Valley Oak – in the act of creation

This blog has always been open for comment, but now this blog assumes the role of official on-line sounding board for the effort to form a charter around Valley Oak Elementary School.  You are encouraged to speak with Valley Oak teachers, to call and e-mail the organizers, and to ask your questions here.  As you see comments, questions and answers posted here, please join in the conversation.

This blog announces a change in direction of the discussion. DJUSD has made its business and its unshakable priorities known, so…

Now it’s our turn.

We need to have an extended conversation about the desirability of charter status for Valley Oak Elementary, as such status gives us the means not only to survive and sustain what works for our children, but to create a new vision to serve them even better.

There are many fundamental questions about the concept of charter schools, so a FAQ has been created to get us past the starting line: Does this make sense for Valley Oak? Click on the link at the top of the page or follow this to the

Valley Oak Charter FAQ.

What is the law? Go to the original source, the California Department of Education and take a look for yourself. Follow this link to the

CDE Charter Schools page.

Ask yourself if Valley Oak’s predicament is what the writers of the Charter Law had in mind.

Please talk with your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues, your children’s teachers. I will be posting documents and data here as we need for reference sake, along with links to resources from the state and others.

I invite any conversation on this blog that deals with charters and dreams for Valley Oak. Kindly keep your comments to this blog pertinent to the issue of charter status for Valley Oak.

For the information of the community, this conversation will include not only Valley Oak teachers, staff and parents, but also affiliated professionals from the world of education technology at CSUS, plus other concerned Davis educators with a stake in our children’s futures.

Bill Storm

Valley Oak Science

The Context

It is not seemly for one school in a district, a district which purports to serve all the children, to start jumping up and down in order to stand out in the crowd. However, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. There are many confusing numbers being bandied about describing the performance of Davis schools, but the one that really matters in the discussion of the importance of Valley Oak requires some unveiling.

When it comes to measuring school performance, our one instrument for comparing apples to apples in California is the Standardized Testing and Reporting, or STAR test. Below are the 2006 performance numbers for the subgroup around which is swirling the greatest amount of energy in defense of Valley Oak, the Economically Disadvantaged (ED) population. This is but one aspect of STAR data, but it is valuable to examine this particular subset in this circumstance.

To view the source of the numbers given below and to see the complete results of each specific school in the district or state, go to the STAR Report Panel website. In the interest of defending Valley Oak while preferring to not blast our sister sites, the reader may visit that link if they wish to see site-specific data. Otherwise, district elementary schools are identified by letter in the table below.

Data in Table 1 is limited to the 6th graders, who as a group have spent the longest time at their respective sites and presumably represent the best work of the schools relative to the ED population. Valley Oak has 22% of the ED 6th graders in the district, and they are clustered in the traditional neighborhood sections, as the self-contained GATE classes tend to not serve that demographic. Therefore, those twenty-five 6th graders make up approximately 40% of the traditional 6th grade sections at Valley Oak. The approximation allows for the possibility of an extremely small number of ED students in the GATE program. The other schools cited below ((A-D) do not have self-contained GATE, therefore their ED population is distributed amongst all 6th grade sections. The remaining three elementary schools do not possess statistically significant populations of ED students, so no data is available.

The Numbers

2006 ED 6th Grade Subgroup, % scoring proficient or advanced

All DJUSD (109 students): 38% English/LA and in math, 39%

School A (13 students): 46% English/LA and in math, 62%

School B (17 students): 18% English/LA and in math, 29%

School C (17 students): 35% English/LA and in math, 24%

School D (13 students): 46% English/LA and in math, 31%

Valley Oak (25 students): 46% English/LA and in math, 50%

 

Conclusion: While the performance of ED students across the district appears to be wildly variable and hardly admirable, Valley Oak, with 40% of its traditional 6th grade classes populated at the highest rate of ED, nearly double that of other sites brings the most students to proficient and above levels.

