Seattle Schools This Week, October 22-28, 2018
Monday, October 22nd
Work Session on Assignment. Agenda. Highlights:
Tuesday, October 23nd
Special Education PTSA Meeting from 6-8 pm at JSCEE in room 2700.
Thursday, October 25th
Work Session on Assignment. Agenda. Highlights:
SATP Updates
– Potential Middle School pathway expansion
- Name change for "Service Schools”
- International /Dual Language Immersion Pathway Updates
- Highly Capable (HC) Updates
– Potential Middle School pathway expansion
- Grade Level Adjustment for Middle College from 11-12 to 9-12
- Blending of Graham Hill’s Montessori program
- Updates to Special Education Language
- Definition of Space Available
- Clean up of the Advanced Learning (AL) language to indicate that Advanced Learning (Spectrum) is available at all schools.
- Removal of “Spectrum” tiebreakers from Student Assignment Transition Plan in 2019-20 since AL available at all schools.
- This was a proposed change for the 2018-19 plan that did not get approved.
Tuesday, October 23nd
Special Education PTSA Meeting from 6-8 pm at JSCEE in room 2700.
Magnolia Elementary Boundaries meeting at Lawton Elementary from 6:30-7:30 pm.
Sunday, October 28th
Community meeting with Director Scott Pinkham at NE Branch of Seattle Public Library from 3:00-4:30 pm.
Comments
Instead of cleaning up the language, they should worry about cleaning up the programs/services, no?
DisAPP
I’m also wondering if families with children with sped plans, find it convenient to attend meetings at the Stanford Center, or if they could get better turnout if they made an effort to hold the meeting in different quadrants of the city. Rotating of course..
Improving communication to those families was always such a challenge, because of privacy reasons, you can’t mail info( I am speaking of at the school level) , but it is so critical.
interesting
This is how SPS collapses.
Looking Private
As far as the assignment plan goes, it would be closer to the truth to say that student assignment staff will place students wherever the staff find it convenient to place them, and written policies will be followed unless staff override them because of considerations not explained in the written policies.
The current and proposed wordings are both so far from actual practice as to be useless.
Irene
I'd like to see this kind of transparency applied across various district communications. Here's another example: "We would really like to provide transportation service for your child and other students who live far away from their school, but we'll be honest - you'll probably need to get a carpool together because the bus will be two hours late every day for at least the first three months."
Honestly, I'd rather see this kind of messaging than the kind of hand-waving that seems to plague every district communication. Just give it to us straight so we can deal with reality more quickly and effectively.
Realist
Maybe they need a similar work group to figure out what the heck "Spectrum" means. Not an obvious term, not an obvious program, not an obvious curriculum, not obvious goals or outcomes, many reports of inconsistency in implementation (or complete lack thereof), an so on. It's impossible to "clean up the language" to be accurate if it's unclear what the language--in any form--even means.
When did "Advanced Learning" become synonymous with "Spectrum"? There used to be separate programs called "Spectrum" and "Advanced Learning Opportunities" but now they say AL is Spectrum. When they ended ALO's, did they transfer use of the AL term to Spectrum for some reason? Why?
Is "Advanced Learning" distinct from "Highly Capable?" It would seem so--and they should be--but why then does JSCEE so frequently conflate the two?
- Example 1: In these slides, the Advanced Learning term is discussed under the HC header. AL would thus seem to be a subset of HC.
- Example 2: The currently ongoing Advanced Learning Task Force has the AL name is generally focused on AL, but a few little comments under the description of its work indicate it also includes HC services. In this case, it would seem that HC is a subset of AL--the reverse of what's seen in example 1.
- Example 3: The survey (last year?) re: "access to advanced learning" seemed to talk about general access to advanced classes, as it had nothing to do with meeting either "Spectrum" or HC eligibility criteria. Is that a whole different type of Advanced Learning, or are they now saying everyone should have access to Advanced Learning AKA Spectrum, in which case there's not really a Spectrum program so there's no need to clarify the language to make clear that it's available at all schools.
- Example 4: The Advanced Learning office name itself. If "Advanced Learning" is the overarching departmental name, it doesn't really make sense for one of it's most poorly defined, inconsistently implemented, and not mandated services to take on that same name. That creates additional confusion as to whether HC is a subset of HC or vice versa.
