Seattle Schools Community Forum

It's a funny thing, this public education advocacy.  There are many of us, locally, and nationwide, representing all kinds of issues and viewpoints.  But, with the advent of corporate ed reform, there are now new players, most of the funded by the big fish (people like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Alice Walton, etc.)  They create these faux groups that just pop up as if they have existed forever and yet they can only point to a few - seemingly token - parents or teachers. But regular advocates forge on without that kind of financial backing or big name firepower.  Our coin of the realm is that biggest, widest picture on issues.  Many in corporate ed reform hate it.  They need to get something done and so, put their side in a pretty frame where the frame covers half the picture.  Since most of us regular advocates traffic in the truth with real data and real outcomes (just as the other side does sometimes), well, the truth has the ability to get people ...

Via my student data privacy network of colleagues (via Student Privacy Matters ), I have learned that there are teachers doing edTPA teacher certification training who are videotaping their work with students.  Some of the issues noted from my colleagues like Leonie Haimson: Molly, a NYC parent, tweeted and emailed me this AM about the many videos exploding all over YouTube that were originally submitted through the edTPA teacher certification process showing students being taught by teachers in training . One in particular shows a student who the teacher is trying to train him not to hum during reading. 

How does once in elementary, once in middle school and once in high school sound for state testing for federal reports?   Because honestly, the overwhelming majority of teachers can tell how a child is doing in school so why the time, cost and lack of real help for teachers/parents with multiple year testing.  FairTest has this link to send a letter in support of Senator Jon Tester's amendment (yes, that's his name) to limit testing to three times in a student's K-12 academic career.   (This would not preclude district assessments.) Congress is taking up NCLB on July 7th.  From Diane Ravitch, PARCC is Falling Apart with the Departure of Ohio:

From Diane Ravitch: A teacher wrote this little essay and dedicated it to Governor Andrew Cuomo: “There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators. He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs. Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership. We have given him sufferance for far too long. He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters. The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba? She added: I’m not supposed to say this, but all these insanely hard words appeared on the 4,6, and 8th grade tests last week. Ridiculous? Or just hard? Hard? Or just ridiculous? I can say, with no embarrassment, that I did not know at least half those words until high school (a fe...

First up, apparently poor Minnesota got hit by an overloaded processor AND some kind of hacking which lead to a shutdown of their testing on Tuesday.  Minnesota is using PARCC and that means our friends at Pearson had some explaining to do.  Pearson got it back and running but the Minnesota ODE was not quite prepared to say all was well.  From MPR : "We still need to hear from Pearson exactly what the issue is, how they have resolved it, and receive an assurance that testing can resume smoothly," department spokesman Josh Collins said. The department hopes to restart testing on Thursday if it gets those assurances, he added. The hacker attack went away after about 30 minutes. I'm just going to interject at this point.  Look, even without opt-outs, multiple states had to shut down testing.  ANYONE who knows how testing goes at a school, knows that it is a carefully planned event and anything that changes, throws the whole thing out of whack. My poi...

Update: now it's SBAC.  Nevada, Montana and North Dakota have shut down testing because of a "computer glitch." From Diane Ravitch's blog: Yes, you read that right. The vendor of the Smarter Balanced Assessment was not prepared for the number of tests that the server had to deliver, and the system broke down in three states. According to the Nevada Department of Education, a spike in students taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC) this morning in Nevada, Montana and North Dakota exceeded the data capacity of Measured Progress, a third-party vendor contracted by the states to provide the test. All testing in the three states has been stopped until Measured Progress can increase its data capacity, according to an email sent to state superintendents today by state deputy superintendent Steve Canavero. Think about it. The vendor didn’t know that so many students would be taking tests at the same time. What were they thinking? Seriously? Is an...

Unhappy with Pearson ?  Apparently you are not alone.  Speaking of Big Brother, here's the SBAC's "Guidance for Social Media Monitoring during the Field Test."  The State Senate is to drop its budget this week.  Let's see how that fulfillment of McCleary is going and where they find the funding.  I spoke to Speaker Chopp last week and that's pretty much all he would say.  I note that when I mentioned that while I think preschool is great, that the Constitution says K-12 is the state's paramount duty and that I was worried about the push that both preschool and higher education are receiving this session.  He said something to the effort that there would be more dollars for preschool but not in McCleary. Whether it's in McCleary or not is not really the point.  Because, frankly, education dollars are education dollars. I note that there's a new group, Why Not Us Washington that is pushing the Legislature to invest more in preschool.  ...

