Tuesday Open Thread
I am behind on stories but will be doing much more towards the end of the week including:
- charter school lawsuit
- departures from zoning ordinances for Green Dot charter group and possible ramifications for the relationship between the City and the district/Board
- Lincoln high updates
Is the Cat in the Hat Black? That's the name of a new book and the interview in the Washington Post with its author is insightful and engaging.
WASDA (Washington Association of School Directors) is having a conference in May 2018 called Equity: From Boardroom to Classroom. This as equity continues as the word of the year in public education (that's my call).
Here's commitment: Board President Leslie Harris will be holding a community meeting on December 23rd from3-5 pm @ Delridge Library.
Here's a great tool from GO Oakland about Oakland School District - a easy way to look up how board members vote on issues. I'm interested in learning more about this org - it looks like a REAL parent/community association doing great things in service to their district.
Congrats to West Seattle Elementary's state-qualifying chess tournament. They had over 100 participants.
From King County:
What's on your mind?
- charter school lawsuit
- departures from zoning ordinances for Green Dot charter group and possible ramifications for the relationship between the City and the district/Board
- Lincoln high updates
Is the Cat in the Hat Black? That's the name of a new book and the interview in the Washington Post with its author is insightful and engaging.
WASDA (Washington Association of School Directors) is having a conference in May 2018 called Equity: From Boardroom to Classroom. This as equity continues as the word of the year in public education (that's my call).
Here's commitment: Board President Leslie Harris will be holding a community meeting on December 23rd from3-5 pm @ Delridge Library.
Here's a great tool from GO Oakland about Oakland School District - a easy way to look up how board members vote on issues. I'm interested in learning more about this org - it looks like a REAL parent/community association doing great things in service to their district.
Congrats to West Seattle Elementary's state-qualifying chess tournament. They had over 100 participants.
From King County:
Students from Seattle Public Schools‘ Salmon Bay School did an amazing job planting trees Dec. 6 at Big Finn Hill Park, part of King County Parks – Your Big Backyard. Hear why these students think trees are important — and learn more about why we’re planting 1 Million Trees by 2020, plus how you can get involved.The Queen Anne area schools used to have an association several years back but it disbanded. Now I see an association for West Seattle schools. This follows on the heels of another group (this from KNKX):
A group of parents called the PTSA Equity Project Seattle has suggested creating what they call an equity fund that all PTAs pay into to redistribute a portion of money to high-need schools. It would be modeled after something similar in Portland that’s existed for more than 20 years.There was more to this KNKX story about PTA fund-raising and Title One funds but I'll have a separate thread on that.
What's on your mind?
Comments
G is for Genes by Kathryn Asbury and Robert Plomin (2013, Wiley-Blackwell)
They talk about everything from ways to cut down on teen smoking (high school sports) to just how much of students' achievement in reading, writing, math or science is related to genes and how much to shared vs. individual experiences. It's easy to read and the science is sound. And it raises a lot of issues to think about.
and
The End of Average by Todd Rose (2016, HarperOne)
He's the director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Like the book above, this book will kind of blow your mind and keep you thinking for a long time about education and how the individual fits into it.
For progress
Any mention of genetics or nature vs. nature will draw charges of eugenics from FWIW/For progress. Somehow genes seen to be a factor in all aspects of human biology except anything that has to do with the brain. FYI, environmental exposures are also OUT as a factor when it comes to the brain. Only racism and classism explain any differences in performance. Students are all blank slates!
genie
He basically admitted that the board meeting was a total sh^* show! He also said that the board knows that this process is going badly and uniformed decisions are being made that could have unintended consequences which will then have to be fixed in the years to follow.
Rick couldn’t guarantee that SPS staff would have time to do a transportation analysis for Magnolia being assigned to Lincoln.
Nevertheless, Rick said the process is moving forward and decisions will be made in January because they promised to let families know the final maps before open enrollment. Parents pushed back and said they would rather the board extend the deadline and take the time to develop a plan that was well thought out.
The board (via the operations committee) has asked staff to draw up new maps that include HC students’ assignment.
These are the scenarios staff is supposed to research/develop:
1) HC @ 2 High Schools … Lincoln and Garfield
2) HC @ 4 High Schools … Ballard, Roosevelt, Garfield & W. Seattle
3) HC @ 3 High Schools … Ingraham, Garfield, W. Seattle
Staff is also going to develop maps for their preferred proposal which is HC students assigned to 5 high schools. Option #2 from above + Franklin. Which seems to be a waste of time since the principal at Franklin refuses to have a HC pathway there and their board director (Patu) has promised that it won’t be placed there.
The board also asked staff to develop projections around the possibility of increasing the size of the IB/IBX programs at Ingraham, Rainier Beach & Sealth.
What a mess!
N by NW
I am concerned about Lincoln taking too many students from Ballard high school. Ballard has a lot of offerings due to it's large size.
HF
The authors are quick to point out how little geneticists know even about what they know. There's a whole section on how people figured out there was this gene (the ACTN3 gene) that fast runners have. So they tested a bunch of elite athletes with the hypothesis that the better athletes would be more likely to have this ACTN3 gene:
In conjunction with the Australian Institute of Sport, a research team took DNA from more than 4,000 elite athletes from a wide range of sports and compared it with that of a control sample. They found that power and sprint athletes did in fact tend to have two working versions of the ACTN3 gene (RR) but, perhaps more surprisingly, they also found that endurance athletes had two deficient versions (XX). In other words, they found that what was originally perceived as a deficiency (the X version) actually benefited slow, efficient muscle performance.
It's an interesting book.
The reason I'm particularly interested is that I have an 8th-grade HCC student at Hamilton and a Junior in the IBX program at Ingraham. Obviously our junior is unaffected, but we were planning to put in for the IBX program for our 8th-grader come open enrollment. I understand that that the space at Ingraham for choice students is limited, but at least had he gotten in, under what I understood to be the proposed SATP (before amendments, etc.), HCC students in a particular program in 2018-2019 would be allowed to stay in their current program regardless of boundary changes.
Now, however, it seems likely that even if he is accepted to Ingraham in 2018-2019, he would be moved to Lincoln in 2019-2020 without consideration of his desire to enroll in the IBX program and we would have to re-apply under the choice process for him to stay at Ingraham (we will be in the Lincoln district under any conceivable proposal - also, I understand that the IBX program is on the chopping block every year, so I'm ignoring that for now).
Does anybody else have a reading on this interpretation? Does anybody know if this question will be definitively answered before the open-enrollment period ends?
Thanks.
Advocate NOW for what you want because right after school comes back into session, the work will accelerate.
JK
LS
Fairmount Parent
JK
First, if you believe that it is just HCC that segregates schools, you would be wrong. Kids separate out for all kinds of reasons. To my eye, I think high schools in Seattle look a lot more inclusive than ever.
As well, "that program's classes" do NOT exist. There are no special HCC classes. That fallacy has to stop.
- there are AP classes at every single comprehensive high school
- ANY student can access those classes
- ANY student can access an IB class and indeed, at RBHS, they are required to take one. (Roosevelt and I believe West Seattle also require students to take one AP class.)