Yoo Hoo, Seattle School Board - Here's the 411

Dear Directors,

As the late, great Anthony Bourdain said on Top Chef, "What kind of crack house are you running here?"

Naturally, that is some measure of hyperbole and yes, I know, you are running nothing.

However, your job is oversight.  And frankly, I think you are doing a piss-poor job on oversight (except, of course, for Director Hersey who just got here).

Here's a few suggestions for improvement:

• Not accepting every single explanation you are given.  Tell staff, "That doesn't make sense to me?" "What is the context?" That kind of thing. I saw this one time at a Board committee meeting in the spring with Director Mack who twice said, after staff said their enrollment numbers were correct, "I don't believe that."  She didn't expand on it but made it clear that she was not buying what they were selling.

• If you don't get answers to questions after a second time, demand to know why not and ask for a firm date.  President Harris has asked, over and over, for more than a year to see data on Honors for All at Garfield.  It's as if she wants to know the highs and lows so that if the district decides to put this out to all the high schools, those schools will know how to avoid those issues. 

• If the district is making a quiet and unexplained shift in programming, again, demand why that is the choice being made and why the district does not want to be clear and transparent with parents (see Advanced Learning which has quietly morphed into something almost unrecognizable except for HCC but wait for it! that's coming as well).

• Be clear on the use of Intro/Action at a Board meeting.  My understanding was that was for true emergencies, NOT that staff couldn't get things done in a timely manner.  I see this happening more and more and I cannot fathom why you would allow that. 

Here's a not-complete list of what my readers have to say:


- In a nutshell and throughout the district:

"The most frustrating aspect of math at SPS is the lack of clarity. Regardless of the reasons why families want to know how to get to 8th grade algebra/12th grade calculus, there should be clear, district wide policies and options. Sadly there are not. And even at a school level there is rarely a well documented and communicated answer."

Kellie LaRue
Downtown says "Parents, you need to trust us. We know what is best for ALL students. This time will be different. I promise."

Parents say "Trust is based on promises kept."

Downtown makes it clear over and over again, that putting teachers into school buildings, is not the number one priority of the school district. This year's drama can be boiled down to ... 'We find overstaffing the entire district by even one teacher so fiscally offensive, that we understaffed by 45 teachers instead. You are welcome."

Seriously, parents have every right to be skeptical that any plan based on PROVIDING MORE SERVICES at the school building level will be yesterday's news before the ink is dry on the press release and will be long forgotten during the next budget cycle when those services need to be paid for with real money, not lip service.
True real meaningful differentiation is the holy grail in education. It can be done, but only with a lot of funding for small class sizes and professional development.
IB has been in Seattle Schools for 15 years now. IB requires a tiny amount of additional funding, in the form of test fees and an IB coordinator. Just look at the history of paying for that small promise and you can easily understand the skepticism / hysteria.  

Reader

Why does staff choose to use racially charged words. Because Juneau likes it.

Why does staff use false history. Because Juneau likes it.

Why was Washington middle School allowed to simmer in hate for the whole year and then the perpetrator of that hate was placed at licton springs. Because Juneau likes it.

Why did staff silence the third ALTF in 5 years. Because Juneau likes it.

Reader

Since our family has been in Seattle Public Schools:

* Walk to Math was eliminated in our neighborhood school (kids that were ahead had to redo a year of math)

* Spectrum was eliminated in our Service Area Elementary School
* Advanced Language Arts was eliminated in our middle school for “Spectrum” qualified students

* Advanced Language Arts was eliminated in our middle school for “HCC” qualified students

* HCC Elementary Reading standards were changed from two years advanced to one year advanced and new curriculum was purchased that was 1 year ahead. Our child received the same grades on the same school level report card to years in a row.

* Regular Math Homework was prohibited school-wide in our elementary school
* Regular Writing Homework was prohibited school-wide in our elementary school

* The Wednesday school day was cut short

* Separate High School Honors English was eliminated
* A new “Science for Dummies” curriculum was adopted district wide

* Our son spent 2 weeks at the end of the school year watching movies in math class because the planed materials had been completed.

