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 in 2003 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: Lincoln Elementary School (Oakland, California)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)