This and That

It appears that the district will be granting a leave of absence to Lowell principal, Colleen Stump, as soon as this Friday.  No word on her replacement.

No sure if the district's Science Department is really hearing what parents and teachers are saying but here's what I'm hearing about the new changes for high school science.


The new 9th grade “PhysA PS / ChemA PS“ course codes that were given to the registrars at most high schools are the course codes of the Physics and Chemistry courses that, up until now, have been offered to juniors and seniors who have fulfilled math prerequisites, and are crucial for admission to some colleges.

Meaning, that colleges may end up confused about what courses students have taken.

Registrars were given this note:

NOTE – Since these courses are existing courses, they will see outdated Descriptions when they participate in the PowerSchool Online Course Request this spring. To not impact current student transcripts, the changes will take place over the summer & schedules will reflect new names when PS is available in the fall.

It looks like parents of incoming 9th graders will see their student sign up for a course - based on the description in the course catalog that has been there for years - and their student will get something different in the fall.

Why all the subterfuge?

Also in science news, Trump was going to pretty much slash and burn many federal departments that support scientific endeavors including public education and then, at the 11th hour, those cuts were pulled back.

There's a great article from NPR on the science of learning to read.

Success in reading depends on linking print to speech. There's a massive amount of behavioral research, neuroimaging research, on brain organization and brain development, which conclusively shows that skilled reading is associated with children's spoken language, grammar and the vocabulary they already know. It's about teaching kids the correspondence between the letters on a page and the sounds of words.

What also caught my eye was this:

One interesting recommendation you offer is that college graduates who sign up for Teach for America be hired not as classroom teachers but as an army of reading tutors.

Yes. They could be trained to provide supplemental reading instruction, one-on-one or in small groups. That's what wealthy people do. They pay for tutors. Poor people can't.
So I would say yeah, put more people in the classroom or after-school programs who focus on reading and language. This would be helpful.

First, amen to that on two counts.  We definitely need kids in early grades to have more one-on-one time with tutors.  And the point about better-off parents being able to afford tutors rang true to me after hearing a discussion at the Crosscut Festival a few weeks ago about public education.

I'll have to write a separate thread on the discussion (and the odd moderating) but on the point of tutors, former Washington State Teacher of the Year, Lyon Terry, talked about opportunity gaps.  He mentioned how at his school in Magnolia, there were six students in his class who had tutors outside of class and how he wished all his students had that.  He spoke of these kids of privilege and that it was an equity issue. 

And holy Toledo!  The vaccination rates in Oregon charter schools and traditional schools is frightening.  If they get an outbreak of measles, it will spread like wildfire.   Some charters have up to 65% of their students not being vaccinated.

An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows that nearly 65 percent of the state's public charter schools lack what scientists call herd immunity against measles, meaning not enough children are immunized to prevent the disease from sweeping through their immediate community.

A much smaller percentage of traditional public schools fall into the same category, but they have more students, so the potential exposure is greater.

Oregon historically has had among the lowest overall vaccination rates in the country.