Oakland and Berkeley Public Schools - need advice!

Piedmont, Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, and Castro Valley all have better overall public school systems (K - 12) than Oakland on this side of the tunnel. If you are willing to go through the tunnel, then Lamorinda area, Walnut Creek, San Ramon, Danville all have great public school systems.  Oakland has a handful of great schools but you will need to select where you live very carefully. I think there is a small portion of Rockridge area where you are zoned for Hilcrest for lower grades and Oakland Tech for high school. We live in Oakland in an area with a good elementary school and Oakland Tech (the most popular high school) but our middle school is weak, and we intend to choose private school for middle school.

You've got a few years yet. Any school is good if parents are involved and participate with their community.

Recent threads have discussed how Oakland schools are merging for budgetary and shrinking attendance reasons.  This phenomenon is happening throughout the Bay Area and is most evident in larger school districts.  Try to keep an open mind.  Smaller school districts such as Piedmont are being financially bailed out by parents and the local community.  My advice would be to find neighborhoods where the majority of the kids actually attend their local area attendance school.  This will create many more opportunities for friendships (and mischief-making).  A supportive community is involved and will help a school to survive and thrive.

I was very pleased with the education provided by Berkeley elementary school.  My children attended Malcolm X, and I think all the elementary schools are good in Berkeley.  I have been less impressed with Berkeley High School.   The administrator literally refused to allow my child to enroll in the appropriate math class, despite YEARS of teachers excusing my child from all homework since he had mastered it.  

The problem is political: the school is obsessed with closing the gap between high & low achieving students.  They refused to test my child for appropriate placement, since "all testing is biased against students of color".  Since Berkeley High can't raise the low math scores much, they don't want to raise the high achieving scores.  Their math is right: it closes the gap a bit.  Too bad for gifted students of color who can't afford private education.

Don’t give up on Oakland! I have 3rd and 6th graders who’ve been in OUSD schools since K and are doing well.
Under the current system, you can apply for a spot in any school in the district. Priority goes to kids with a sibling already in the school, and then to neighborhood kids, but lots of schools have spaces after those are filled. (There are a handful, mostly with predominantly wealthy, white populations, that are difficult to get into. Those weren’t the schools I was interested in, though.) The OUSD website has a lot of info on the process. 

My personal experience, the bad first:

The central administration is awful. Lots of corruption, financial mismanagement, turnover of leadership. The district plans to close multiple schools over the next few years; I went to many school board meetings in 2019 around proposed school closures and the superintendent and current school board just ignored the community feedback and voted in the plan they came up with. This was for multiple schools, and the community feedback wasn’t uniform by any means; some parents were open to closures but wanted the district to provide certain supports or conditions, but they were ignored. Outside of 1 or 2 board members, they (and the superintendent) clearly decided how they would vote before even hearing feedback.

-Very segregated, along racial and class lines. A handful of schools have true diversity, and I sought those out for my kids.

-Very uneven distribution of resources. What the district funds is minimal, so schools with the most resources tend to be in wealthy neighborhoods where the parents fund a lot. This will be true in most CA schools though, because of the way education funding is allocated. Some schools with mostly low income students have additional grants that fund enrichments. 

But also, the good:

The school staff! Our experience at our schools has been great. My kids have attended 3 schools (2 elementary,1 middle) and had many excellent teachers (a few not so great, but that’s to be expected anywhere). One of my kids has learning disabilities and had amazing resource staff at 2 different schools-seriously, I’m not sure if my kid would have learned to read if not for the resource staff at his first school. We never had any trouble getting the services outlined in his IEP. And we’ve had great teachers for art and music too.

-The families! Our 3 schools vary in racial/socioeconomic makeup but all have a core group of parents who commit time (and sometimes money) to help with enrichments, community events, etc. Not all parents have the bandwidth to do this, of course, and I haven’t felt pressured to do more than I could personally. 

I think it depends on what a good school means to you. I value diversity, strong teachers, and community, not just test scores. I want my kids to develop strong skills in reading/writing/math/etc, but I also want them exposed to art, music, and other subjects so they can find what interests them. I want them to socialize with kids who are different than they are. Our schools are not perfect but overall I’ve been happy with our experience.