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.

The transition to middle school is a big one for families. In Oakland, students from a wide range of neighborhoods converge at city middle schools, which are larger than elementary schools, have less parental presence and are full of newly minted adolescents.

Students from neighborhoods riddled with violence and poverty sit next to middle- or upper-class kids with soccer moms and children of immigrants with strict codes of conduct.

While students leave Oakland schools at many grades, the greatest percentage of them make the change when it's time to move on to middle school, with rates far exceeding other urban districts. In San Francisco, about 12 percent of fifth-graders leave after elementary school.

Oakland officials are now looking at why families leave and how to stem the flight.

A tough choice

Oakland parent Stephanie Pearl kept her first daughter in Oakland schools until ninth grade, but withdrew her second daughter in sixth grade.

The younger daughter, Kelsey, who has a learning disability, just started middle school at Saklan Valley School, a $15,000-per-year private school in Moraga.

Pearl said the private school's smaller classes - 15 students instead of the 30-plus common in the public schools - was a major factor.

"The education (Kelsey) is getting is far superior to what my older daughter got at Montera" Middle School, she said. Kelsey "was amazed when she first started there. She said, 'Wow, Mom, I can actually hear the teacher speak." '

Annual weeklong field trips, to Yosemite in the sixth grade, Hawaii in the seventh and Washington, D.C., in the eighth, are included in the private school tuition - extras public schools can't offer.

Pearl wishes she sent her eldest to the private school, too.

Although it was hard to walk away from the public schools, she doesn't regret it.

"If a kid is focused, they will learn," she said. "But it's not the same education."

A catch-22