Yes, clean up the language. But first, clean up what's behind the language.
DisAPP
Talk about needing to clean up language...!
DisAPP
Yeah she went on a listening tour, but has she done anything to shake up SPS yet? I haven’t seen any of the staff replaced. I haven’t seen any substantive policy changes. Just more of the same from JSCEE.
A better title:
Is Denise Juneau the new Jose Banda?
Keep Dreaming
The trend is unmistakable.
When you starve students from rigor, when you make getting a coherent schedule difficult, when you meter out high-level AP courses like they are a scarce resource, the best and the brightest flee because RS is an elegant solution to avoid all of those problems.
Last year This year
RS 1,313 1,421
total HS 14,251 14,211
In 2009, RS was 5% of total high school enrollment (651/13,003).
This year, it is now 10%.
That is a huge leap in 9 years: an entire high school worth of kids who've run off to running start.
So, to review. Running Start enrollment grew by 8% this year, while high school enrollment shrank -.3%.
The market share analysis betrays the no confidents of the clients.
Last year, for the first time ever, cohort survival from 5th to 6th grade for SPS went down to 81%. Typically, that number was always 95% system-wide historically, and, very stable. Those missing kids will not be coming back. Families in the system leave once they hit secondary comprehensive offerings.
The district does not know this or care about this. They are incurious as to why their intake value has not been full.
Maybe the leavers and the accelerating rate of leaving could have something to do with the education part of education? Greener pastures are elsewhere. While enrollment is mostly sticky because 'switching costs' are high (barriers to exit are high, i.e. moving costs are expensive), enrollment is not entirely fossilized. Families migrating to the region can intentionally choose bypass Seattle and locate in Bellevue, for example, and families in Seattle can quit and go to the eastside. We have seen this pattern before.
DataDon'tLie
I think you nailed it there, Keep Dreaming. Juneau has come in and totally deferred at every turn to the current SPS leadership, becoming an out of touch figurehead. I know she had higher political ambitions, but if she still does, she's burying them here in Seattle by refusing to undertake the thorough purging and reforming that is so desperately needed at the JSCEE.
I hope that the school board realizes if Juneau won't fix the broken culture at JSCEE, then the school board will have to be replaced en masse until we get directors who will finally fix this.
2019 voter
KL
Scrap MAP
I have a kid in both programs and I have zero difficulty keeping them apart. You would think the people running them would be able to do that, too.
Arbor Heights Elementary
BF Day Elementary
Broadview-Thomson K-8
Fairmount Park Elementary
Hawthorne Elementary
Hazel Wolf K-8 (formerly Jane Addams K-8)
Lafayette Elementary
Lawton Elementary
Lowell Elementary
Muir Elementary
View Ridge Elementary
Wedgwood Elementary
Whittier Elementary
Wing Luke Elementary
Or do those kids have to go back to their geozone schools? There's not really any reason to go to a special site anymore if the program is offered at their home school...
H.M., I think AL doesn't know because it's all in the hands of Jesse and Tolley. And they have then put that into the hands of principals. 104 different principals.
I think there have been some good explanations from Kellie about how some of these issues interact with program placement and student assignment. Sorry, I don't have links to them handy.
Irene
WMS GP
--------
MAP Testing: We communicated with students in classes last week that they would begin taking NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress assessment. MAP is an online assessment that adapts in response to students getting right or wrong answers until their performance level is identified. Some quick facts about MAP:
MAP testing is part of a district approved testing calendar that is created by a Joint SEA/SPS testing committee.
MAP in many ways is being utilized more similarly to classroom created assessments this year and because of this many teachers did not feel the need to send home information. Tests are part of the learning process for our students and should be expected in classes.
MAP testing was chosen to replace SBAC interims and SRI tests because it offers a wider range of student questions (and therefore better assesses student growth). The SBAC interim provide information regarding where a student is performing in relation to grade-level, but does not provide the information needed to pinpoint how far above or below grade-level they were performing. Given so many of our students are well above grade-level, or, in some cases, far behind, MAP is an invaluable resource to teachers at WMS.
MAP testing is NOT required by the district, but is being used by teachers at WMS to help inform classroom instruction, to target specific areas of need or growth for students, to set goals, and to discover holes or gaps in students' knowledge base.
