Friday Open Thread
First, a huge salute to the third-grade Bremerton teacher who helped to save the life of her student when the student got hit by a bullet from a handgun in another student's bag. Doctors are crediting the teacher with saving that girl long enough to get her to the hospital by stopping her external bleeding.
Second, this news item was in the Times/Seattle's Child and may be of interest:
In honor of National Children’s Dental Health Month, The Center for Pediatric Dentistry will offer free dental screenings for children ages 1 through 18 on Saturday, Feb. 25. The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the center, which is located at 6222 N.E. 74th St. in Seattle.
All children in attendance will receive a free brief dental screening to identify potential trouble spots in the mouth (no X-rays will be taken). Fun activities will include some of the 3D interactive exhibit “Attack of the S. Mutans,” which showcases virtual tour guide Dentisha battling mouth bacteria, and the Labyrinth i-Pad game. The Tooth Fairy will also be on hand. No reservations are necessary and every family will be seen. To learn more about this event, visit www.thecenterforpediatricdentistry.com.
Lastly, I have a bit of suspicious feeling about how quiet the discussion over charters has gotten. It has died down publicly in the Legislature (can't find it listed on any meetings anywhere) and LEV seems to be avoiding the subject the last couple of days.
I didn't get in to see either Chopp or Murray. I didn't think I would but I had hoped so. But with Chopp as Speaker (and I guess taking it on the chin from Nick Hanauer who Chopp did have time to see) and Murray as head of the Senate Ways and Means committee, I just have to wonder if they will succumb to pressure and sneak it into a budget bill.
What's on your mind?
Second, this news item was in the Times/Seattle's Child and may be of interest:
In honor of National Children’s Dental Health Month, The Center for Pediatric Dentistry will offer free dental screenings for children ages 1 through 18 on Saturday, Feb. 25. The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the center, which is located at 6222 N.E. 74th St. in Seattle.
All children in attendance will receive a free brief dental screening to identify potential trouble spots in the mouth (no X-rays will be taken). Fun activities will include some of the 3D interactive exhibit “Attack of the S. Mutans,” which showcases virtual tour guide Dentisha battling mouth bacteria, and the Labyrinth i-Pad game. The Tooth Fairy will also be on hand. No reservations are necessary and every family will be seen. To learn more about this event, visit www.thecenterforpediatricdentistry.com.
Lastly, I have a bit of suspicious feeling about how quiet the discussion over charters has gotten. It has died down publicly in the Legislature (can't find it listed on any meetings anywhere) and LEV seems to be avoiding the subject the last couple of days.
I didn't get in to see either Chopp or Murray. I didn't think I would but I had hoped so. But with Chopp as Speaker (and I guess taking it on the chin from Nick Hanauer who Chopp did have time to see) and Murray as head of the Senate Ways and Means committee, I just have to wonder if they will succumb to pressure and sneak it into a budget bill.
What's on your mind?
Comments
Details 10 am: We review the news with @LKVarner, Eli Sanders & @Crosscut's Knute Berger. What's your take? weekday@kuow.org
http://bit.ly/zd5lVV
Might be interesting...
Nine Schools Cited for Exam and Credit Irregularities
2012 update of 2008 Twin Cities charter school study
Facts don't matter when you are dealing with ideologues. It's not that ideological thinking is fact free; it's that the ideology is a filter that allows some facts in and blocks others out. And because our society has become so ideologically Balkanized in the last thirty years, ideologues mostly talk among themselves reinforcing their particular set of facts and their interpretation of them as completely legitimate. Everybody they know and respect thinks as they do.
Everybody does this, even liberals. Think how many times you've had your opinion swayed on a subject you weren't sure about, but learned that someone you respected thought X, so you then moved toward X in your own thinking about it, even if at first you were leaning the other way. But, as the Salon article points out, conservatives are more egregious in their committing this intellectual sin than liberals. Why?
The article doesn't explain why, but I think it has to do with liberal ideology being more deeply grounded in the tradition of enlightenment rationality where reasonableness and a cosmopolitan openness to diverse opinions is valued, while conservatives are more deeply grounded in faith traditions (or pop-Nietzchean cults like Ayn Rand's "Objectivism') where the irrational and belief and loyalty are more valued.
And so while liberals might scorn belief and loyalty when conservative positions are counterfactual, liberals almost always lose the political argument. Why? Because belief and loyalty enable the creation of more cohesive political movements. True believers hot for a fight are going to beat cool, fact-obsessed rationalists every time.
