Friday Open Thread
First up , Thank You for your support of the No On 1240 Money Blast! It was a great success and will allow more outreach to voters.
Next, will you look at this? After only 17 months in Chicago, yet-another ex-Broadie bites the education dust. This would be Chicago Schools' "CEO" Jean-Claude Brizard.
Also, two Director Community Meetings tomorrow:
Carr - 8:30-10 am at Bethany Community Church, 8023 Green Lake Dr. (access at N 81st by playground)
Martin-Morris - 9:30 am -11:30 am at Diva Espresso at 80th and Lake City Way
And will you look at that? It's wet stuff on the ground. Perfect time to go see a movie. If you have teens (well, actually there is nothing really objectionable to this movie but teens might like it best) or like a story of the triumph of the human spirit, go see the documentary, Searching for Sugar Man at the Varsity. (I'm going to see the lead play tonight at the Showbox.)
It's the story of a guy who, in the late '60s, cut two rock albums that were critically acclaimed and yet went nowhere. He went back to working construction in Detroit and that was it.
Or was it?
I don't want to give away the secret of what happens but the focus of the story, Sixto Rodriguez, is about the most zen, generous person you will ever meet on a screen. His ability to transcend his circumstances and his quiet dignity is a lesson for us all. Uplifting and amazing. I predict an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary (and probably the win).
Next, will you look at this? After only 17 months in Chicago, yet-another ex-Broadie bites the education dust. This would be Chicago Schools' "CEO" Jean-Claude Brizard.
Also, two Director Community Meetings tomorrow:
Carr - 8:30-10 am at Bethany Community Church, 8023 Green Lake Dr. (access at N 81st by playground)
Martin-Morris - 9:30 am -11:30 am at Diva Espresso at 80th and Lake City Way
And will you look at that? It's wet stuff on the ground. Perfect time to go see a movie. If you have teens (well, actually there is nothing really objectionable to this movie but teens might like it best) or like a story of the triumph of the human spirit, go see the documentary, Searching for Sugar Man at the Varsity. (I'm going to see the lead play tonight at the Showbox.)
It's the story of a guy who, in the late '60s, cut two rock albums that were critically acclaimed and yet went nowhere. He went back to working construction in Detroit and that was it.
Or was it?
I don't want to give away the secret of what happens but the focus of the story, Sixto Rodriguez, is about the most zen, generous person you will ever meet on a screen. His ability to transcend his circumstances and his quiet dignity is a lesson for us all. Uplifting and amazing. I predict an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary (and probably the win).
Comments
Moving JA to that would work and would leave Pinehurst unperturbed (for now).
If I was JA, I would POUND the mayor, I mean, I would organize shift to sleep outside his office starting yesterday, and get that property back ASAP.
You'd be doing the SPS a huge favor, because they need that property back anyway, they just lack the foresight (shock!) to grab it a few months ago when their lease came calling to dump it.
Get the playground back and you are golden. Yes, the community enjoys the park and wants to put a skate park there, but ' imminent domain' ( not legally, just colloquially) must carry that day here. This invokes pretty much ALL children east of the I-5 and north of the ship canal: Eckstein gets relief, olympic Hills, Olympic View, etc, gets a middle school ( sorry to offend or shock people about which elementaries are going to have their feeding pattern altered away from Eckstein, but that is geography....), Jane Addams program and community survived in a great location (way better than John Marshall!), Pinehurst survives, and there are more home rooms added into the system for elementary right where they are needed (there will be growth in enrollment here, think of the acres ro be developed right there, all 14 of them!).
This isn't the easiest solution, unlike canabalizing Pinehurtst, and it may not be the preferred solution from Jsne Addams' perspective (just leave us in our building!). But, it really is the optimal solution for the 5,900 k-8 school children who live in the Eckstein middle school feeder area.
Jane Addams, if you get this to happen, you deserve a massive debt of gratitude from everybody. Sorry this falls to you, but who else is going to carry the torch? You guys are the ones in the cross hairs. If you decide to lobby for this solution, nonJsne Addamites should/will also get in the tents in front of city hall. And while you're at it, talk to Norm Rice, because he wants to be a savior of sorts for education. Give him credit for the idea, politicians do love the credit. Me, I just love to see communities respected and school children thrive.
Signed, I know this is next to impossible but it really can work!!!
Speaking of which, I know that Melissa has versed everyone who reads this blog on I 1240 but I wanted to add my two cents.
I posted
Why Initiative 1240 won’t work for Washington State: The abbreviated version
to be used in soundbites or op-ed's. Use as you see fit.
I urge you to take your student to see Bully, The Movie, showing at the Admiral Twin Theaters in WS from 10/12-10/18 as part of National Bullying Prevention Month. Take note, the movie is rated PG-13 and is emotionally evocative. The message is SO important however, as we read today that a Vancouver B.C. teen took her own life due to cyberbullying.
