On the steps of Oakland City Hall on August 18 for the Attend and Achieve Back-to-School Rally 2012 — in partnership with the Oakland Natives Give Back, the Oakland Unified School District and the City of Oakland’s Office of the Mayor, City Administrator and community organizations.
The day will include performers, family-friendly activities, a teen summit and parent workshops. The first 1,000 people to register in the morning and take advantage of a series of life-enrichment workshops and networking opportunities with community organizations and vendors will receive backpacks and school supplies for their kids. The “tools for school” giveaways will be distributed at the end of the day to those with wristbands received during registration.
This event is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is part of KQED’s American Graduate initiative in Oakland, which seeks to build awareness about the dropout issue by working with students, teachers, parents, businesses and nonprofits on news coverage, reporting, community events and town hall.
Using audio from the Teacher Town Hall poem written by Arise High School teacher Cesar Cruz and research that the student filmmakers found about the drop out crisis in Oakland they created this thought provoking video.
BAVC/The Factory assembled a team of four advanced youth filmmakers to create four videos; the content of which is intended to help counteract the significant high school dropout rate in Oakland, CA as Part of the American Graduate Initiative
The vast majority of the class of 2012 – 95 percent of the state’s 450,000 seniors – passed the California High School Exit Exam by graduation day, an all-time-high pass rate, according to results released Wednesday.
Not surprisingly, state education officials celebrated the news, noting steady improvement from the 90 percent pass rate in 2006, the first year students were required to pass the math and English test in order to graduate.
“When 95 percent of California students are hitting the mark – despite the tremendous challenges we face and the work we still have to do – there’s an awful lot going right in our public schools,” said state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.
Yet critics of the Exit Exam have long questioned whether passing the test is anything to celebrate.
The exam, which was adopted by the Legislature in 1999, tests students on eighth- or ninth-grade math and 10th-grade English skills. Students are first required to take the exam in their sophomore year and have several chances to pass it.
Over the years, the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars administering the test as well as providing remediation, tutoring and test preparation to ensure students who graduate meet minimum standards.
And yet the Exit Exam isn’t much of a gatekeeper. Relatively few students who didn’t pass would have graduated anyway because they didn’t finish required coursework.
In San Francisco, for example, 109 of the district’s 4,058 high school seniors were denied a diploma in the spring solely because they had not passed the Exit Exam.
And those students were eligible to take the test again after their senior year. Those results were not available.
In other words, the Exit Exam is costly, measures early high school skills on a multiple-choice test, and the vast majority of students pass it.
Since March of this year, musicians and filmmakers in BAVC’s Next Gen youth programs have been contributing to a nationwide project focusing on the high school dropout crisis in the United States. Supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Graduate is a public media initiative created in response to the staggering 1.3 million young people who drop out of high school each year. The project engages with 68 public broadcasting stations and 300 community partners throughout the country to create locally-based solutions and media content.
Working in partnership with KQED, youth from BAVC’s Factory and BUMP Records programs were recruited to create work that documents the state of the American educational system as experienced by the students in it. Artists in BUMP Records recently completed a compilation of music that explores the complexity of the situation in Oakland, California. Touching on topics like the links between education level and income/incarceration, student alienation, and the challenges faced by teachers working in the system, the songs approach difficult subject matter with nuance and honesty. The album, An American Graduate, can be downloaded for free at BUMP Records’ Bandcamp site: http://bumprecords.bandcamp.com/
In support of the album release and larger project goals, BUMP artists Bhindi G, JustKidding and 3ss3ns3 performed a short selection of songs from An American Graduate on Saturday, August 18 at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.
Visit: KQED’s Sound Cloud site to listen to the album.
Claudia recently graduated from East Oakland School of the Arts at Castlemont High School
August 1, 2012
Written By Claudia Luz Suarez
Recently, the Oakland Tribune released graduation and dropout data on students they’ve been tracking since 2007. As a recent graduate from East Oakland School of the Arts, one of Castlemont’s small schools, the rate for my school was not surprising. Many students in my class did not make it to graduation day. The graduation rate was only 3% higher than the dropout rate: 46% versus 43%. Oakland has been in the spotlight these past few years because of its low graduation rates and its high crime and homicide rates. These problems correlate with each other. One could say violence leads to low graduation rates, but the lack of education also leads to increased violence.
However, I think the problem is much more complex than that. The Oakland educational system has been suffering a lot, but many of the causes have gone unnoticed because not everyone is aware of them. Inequities by design, structural racism, and environmental injustice have been contributing to this dropout crisis in Oakland in major ways.
