Seattle Schools Community Forum

I have said, over and over again, that having an ALO in a school is usually no different from not having an ALO in a school. Schools typically don't define their ALO in any meaningful way. They cannot and do not describe the ALO for families or tell families what the ALO provides that is any different from the norm for good teaching practices. There are typically no practices specific to school ALOs. Schools cannot identify anything they do differently for students in ALOs than they do for students who are not in ALOs. Often the school cannot even say which students are participating in the ALO. There is no assessment of school ALOs. The District has never made any assessment of their quality or efficacy (or even their existence) and the schools make no assessment of their quality or efficacy. The bulk of ALOs are a fiction. They exist exclusively in marketing materials. I recognize that this is a pretty harsh characterization of ALOs and, let's face it, Spectrum sinc...

It is time, once again, for the annual approval of schools . In short, the Board has to attest to the State that there is a CSIP for every school. The Board, however, does not actually check to make sure that there is a CSIP for every school. Instead, the Board accepts the claim of the presence of a CSIP from the Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning that there is a CSIP for every school. It's an interesting sleight of hand that allows the Board to both deflect responsibility from themselves if the CSIPs are faulty and to evade the work of checking the CSIPs. They are wise to do that because this year, as we see in most years, the CSIPs are faulty. I'll give just one example: Take a look at the CSIP for K-5 STEM at Boren and tell me how all of those folks working at Thornton Creek are going to create improvements at Boren. When these came up for a vote once before, Director Martin-Morris, rather infamously, said from the dais that it didn't matter if th...

Looking ahead to the next couple months, there are few items of interest that will come due.

So I attended this Community Center for Education Results' The Road Map for Education Results kickoff today (I'm tired just typing all that). More on that later but they had breakout sessions that, like most conferences, were a lot better than the speeches. One was about Seattle Schools and Data (the word transparency was used). It figured out favorite manipulator of data, Brad Bernatek and a couple of other SPS women (a data coach and a data steward). They went through the creation of the School Reports and how they used MAP and how they could put together data as a " trigger " to help students. Fine, I'm sure other districts are interested. Now Dorothy had been in the first session of this information and told me Brad apologized for the 17% stat. Indeed he did. He called it a " good lesson for all of you ". He explained how it came about and that last year they had changed it to "TBD" (first I heard of this) and they were not ...

There is a little thing on the agenda for the regular legislative meeting of the School Board this week. It's so small that it is buried in the consent agenda. It's the annual approval of schools. It's a little thing, but it means a lot because it is required for the District to collect the Basic Education funding from the state. That's the bulk of the District's revenue. The state makes districts fufill some requirements before sending their their annual wad o' cash and one of those requirements is that they write and approve an annual improvement plan for each school. In Seattle, the requirements for that annual plan are fulfilled with the CSIP, the Continuous School Improvement Plan. Here's the problem: the District didn't do CSIPs this year. All of the CSIPs on the District web site are out of date. Worse yet, it's obvious. Anyone who knew about the District and looked at the evidence could see that no work has been done on these plans. The C...