It is an office complex now so beyond buying out the lease, you'd have to do some kind of remodeling.
But I applaud your out-of-the-box thinking which the district too easily rejects.
Mirmac, I heard good things about that film as well. Documentaries can be good movies for kids.
-skeptical-
If the final facility was big enough to accomodate our program, I think most Jane Addams K-8 families would consider Lake City a good alternative.
For 6th grade for each class, "effort" is 60% of the grade and "performance" is 40%.
For 7th grade, effort and performance are each 50% of the grade for each class.
For 8th grade, effort is 40% of the grade and performance is 60% of the grade.
Is this the standard middle school grading approach? I am just wondering if this is more of a school by school thing or district wide for middle school.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
-FedMomof2
HIMS mom.
Grades are supposed to reflect the students progress towards the grade level expectations for the Standards. Effort isn't supposed to have anything to do with it.
There is a policy regarding high school grade marking but it is almost unintelligible. There is no policy regarding middle school grades. This may be because middle school grades don't matter.
My most successful (of 3) students attended a private middle school (Spectrum kid with no seat available). The school had an honor roll (and a sports participation policy) that was built entirely around turning in homework. All of it. On time. Every day. In the end, what it did was "level the playing field" between the "smart" kids and those who weren't as smart, but who worked hard, kept up their planners, stayed organized (or got help getting organized). When high school hit -- and the grades mattered -- this child was FAR more successful than the older APP sibling who was less organized, more inclined to get by on brilliance rather than hard work, far more likely to procrastinate, etc.
If EVER there is a time for teachers to concentrate on habit training -- it is middle school!
Obviously, none of this means we should overlook grades, pass kids who haven't mastered concepts, etc. It just means that for this school, what got measured got done -- and what they measured (in terms of honor roll -- not grades) was consistently doing the work -- all of it -- all the time, and on time. For my child, this (along with one middle school teacher who loved literature, and literary ideas, with a passion) were the two biggest things, over twelve years, that contributed to his academic success.
Comments open....
Public School Parent
You contradict yourself. If there is no policy, then "progress towards standard" isn't what grades are "supposed" to do, necessarily. If there's no policy, then the meaning of grades is undefined, and yes, left up to the school. In point of fact, middle schools do it all sorts of ways.
Furthermore, effort is something necessary to make progress towards standards. So effort may well be a worthwhile thing to measure and base grades upon. "Standards" based grades is essentially grading based on demographics alone. Nobody, anywhere has moved the needle in the demographic linkage between perforance and standards. There are so many standards in every given subject, which one is really being measured for the report card? We already have the MSP/HSPE/EOC for progress towards standards. We also have MAP given 3 times a year. There are many things to factor in when grading that are equally important. Effort, citizenship, behavior, perserverance, creativity, etc. Many of these things are very important success factors in college and life. It's reasonable to use them in grading.
-parent
That practice doesn't actually level the playing field at all. It turns it into a completely different playing field, on which different students are handicapped. In fact it's practically guaranteed under such a policy that some of the students with the highest actual achievement would not make honor roll. Continuing to call it "honor roll" under such circumstances seems to me to be blatant anti-intellectualism, and exactly the kind of thing that puts kids' backs up and makes them not WANT to follow the rules.
That said, I have nothing against teaching better executive function skills. I would have been ecstatic for someone to actually do that with my kids, rather than just piling on the work and expecting them to deal. And if they had such an honor without calling it "honor roll," it would be okay with me.
Helen Schinske
Just depends. Are you actually recognizing "acheivement"? Are you saying students should get some "I'm smart award?" That's not my idea of an honor roll either. Because a student may show up already at the honor roll level, and actually having achieved nothing at all in the timeframe the award is for. I see nothing wrong with making such a student demonstrate that they actually did something, learned something, or grew... not that they were simply at a certain level. Having such a requirement isn't anti-intellectual. It's more intellectual actually.
Another parent
Eckstein Parent
So I have been trying to figure it out. Credit doesn't mean the child learned a specific amount, because they don't pre-test, some kids may have learned twice as much as others (or nothing at all), but get the same credit.
Credit doesn't represent what they know, because they don't get credit for knowledge they gained outside of school even if their high school awards credit for that subject in a class.
Credit doesn't measure effort by time spent since we know how widely seat time varies.
So I'm asking, What is credit? How is it standard across the district or the state?
And yeah, if students know the material beforehand and can ace the classes without working very hard, it's the school's fault for not challenging them further, not theirs. Excluding them from honor roll for not being able to show their true achievement is valuing hoop-jumping over learning.
