUSD data used were those from the 2007-2008 academic year, the most current complete year currently available to us. These student level address records were matched to the Notice of Default addresses and the ARM addresses in the two housing datasets. This method does not capture all students as many had poor address information and many have moved since 2007-2008. Differences in address entry will also result in lower numbers than calculated. Some tables show 2008-2009 enrollment numbers for context as many schools size change significantly from year to year.
These data were calculated using all Notices of Default (NOD) that were filed between April 1,2009 and June 30, 2009- a fraction of the NODs to occur in Oakland this year. The adjustable rate mortgages linked were those adjusting between July 2009 and December 2010.
Full report available here.
In early 2010 the Council conducted a detailed research study into the patterns and trends of attendance in Oakland public schools in partnership with the OUSD Research, Assessment: Data team and Attendance Counts. This research and the following spatial analysis revealed high levels of chronic absence in our district (Chronic Absence is defined as missing 10% or more of a school year- 18 days in California). We then took these results and the nationally backed research findings and best practices to the OUSD Superintendent, Tony Smith, who was shocked at the number of children so chronically absent. Since that meeting we have been working with the OUSD to educate principals and educators about the levels and impact of chronic absence. Using 6th grade absence data we are able to accurately predict high school drop-out rates for poor children so this is a solid, early indicator of later success or failure for our students. The OUSD now prepares school level reports on absence each week with splits by ethnicity and gender as this indicator also reveals the massive ethnic disparities in our school system - African American children are more than twice as likely to be chronically absent as their White and Asian counterparts.
Click map above for a larger image.
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