We want to build a culture in our school where we are emphasizing growth for all students,. MAP is a unique assessment that, unlike grade-level assessments, generates a growth goal for students based on where they perform at the start of the school year. In many classes, students will be looking at their own scores and strand information (which identifies specific areas they can/need to work on), and tracking their own progress throughout the year. We will celebrate students who meet or exceed their goal at the end of the year, regardless of where they are performing at the start of school.
In non-Math classes, MAP will help teachers select appropriately challenging texts both for entire classes as well as for groups and individual students. The data will also help teachers make smart choices in planning vocabulary teaching.
MAP is not used for any course or school placement and is purely an instructional tool for teachers.
MAP is being taken in Math class, Social Studies class (Language Usage test), and ELA class (Reading).
There are some very disturbing trend lines in enrollment that clearly show problems and clearly shows that families are making other choices. The big drop in cohort survival means that capacity problem should no longer be such a concern. I would not be at all surprised if this is the beginning of a downward trend.
I have also been quite disheartened to hear the rhetoric about how choice, advanced learning and transportation is now equated with privilege. IMHO such gross oversimplification is detrimental to everyone.
If this was my problem to solve, then I would handle this very simply and based on some historic precedent. If you go back to the 2008 enrollment numbers by school, you have a really good approximation of what the potential baseline for "space available" capacity of a building. 2008 was the height of the choice system, before capacity problems forced many schools to start to expand. The number used to cap schools in 2008 can reasonably be presumed to be a number up to which, the building can function very well and this was a number at which, enrollment put a closed sign on the door and started to assign students to other schools.
Here is a simple example, Eckstein Middle School had a historic enrollment of 1100, with a long wait list. This number was very consistent for a over a decade. Student #1101 was not assigned to the school and was placed on a wait list.
If you just pull the 2008 enrollment by school, you can quickly get a sense of what people believed was the space available capacity for an effective teaching program. It would be pretty easy to use this number as a high water mark. We have many schools today that are vastly over those numbers. Those schools would not have space.
However, a school like Whitman with historic enrollment of about 1,000 should NEVER have a waitlist. There is plenty of space available. You simply need to assign the students and then do a post open enrollment staffing adjustment.
All of this pain about "space available" has NOTHING to do with space and instead is simply about attempts to create staffing stability and avoid making post open enrollment staff adjustments.
Enrollment varies. Staffing varies. When you make a system too rigid, you just create different problems.
This may just be turn of phrase but yes, MAP is used for placement for HCC.
But if you have a different end game, then, of course, this all makes little sense.
Again, there are too many bright people at JSCEE for this to be this way; it's by design.
Can anyone shed light on this?
Concerned parent
Frederike
Also, DataDon'tLie, please don't use the phrase "best and brightest" to describe Advanced Learners. It really perpetuates a stereotype. No kids are better than others. Different kids have different educational needs. Needing more challenge does not make a kid better than another kid.
open ears
Here is my evidence:
- When standalone Spectrum was eliminated at our elementary service school over 5 years ago, no effort was made to communicate to parents how the new MTSS replacement would work. The teachers refused to say anything. The principal refused to say anything. And there was nothing written. This was not an oversight, it was clearly intentional obfuscation. The impression parents had was that a new principal was hired specifically to dismantle the program.
- This year at our neighborhood elementary, the walk-to-math program was eliminated. Students that had been walking to math a year ahead suddenly found themselves retaking the same math a second year in a row.
- HCC used to be defined as 2 years ahead for Math and ELA, and Spectrum 1 year ahead. These definitions were written on the district website (still available using the WayBack machine). But without any discussion or action by the school board, these definitions were removed.
- Last Year a new elementary ELA program was adopted. But rather than using materials 2 years ahead for HCC, the district adopted materials that were one year ahead. So, if HCC ELA is 1 year ahead, what does that make Spectrum ELA? Nonexistent.
- Last Year for elementary HCC the report card ELA standards were switched from 2 years ahead to 1 year ahead. So, if HCC ELA is 1 year ahead, what does that make Spectrum ELA? Nonexistent.
- This year at Eagle Staff its entirely unclear whether HCC students are mixed with general education or are in separate classes. When asked, the principal said look at the website, where of course there was nothing written. The impression that some parents have is that the new Eagle Staff principal is hostile to Advanced Learning.