Absolutely hilarious blog thread from a woman calling herself the "FERPA Sherpa" and saying she's for student data privacy about Pearson and their interception of a student's tweet on the PARCC test. She says (bold mine): Have we stopped to think if students care or, dare we say, expect it even? You see, as adults we can express our outrage over a multinational corporation monitoring students but are we speaking for students or for ourselves? Is this our outrage or the students? K-12 students think differently. They expect to be watched by their teachers, parents, peers etc. but certainly do not expect companies monitoring social media to see who mentioned a test. And here is where it gets interesting. I asked some 5 th grade students how they would feel if they posted something online and it became public information. They said that everything they do is seen by their parents and their parents are always posting things about them anyway . They expec...

Vermont says no .  From the Vermont government website, an op-ed by a member of their Board of Education: On Tuesday, March 17, 2015, the Vermont State Board of Education unanimously voted to suspend the use of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) scores for the 2014-2015 school year for the purpose of annual school evaluation determinations. These English Language Arts and Mathematics assessments were developed to measure student mastery of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which were adopted in 2010. Until students' education has been guided by the new standards and schools have practiced administering and interpreting SBAC, the results will not support reliable and valid inferences about student performance and should not be used as the basis for any consequential purpose. Unless empirical studies confirm a sound relationship between performance on the SBAC and critical and valued life outcomes ("college and career-ready"), test res...

 Update: a student "oath" from Louisiana from last year's testing: End of update Update: Via news updates , this is what the student did: Apparently, the student had just commented on the question after taking the test, and deleted his tweet after being contacted by the district. So commenting on a test score via social media will get your child on Pearson's naughty list.  What a bunch of bullies.  (You should read the whole article but here's a bit of it.) In addition, Pearson/PARCC has access to if a student is using testing modifications, along with their names, unique identifier numbers, etc. Beyond sensitive student information, Pearson also collects everything a student types into the keyboard during the test including words or sentences that were typed and then deleted. Pearson knows whether or not the student views a test item, how long it takes him/her to answer a specific question, and it tracks the student's clicks as he/she na...

A lot of this uproar is about technology, I'll admit that.  But it further confirms that schools and districts are - not - ready.  I have no idea is SPS is truly ready. It's funny because at last night's Board meeting, Director McLaren asked what kind of message it would send to kids to entertain discussion about SBAC.  (She also said kids would be "proud" to have taken the test.  Are kids supposed to feel proud of getting thru a slogfest of a test?) But if I were a kid, siting and waiting and sitting and waiting, I think my range of emotions probably would not add a lot to the actual taking of the test.  If I were a teacher, I would feel a lot of frustration and some despair for my students.  And, as a parent, I would just not take any test result seriously. Maybe SBAC will do better than PARCC.   So let's see what's happening around the nation.  (all bold mine)

 In the "grrrr" edition of Open Thread: In Jurupa Valley (a small city near Irvine, California), s chool officials apologized to parents of high school Sped students because, as part of a "functional skills program," the schools had them dig through trash for items that could be recycled for money.  The Superintendent carefully phrased his apology: “I personally apologize to any students who may have been humiliated,” but also said: Duchon said Tuesday that “this is standard curriculum” for the program’s students, who routinely collected recyclables such as cans and bottles. “Up to last week, there has not been one complaint,” he said. Gee, I wonder why students didn't feel they could stand up to their teachers over this nonsense. (It was discovered after complaints appeared on Facebook.) Their Sped ex director said it was a common project to teach life skills. Next, remember that HUGE planned iPad buy for Los Angeles Unified School District...

Ramping up to the start of school, I hope to (finally) get several threads on student data privacy going.  I also hope to draft a template letter that I'm going to offer to parents to ask their school about any kind of signing up for online groups that a school asks students to do.   I don't know why the district would not think this important enough to even inform (no less ask permission from) parents about online services that their child signed up for and what information their child was asked to give away. Don't let anyone tell you that you do not have the right to ask - you do.   Education writer, Anthony Cody, has left Education Week and is writing his own blog, Living in Dialogue .  Anthony is a gifted thinker and his work is worthy reading.   He has guest bloggers on occasion and this piece by high school teacher, Mary Porter, is very good and very troubling.  Her thesis? Teachers must protect student agency and identity from the “templ...