In politics facts don't matter as much as organization and zeal. Educated Liberals tend to be individualists who don't do organization and zeal very well. They're more comfortable in being contrarians and in splitting hairs than in manning the barricades in a political dogfight. Conservatives on the other hand, see themselves as an oppressed minority--their adrenaline has kicked in, they are snarling mad, and they look at liberals and their continuous whining about facts as effete pansies.
And let's not forget that the elite 1% couldn't care less about ideology or facts; they only care about themselves and their interests. They will use facts or ideologies cynically as it suits them to advance their own agendas. Shrewd elites are quite happy to keep liberals and conservatives engaged in an argument about facts (or about abortion and gay rights) in the front parlor while they come in through the back and steal everything they can lay their hands on. From the elite's point of view, as long as everyone is preoccupied with arguing, those who would oppose their agenda are divided and conquered and rendered politically impotent.
Example 1: school #1 is full and school #2 is full. Which school is child wait listed at?
Example 2: school #1 is full, school 2 is not. Is child put into school #2 and then wait listed for #2?
Thanks in advance!!
open enrollment parent
In your second example, your child would be assigned to school #2 and waitlisted at the school you listed as first choice.
Details BREAKING: NYC releases reams of data on teachers. IN UNRELATED NEWS: Number of new tching applicants in NYC plummets. #edreform #edchat #NYC
City Teacher Data Reports Are Released
Then why waste so much time, effort, $$$, and goodwill then?!
Duncan and the Abuse of Research (As Well As Power) from Jay Greene's Blog.
There is an incredible misuse of research and in the case of the WA legislature an absence of thought when it comes to things about k-12 education.
The charters that are above average would be the ones most likely to have an extended school year and an extended school day. Keep in mind the "Eurpoean and partners" OECD average is a 195 day school year. Remember 2 million minutes and the amount of time spent in study by some top students in USA, India, and China.
WA State has no interest in funding the school system adequately. Even the WA Supreme Court took a bye on making it happen for the next 6 years.
(continued ...)
In the last couple of weeks, the esteemed What Works Clearing House has reported on a large well developed Professional Development program study = $21 million dollars worth. The program was designed to improve the content knowledge of rational numbers for seventh grade math teachers and to improve 7th grade student academic achievement in math. The program was done by competitive bid and followed the guidelines and specifications of the "finest minds" in Math Education (and blah blah blah). The result was that 114 hours of professional development produced "ZERO" .... there was no change in the teachers knowledge of rational numbers and there was no achievement gain difference from the "Control Group".
I guess the good news about the above 114 hours of PD is that at least the student performance did not get worse. ... At Cleveland HS the UW ran a 5-year PD including three years of a school wide "experiment" with IMP textbooks that lowered scores.
The SPS has shown a remarkable ability to make lousy math choices. The EDM disaster and the Discovering disaster were the latest flushing of dollars. EDM 2007 and Discovering 2009. SO HOW CAN Math Teachers be expected and evaluated on student gains when required to use inferior tools? So who evaluates the administration, the Board, OSPI, SBE, US DoE, and the Legislature because that is where the source of the problems reside.
NOW here comes STEM .... complete with its allegiance to Discovery/Inquiry in huge amounts which requires a lot more time for students to learn because it is not an efficient effective way for most students to learn, especially in k-8.
WWC reports on results from Alabama's big move with STEM Education HERE. This was aimed at grades 4 through 8.
While the headline reports:
New Research Finds Benefits From Alabama STEM Initiative
The spending produced very little gain or benefit .... it was designed to produce an effect size of 0.20 greater than the control groups but produced an effect size of 0.10. which was a 2% gain the first year and a 2% gain the second year.
IMO this is another demonstration that
(1) John Hattie needs to be listened to
(2) The Ed Guru's are so wedded to an unproductive ideology that money is continually dumped down the same rat hole.
(3) If strategies that do NOT work are reused, they still do not work. The Alabama STEM was as is currently in vogue: big on excessive Active Learning, Discovery Inquiry, and Project Based Learning. ....
The WA legislature has ZERO clue about how to improve anything in Education.
Teachers need a professional organization like the IEEE for electrical and electronic engineers, which is research based and improves the profession. Instead teachers are stuck with NEA, WEA, SEA and math teachers have the NCTM .... (This looks like the terrorists won ... in terms of results in education produced by these four groups).
The WEA and the SEA failed to oppose the Common Core State Standards .... The CCSS are going to be an incredibly expensive boondoggle because there is ZERO research and NO Prototype that supports this course of action. In previous blog posts Jay Greene does a nice job exposing this nonsense. (I'll put some links to this below.)
(cont ...)
(1) Looking at the actual problems that face us
(2) Looking at relevant research
We need truth, leadership, and solutions as usual the legislature is 0 for 3.
