Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Accreditation

Self-Study

All California public schools, including Oakland Tech, follow a six-year accreditation cycle conducted by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).

The philosophy of the accrediting commission centers on three beliefs: (1) a school’s goal is successful student learning; (2) each school has a clear purpose and schoolwide student goals; and (3) a school engages in external and internal evaluations as part of continued school improvement to support student learning.

Every six years, we conduct an exhaustive self-study –– including a detailed action plan — to guide our school improvement. It follows the Focus on Learning model used by WASC and the California Department of Education.

In the interim years, we gather and review data related to the action plan, assess the effectiveness of the plan and modify the plan, if necessary. The current self-study posted below was completed in Spring of 2022.

Key Questions

Using the school’s Vision Statement, School-wide Learning Goals and Critical Needs of Learners as guides, we seek to answer two key questions through the self-study process:

How are our students achieving?
Is the school doing everything possible to support high achievement for all of our students?

The Focus on Learning model provides five sets of criteria that we use to assess our effectiveness. In the self-study process, we form five focus groups –– each of which contribute to the final Self-Study Report.

The completed self-study report provides data that we have collected from many sources, implications of that data for student achievement and school development, the evidence-based analysis that the five focus groups have prepared, and an action plan that the school sets to follow for the next several years.