Seattle Schools Community Forum

To note, the press release references a "federal fee reduction program" so that is one discount available to F/RL students for AP testing. I'm still checking about the state and the district. Results released today by the College Board show that the number of students taking the SAT has remained steady but that PSAT and AP participation has increased.

From Reuters: Just months after the College Board unveiled the new SAT this March, a person with access to material for upcoming versions of the redesigned exam provided Reuters with hundreds of confidential test items. The questions and answers include 21 reading passages – each with about a dozen questions – and about 160 math problems. 

From the Graduation Alternative Application for Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction:

This Saturday, Jan. 23rd, will be the last time the old version of the SAT will be given. The newly redesigned SAT will be given for the first time in March.   That one will be the one now aligned to Common Core standards.  Test prep companies say yes - it's creating a lot of anxiety (which may help the folks that give the ACT.)

A couple of items to consider. Update 2: SPS teacher (and parent and activist) Jesse Hagopian's essay on why he is opting his 1st grader out of MAP testing.

Despite the lowest reported SAT scores nationally in 10 years, participation rates - across all groups in Washington State - continues to go up. The steady decline in SAT scores and generally stagnant results from high schools on federal tests and other measures reflect a troubling shortcoming of education-reform efforts. The test results show that gains in reading and math in elementary grades haven’t led to broad improvement in high schools, experts say. That means several hundred thousand teenagers, especially those who grew up poor, are leaving school every year unready for college. [ State-by-state SAT score results ] “ Why is education reform hitting a wall in high school?” asked Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank. “You see this in all kinds of evidence. Kids don’t make a whole lot of gains once they’re in high school. It certainly should raise an alarm. It is difficult to pinpoint a reason for the decline in SAT scores, but ...

From NPR: There was a discrepancy between the time allotted in the student test booklet for one of the sections, 25 minutes, and the proctor's instructions, just 20 minutes. A version of this stressful situation played out across the United States on June 6. Scores will be thrown out on two of the 10 sections of the SATs taken that day. And late Monday night the College Board announced that fees will be waived on the next testing date for students who report having a bad experience this time. That's because a printing error in the student instruction booklet stated the wrong time limit, leading to widespread confusion. A reported 487,000 students were registered for the test, the last SATs of the school year.

Have you read thru the District's budgets ?  One funny thing is the cover with "Three Goals - 50,000 Journeys."   Last I looked the District was near 53,000 students.  What about the other 3,000?  Also, page 54, where they show the broad breakdown of "Expenditures" - it adds up to 99%, not 100% .  Must be that Common Core Math.  And guess who's spending is going up the most within SPS?  Central at 16.4% (but they still like to contend they are only 5.8% of the budget with 800 people working at JSCEE). Important new ruling from the State Supreme court on sealing juvenile records .  Story from Crosscut .

A couple of things that may extend beyond one school - if you know this is happening at your school, could you please let us know. Update: on the SAT testing story, at the end of the thread is a letter from Roosevelt principal, Brian Vance. Key passage: In the following weeks we received no indication that there would be a consequence for our timing error and even after speaking with College Board and Educational Testing Services after the exam, we received no information that would lead us to believe they would invalidate the test scores. The first indication that there was an issue came last week, when students were not able to access their scores. In the end, the College Board invalidated our students' scores.  It sounds like RHS was trying to figure it out but the College Board took their sweet time in making a decision.  Not good. end of update  First, I received this e-mail from a reader about recent SAT testing at Roosevelt on Feb. 25th: Evide...

From SPS, information on low-cost AP/IB testing: SAT:   Next Wednesday, Seattle Public Schools will be administering the SAT to all juniors during a regular school day at no cost. The SAT normally carries a fee of at least $52.50. The district is offering this free SAT Day to open higher education opportunities to all students.  More info here. (Editor's note: as well, the district is offering for scores to be sent to colleges/universities (up to 4) for free AND students get lunch and snacks.  This is really great but boy, I wish I had gotten this info sooner to alert more parents.) AP and IB:  The Test Fee Reduction Program for Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge Capstone program exams, gives students from low-income families a significant break on fees for taking these tests. This year's fee of $12 per exam is down by one-third from last year and applies to an unlimited number of AP exams. More information at  www.k12.wa....