 

Another critical factor is the course of improvement as ED children progress through the grades. One would hope that children, particularly those learning English, would demonstrate increasing mastery over time, leading to more students at levels of proficient and above at the progressively higher grades.

When one considers data longitudinally, following students through the years, it is a more complicated picture, and the range of performance between schools becomes more variable. District and site data are offered below. ELA = English-Language Arts. Number of students tested are in parentheses, % given for those students scoring profient or above:

…………………… 2003 3rd Graders ……..2006 6th Graders (same basic population)

All DJUSD …….(101) 22% ELA/Math 35%……….(109) 38% ELA/Math 39%

School A …………(12) 25% ELA/Math 64%…………(13) 46% ELA/Math 62%

School B …………(12) 17% ELA/Math 17%………….(17) 18% ELA/Math 29%

School C …………(11) 18% ELA/Math 18%…………(17) 35% ELA/Math 24%

School D …………(13) 23% ELA/Math 31%…………(13) 46% ELA/Math 31%

Valley Oak………..(22) 27% ELA/Math 36%…………..(25) 46% ELA/Math 50%

[Totals of students do not equal the district total due to other sites whose ED subgroups were too small to be statistically significant.]

Conclusion: Valley Oak stands ALONE among district elementary sites in bringing the most students the furthest distance in both English/Language Arts and Math.

Pop Quiz:

(1) Why does your Board of Education want to close the most effective elementary school it “runs” when neither it nor its district staff can replicate the Valley Oak numbers at any other site?

(2) If the only facility in the district producing these results is Valley Oak, why is it that a task force with the words “Best Uses” in its title could find no value in them? Precisely which values are at the heart of their determination?

The elitist dilemma:

“How can we open a school just for our kids while not appearing to close a good school for your kids?”

Davis, California, is an affluent, highly educated town of about 60,000 residents, home to a University of California, and very proud of its excellent schools and high-achieving students. It also seems to have very mixed feelings about the less-affluent part of town. It is grateful for a neighborhood where immigrants, service workers, and graduate students can afford to live in apartments, and where teachers and police officers can afford (perhaps) to own homes, but it worries that this older, less spiffy part of town in east Davis is perhaps not representative of what Davis aspires to be, or at least aspires to appear to be.

The Board of Education in Davis has voted to close the neighborhood elementary school that serves that less-affluent population in east Davis, the school we call Valley Oak Elementary. It serves a disproportionately non-white and low income demographic of students, and is very successful in its efforts to bring those children to a high level of academic achievement and English-language proficiency. You are invited to visit this school at its website to see for yourself.

A few years ago, against the advice of its superintendent and business manager, the board of education approved the building of a new school, a school known to be unnecessary based on enrollment figures. It was to be sited in a newly built, affluent subdivision, whose students attended school along with some of those same less-affluent students.

Last year, to keep the new development homeowners happy and to advance the cause of opening their new, unneeded school, they appointed a committee of suburban professionals who live in affluent neighborhoods of Davis to study how best to close Valley Oak, a school rendered inconsequential in their minds, preserving their new neighborhood school at no educational benefit to themselves, and at great educational detriment to those children served by Valley Oak. An excellent source of information is another local blog, Davis Vanguard, you are encouraged to visit regularly, as it chronicles the news regarding violations of public trust, revelations of conflicts of interest, and more.  Also, the website formed by Valley Oak Community Members, Davis Open, merits your study.  They issued an analysis of the Best Uses Taskforce report that was ignored by the Davis Board of Education. That analysis is available on their website.

This particular blog is offered as a forum to the voice of Valley Oak itself. The pages to the upper right are authored by staff and other education professionals who have worked, in some cases, professional lifetimes in service to the Valley Oak population, and who stay there with the glow of profound accomplishment and gratitude for the opportunity to work with those brilliant, promising children whose parents don’t happen to drive Hummers.

You are free to comment, but understand this blog is an answer to the elitist politics of Davis, California. If you wish to argue for the closure of Valley Oak, get your own blog. Any comments opposed to the preservation of Valley Oak Elementary will not be published on this website.