But instead it listens to the same "Ed Experts" that produced the last decade and more of ongoing unproductive nonsense...... as if WASL was not a big enough boondoggle now the thinking is a "FEDERAL" version is needed.
OH and don't forget those math scores at the school the new West Seattle k-5 STEM school principal came from in AZ .... they got even worse under her guidance. You see the "right ideology" as in politically correct to get the WS k-5 STEM job .... completely fails to produce satisfactory results under normal conditions.
{{Cleveland STEM Algebra scores were better as Algebra is taught everyday for 85 minutes}}
==============================
Jay Greene's link to recent posts:
This Deal Is Getting Worse All the Time
More Vegetarian Conspiracy Theories!
School Choice Researchers Unite in Ed Week
Lance Izumi on Nationalizing Education
Common Core Chickens
Common Core Quality Debated
The Desperate Need for Market Forces in Education
Duncan, the Bizarro Ed Secretary
U.S. Department of Ed Really is Breaking the Law
After Seattle: Social Science Research and Narrowly Tailored School Desegregation Plans
Why Common Core standards will Fail
Virginia, take a bow.
While Maryland, 44 other states and the District are spending billions of dollars to install new national standards for their schools, Virginia has stuck with the standards it has. Mounting evidence shows Virginia is right, and the others wrong.
Common Core standards are the educational fashion of the moment, but your child’s teacher can name many similar plans that went awry.
I really wish they would go to year round schooling with 2 or 3 week breaks between semesters rather than shortening mid-winter break and lengthening summer break. We are going from private to public for high school for our youngest and this change has really messed up our planned family vacation. The spring breaks already are off from public and private, now this too. Makes me wish we had just stuck with private.
Susan
I used to feel as you do about year-round schooling, but now that I have a high-schooler who is eying a summer job I am glad he will have a long enough break for that opportunity.
You can't please everyone, or maybe you can but not all at the same time ;)
--lisa
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=5595
Next year (2012-13) there will only be a four-day, extended weekend on President's Day weekend, rather than the nine-day week off that has been the norm since...since....way back.
Protect effective educators: rethink 'last in, first out'
I think you have to walk in our shoes to know how much we do at the elementary level.
n...
ought to get rid of I-732 and I-728
How about all the money which has been siphoned by the Boeing corporation from these dollars for education so the state can help the war machine.
Why do we not fund education properly?
Because our state is a war monger state.
Think about it.
Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate
The ratings, known as teacher data reports, covered three school years ending in 2010, and are intended to show how much value individual teachers add by measuring how much their students’ test scores exceeded or fell short of expectations based on demographics and prior performance. Such “value-added assessments” are increasingly being used in teacher-evaluation systems, but they are an imprecise science. For example, the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said. Some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students.
Education officials cautioned against drawing conclusions from numbers that are meant to be part of a broader equation.
----
“I believe the teachers will be right in feeling assaulted and compromised here,” Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said in an interview. “And I just think, from every perspective, it sets the wrong tone moving forward.”
In releasing the reports, New York became only the second city in the country where teachers’ names and ratings have been publicized. In 2010, The Los Angeles Times hired a statistician and published its own set of ratings, in spite of fierce opposition from the local teachers’ union. Many thousands of people visited the newspaper’s Web site to check the rankings, though, and Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, praised the effort, saying, “Silence is not an option.”
Whether or not they are made public, such ratings have been gaining currency, in part because they are favored by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative. New York City principals have made them a part of tenure decisions. Houston gave bonuses based in part on value-added measures, though that program was reorganized. In Washington, poorly rated teachers have lost their jobs.
The New York City Education Department will release the ratings of thousands of teachers on Friday, ending a nearly year-and-a-half-long legal battle by the teachers’ union to keep the names confidential.
The ratings, known as Teacher Data Reports, grade nearly 18,000 of the city’s 75,000 public school teachers based on how much progress their students have made on standardized tests. The city developed these so-called value-added ratings five years ago in a pilot program to improve instruction and has factored them into yearly teacher evaluations and tenure decisions.
Even before their release, the ratings have been assailed by independent experts, school administrators and teachers who say there are large margins of error — because they are based on small amounts of data, the test scores themselves were determined by the state to have been inflated, and there were factual errors or omissions, among other problems.
by Neal McCluskey
Apparently, if you try to undo something the feds want you to do, they’ll slap you around until you confess they’ve never threatened you. At least, that’s how Education Secretary Arne Duncan rolls when it comes to national curriculum standards.
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Petition to Dump Duncan
Great idea.
n...