Imagine trying to get an education in an environment where you are already set up to fail. There hasn’t been a time in my whole 12 year journey through the Oakland Unified School District that I felt I had access to enough resources. My question has always been: why aren’t low-income communities getting the resources higher-income folks get? We have always been in need of essential school resources while higher income communities are living a comfortable life – Mac laptops, trips to Washington D.C., books without graffiti, and an abundance of AP classes. It always comes down to one thing: TEST SCORES. But how can we be successful in achieving these high test scores when we don’t have the resources needed to get the,? This is how we know the system is already built for low-income communities to fail. They deprive us of resources that often make our drop-out rates almost impossible to overcome, while feeding us an empty promise of, “Get these high test scores and you too can get the funding you need!” The people most affected always seem to be black and brown, and that is not a coincidence either.
One term to describe what is happening is called “Inequity by Design.” Inequity by design is a term used to describe a system or a plan that is built to purposely perpetuate injustice. Those bearing the brunt of this injustice are struggling students in low-income communities. In a short film I watched called, “Bring your A Game,” the narrator discussed African American males in communities like Oakland and the path to prisons. When determining how many prisons to build, he said African American 4th grade reading skills were used. If the students were reading at a low level, more prisons were to be built. Throughout the continuing years, as students become more and more part of the system, it gets really frustrating when faced with the robotic school structure and sometimes the only response left is to be angry. When I’m in class, i’ve seen that it is common for students to lash out and snap at teachers for simple things. Except, it’s not so simple — my peers are on probation. They are in the foster care system. They are from East Oakland. They are mothers and fathers. Some are pissed off because they don’t think they will graduate high school due to being so absent. They are facing issues that they carry to school. Kids lash out and face getting suspended, therefore missing school.
When systems of power have created a structure that isn’t fair due to the disadvantages and privileges certain people have, the disadvantaged aren’t given equal opportunity to succeed. In Oakland, the impacts of inequity by design burdens our city, and is highly connected to our educational system and educational outcomes.
For example, the SAT’s, a test most students take to go to college, is a test ultimately based on how well you’ve studied, and your preparedness on the subject. There are some students with parents who are willing to pay thousands of dollars for SAT preparation classes and there are students, like my peers and I, who got 1 week of SAT preparation that our AP teacher — who taught this course voluntarily because the school gave no funding for AP courses — put together the week before our test day. The SAT score is a vital piece in your college application, and students from low-income backgrounds do not have the same opportunity to truly thrive in this section.
Where there are high drop-out rates, there is also a low average of students that continue to pursue a higher education. Before my brother dropped out of school his senior year, I tried to get him to apply to a California State University. He told me he was serious about doing it until I outlined all the things he had to do beforehand (i.e ask a counselor if you’re A-G Eligible, get a fee waiver for the SAT’s, research schools, do FAFSA). So discouraged, he wasn’t sure if he’d meet the A-G criteria, or be able to sit through a 4 hour test.
Systems like this indirectly affect the dropout crisis in Oakland, beginning with discouragement after failing a test or feeling stupid because you don’t understand material you never learned, while having little support in the community to continue trying after being rejected by the system. Not to mention, so many of my friends have faced a situation when a counselor has looked them in the eye and told them, “you are not good enough for college.” With many statistics saying that we won’t graduate, the youth in Oakland are carrying and always fighting these low expectations that are present, always, in the back of our minds.
Structural racism is yet another factor that has joined forces with inequity by design to cause barriers for youth in Oakland. The students and the curriculums have failed to connect because we are being taught along the lines of the Western Canon in a community with mostly people of color. These are euro-centric studies being taught to students of color who are in a community where they face struggles that are being ignored in lectures. How can a student concentrate on Shakespeare’s tragedy, when they’re facing their own tragedy? How can a student read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when they themselves are African Americans reading stories of their own people’s dehumanization? This has always been a recurring conversation between my brother and I, “why don’t you just go back to school?” I ask him over again, and his response never falters, “I can’t go back there because I never learn anything. It’s not challenging, and it’s so repetitive I get bored.” When there is a lack of ethnic studies in an environment that is so ethnically diverse, students can’t find any relevance or connection to their studies, and can’t focus or do their work. So if we ask ourselves why students in Oakland stop going to class? It has a lot to do with the fact that what they are learning just doesn’t feel important.
