Restoring Faith in Seattle Public Schools
I met with Carla Santorno on Friday, and said the purpose of my meeting was to have my faith restored in Seattle Public Schools.
During a 30-minute meeting, she did a pretty good job of it.
From watching Carla speak at public meetings, I already knew she was smart and talented. What I learned on Friday is that she is a genuine, down-to-earth person, with a clear understanding of many of the issues and challenges Seattle Public Schools faces, a vision for where she wants to take the district academically, and some good ideas about how to start down that path.
I also learned that she strongly supports alternative education and recognizes the importance of a network of quality alternative schools in Seattle. That puts her in alignment with the Board position on this issue and is, obviously, particularly important to me given the current proposal for the Pathfinder/Cooper merge.
I have high expectations for Carla, which means I will likely be disappointed and frustrated at times. But, I am very pleased that Carla is the CAO for Seattle Schools. It provides me with hope that a better public school system is possible in Seattle in the future.
During a 30-minute meeting, she did a pretty good job of it.
From watching Carla speak at public meetings, I already knew she was smart and talented. What I learned on Friday is that she is a genuine, down-to-earth person, with a clear understanding of many of the issues and challenges Seattle Public Schools faces, a vision for where she wants to take the district academically, and some good ideas about how to start down that path.
I also learned that she strongly supports alternative education and recognizes the importance of a network of quality alternative schools in Seattle. That puts her in alignment with the Board position on this issue and is, obviously, particularly important to me given the current proposal for the Pathfinder/Cooper merge.
I have high expectations for Carla, which means I will likely be disappointed and frustrated at times. But, I am very pleased that Carla is the CAO for Seattle Schools. It provides me with hope that a better public school system is possible in Seattle in the future.
Comments
Any discussion on BEX III and choice issues - 30 minutes isn't that long, is it?
We need to watch and see how she does. I believe between her newness in the job and the need for her to show support for the leadership, she probably can't be very open in her assessments about how this district has run and does run.
My hope is that she continues on and eventually is on the short list for a new superintendent.
1) Her support for and understanding of the need for good quality alternative schools.
2) Her vision for a district where every child succeeds.
3) Her desire to get arts back in all the schools.
4) Her views on the WASL, which I don't necessarily agree with. But they seem well-thought out and backed by knowledge of the test.
5) Her desire to make some centralized curriculum decisions, doing the research on best practice and putting tools to support this in teachers' hands. Yet, also, her willingness to let schools who have proven success with other methods keep using them.
We did not touch on BEX III or choice, and only briefly on the current school closure mess.
I agree we need to watch how Carla does and provide her with supportive, constructive feedback.
What impresses me most is that she not knows what the goals are, she has real concrete methods for achieving those goals. I mean ground-level, where the rubber meets the road, here is how you teach this idea to these students, kind of methods.
After years and years of "aspirational" goals that are no one ever expects to meet or really tries to meet, and airy-fairy descriptions of methods four steps removed from the classroom, this is like meat to a starving man.
With these concrete goals comes the opportunity for real accountability, mmmmm... more meat.
Carla Santorno is a reasonable, competent person, which is not so remarkable in any other context. But in the context of Seattle Public Schools - or really anywhere in public K-12 education - is absolutely revolutionary.
Think about this: the District's number 1 goal and priority for at least the past five years has been to close the academic achievement gap by bringing every student up to Standard. So where is the plan to do that? There is none. What kind of leader doesn't make any plan to achieve the organization's number one goal?
I have also met individually with Ms Santorno and, again, she struck me as genuine, reasonable, and competent. That's high praise.
She is the kind of person who can say, with an outsider's ability to cut through the crap, "You said that you wanted to do this, so why didn't you do it?"
Finally, look at the presentations she made at the Community Conversations. That representated a higher standard of work than we have seen from anyone in SPS for a long time.