* I was twice been told, once by a senior district administrator, and once by a principal, that providing advanced learning, such as walk to math, added logistical complexity.

- Hazel Wolf is phasing out walk to math at the elementary level.

Reader

No one should kid themselves. MTSS is not about ensuring advanced learners are challenged. Rather, it is about (1) helping struggling students catch up; (2) keeping advanced learners from staying ahead, and (3) making things easier for district administration.

Reader about The Source 

Apparently the district is about to announce that the Source will no longer be available for regular grade monitoring, and parents will get only 8 grade updates (progress reports, report cards) per year now.

Reader on Strategic Plan goal for African-American Males

Today, my high school student daughter shared something concerning. Students sit at tables in one of her classes and get up to 3 points for participation. She learned today that her teacher had given her 2.5 points. She went to the teacher and asked why she hadn't gotten 3 points, pointing out that she pays attention, asks questions and doesn't talk during class. The teacher said she was right and would give her 3 points this time. But, the teacher told her that she won't be able to do that in the future because the other students at her table are black and two of them are not paying attention, but it wouldn't look good if she gave the only white student at the table 3 points. 

Me on the Budget

Directors Mack and Pinkham refused to approve the budget because of these enrollment concerns.  I have been watching this district for decades and I almost have never seen this.  Did this not register with some of you?

Reader on Enrollment

Can we approach the board to adopt a policy that errs on the side of over projecting enrollment? Staff can be let go easier than they can be hired and the long term implications of what happened this year have far reaching implications, for affluent and especially for FRL schools.

Kellie La Rue on Eric Blumhagen's assessment of the high school enrollment issues:

Eric Blumhagen's essay is very well written and gets directly to the point. This situation was entirely preventable.

Eric's conclusion is also equally clear and illustrates the interconnections of budget, enrollment and capacity. The change we need to make is straightforward. We need to prioritize teachers and students in the budget process.

The phrase "it goes without saying" was practically invented for this situation. It should go without saying that prioritizing teachers and students in the budget is the core work of a school district. However, that simply is not the case with SPS.

I attended the 5/8/19 Board Work Session, and staff make their priorities quite clear during that meeting. It was stated that there was "not enough money to take the risk of over-staffing schools". They repeatedly mentioned that once teachers are in place, they are nearly impossible to remove, because of board and public pressure.

Because over-staffing a school building by even one teacher was so fiscally irresponsible, staff was very clear in their assertion that they only fiscally responsible option was truly to RIF teachers in June and then re-hire in October, if necessary.

That is a plan created by bean counters, not educators. So the "solution" to the problem of "over-staffing" is to create chaos for the start of school process. If staff wanted to prioritize teachers and students, there is a very simple solution.

Every year, we have millions of dollars in underspend for budgeted teaching positions. This is because some positions go unfilled and because new inexperienced teachers are less expensive than the budgeted amount. These dollars that were already budgeted for teachers could easily be converted into a staffing stabilization fund.

Reader on Capacity

Dozen of capacity-hardened parents contacted the district. By this point, many parents have been fighting capacity related battles since their high school students, started Kindergarten.
For just high school, there were 300 new registrations for high school after open enrollment and before the start of school. That is 10 teachers worth of students, added over the summer. Budget flexibility is a requirement.

Kellie La Rue on the Crosscut story by Liz Brazile on RBHS and its teacher cuts :

"Community based funding" can't help enrollment and budget swings of this size. What can help is the district guaranteeing that the current year's staff at Title 1 schools is continued into the next year. Title 1 schools need some semblance of staffing stability. That should be the budget priority. 

While all high schools were needlessly harmed in this process, some schools are able to bounce back faster than others. Liz's article clearly captures that dynamic.