The environment we are raised in affects us not only externally, but internally. Apart from the way it teaches us to speak, behave, and dress, it is also changing the way our bodies function. With the Port of Oakland spewing chemicals and toxins into West Oakland, and the growth of liquor stores block by block, Oakland citizens suffer many environmental injustices. One big issue is our access to food: do we have healthy food in our bodies throughout the week? Or is it damaging our bodies and our ability to think and process normally? Another factor contributing negatively to the environment Oakland residents live in: A lifetime of constant stress. With such high percentages of students coming from low-income families, major conflicts students face include having a place to sleep, food to eat, or stress from the cyclical violence. From high-levels of stress that aren’t relieved, come illnesses. Especially in school, a lot of my peers are dealing with the loss of a friend or family member. Not everyone makes it to senior year, and therefore students don’t feel good in their bodies because they aren’t mentally healthy. Putting the body through non-stop high-levels of stress and trauma has tragic outcomes, sometimes beginning with having to dropout of school because you can’t seem to remember why It’s important to be there in the first place.
As I’ve mentioned before, it is far too easy to overlook these topics, as they can sometimes be incognito, yet very evident wen you look close in the way students carry themselves to and from school. It is very true that often students themselves don’t know that they are playing cards with a messed up system that has created two different maps for attempting to reach the same destination. And even though our map lacks shortcuts and straight paths, the best way to keep students rising above these injustices is to teach them that no matter what path you take, whether it was 10 miles before the starting point, or way off the grid – the best way to beat the inequitable educational system is by laughing in its face with not only a high school diploma, but your college degree.
Created by Carla Tamayo
On June 14, 2011, 20 High School juniors from East Oakland participated in the 6th Annual Youth Showcase and Cultural Symposium were they lead presentations and workshops using poetry, architectural school re-design, and research on trauma to talk about their experiences learning and living in a city that’s considered on of the most dangerous in the country (according to the FBI stats).
KQED American Graduate is proud to share four of these stories.
Hallie is a seventeen-year-old Gay-Straight Alliance Network youth leader who attends the Haven Program at Peninsula High School.
Why I Stay In School
By Hallie Cohen
School has always been difficult for me even in my elementary school years, mainly because of social anxieties. It showed through my horrendous attendance record. By my fifteenth year, I had stopped going to school entirely. That was the same year that my mental health completely disintegrated. The depression became debilitating, and the eating disorder drained my energy. I heard and saw things that no one else could. Being in school was impossible and I missed my entire sophomore year of high school. I asked my mom to fill out papers allowing me to officially drop out when I turned sixteen. Ironically, there was a problem with my paperwork and I was mistakenly referred to another school. That mistake changed my world around, and I’ll be forever grateful that it led me to the place I am now.
Now I stay in school because it’s my haven. The teachers, therapists, and students all do an exceptional job in ensuring that my school is an emotionally and physically safe place to be. This kind of safety, along with the academic support I need, allows for me to thrive. I am given the tools to dream and do, with unbridled encouragement all along the way.
The students in my new school all have one thing in common: we all have some form of anxiety. To combat the anxious feelings, we start every morning with a yoga session consisting of four or five sun salutations with a couple of balance poses thrown in for good measure. Another way we are taught to manage our anxiety is Over Energy Correction: a type of deep breathing exercise. Some tricks we use are maybe a little less conventional, like blowing bubbles, which also regulates your breathing.
One major contributor to my anxiety is leaving the confines of my small separate classroom and going onto the main campus. There, it is not so friendly. I stand out from the crowd and am constantly harassed because of my genderqueer/transgender identity and perceived sexual orientation. For example, no matter which restroom I enter, I am punished by the other students. I’m too masculine to be in the women’s, and too feminine to be in the men’s. I am lucky that my teachers understand and allow me to use the single-stall staff bathrooms, because without that accommodation, I would have no gender-neutral options.
The bullying and harassment leaves marks, literally and figuratively. My school’s incredible Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club has become one of the few places I feel comfortable enough to share my true thoughts and feelings. The students in the GSA are dedicated to making positive change, and are supportive, protective, and truly interested in each individual and how to make school a safer place for everyone. After our GSA enacted a new anti-slur policy, and did a teacher training on the subject, the amount of hateful language used on campus has dramatically decreased. This was a huge victory for our GSA and for students like me who were being bullied on a daily basis.
I consider my school to be my second family, and I couldn’t ask for better relatives. The teachers and therapists are adults that I not only admire, but also wish to emulate. They are my role models, and have been my heroes by introducing me to life-saving resources like the Trevor Lifeline and Gay-Straight Alliance Network. School is a stable force and comforting routine in my life. If it weren’t for the support that I receive at school, I wouldn’t be here today. I stay in school because it’s the place I crave to be when I am homesick, or lonely, or both; because there is no place on earth that is safer; and finally, because our Uno games get pretty intense. We have fun, and that’s important.
So thank you, Haven Program and Peninsula High School, for being there when I needed it most. Thank you for laughing with me, crying with me, and keeping me on the right path to a bright future. You helped me get from zero attendance, to now having one hundred and twelve days of uninterrupted perfect attendance. One hundred and twelve reasons to be proud, and counting…
