This is a sampling of The Education Report, Katy Murphy's Oakland schools blog. Read more at IBAbuzz.com/education. Follow her at Twitter.com/KatyMurphy.

In preparation for a public radio show this week, I asked readers to write in with stories about what was working in their schools, despite the lousy economy and perpetual state budget crisis -- and ways people have coped with diminishing state funding. It was inspiring to read the responses. Here are some of them:

David Orphal: Skyline High had created a great teacher collaboration system in 2010-2011 for our freshmen core teachers. Each teacher worked in a team of four who shared 130 kids. These four teachers each got two of our six class period to work without their kids. ...

This costs money. We used a grant to pay for the extra time these teachers used to collaborate.

This year, we wanted to expand this tool to all of the teachers at school -- but, of course, there's no money. But we solved it.

We moved from a six- to a seven-period day. Now every teacher has five classes with kids and two periods without.