Threads to come - are the school funding numbers a Brad Bernatek kind of issue (meaning, the district has them wrong) or deliberate subterfuge?  What do these midterm elections mean for the state of public education in the U.S.A? Next major drop of ballot counts for I-1351 is about 4:30 pm today. OSPI reports that more Washington students are taking the SAT, PSAT and AP tests , across all racial subgroups.  The state’s student performance remained relatively strong. SAT and PSAT saw a slight downturn in overall scores, but the number of AP scores of at least “3” — the score needed to earn college credit — increased 5.7 percent.  I haven't watched this but there's a "Conversation with the Superintendent" at the district's channel .  It appears this will be a regular feature and you can submit questions. Viewers are invited to submit questions for the Superintendent by emailing publicaffairs@seattleschools.org (please put “Conversation” in the s...

To note: college success is better verified by GPA than SAT or ACT. From the president of Bard College via Time : The SAT needs to be abandoned and replaced. The SAT has a status as a reliable measure of college readiness it does not deserve.   The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. First, despite the changes, these tests remain divorced from what is taught in high school and what ought to be taught in high school.   Second, the test taker never really finds out whether he or she got any answer right or wrong and why.  What purpose is served by putting young people through an ordeal from which they learn nothing? Is the SAT a reasonable representation of the ideals and benefits of learning? No, it makes a mockery of them. The time has come for co...

Update: listening to the NPR story this morning, I heard a few interesting things about this story like: - David Coleman, the head of the SAT, says it will be better aligned to what is being taught in high school.  Fair enough, until you learn that he helped write the CC standards.  Oh. - also, apparently historically, the SAT was NOT supposed to follow high school curriculum End of update. For one thing, the SAT essay will be optional by 2016 - there's a big change.   The SAT essay will have to have accurate data and facts to support the essay which leads me to believe that somehow the essay topics must be given out.  How else can any student have facts at their fingertips broad enough to cover whatever is thrown at them? Here's a handy Ed Week chart outlining the current SAT, the new one and how it aligns with - what else? - Common Core. Here's a link to the LA Times story on this issue. It will be interesting to see what colleges/universities ...

Rainier Beach is one of three comprehensive high schools to not have a complete renovation. Chief Sealth has had major work done and got some of it via the fallout of them having to share a campus with Denny.  Ingraham is the other but Ingraham has also had major work done and has been on every single BEX and BTA.   Rainier Beach got a performing arts hall (but no performing arts curriculum or program so it sat, mostly unused for years) and had some building area upgrades but not much else. According to the Times, the Rainier Beach community isn't going to wait for the district to make their building better.  They would like to make it the greenest high school in the state.  The story in the Times . T he community’s aspirations were announced Tuesday at a news conference where Mayor Mike McGinn and Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation, expressed their support, albeit not the financial kind.  The Bullitt Foundation doesn’t fund capita...

The Times is reporting that for the 8th straight year, Washington state students had the highest SAT scores in the country among the states where more than half the eligible students took the tests. They ranked highest in all categories - critical reading, math and writing - than other states where at least 25% of students tested. (This is important because in general, the more students taking the test, the lower their scores.) I am happy to say that my son and his friends are in these SAT numbers for 2009. As well, Washington State's participation rate of 54% beats the national rate of 47% AND is the highest among Western states. The College Board says more than 37,000 Washington students took the SAT test last school year, including nearly 29,000 public school students. Let's sit back and just feel good about this news. Always more work to be done for sure but this is nice to hear.

From the online Seattle PI: "Three students, working with the Cambridge, MA based SAT prep company, Ivy Insiders, Ben Schmechel, a sophomore at Princeton University, Michael Dunn, a senior at Yale, and Megan Ji, a sophomore at Dartmouth College, are looking to change the way families approach and handle this future defining test. Recognizing the implicit disparity, as well as the increased financial difficulty for many families as part of the current economic recession, Schmechel, Dunn, and Ji, through Ivy Insiders, are moving such traditionally expensive test prep to a more variable sliding scale, "Pay What You Can" model. Last year, the 1,600 students around the country who were part of Ivy Insider classes averaged a 265-point gain‹results which beat those of national test-prep averages by a factor of nearly 2. Having scored in the 99th percentile themselves, averaging a score of 2300, Schmechel, Dunn, and Ji are seeking not only to change the way students prepare and...