What usually happens, though, is that the school makes the class harder to ace by requiring more volume of output. Then it doesn't matter whether you already know the material -- you can't test out. You still have to do all the worksheets, the dioramas, the papers, etc. That's not nothing in terms of effort, no matter how much you already know about algebra or the Thirty Years' War. It's just way duller than getting to do the same stuff with material that's actually teaching you something new along the way.
Helen Schinske
When teachers submit official grades at the end of the semester they are required to give separate grades in three categories - the actual academic grade earned for the course, as well as effort and citizenship. I don't understand how your kid's school gets away with putting %60 effort weight into the grade earned when there's already a designated category for that. Seems fishy.
open ears
-glad to be out of that nightmare.
And before you suggest that she meant post-construction capacity, no, she was clear that she meant right now. Hard to imagine how she could make an informed decision when she's been so poorly informed. Has anyone else seen that kind of number out there? I can't find it ANYWHERE in SPS documents, but she must have seen it somewhere.
At BEX, there was a big push from somewhere to repurpose JA for Sept 2013 and move JA into Pinehurst for Sept 2013. I have gotten over a dozen emails from parents urging me to contact the board to urge them to move JA into Pinehurst immediately to relieve the crowding at Eckstein.
I think the bomb scare at Eckstein has made everyone pretty crazy. Eckstein was way crowded at 1100 at 1300, it is just insane.
- ne parent
Another NE parent, if it wasn't so troubling, your words would be very funny.
This is not new. Eckstein has more than 450 kids in portables. They can not open their lockers between classes because they can not give up the extra 9 inches that takes away from hall traffic. And don't even imagine what that means for the bathrooms, ugh. The district has known for years that it was bad and that is was going to get worse.
Why can't Eckstein's 6th grade be moved into Lincoln? Roosevelt fit there so it must be big enough for LOL & 500 6th graders. And JA could take some portables to add to their middle school. Definitely use anti-gravity belts at AS1 & JA to attract middle schoolers who might otherwise go to Eckstein.
-Eckstein Parent
A middle school is more than just kids assigned to an empty building! What are these people thinking?
I understand how terrible the crowding is at Eckstein, but to want to kick kids out of Eckstein without a plan is unbelievably selfish and harsh, not to mention the damage this would do to Jane Addams K-8 and Pinehurst K-8.
Unbelievable!
-Eckstein Bound (and reconsidering)
--Not so sure about APP
It's the Capacity Planning and Management Annual Report January 2011.
Pinehurst appears on the report because it is one the "Capacity Challenges". On page 5, at the top, the District Capacity Management Report shows the K-5 capacity of Pinehurst (AS #1) as 175 and the 6-8 capacity as 90. This makes a total capacity of 265.
That is the official capacity of Pinehurst according to the the District's own annual Capacity Management Report.
Gee, it sounds like what we need is an aligned, written, taught and tested curriculum for APP. You know, like the one that we were promised would be implemented concurrent with the split. Like the one that the APP Review said we absolutely need. Like the one that we still don't have.
Students with disabilities have modified grades on their IEPs. They have the right to modified content. They also have modified HSPEs. And, they may be getting a certificate of individual accomplishment. Where has this teacher been all these years? She's a bit of a bonehead if she doesn't know that by now. She needs to get with the IEP team and decide what standards the kid is supposed to be working at.
-sped parent
Helen, material in any class can ALWAYS be accessed at many different levels. So what does it really mean to "Ace" the material and get on the honor roll? If you demonstrate some level of "achievement" that required nothing from you, just because it's in some standard's book, that really shouldn't earn you anything special, except maybe a "pass" since you do actually need the credit at the high school level.
I don't really think it's the school's fault for "not challenging" the student either as you put it. Students often elect the classes they take, and elect the level of depth they choose to take the subject. If schools decide to assign meaningless hoop-jumping for grades, yes, that's on the school. But, they don't have to do it that way.
Another Parent
I didn't have the experience to rebut the teacher's claim about modifications, though I know that sped students could get modifications in curriculum elementary & middle school.
Does modification to high school curriculum mean that they have a modified diploma or are the credits somehow marked at modified? I was surprised to hear the concern about credit & modifications because I never understood 'credit' to have any standard meaning. So if credit means different things in different classes or different schools or between different students, how could modifying the curriculum be a problem?
Any further enlightenment would be welcome.
You will find some teachers believe adding "challenge" to a class means going beyond what is age appropriate both content wise and work load wise. Some believe kids need to experience failure, even if it means imposing unrealistic expectations. These attitudes have most often come from teachers with little to no gifted ed training.
If it's possible to "coast" at the end of the class, then either there isn't much vital being done at that time, or the grade weighting hitherto hasn't accurately reflected what proportion of the material the kids are supposed to have finished. Neither one is the kid's fault.
In any case, a conscientious student won't usually coast, at least not to the point of doing their work any harm, because (a) they're in the habit of doing their work regularly, and (b) they may well actually care about learning something. Neither of those qualities is something you can put into a kid by means of ever more punitive grading. Punitive grading actually promotes practices like coasting, because it teaches kids to pay attention to the minutiae of their grades and look for loopholes.
