Top students fleeing Oakland public schools

One of every four Oakland students - including 40 percent of its highest achievers - fled the district's public schools after finishing fifth grade in the spring, shunning the city's middle schools in favor of private, suburban or charter schools.

The exodus, which crosses all ethnicities and income levels, meant a loss of at least $6 million in state revenue. But perhaps more importantly, it shows the staggering brain drain that consistently leaves middle schools heavily weighted with struggling students.

It's a confounding problem for Oakland administrators: How can they improve the middle schools' test scores when the brightest students leave?

"The middle schools are saying, 'Come on. We're supposed to get these kids,' " Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith said. Oakland is the most improving large urban district in the state, but that's not showing up in middle school test scores, he said.

Smith asked district staff this year to examine enrollment figures to confirm his hunch that there was more to the precipitous drop in proficiency rates from elementary to middle school than what was happening inside the classrooms.

The numbers confirmed that the district was losing 40 percent of the advanced students as well as 28 percent of those who reached grade-level proficiency at an Oakland elementary school.

The result has been a drop in test scores from elementary to middle schools - scores that make it hard to then attract families of incoming sixth-graders.

For example, in 2010, 54 percent of fifth-graders were proficient or advanced in English, compared with 39 percent of sixth-graders. Next door in Berkeley, 63 percent of sixth-graders were proficient or better.

In short, many families feel their high-performing children can't maintain that kind of achievement at the district's middle schools, Smith said.

Leaving in droves

The flight from Oakland schools doesn't happen just at the fifth grade. The district struggles to retain certain subgroups of students.

Nearly three-fourths of the 364 white kindergartners who started at a district school in 1997 left by the 12th grade, leaving just 92 white seniors in the 2010 graduating class of 3,442 students.

And at Lincoln Elementary in Chinatown, a predominantly Asian school and one of the district's top performers, 77 percent of last year's fifth-graders left to attend middle school elsewhere. They eschewed nearby Westlake in favor of Alameda or American Indian Charter School, district officials said.