Seattle Schools Community Forum

From OSPI: State Superintendent Randy Dorn announced recently that Washington will officially join the #GoOpen initiative. According to the U.S. Department of Education web site, the initiative “encourages states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational materials to transform teaching and learning.” Washington is the 17th state to join #GoOpen.

From Education Week : All eyes have been on Washington state since lawmakers there adjourned last month without making a key change to their teacher-evaluation system that would have enabled the state to hang on to its flexibility from the mandates of the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act. And now, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is on the verge of yanking Washington state's waiver, several sources say. An official decision is likely by the end of month—and if the waiver is pulled, as expected, the move would make the Evergreen State the first to lose its flexibility. Duncan called Randy Dorn, the state schools chief, Tuesday to discuss the waiver situation, but the state didn't get official word during that conversation that the flexibility would be pulled, Nathan Olson, a spokesman for Dorn, told my colleague Andrew Ujifusa. "We'd hoped this phone call would yield a simple yes-or-no answer to the question about whether we'd continue the waiver,...

Oh for Pete's sake.  No good news here.  From the Seattle Times : The school district submitted a proposal to state officials by the June 30 deadline, but they have rejected it, saying it falls far short of what is required. The school district submitted a proposal to state officials by the June 30 deadline, but they have rejected it, saying it falls far short of what is required. The school district submitted a proposal to state officials by the June 30 deadline, but they have rejected it, saying it falls far short of what is required. Gill’s office also had asked the district to identify the root causes of the problems, but Gill didn’t see that either. So the proposal is inadequate and the district can't identify the real issues for the lack of compliance. For years the state has been urging Washington’s largest school district to address dozens of problems in its special-ed programs. The state says, for example, that too many of the learning plans that ...

I have no time to read and analyze these results but I put them up for your own viewing.  According to this article in the Times, Washington State students are doing better on the math and science exams. Math scores in grades 3-8 increased in every grade except eighth. But What hasn't improved is the number of schools failing to make adequate yearly progress, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Preliminary figures show 1,388 Washington schools were on that list in 2011, an increase of about 200 schools from 2010. A total of 223 school districts — out of 295 in the state — failed to make adequate yearly progress in 2011. Here's the link to the scores at OSPI. I checked but there is no announcement yet from Seattle Schools about the scores for our district.