- Last year the district tried to do away with high school pathways, but the decision has been delayed only because parents and the school board pushed back.
- Lincoln, which is supposed to be the HCC pathway for the north end, has a principal that many parents feel does not support HCC.
- From Year to Year, the “HCC Advisory Council” becomes the “Advanced Learning blah, blah”, etc. The fact is that last year when the decision was being made about high school HCC pathways, the “HCC whatever” was not consulted, and the superintendent didn’t even realize it existed.
- At this point, Spectrum exists in name only for legacy reasons. If it hadn’t previously existed, it certainly wouldn’t be created today. The district provides each school with a list of students that meet certain criteria and leaves it up to each individual school to do as it will.
- Years back the old Advanced Learning “director” level position was replaced with a “supervisor” titled position that clearly has no power related to the above issues. Advanced Learning is responsible for student identification and teacher development, and that’s it.
- The list goes on…
My experience with the district is that they are masters of the bureaucracy. The will ignore you. They will act like they don’t know what you are talking about. The will stall months and years until your child has moved on. They will document as little as possible, and what they do document, the won’t willingly share.
In my opinion, if you want to fight and win, you first need to realize it will be a fight. That means submitting FOIA requests for all related documents. It means organizing together with other parents. It means speaking at the school board. It means getting vocal. It means planning ahead (like during the hiring process for a new principal) And it means convincing them, you won’t go away.
For my child and many friends as well, these were big factors in their decision to take Running Start classes...
- Guaranteed college credit at any Washington state college for any passing grade rather than having to get a certain score on one AP test at the end of the year.
- Free college credit that will save huge amount of money in college tuition; 2 years of full time running start is worth about $50K saving at a Washington state university
- Ability to get more college credit by taking a full course load through RS over AP classes. Students have only a 6 period day in high school but can take the equivalent of 9 classes with RS.
- My child found classes to be easier than high school classes
- More free time to pursue other interests and work; ability to sleep in...
Your experience with students you know in RS is clearly different than mine, but I don't know of any students that chose RS for any of the reason you gave. I think you need a bit more data before coming to your conclusion.
1down1togo
The information that datadon'tlie posted is accurate. Running Start enrollment is up and high school enrollment is flat.
As SPS does not track ANY DATA on why students choose RS, your conjecture is as good as mine or datadon'tlie's conjecture. There are lots and lots of reasons to pick Running Start as it is an excellent program. That said, the data around high school enrollment is not very encouraging.
The current high school enrollment is large enough to cause the need for Lincoln to reopen. During the last 5 years, all of the projections, based on students already enrolled in SPS, had indicated that opening Lincoln would not be enough and that a 12th comprehensive high school would be needed. Now ... the cohort survival rates have plummeted and there is no longer a need for a 12th comprehensive high school.
SOMETHING has clearly happened to cause high school students to vanish from Seattle Public School. What has happened? I have my guesses but it would be nice if there was some better investigation by SPS and some actual data on families that have left.
Datadon'tlie mentioned the most challenging data point of all. The cohort survival rate from 5th grade to 6th grade. Most people make changes at the big break points of 6th and 9th grades. Historically, there is a small drop at 6th grade and then an increase at 9th grade. Currently the 6th grade drop is increasing rapidly and there was no 9th grade increase this year.
Families are making choices other than SPS. The "why" for the other choices is left to conjecture because there is no official data collection by SPS.
Gaaaah! MAP has a ceiling which many HCC students have already hit by middle school. Scores for many students will just bounce around some upper bound. You will not be able to measure growth for students who are already hitting the ceiling. And wow, no prior notice to parents? No chance to opt out?
What the
@1down, while I don’t begrudge students/families for going the RS route to save money, I find it sad that RS classes are often easier than high school classes. No wonder our universities end up doing so much remediation. It’s a sad state of kids are opting for RS because it’s the easy way out. It’s equally sad if kids are taking RS for more challenge, only to find that’s not the case. I hope at least some RS classes do provide challenge beyond what one can get in high school, but from experience and anecdotes, the percentage doesn’t seem too high.
Reason2go
Yes, there are many good reasons for choosing RS, but there are also students who feel forced into RS as a means of having a continuum of appropriate coursework. It's not the best placement for some students. There's a difference between freely choosing RS and being left with no other option.
data needed
Hats off to those of you who fight for clarity of language. You are fighting the good fight. But you are destined to lose. Weasel words and obfuscation are the essence of SPS communication strategy and they aren't going to change.
