2010 Achievement Winners

OSPI announced its list of 2010 Washington Achievement Award winners. There are several Seattle schools on the list (a couple notable for being named in two places) but there aren't many.

From OSPI:

The Washington Achievement Award:

  • Is awarded collaboratively with the State Board of Education (SBE) and based on the Washington Achievement Index.
  • Celebrates schools for overall excellence and special recognition in: language arts, math, science, graduation rate, improvement and closing achievement gaps.
  • Honors schools at an annual ceremony hosted by the SBE and OSPI.
OSPI uses statewide assessment data from the past three years to make their selections. OSPI wants to recognize the efforts of schools and their families into making good schools happen.

So what SPS schools are on the list?

Overall Excellence
Bryant* - Concord Int'l* - Coe - Hay* - Loyal Heights* - McGilvra* - Montlake* - Schmitz Park -
Mercer* - Blaine K-8

Language Arts
Nova

Math
Loyal Heights - Schmitz Park

Science
none

Extended Graduation Rate
Home School Resource

Improvement
Thurgood Marshall
AS#1 K-8

Closing Achievement Gaps
none

*indicates a 2009 recognition as well

Schmitz Park uses Singapore math while Loyal Heights uses Everyday Math. (LH reports that 100% of their teachers have participated in professional development to use the curriculum and they hired a math specialist. No word on whether this is part of the LH's budget or the PTA funded him.) From the LH website:

Walk to Math: Our new math program for all K-5th grade students. The concept behind Walk to Math is students receiving math instruction at their individual level. Our goal for this program is for students to receive math instruction for the skills and concepts that they need to master.

Schmitz Park (from their website) has got a HUGE amount of academic enrichment. Very impressive. Their ALO should be a model for the rest of the district. They a Challenge program that is open to all using differentiated instruction, challenge activities (in areas like verbal, musical, physical, written) in groups or singly, projects, or at-home work. They also put how your child does in these areas on their report card. They piloted their program in 2002.

Congratulations to all the schools on the list.

Comments

none1111 said…
Math
Loyal Heights - Schmitz Park


What is it going to take for the district to acknowledge this huge glaring fact staring right in their face every year?!?! That the school NOT using their crappy standard textbooks is consistently at the top of the achievement heap. This is not coincidence!

Anyone looking out for the best interest of the kids would at the very least be looking at replicating this out to 2-3 more buildings (that want to change), for evaluation. (Of course to many of us there is no need to evaluate, we know what's going on).

Anything less than that can only be seen as a CYA mentality. Adult egos overshadowing kids' needs. :-(
Anonymous said…
I'm going to point out the obvious for TM - APP was moved there last year. Is the improvement based on school wide improvement in scores?
Anonymous said…
Loyal Heights HEAVILY supplements Everyday Math.
Kathy said…
Sorry, I forgot to sign my post.

Loyal Heights HEAVILY supplements Everyday Math.
Eric M said…
More stupid, one-size-fits-all, reductive, based on marjority-normed multiple choice testing.

There is so much more to what makes a good school than this, people.
Anonymous said…
What does Susan Enfield, the Chief Academic Officer, have to say about there being no progress in closing the achievement gap?

*30% of our high schools are unable to get even 1 student with an IEP to the academic level needed to pass the math HSPE in the 10th grade.

*No students on an IEP passed math HSPE in 3 of Seattle's comprehensive high schools.

*Another 20% of our high schools were only able to pass 1 student.

*Our alternative, non-comprehensive high schools were only able to pass 1 student too.

*50% of our high schools passed either 0 or 1 student with an IEP in math on the HSPE.

*At our highest performing school, only 8 students wiht IEPs passed math as a 10th grader.

*Not a single high school in Seattle could even get 10 kids with disabilities to an acceptable standard in math!

*Nearly 70% of our students received the lowest rating, 1, "well below standard".

*Only 1 student with an IEP enrolled in a south end high school was able to pass math!


The majority of these students are cognitively capable. This performance is the net result of years of ICS (integrated comprehensive service). Overwhelming these students are products of a "resource room" education, which has been renamed ICS. When can we expect to see substantive improvement in outcomes for these students?

Chris, Parent
Anonymous said…
Interesting:

Loyal Heights uses "Walk to Math," a program based on ability grouping. LH supplements EDM material.

Schmitz Park uses ability grouping in grades 3-5 and the Singapore Math Program.