Eric's article captures all the nuances of the problem, most likely because Eric has served on multiple SPS Task Forces related to capacity, enrollment and budget and has followed this topic for more than a decade. Liz's article captures the situation with fresh eyes but misses many of the more complex and more troubling and longer lasting problems from failing to center the budget on students, particularly Title 1 students.

Rainier Beach's 2018 enrollment was 740. Rainier's Beach's enrollment has been growing every year. Despite that Rainier Beach was budgeted for 685 for the 2019 school year. The projected 55 student drop necessitated removing two teachers from the budget.

The first day count was 806. That number is completely in line with the steady year over year growth that Beach has been experiencing and would require adding two teachers. That makes a total gap of 121 students.

RIF'ing a teacher at Rainier Beach was myopic at best. IMHO, it was just cruel.

Director Hersey, as it is in your district, here is Kellie to explain it:

So here is the much longer lasting damage to Rainier Beach.

High School is the Master Schedule and the Master Schedule is set in the Spring. A high school can only deliver classes that are on the schedule and the schedule is set by the budget.

Rainier Beach's schedule was set to 685 students. Now you can overload teachers past the 150 mark and stretch that a bit. But you just can't give 6 full classes to 806 students.

That means many students just have holes in their schedules or a lot of TA slots.

So what can a student do? Those with another choice, leave. Some students who were planning to attend Rainier Beach, but don't have the classes they need, leave for charter schools, Running Start or other districts.

The failure to appropriately staff a high school can easily cause the predicted enrollment drop. This then justifies the projection and the chaos is swept under the rug.

Rainier Beach has worked hard to grow their enrollment and their community. They have done this despite the bean counters short staffing the school, year after year.

This is not a WSS problem. This is not a fundraising problem. This is a management problem.

Using the equity lens, Rainier Beach is the only Tier 1 high school. As such, Rainier Beach is supposed to be protected in the budget. Manipulating the enrollment projections as work around to that protection is beyond inappropriate.

 On Nutrition services. 

You saw the KUOW story? And the letter to the Superintendent by Local 609 where they voted for a motion of no confidence in Aaron Smith, head of Nutrition Services?

Disgraceful.  This the food that children - mostly F/RL children - eat every day.

Readers on Advanced Learning

The district just wants some quick and easy equity points. They don’t actually care if students of color get access to advancement. If they did, they would have listened to the recommendations of the 2014 ALTF. They can change the identification practices anytime. 

The current proposal would send everyone to their red-lined inequitable schools. The well off, low FRL schools with supportive leadership will serve their AL students well. The high FRL or middle of the road ones with unsupportive leadership, bias teachers and with high number of struggling students won’t serve their AL students. Fake equity at its finest. 

This district still has teachers who call the police on their 5th graders, where principals publicly shame their black students, where classrooms go a whole year with no teacher. So now, magically, all teachers will have the resources, capacity, cultural competency and racial training to see and serve their black and brown students as advanced learners. It’s sad that the equity problem will get worse, but the conversation about equity in AL will end because these kids now will be invisible.

"An immediate challenge is that not every building has services to provide even if they all implemented local norms tomorrow. According to a new study published in Gifted Child Quarterly that used data from the Office of Civil Rights, over 42 percent of U.S. schools have zero students identified as gifted. This points to a major implication of what we propose: All schools would need to proactively plan for how they would challenge their most advanced learners."

The first or second slide suggests that advanced learning was set up to stop white flight during the 1980s, which is totally wrong and a historical and should not be allowed to stand unchallenged. (Editor's note - hey Board, Dr. Nancy Robinson whose work help start the program, is still alive and probably would be glad to tell you about it. Contact me for details.) 

DeWolf has never recanted his claim that HC is 90% white.