It's very interesting and significant that public institutions no longer feel they can tell the truth about their own policies. They believe they can only achieve their goals through lies and deception. You can learn a lot, pondering that fact (but don't say too much or you get in trouble.) How long can a society last this way?
It would be very good to see what is the cause of families leaving SPS. Is it high housing costs that are driving people to move to the suburbs? Is it concerns about the direction of SPS? Are the new charter schools and new private schools grabbing a significant share? I've heard anecdotal examples of all of the above, but some hard data would be really useful.
If a "Spectrum" student is attending a formerly designated Spectrum school that is not their Attendance Area school they will be able to stay at the school per the current enrollment rules.
They obtained their seat at that school via a choice application. Once accepted they can stay through the highest grade at the school.
-StepJ
Amplified
Meanwhile, Flip Herndon is leaving SPS for Tukwila.
"Lincoln, which is supposed to be the HCC pathway for the north end, has a principal that many parents feel does not support HCC."
Concerned parent
We all know that there is huge variation between the comprehensive high schools in terms of access and offerings. The same is true at the colleges. The Seattle Colleges have a completely different math placement policy than Shoreline, Bellevue and Cascadia colleges. The English 101 experience can vary widely both from college to college and instructor to instructor.
The big difference is that with high school, students are essentially assigned their schedule and students have very little influence on what they get or the teachers they are assigned. Running Start students have a lot more ability to pick their instructors and courses and switch times to get a different instructor.
When districts are under capacity and have lots of extra space in their buildings, Spectrum-like programs tend to be promoted and grown as a way to attract middle class families into the public school system. When districts are over-capacity, these programs tend to be neglected or actively dismantled.
Spectrum was a space-dependent program. Back in the choice days, spectrum students had priority at many schools over the neighborhood students. When Seattle switched to an attendance area program, there was no longer any capacity set-aside for Spectrum and the program was slowly strangled to death as capacity problems overwhelmed the majority of the schools with spectrum programs.
I am glad that downtown is finally acknowledging that there is no reason to give assignment priority to a program that doesn't exist. Hopefully that acknowledgment could lead to a richer discussion about advanced learning, but I doubt it.
From a capacity standpoint, SPS is "at capacity" While there are more than a few uneven patches, as a whole system, total capacity and total enrollment are pretty equivalent at 52,000 students. At this homeostasis point, districts rarely do anything to be innovative or encourage additional enrollment.
-HadIt
-Curious
From US News rankings (for what they are worth), here are some comparisons:
College Readiness Index: Franklin 24.6%, Roosevelt 65.4%
AP Tested: Franklin 47%, Roosevelt 37%
AP Passed: Franklin 78%, Roosevelt 78%
National Ranking: Franklin #2,423, Roosevelt #320
Minority Enrollment: Franklin 93%, Roosevelt 32%
Economically Disadvantaged: Franklin 69%, Roosevelt 12%
Students who do well at Franklin are going to stand out more than students who do well at Roosevelt, since most students at Roosevelt do well. Also, Franklin students are more likely to contribute to the UW's diversity goal.
Now, if you're asking what Franklin is doing that other schools with similar demographics but lower performance aren't, that would be an interesting question. I assumed your question was more of an overall one, and I haven't checked out all the schools to see if Franklin is an outlier among like schools.
All relative
Our neighborhood school this year got rid of walk-to-math. It is an ALO school, not a Spectrum school, and ALO never had school assignment priority.
Is it easier for the administration if all students are taught at the same level? That I would agree with. Is it easier to have more advanced students help the slower students if they are all in the same class? That may be true.
But it's highly doubtful after 5 years that the school eliminated walk-to-math suddenly because of a "space" issue.
Now the district wants to rename the ALO program to Spectrum. I consider this to be misleading and dishonest. Having students redo a year of math is at best disrespectful to both the students and the parents.
The UW also admits a very large percentage of foreign students who tend to be affluent and overwhelmingly from wealthy areas of Asia. Those students pay a much higher tuition rate and help the university financially as the state has reduced much of their state funding over the years.
In order to balance the diversity of foreign students with local students they recruit heavily from local schools that also have larger percentages of African American students.