Could this be a model for success elsewhere...ya' think?

- Sick of Overcrowding and Portables
Anonymous said…
each elementary is below 10% in FRL, so the parents probably have the resources to fix lousy math instruction - unlike the parents of Northgate elementary, which has appx. 89% FRL.

money is below me.
Charlie Mas said…
So... it's not just me. The District and the Strategic Plan have absolutely NOTHING to do with any of this success.

The only high school that got any recognition at all was The NOVA Project, a school which is excluded from curricular alignment.

The only schools that got recognition in math were Schmitz Park, a school that's using Singapore Math, and Loyal Heights, a school that's using "walk to math". Neither of those is consistent with the District's curricular alignment.

Improvement recognition went to Thurgood Marshall - amazing how your scores will improve when you move APP students into a school. There's no reason to believe that there is any real improvement here. As for AS#1, their improvement came when students who had previously refused to take the test started taking it. There was no real improvement here either.

I can't help noticing that schools in affluent areas like Queen Anne, Magnolia, Montlake, Madison Park, and Ravenna did very well. Good for them. Schmitz Park, of course, gets noticed, only Susan Enfield and Maria Goodloe-Johnson have managed not to notice the math scores there. I wonder how hard they have to work at that?

I'm happy to notice Concord International and Mercer. Looks like there is some extraordinarily good work happening at these schools. In Mercer's case, there is undoubtedly good work happening at the elementary schools in that service area as well. As Cathy Thompson acknowledged at the Seattle Speaks event, that's no thanks to the District.

Congratulations also to Loyal Heights and that community for their work.

So. Now that we have this information, how will the District use it? Will the District institute Walk to Math and Singapore Math in our elementary schools? Will the District find out what Mercer is doing and duplicate it at other middle schools? No, they won't. They only mandate that schools do the things that they imagine will work, not things that actually do work.
Anonymous said…
Who is taking credit for the imorovement at TM? how dare they?

TM Principal Breidenbach noted in the school newsletter (last fall?) that she had declined a couple such awards, noting that it would be neither fair nor accurate (my words) to take credit for the improvement in scores. In fact (my words again) it would be lying. I appreciate her integrity.

Anyone who makes hay out of this trumped up "improvement" is dishonest. If they do so as a district employee (or politician) they should be publically reprimanded.

Damn, makes me want to bring a picket sign to the ospi awards ceremony.
Josh Hayes said…
Charlie writes:

"As for AS#1, their improvement came when students who had previously refused to take the test started taking it. There was no real improvement here either."

This is in fact not true - we were able to go back and normalize our test scores by "averaging out" the zero scores for opt-out kids for the last several years. Increased participation does explain some of the improvement, it's true, but by no means all of it: there is a residual steady upward trend even in the normalized data.

Now, whether or not these test scores mean a damn thing is a different issue, but the fact is, yes, more kids at Pinehurst/AS1 are participating in them, and yes, they're scoring higher on them. Just FYI.
dan dempsey said…
NO AWARDS for REDUCTION IN ACHIEVEMENT GAPS...

HOW is the Strategic Plan doing?


Hummm... Rep. Sharon Tamiko Santos is the Chair of the House Education Committee and she is from the 37th with the huge achievement gaps in math etc. ...

So what is she doing other than making Randy Dorn happy with her actions?

Any chance we will ever see any evidence based decisions? Anywhere?

Eric Pettigrew also from the 37th was the sponsor of HB 1609 .... the we will use a scale of: "teacher effectiveness" Bill for layoffs not seniority.

Only problem there is no tool to measure teacher effectiveness at this time. He said HB 1609 would help reduce achievement gaps.

Pretty clear that these two may show up on a lot of panels etc. BUT they are not fixing anything in SE schools.

Schmitz Park grade 5 Math 2010 Math MSP ranked #3 in the state out of more than 1000 schools.

When will MGJ be fired?
Charlie Mas said…
Seriously - all joking and sarcasm aside - when is this District going to learn from the experience at Schmitz Park? When is someone going to acknowledge that the Singapore method of math instruction is simply better for more students than the Everyday Math method? And when is someone going to take some action on that and replace EDM with Singapore in a lot more schools - if not all of them? How much more evidence do they need?
Charlie Mas said…
Uh oh!

If the Schmitz Park PTA paid for those Singapore math materials, then this would be just another example of a group of rich families self-dealing to buy themselves a higher quality public education than that available to the rest of the district.

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