Oakland Unified School District

Background

By virtually any measure - attendance, test scores, graduation rates - many of Oakland's schools face substantial challenges.

In 2003, a combination of declining enrollment and a massive budget shortfall pushed the district into insolvency. The School Board ceded its authority to the State of California in exchange for a $100 million line of credit. Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) formally became a district in crisis, both academically and fiscally.

Organization Mission

Galvanized by this crisis, the state-appointed leadership of the district embarked on a set of initiatives collectively called Expect Success! Essentially a redesign of OUSD, Expect Success! aims to transform schools into communities of learning to build more opportunity, empowerment and expectations of success in the district.

Specifically, Expect Success!:

• Replaces large failing schools with smaller new schools;
• Aggressively decentralizes budgetary power to schools;
• Equalizes school funding based on student attendance; and
• Shrinks the central office, reorganizing it into service organizations.

Because the challenges of urban education are not unique to Oakland, these reforms are of national significance and some aspects have no precedent in U.S. schools.

Full Circle Fund Role

Full Circle Fund's work, which spanned three full years, focused on fundraising, communications and outreach.

At the outset of Full Circle's engagement with OUSD, fundraising was a huge unmet need. The district lacked a fundraising team, especially for developing local support. The Full Circle Fund team served this function on a temporary basis, driving early action on fundraising results.

In the second year of Full Circle Fund's engagement, the team helped OUSD make effective use of a first-ever survey of students, parents, teachers and staff with the ultimate goal of enabling the district to create actionable changes within its schools.

In the third year, the Full Circle Fund team helped drive changes in the District's communication strategy, helping to make Expect Success! relevant as a unifying theme for students, teachers and the community. The team also continued to work for funding and resources for changes in information technology, which remained one of the major unmet needs in the effort to retool the district.

Impact

The partnership between Full Circle Fund and OUSD has made a significant impact on the health and direction of the district. OUSD school results have improved markedly in this period, rising far faster than the state average.

Together we have:

• Processed more than 30,000 responses to the district's first ever survey of stakeholders, which includes students, parents, teachers and staff; provided over 100 Oakland principals with custom data analysis that they can use to improve school performance and student achievement.
• Organized a Funders Forum to develop broader participation and support among the individual donor community. Over 130 new potential funders were exposed to the Expect Success! project.
• Convened meetings with a set of high-potential partners and funders, from local foundations to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. With Full Circle help, Congresswoman Barbara Lee became a supporter of Expect Success! She secured nearly $200,000 in federal support for technology needs for the effort in 2008.
• Attracted $26 million in support of the redesign project during 2005.

NAME: Expect Success! Oakland Unified School District Transformation Project
LOCATION: Oakland
WEB: ousd.k12.ca
GRANT TERMS: 2004-2007
TEAM LEAD: Jeff Camp and Kim Jacobson

"When I think about the improvements at Oakland Unified, the help we enjoyed from Full Circle Fund is high on the list of contributors. Full Circle Fund's members are smart and talented; they bring outstanding connections; and when they make a commitment they follow through."

Randolph Ward

Former State Administrator, Oakland Unified School District