Tuesday Open Thread

Quite nice to have such a lovely winter scene but I'm glad it happened on a school break; makes it a lot easier all around.

I finally finished watching and notating the last School Board meeting and I'll have a multi-part thread about it and the overlapping subjects that sparked discussion there.

Here's the agenda for the next Board meeting on January 3, 2018.  I suspect it will be a packed house because:

• the Board's resolution against departures for zoning regs for Green Dot charter schools is up for a vote.  I just want to note that the hyperventilating over at the Washington Policy Center states that the Board is trying to close Green Dot.  Nothing of the sort.  Green Dot can continue to open their school; there is nothing in this resolution that even attempts to stop that.  
• more discussion about high school boundaries and HCC pathways

In the meantime, some stories of note that have come across my desk:


Turmoil in Oakland public schools.  

Oakland Unified School District has suddenly found they need to cut $9M from their budget in the middle of the school year.

Now, a Bay area tv station reports that OUSD is closed 30% of their school libraries, including 14 of 17 high school libraries, and let the district's head librarian go.  Interestingly, some of the issue with this part of the problem is principals not using funds given for libraries directly for libraries.  I see some of this in SPS with the growing power of principals especially high school principals.

As part of that funding problem, citing too many schools in their district, Oakland Unified School District is starting to turn away new charters.  Interestingly, some OUSD students in traditional schools came before their board, asking for the charters to be turned away.  This is also what happened at the last SPS Board meeting,where students from Rainier Beach High School asked for the Board to fight the opening of a Green Dot school that wants to cite nearby to RBHS and Aki Kurose Middle School.

From The Atlantic - Why Parents Make Flawed Choices About Their Kids' Schooling

I found this article fascinating because of the push - from DeVos and other ed reformers - about "letting parents choose" in a country where 1) not all parents even have choices like rural parents
2) as this article points out, some parents either don't have the wherewithal to figure out their choices or not enough information to make an informed choice.   The article looks at a study of NYC public schools.

For better or worse, the city’s high-school system doesn’t rely on an automatic process where students head to the school down the block; instead, eighth-graders submit a ranked list of up to 12 high schools they’d like to attend, some of which, like Stuyvesant, require a test. That system equipped the researchers with quite a bit of information about which schools parents and their children are choosing. Their task was to use other data about the students and schools to figure out what drives those choices.

A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. 

There's research showing that girls who attend school only with other girls tend to do better in math and science. The trick, she said, is that those studies didn’t analyze “differences in the students coming into the schools.” As it turns out, those who end up in same-sex schools tend to be wealthier, start out with more skills, and have parents who are more proactive than students who attend co-ed institutions.

Also from The Atlantic -The Urban-School Stigma

Middle- and upper-income parents have expressed misgivings, too. But they’ve done it much less volubly. With relatively little fuss, they’ve simply picked up and moved—departing from city school systems at ever-greater rates. Among expressions of no-confidence, this has arguably been the most significant, because it has reshaped district demography. Each year, it seems, urban schools serve larger concentrations of poor students, racial minorities, and English-language learners. As higher-income families depart, resources go with them, and schools are faced with the daunting prospect of doing more with less.

If such departures are driven by good information about school quality, one can hardly blame parents with resources for acting in the best interests of their children.

Yet what if the information people are acting on is inaccurate or misleading?

To be sure, urban students don’t post achievement scores equal to their suburban peers. But discrepancies in test scores indicate more about families and neighborhoods than they do about the work being done in schools. One notable study, for instance, found that the influence of family and neighborhood factors accounts for roughly 60 percent of the variance in student test scores; teachers, by contrast, account for only about 10 percent.

From Sightline -
One Tool for Dismantling Structural School Segregation in Seattle: Better Zoning
72 percent of land around Seattle’s top elementaries is zoned single-family. 

From Nate Bowling, Washington State Teacher of the Year, and one of the brightest voices in public education today:

Much of white America is ‘perfectly happy’ with segregated schools, says one Teacher of the Year


From Check State Plans (part of The Collaborative for Student Success) - an assessment of Washington State's ESSA plan.

What's on your mind?