Helen Schinske
Then there's the whole grading craziness. First it was that no kid can ever improve their grade from their lowest test score (this was supposedly done to prevent the previously mentioned end of quarter "coasting"). Then the grades from the first test were "adjusted." Then on curriculum night we heard that grades were "corrected" again after the teacher spoke with other teachers. Hamilton is switching over to "standards based grading" and I don't think this teacher understands it. My child is not having the same grading issues with other teachers using this same system.
Are other middle schools switching to this new grading system?
-annoyed HIMS parent
-Sped Parent
As much as high grades ever mean. As I said, I don't personally put a lot of stock in honor rolls. But the whole attitude that you shouldn't get credit for already knowing something kind of frosts me. After all, you did whatever work it took to learn that in the first place. You read a book or thought about things or talked to people. Just because it wasn't in this year's class doesn't make you a lazy bum or your knowledge less valuable.
When I was a sophomore in high school, we had to read Macbeth, a play I had already seen, become obsessed with, and read over and over. I still enjoyed the class discussions and learned a lot, but I probably spent less than a quarter as much time on the homework as everyone else, because I already knew the play and was just skimming to refresh my memory. I got top marks and praise from my teacher AND I DESERVED THEM. Plus I had more time to work on classes that were more difficult for me, or hell, just chill. Not a sin.
It's considered an ideal result of education to be a curious lifelong learner -- to have that quality sneered at and related to laziness by the very people who are supposed to be fostering intellectual curiosity is quite damning.
Helen Schinske
I suggest figuring out which vocab he's likely to look up next and changing the Wikipedia entries right before class.
Helen Schinske
@HIMS
Wow. Asking students to actually do something when they get into a classroom really isn't the same thing as "sneering" at them. ??? And resting on your laurels isn't really evidence of "lifelong learning". I agree that students should get credit for having already learned something, but I'm not certain that they deserve to "ace" a class, as you put it, with no effort or evidence of work.
-Another Parent
--D is for Dropout
(Helen, thank you for your perspective both here and on the APP blog--it's been very valuable to me.)
But it still doesn't explain why Director Carr is so certain our current capacity is 400-500 kids. Puzzling indeed.
Okay, look. This is not just theoretical here. Look at all the kids at Hamilton who have had to take math classes a year or more below where they belong. Should they really not be able to get A's in math just because it's easy for them to do so? What the heck kind of sense would that make?
This is their year to get credit for algebra or geometry. They know their stuff, they come to class, they do their homework, they ace the tests. That's not no work. That's a lot of hours that they're putting in. It's not their fault the administration wouldn't let the teachers have a third year of high school math.
I don't know how to make this any clearer. You're the one who postulated "a student [who] may show up already at the honor roll level, and actually having achieved nothing at all in the timeframe the award is for." That's a straw man. And yes, it's sneering to suggest that it's the student's fault when there was no class at their level for them to even sign up for, or they were forbidden to sign up for it -- as did happen at Hamilton.
Helen Schinske
Helen Schinske
The grades in classes reflected achievement. But the "honor roll" was pure effort. ANY kid could get on it, as long as they were willing to master a planner, and just do all the work. The school backed it up in two ways:
(a) by NOT giving "stupid" homework. There were no "dioramas," no "construct a civil war building and write a report to go with it." Arguably, some of the math homework my kid did was stuff he already knew -- but really, most of it was good for him, and all of it was reasonable. To keep him challenged in math -- we just did more of it at home; and
(b) valuing and celebrating hard work. This meant that all the "smart" kids could be (and many were) also on the honor roll -- but anyone could get his/her name on the list by just committing to hard work.
AND -- none of this applied to the stuff like "getting signatures in," etc. -- the stuff that "counted for grades" in high school merely to make the teachers' administrative tasks easier.
It was one of the most intellectual schools any of my kids attended -- because love of learning and hard work, rather than gaming the system for grades, formed the basis of the community's value system.
I don't mean to denigrate giftedness here; and I deplore the "gamey" sorts of grading systems that people have discussed above. I think that sometimes there is far too little thought put into what values are taught by our evaluation systems, and how to actually inspire kids (as opposed to annoying and discouraging them).
To me, the "heart" of the system that worked for my kids was the intentional teaching that came from the faculty -- "we care about character; we care about helping you form strong habits to succeed in high school; we care less about exactly where you ARE in terms of what you know, than what you are doing to move forward. We honor your hard work and effort, even if the grade on the paper is a "C." As I am writing this, I am realizing -- maybe it worked so well not because the actual system was so good -- but because the incredible faculty that put it into place was of one mind on the joy and value of learning (and working hard to do so).
Helen Schinske