Now, the Highline Schools public meets for Engle, Garcia and Enfield are over. I wonder when we'll know. She was the only Harvard applicant. I like Garcia's resume best. He's got his doctorate from SU and Engle's is from SPU. That's pretty local.
Meet the Superintendent Candidates
n...
This whole thing is pretty bizarre .... My PhD trumps yours etc.
Anyone ever care about results?
Enfield's selection of Dr. Shannon McKinney appears to have been yet another prime example of NO Research done by Enfield.
The most wacko portion of this K-5 STEM principal selection is that Dr. McKinney's efforts produced results in math at Hohokum MS that were pathetic.
I just found her PhD thesis HERE
AN ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND AND ARIZONA LEARNS ON MIDDLE-SCHOOL PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
completed in Dec 2008
Check those scores at Hohokam MS in math for 2010 and 2011 ..... and Enfield picks her to be a k-5 STEM principal.
Clearly resume Blah Blah trumps NO Positive RESULTS.
==========
The big problem is clueless leadership and management at high levels in k-12 education.
The fact she made it to the final interview then got passed over by Enfield tells you: 1) HR does a bang-up job vetting candidates; 2) SPS ignored parents that said they wanted a leader with SpEd background; 3) McKinney must have known the writing was on wall in Ariz and 4) talk the "transformational" blather and you'll breeze through interviews.
Interesting to hear what she would do as a super and compare to what she did as CAO and interim super in Seattle.
I am pretty sure Highline will see through her, especially the closing remarks about wanting to plant roots in the community for five, no wait, ten years. Yeah 10 years sounds great!
If she, McKinney, "made it" to the final interviews.... because Ensfield wanted that... then it makes no sense for Ensfiled NOT to hire her, as it was her decision alone to make.
-sped watcher
Families were updated on the "search" for the Exec Dir of SpEd. Too bad nobody downtown noticed that the top finalist had NO SpEd background. Oops. Enfield KNEW we wouldn't be happy about that. Besides they had a juicier assignment, K-5 STEM. So what if SpEd families are left twisting in the wind another year.
How is this really an option?
What does this mean for option schools in terms of sustaining enrollment?
I fully understand that transporation is expensive, but I really don't understand how option schools can are really an "option" to families that have both parents working. Or families that don't really believe 11 year olds are ready to do the multiple bus in the dark thing.
Signed,
-Call me disappointed again.
Signed,
-Call me disappointed again.
What do you suggest? Providing dedicated door-to-door transportation for all option schools from all parts of town? It's just unrealistic.
Many, many families with 2 working parents manage to make it work. You need to figure out how to make it work according to your own situation and what you're willing to sacrifice for your kids. And yes, it does take sacrifice if neither of you are willing to compromise your full-time work schedules.
One parent might choose to work a slightly earlier or later shift, if that's possible. Carpools are great if you can arrange them (and many people are eager to do so at non-neighborhood schools, because you're all in the same boat!).
If nothing else, Salmon Bay offers child care before and after school for elementary kids, and FREE (!) after school programs for middle schoolers, funded by the 2005 Families and Education Levy.
What more do you want? If none of the above work for you, perhaps an alternative program just isn't that important to your family. There's nothing wrong with that. But for many families, it is worth the sacrifice, and therefore I'm very happy programs like Salmon Bay exist.
How about letting us walk to a local school and catch a bus there. The community stops? Remember that?
How about offering equal access to options programs to families that maybe cannot go part time? Do we really think that most people can just make a work schedule happen? How about that? Is this what we expect of families in order to have equal access? Really?
Options schools are becoming to me much like immerson schools. They provide uneqal access to those who are lucky enough to live close by.
-Call me STILL disappointed.
-Call me STILL disappointed.
Thank you for post about the other option schools. I did not realize that and will look into it. Really appreciate your response. Thanks again!
-Still disappointed, but I apprecate the help!
If you do the "address look up" on the SPS website it will tell you which option school with transportation is available to you. I hope you find a middle school that works for your child and your family.
Also, my 8th grader started taking Metro to TOPS from Greenlake in 7th grade and it really has been fine, plus she has gained really useful bus skills. We did get her a cell phone and that really helps how we feel about it.
Also, you can ask to have your kid picked up at a stop that is not close to your house, but easier for you to get to (work? friends house?). You can have a kid dropped off at an activity or community center (but not at a random address that is not close to your house/work/daycare). I heard about parent of Salmon Bay kids from the north east trying to set up a community stop yellow bus (maybe just for a.m. or p.m.?) for this year. You may want to check in with the SB PTSA (or other Option school) to see what families there are doing. Goodluck!