Dr. Enfield Answers Questions on Questionland Today
Today is the day that Dr. Enfield will be answering questions posted for her on Questionland. She will reportedly answer at least ten questions.
It's not too late to add questions or vote for your favorites.
It's not too late to add questions or vote for your favorites.
Comments
Good to know that when materials are adopted .... she believes we throw the first wave of kids under the bus for three to five years. This is complete idiocy. She needs to look at Singapore math results in various schools throughout the nation. Schmitz Park apparently just lucked out with the 5th grade having the highest MSP Math passing rate in Seattle and #3/1089 in state.
She wisely said at least three years to be effective as Everyday is still a flop after three years.
So where is the money coming from for these math special goodies? SPS is blowing it all on MATH testing and various other measures that do not assist struggling kids.
Betty Patu was certainly right with her vote against Enfield as interim Superintendent. This was hardly the cange the district needed as this is NO CHANGE. The CAO who pushed baloney under MGJ, now liberated from MGJ and on her own, is continuing to push baloney.
The WA state constitution will likely never be fulfilled when it comes to article IX and math in Seattle.
"Disappointingly evasive" is too kind a word choice for Dr. Enfield's math answer "purposely deceptive" would be better.
At least "her current purposely deceptive answer" was not at the level of submitting forged evidence to the Superior Court..... so maybe she is getting better.
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Sure is great to know that when it comes to instructional materials and practices...."The SPS never ever makes a mistake .... thus nothing ever needs to be fixed." How reassuring.
I guess that 7 rounds up to 10.
Oompah
The wrong question got asked. It should have been Central OFFICE because I'm sure that's nowhere near 7%.
She didn't answer the TFA question.
I had asked Communications about summer school being cut weeks ago with a "no answer available." So now we know; there will be no summer school available.
Interesting that she didn't answer the question with highest votes which was about funding maintenance.
is probably false as they do not want to disontinuie their little thiefdom. You will find the people cut in other line items.
Boy if I was a math teacher I would be livid to see that comment...
Whatever the case, these are not public-trust-winning answers in my estimation.
It sounds like more of the same -- same bad SPS policies, new face.
Wonder how that levy vote is coming along.....
Sounds good,right? Dr. Enfield said;
"Concentrating resources at a single school to complete the entire backlog of work orders enables us to reduce the backlog at a faster rate."
They have slowed the rate, not decreased it. SPS has $530M in backlogged maintenance. Under the proposed budget only "emergency incidents" would be taken care of.
"Our custodial teams now complete preventative maintenance on our existing building systems on a regular basis."
Custodians are not maintenance workers. What they are doing is minimal.
We have $120M new buildings and 80+ year old buildings and we aren't maintaining them much. So you, the taxpayer, get asked for money over and over and yet the district will not take care of the investment.
They let go that Maintenance manager who came up with the zone idea. Interesting.
Oh, and yes, keep in mind after the Japan earthquake - the district has a fair number of buildings that are have no seismic upgrades. Good luck, kids!
No, it's more important to build a "data warehouse" and pay for Teach for America recruits. Those are more important than basic maintenance to protect kids and staffs in our schools and respect the investment the public makes in our schools.
If I ever meet an administrator who didn't do this, I think my head would probably explode from the novelty.
But, Enfield did seem particularly persistent in her efforts to avoid direct answers. I'm thinking of the Ross Reynold's interview -- he can be pretty insistent in asking questions, and she managed to keep repeating the party line (which wasn't a bad one) and thus avoiding answering.
I guess if they don't actually lie, though, we can read between the lines of their evasion and get something useful out of it.
The answers are politic, I wound be very surprised if they were anything else.
At least there was a bit of real information in a couple of the answers.
There are 74 academic coaches that don't teach students directly. There will be no summer school this year. (An interesting pair of answers. Hm, now where could we get money to fund summer school? Maybe we should just revise the job description of academic coach, so that they will now teach summer school as part of their work.)
She weirdly didn't answer the TFA question. Hard to legitimately duck a yes or no question without looking bad.
I'd really like to know the answer on that one.
I wouldn't expect any more.
I wonder how this will affect the drop out rate. If kids have no options within SPS to make up failed classes, and can't afford online classes, or summer school in another district ($300 per class or so), they may very well feel hopeless and dropout.
She was catching up but was still behind sophomore year and the summer before junior year she took a summer school advanced algebra class & passed it, which enabled her to register for chemistry in the fall ( she received an A in chem).
Without the summer school class, she would not have been able to get to grade level math until sr year & she would not have been able to take both chem & physics.
Summer school was only held at Franklin & Ingraham that year- both difficult to get to by bus from many areas.
However ,they were each easier to access from Seattle than Interlake is, which is apparently what the Seattle school district is recommending for students.
How does cutting summer school make any sense in a district that claims to want to reduce the achievement gap?
Along with elementary school counselors, they are cutting funding to the supports that at risk students need.
The District claims all kinds of stuff. They've never been very good at building trust with those claims. Looks like it is just more of the same.
The building trust campaign in the district is mostly spin and little if any substance. How many folks will be fooled into increased trust in the district?
No career/college counseling.
No direct intervention for struggling high schools students.
All these things should be funded by a district that claims students should graduate college or career ready.
Apparently the SPS believes that funding lots of MAP testing etc. will increase learning and make the kids ready for anything.
There is absolutely no data that indicates this testing is in anyway appropriate or will increase learning.
Students will not be guided from NWEA tests. For an action to be formative it needs to happen often and be useful.
This is just more BUNK from the SPS.
NWEA MAP fits with all the Ed reform Bunk. Obviously 30 senators believe in Bunk. False belief and spending money on pointless purchases will not result in any increase in student learning.
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I am still waiting for an evidence based explanation for voting for 1443 from any Senator.
Dr. Enfield was not nearly as honest or candid as she should have been.
This did not help build trust.