History
The Oakland Unified School District was founded in the 19th century as part of the city's birth as a bedroom community for families working in San Francisco. Today the district includes around 120 schools including several dozen sites that have been founded or redesigned as part a nationwide small schools movement.
In 2003, the state Legislature passed an emergency $100 million loan for the insolvent school district leading to state control of the 48,000-student school system. Randolph E. Ward, Ed.D., was appointed in2003 to serve as state administrator for the school district.
During its early twentieth century history, Oakland was one of the first school districts to use the I.Q. test developed by Stanford Professor, Lewis Terman, to track its students. Terman stated his view that Northern European whites were smarter than others. He placed his graduate student, Virgil Dickson, as research director of the Oakland schools, and the resulting tracking system placed most African-American and Mexican students in the lowest track classes
The resulting racial stratification continued through the 1960s until more African-American and Latinos began being elected to the school board and questioning the tracking processes.
Read more about this topic: Oakland Unified School District
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)