Seattle Schools Community Forum

I asked the district: Is it true that opting out your kids can get them removed from the Spectrum/APP seats? The answer, via Advanced Learning, was a flat "no."   So if your teacher/principal is saying this, tell them you checked with the district.   If you continue to hear this, I would write to your region's Executive Director because it is wrong to give out misinformation about SBAC testing. Nationally, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, endorsing opting out (at least in her home state of New York).  Her statement yesterday via Twitter, We believe parents have right to opt-out & tchrs shld be able to advise parents how. We’ve said it repeatedly, are fighting for it in ESEA. @lacetothetop et al have asked what I’d do if I had kids in NYPS—based on what I’ve seen, if I had kids, I’d opt them out of the PEARSON (PAARC) tests this yr. I may have put this up before but I think it worthy of a repeat: it's the ...

  Update:   Washington Post's guest post refuting claims Brown made to Stephen Colbert on his show.  Pretty interesting stuff. Move over, Michelle Rhee - here comes Campbell Brown. Did you hear about this? Rhee's star is waning. Her StudentsFirst group has closed up shop in about five states and the billion dollars she was hoping to raise didn't materialize. Well, nature abhors a vacuum and so we have former CNN anchor, Campbell Brown. This newest ed reformer on the block is going after the teachers union and, in specific, teacher tenure.  (But like the star-crossed coupling of Wendy Kopp of TFA married to Richard Barth of KIPP, Brown is married to Dan Senor who is on the board of the NY state StudentsFirst.) Let's pause here for a moment and all say together: Tenure for public school teachers is NOT the tenure of university professors. Teacher tenure basically guarantees due process for teachers so that they cannot be stripped of their jobs for things l...

From Politico : "The American Federation of Teachers ended a five-year relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation after rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation's approach to education reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten told Morning Education the union will no longer accept Gates money for its Innovation Fund, which was founded in 2009 and has received up to $1 million a year in Gates grants ever since. The Innovation Fund has sponsored AFT efforts to help teachers implement the Common Core standards - a Gates priority - among other initiatives. - Weingarten said she didn't believe Gates funding influenced the Innovation Fund's direction, but still had to sever the relationship. "I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing - not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders - that it was important to find a way to replace Gates funding," she said. Weingarten plans to ask members t...

First off - read Anthony Cody's column from his Living in Dialogue slot at Education Week.  READ IT in its entirety.   Why?  Because it gives quite the total picture of Common Core and why so many - yes, including Tea Party folks - are against it.  Worried about it.  And will fight it.  You should be, too, if only to protect your child's privacy. Here's the basics from his column but again, READ IT: "1. Sharing of student and teacher data with third party developers of all sorts, with no guarantees of privacy.  As noted in this post, there are plans in place in some states such as Illinois and New York, and others as well, to collect massive amounts of data, which will be housed in a cloud based databank maintained by inBloom, a non-profit created by the Gates Foundation for this purpose."

To finish up with the AFT convention, I attended Bill Gates' speech. There were a few protesters outside the entrance to the hall calling Gates a Trojan horse. I asked the AFT press area folks if leadership had said anything to members about the speech. They said that Randi Weingarten had said that AFT had a tradition of looking for speakers with different views. She also asked them to be respectful during the speech. I sat through several discussions/votes on various resolutions (I missed the one they passed about teacher evalutions). It was pretty interesting and it felt very democratic. (There was quite the interesting discussion about whether children of illegal immigrants should have access to scholarships and loans.) But finally, the lights went down and Randi was introducing Gates. She was very appreciative of him being there and pointed out that his foundation had given money for the AFT's Innovation project. She talked about teacher evaluations and "not ma...

Day One of the AFT convention. Randi Weingarten is one good speaker (but so is the head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous ). She gave a fairly long speech but she had some pretty good lines that are worth repeating. ... a growing pundit class that has engaged in the browbeating of unionized teachers and public schools - in other words, affixing blame rather than fixing schools. “As much as we wish it weren’t true, these factors matter—whether it’s poverty, or stressful experiences like a death in the family, or losing one’s home, or a parent losing a job,” Weingarten said. Yet, when we point them out, she continued, “It’s more likely that people confront us rather than join us in confronting the problem.” True educational success isn't just a test score, just as economic success isn't just GDP growth. Teacher evaluations should include measures of student learning, but “there’s a huge difference between using multiple indicators of student learning as part of a teacher’s eval...