If you are a straight A white student who is not also F&R lunch and attended a middle class/affluent school such as Roosevelt, you would not automatically have any admission advantage over a student who did not do as well and attended a low SES school. I have heard of 4.0 freshman students not gaining admission to the UW, a state school.
I believe in equity and appreciate the goals of the UW. However, it is also a state school and our only local state university so the admission rate to some of their competitive majors (like engineering, computer science etc) should also be more accessible.
However I do have a problem with the "legacy advantage" (like justice kavanaugh had at Yale due to his grandfather) at Ivy league schools in which graduates also enter the most influential positions in society.
At Ivy and prestigious schools very affluent legacy students most who also have attended exclusive private prep schools have an admission advantage.
Kids in the middle class public schools seem to not have any admission advantage anywhere and IMO in Seattle there seems to some concerns amongst parents their kids will have an issue with college admission to a "good" program or school.
HJ
I tend to post about institutional memory and macro trends. Individual students choose Running starts for individual reasons. That said, the larger number of individual choices often paints a picture.
The same is true about ALO and Spectrum. Individual schools makes a lot of choices for site specific reasons and then all of those site based decisions in aggregate paints a different picture.
I remember when Maria Goodlow Johnson announced "walk-to-math" in 2009. It was at the end of the closures and the beginning of the NSAP. Walk to math was "announced" that is would be rolled out at "all schools" in 2010. (BTW, like MTSS was also announced and rolled out). Spectrum at that time was mostly self contained and this was a clear response to the fact that there was no additional space for any additional spectrum programs.
I remember thinking this seemed like a good idea and it had potential. At that time, I had lot of conversation with elementary teachers who "hated" the idea. At first, I really did not understand the intense push back from teachers but I quickly found their logic very persuasive.
Elementary school is a homeroom based experience. Walk to math happens naturally at middle school which is a master schedule based experience. It is easy to batch kids for math when you are working on a master schedule and Walk to Math was essentially trying to push a master schedule like experience into the elementary schools.
The teacher's complaints really focused on how walk to math meant that 100% of teachers would need to teach math at the same time, every day. This meant that if a teacher felt that they needed 10 extra minutes on math, that was no longer an option. Math time was now fixed. It also changed the teacher student relationships. Now the teacher has their homeroom plus, their math students. This meant the the homeroom dynamics was completely different for the math class vs the rest of the day.
As we know, students don't come in nice little packages so there would be some extreme unevenness between classrooms who sent students and classrooms who received students. 5th grade teachers would only be receiving extra students.
I'm not at all surprised that walk-to-math programs are dying out. Space problems do not directly cause this. That said, in the absence of any "empty space" in the system, there is no reason for schools to go over and above with unique and/or labor-intensive programs.
This Student Assignment Plan meeting essentially announced the end of Montessori as well as the end of the end of Spectrum.
Montessori was also a strategy to try to attract middle class families to under enrolled schools. Former School Board member Sherry Carr helped launch the Montessori program at Bagley as a way to prevent Bagley's proposed school closure. This was very successful. Within a few years, Bagley was fully enrolled.
Montessori required a lot of extra site based management. You need to hire qualified Montessori teachers and you had to managed the classroom enrollment between Montessori and "contemporary" classrooms.
Programs that make families happy, only seem to be matter when districts are under capacity. Language Immersion at JSIS was first launched at one of the all time low district enrollment points.
DisAPP
Thanks for sharing the elementary teacher's perspective on walk-to-math. Did they have an alternate suggestion for how to meet the wide range of needs at neighborhood assignment schools including kids who needs more than a year's acceleration?
n
"Lincoln, which is supposed to be the HCC pathway for the north end, has a principal that many parents feel does not support HCC."
Can any others with knowledge of this share?
Concerned parent
That’s interesting. I’ve usually seen walk to math grouped within a grade, not across grades, so at least a little easier from a scheduling perspective, but still means all teachers within a grade band need to be on the same daily schedule, at least for math. That probably works better at the larger schools though where there’s more critical mass at each group.