"RECOMMENDATION 5: Enhance equity in access to Highly Capable and Advanced Learning services and programs. The District should provide additional pathways for identification of students who need Highly Capable services at all grade levels. In addition to teacher nomination and parent nomination, the District should investigate testing all kindergarten and/or second-grade students with an unbiased, non-verbal, cognitive screener (such as the CogAT screening form). In addition, the District should design and implement plans to support students who demonstrate potential for high achievement, especially those from underrepresented groups (including special education and high-poverty students), through talent development
initiatives. Details of administration and implementation would be developed jointly by the Advanced Learning office and the Equity and Race Relations department. "

Yeah that was 5 years ago and nothing. happened. I see nothing but inaccurate data, bordering on propaganda false history, smoke and mirrors in this bogus deck. 

Teacher Theo Moriarty

A gifted cohort IS an affinity group. It is THE most effective service for students diagnosed with giftedness.

A gifted cohort IS the best social emotional learning environment for these asynchronous children.

But since SPS is relying on demagoguery rather than research based best practice they are blaming the children for their own needs rather than owning up to being directly hostile, encouraging staff ignorance through a lack of training, removing what few qualifications a teacher needed in order to teach the program, and now saying that since they don't like how they've run it they are now going to fix it by killing the hopes and dreams of these children? 

Reader on the Documentation for today's Work Session on Advanced Learning

@Raceless who said "15% OF HCC STUDENTS HAVE NO RACE!!!
The percentages in the chart on page 5 don't add up to 100%. Which is weird given how the whole AL part of the document is focused on race rather than academic need.

Yes and the new demographic form is just as bad. It specifies ethnicity from 7 regions for "Black" Americans. They broke down every other racial group but "white" and "Asian". "Asian" can be a multitude of diverse people with diverse backgrounds, no different than Black people. "White" is also not a region, country, or unified ethnicity. European American is not even accurate. Historically "white" has been an elusive ever evolving term and only those specifically of Christian Northern European Anglo-Saxon heritage being clearly considered "white". This continues even today with Jews being targeted as "other" by white nationalists. What the heck? White and Asian are just as diverse!

MTSS is not the answer. As stated near the beginning of the district's own slide deck, there is already serious variability in schools' ability to provide differentiated services. Asking even more of teachers is not going to change that.

A few reminders:
-the AL program was developed by SPS. At this point I don't care about it's provenance. From 1977 or whenever. It's no longer relevant. Every other school district that I can think of recognizes that there are kids who work and learn at different levels. There are kids who are advanced, there are kids who are behind and they all need to be given their version of basic education. Don't tell kids who are to hurry up-so why is it of to tell advanced kids to wait?
-most of the reasonable voices within AL have been advocating for years, yes years, that the identification process is flawed. And what does SPS do? Double down on flawed. And also, use tests like the SBAC as a gate for apparently rationed services i.e. Middle School Math.
-SPS has lied along the way. They have lied about services, they have lied about identification, they have lied about putting an actual curriculum in place for AL.
All of you folks who are up in arms about how awful it is to have bright, gifted kids in SPS have been duped by none other than SPS who will ultimately lie about everything they promise to implement. Like capacity issues, this will be a self fulfilling prophesy in that those who can, will leave. And viola, the AA Male gap issue--will have been solved. Because you know, those AL kids are taking resources from everyone else, right?

That's the way that SPS has rolled.

Finally from Kellie LaRue  - The basics of project management go like this.

* Plan to accomplish X
* By doing Y
* As measured by Z.

This presentation utterly fails that rudimentary lens.

* Plan to accomplish racial equity
* By a mysterious 6 year, undetermined plan to make identification the problem of the homeroom teacher
* As measured by ... (crickets)

What should be in this (AL)  presentation is something more like this.

* Plan to increase AA participation in Advanced Learning
* By hiring gifted education specialists trained to identify gifted learners in historically underserved populations.
* As measured by our goal of 8% participation in AL by African American Students.

And then the real way, you can identify an actual committed plan

* Using this budget code and this funding source.

All we have in this entire presentation is one more unfunded mandate placed onto homeroom teachers.