Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Board's Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee met on Monday, May 21. The meeting started just after the scheduled start time of 4:00. All three committee members, Marty McLaren (chair), Sharon Peaslee, and Harium Martin-Morris, were present. No other board members were in attendance. They quickly approved the agenda without amendments and then approved the minutes from the previous meeting, also without amendments.

This is critically important. This is the most important and most urgent crisis in Seattle Public Schools. This is also indicative of the deep flaws in the District. This conversation is from the School Board meeting of 11/3/2010. It occurred during the discussion of an introduction item, the update and revision of some enrollment policies. The conversation begins with Director Smith-Blum expressing her concern about the inadequacies of the interventions available in our middle and high schools for students working far below grade level. I would encourage you to watch the video of the conversation from the start, but I offer here a transcript of it starting at 54:40 of Part 3 of the meeting: Chief Academic Officer, Dr. Susan Enfield: Director Smith-Blum and I did have the opportunity to have a conversation about this and actually I think that many of the issues that Dr. Smith-Blum raises are legitimate, but I think that they’re really separate from this actual policy question t...

At the Board meeting of 11/3/2010 there was a discussion, prompted by Director Smith-Blum, that arose during the talk about fairly innocuous motion about cleaning up some obsolete enrollment policies. Her concern was that the District should do assessments of incoming students to determine their academic needs. The superintendent quickly jumped up to twist that by saying that it sounded to her like tracking and discrimination, but Director Smith-Blum made it clear that was not what she meant. Here's the critical part. Both the superintendent and Dr. Enfield spoke of assessing students' abilities and providing interventions where necessary as a core function of schools. But then Dr. Enfield said that the District's effort along those lines was Response to Intervention and that they were actively seeking outside funding to "take that to scale". Stop right there. This work is core to the district's mission, but we don't do it and we don't budget for i...