I can see how making all grade band teachers do math at the same time would be more challenging for a teachers. That said, I have yet to see any meaningful differentiation in math in most schools where walk to math doesn’t happen. Given the very high threshold to qualify for HCC and SPS’s lack of single subject high cap qualification, that leaves a lot of kids who are strong in math both bored in school AND on a lower trajectory than they would be in many other districts in the country. Still not really surprising that so many people try to get into HCC if it’s their child’s only opportunity for acceleration, especially in math (I’ve never seen a school that doesn’t do reading in leveled groups).
I’d also argue that keeping grade bands on a consistent schedule is also very helpful for kids who receive special ed services. If the teacher is changing their schedule regularly, kids in special ed can easily fall behind in other areas or miss out on big chunks of learning when their pull out times don’t line up with class instructional time. I saw pull outs be very disruptive last year when I volunteered and and often saw kids playing catch up in science or math to be able to get small group reading instruction or doing pull out and in class math, but missing reading for a day.
NE mom
NE mom
Mad Dad
One argument FOR unlinking walk-to-math and grade level is that the range of math abilities often exceeds the number of classes that could be offered. Most kids will end up in a grade-level type class, with smaller numbers below and a little above level. For those significantly above grade level in skills and complexity of thinking, they aren't likely to be well-served by grade level WTM. Letting them walk to a class 2-3 grades higher might help--although as they get into the highest grade levels at that school they need different solutions.
Appropriate differentiation in regular elementary schools is not all that common, in our experience.
reality bites
"But your kid needs to be accelerated in math? Oh, no. We can't do that. It wouldn't be developmentally appropriate!"
Eyerolls
unimpressed
It's especially frustrating for students who haven't been redshirted, but who are working above grade level. Spectrum once offered a modicum of meaningful acceleration. It was enough for many students. Yes, it sometimes meant leaving your neighborhood school, but it came with a better guarantee of appropriate level instruction.
It seems the ultimate SPS goal is some empty promise of ALO at every school, meaning next to nothing. The stated intent is increasing access to AL, when the reality is a reduction of AL opportunities.
lowered expectations
“In Seattle Public Schools, some huge number of kids are ‘redshirted’ in a given grade, typically the wealthier ones whose parents could afford another year or two of preschool. It's not uncommon for kindergarten cohorts to have kids who just turned 5 in class with kids who will soon turn 8.”
I’ve never seen that. Can you be more specific about this “huge” number—and the data source?
Are you suggesting that the people who hold their kids back are the ones who want acceleration? In my experience, parents of “highly capable” students have often wanted the reverse—to have their kids start school early. I’m not sure what point you’re attempting to make with the redshirt argument.
Unclear
UW draws biggest freshman class in its history | The Seattle Times
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle.../uw-draws-biggest-freshman-class-in-its-history/
Jul 16, 2018 - More than half of in-state students who applied were accepted at the UW in a “historically diverse” freshman class.
I hope this article dispels some of the myths that people hold about UW admissions.
-UWer
UW had a large incoming class, not just because of a record setting number of applications, but a high number who then accepted the offer of admission. The freshman class also has some 800 students from China.
another fyi
There are no myths, just different data. Admission to the UW is a separate from admission to competitive majors.
As another fyi mentioned getting into competitive majors at UW such as engineering and CS is currently highly difficult for incoming Freshman. This includes local students from WA state.
It is disappointing there are few spots as it is a state school, and STEM positions at local companies are being filled with many applicants who come from outside WA state. Seattle resident high school graduates don't have alot of options for an affordable state school (commuter) in their vicinity.
The UW does plan to increase its number of direct admits after 2019, but the stats still make it very difficult. I have heard an average also 5% DA overall historically, but that will increase a bit after 2019 after the UW expands their DA to CS, engineering. The rate of admission for a WA state freshman will depend upon number of applicants.
In fact recently I was told by a UW CS dept that if a student does not gain admittance through direct admit, if they are committed to a specific major such as CS, it would be wise to apply to other colleges because it will become the primary route to admission.
In addition, the UW admission (including program admission) follow a "holistic" admissions policy to help diverse students access their programs.
I personally know of Seattle HS graduates with high GPA's top students etc who were admitted to the UW but did not get into competitive majors such as engineering and CS and transferred elsewhere.
As another fyi also mentioned there is also a very high percentage of international students at UW who are admitted. As I mentioned, these students also pay a higher tuition rate and it helps offset costs as the UW is challenged by dramatically reduced state funding over the years.
HJ