In the "wait, what?!" category comes this story from the Washington Post's Answer Sheet - School puts nearly 100 kindergartners in one class in a teaching experiment.   The first sentence in the article says "no, it's not a headline from The Onion."  This is being tried at the lowest-performing school in Detroit.  There are three teachers in the class. Incidentally, the lead teacher is 30 years old, another teacher is in her second year and the third is in her first year. It's from a story in the Detroit Free Press .  It sounds like it works (somewhat) but I honestly do not believe it is what is best for children. The AP is reporting that Washington state is the only state denied renewal of its NCLB waiver that seems unlikely to get their waiver back (the other three states seem to be doing what Arne Duncan wants).   Randy Dorn, the WA state superintendent said this:

NPR has been getting dollars (a la the Seattle Times) for education reporting from the Gates Foundation.  And boy, does it show in their Common Core reporting. First, their FAQs on Common Core read a lot like what comes from Gates.  Two, they even have one FAQ "fact" wrong which is that Oklahoma has a bill going thru its Legislature to walk away from CC.   The fact is that the bill passed both houses of their Legislature and has been sitting on their Governor's desk for about a week.  (She has the choice to sign it into law, wait until the time period to sign runs out and it automatically becomes law or veto it.)  This morning they had a piece on how most states are nowhere near ready for CC because the curriculum (books and teaching materials) are not ready.  (This is true but that's certainly not the only implementation problem.  What I find troubling is the subtle insertion of editorializing in these pieces.  I'm not sure I even min...

No matter how many tweets that DFER or ReadyWashington or any other group that supports Common Core send out saying that it's here to stay, the evidence is mounting that it may survive but not in exactly the way its end game was pictured. Update on CC across the country: Indiana has already bowed out of Common Core but only to replace it with their "own" standards which appear to be a cut-and-paste of CC.  Minnesota adopted the LA standards but kept their own math standards saying they are "more rigorous" than CC.  The Oklahoma state legislature, both houses , approved a bill to exit their state from Common Core standards.  It is going to their governor's desk soon.  Rep. T.W. Shannon had this to say: The federal government sold Common Core with the promise of increased standards, but instead gave us an inflexible curriculum that does not equip our children for college,” said Shannon. “The federal government has disregarded parental rights, over-r...

A fairly amazing week in national ed reform news.  Common Core. - the Chicago Teachers Union issued a resolution against Common Core that was brilliant. - in NY state, a former Regent spoke out against Common Core, mostly because of the work that had gone into developing NY State standards (only to see them tossed aside).   - from the right, came Peggy Noonan (formerly President Reagan's speechwriter) with a piece in the Wall Street Journal .  It's a good piece that didn't come from Tea Party people but true conservatives.  That law exists because the people who pushed for it fell in love with an abstract notion and gave not a thought to what the law would actually do and how it would work. - yet another prominent, non-Tea Party conservative, George Will , broke down CC in under two minutes.   From Diane Ravitch: Pearson , the British publisher, plans to launch a new PR offensive to push back against the anti-testing and anti-Common Core grou...

From Diane Ravitch's blog via the group, FairTest : Today’s technical problems, which disrupted computerized testing in many Florida districts, are far from unusual. Many other states have experienced similar failures, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which monitors standardized exams across the country. Earlier this month, the statewide testing systems in Kansas and Oklahoma both crashed. Last year, technical problems disrupted computerized exams in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio and Oklahoma. In the recent past, new, automated testing programs collapsed in Oregon and Wyoming, requiring administration of replacement, pencil-and-paper versions. After root cause investigations, both Wyoming and Oklahoma levied multi-million dollar fines against Pearson, the same testing vendor Florida uses. Wyoming labeled the company in “complete default of the contract” and replaced it. Oklahoma let its contract with Pearson ...

Stories that have come across my computer over the last few weeks on a variety of issues. Arne Duncan - the things that Arne says. So first it was those "white suburban moms" thinking their children and their schools were really something.  He said opposition to Common Core came from "fringe" groups.  The Daily News says those against CC are "drunk with right-wing hysteria."  So moms are being hysterical and dramatic?  Almost sounds like a little sexism thrown in there to marginalize any female voice. Common Core   Pearson and Common Core The huge ed gorilla publisher in the room, Pearson, has a nonprofit wing, Pearson Charitable Foundation, which just agreed to pay over $7M to New York state after NY's attorney general determined they had created CC materials to generate money for the Pearson company.  And who figured into that determination?  The Gates Foundation.   (Pearson says it did nothing wrong but admits it could have been clearer ...

Locally (and, of sorts, public education news) comes the announcement that 37th district Senator Adam Kline will not be running to retain his seat.  Naturally, when a senator retires, the obvious replacement often comes from whoever are the representatives in that district (see Jamie Pedersen for Ed Murray).  I am hoping that Rep. Eric Pettigrew runs so that all the ed reform nonsense he has pushed and supported (and seemingly not understood given some of his past statements), he has to explain to voters.  And then he loses.  I also hear that Eric Liu, a great writer, is also thinking of running.  Eric is a great thinker but has never been elected to office.  He is so bright but also his BFF is Nick Hanauer which would (1) fund his campaign but (2) probably get him to support all Hanauer's ed reform push. Also locally, interesting story at KUOW about one family's work to get help for their autistic child , this time with a good outcome in Shoreline Sc...