Seattle Schools Community Forum

Update: here are the minutes from that Work Session; in some ways more fleshed out than mine but I don't see all the things I have reported.  (They also attribute something to Director Pinkham that I do not believe he said and I will ask him about it at tomorrow night's Board meeting.) This section will cover only the Advanced Learning Work Session on Feb. 8th because this thread turned out to be quite lengthy. I'll cover the UW Equity Summit on Gifted Education, Feb. 9-10 in a final part to this series. Advanced Learning Work Session All the Board members were there except for Director Blanford.  (As an aside, I see that Blanford seems to be missing more meetings or coming in very late.  Not sure why but a trend.)

Some sad news on two fronts. One item is this from Ravenna Next Door on Sunday: My daughter and her friends were playing at Bryant this morning when they texted me with concern about glass and jewelry, and "gun powder" on the playground. I walked over to see for myself and sure enough there were empty beer cans, stolen jewelry and a pile of white powder with a razor blade, etc. I called the police who came surprisingly quickly and confirmed the white substance was Meth. Ugh. They took it to the station for evidence but left the jewelry and glass suggesting that I call the parks to come and clean it up. A very surprising site to say the least. Still researching who to call for clean up. The second item is about a beloved staff member at Cascadia: Allen Greenberg, beloved recess monitor at Cascadia Elementary in Seattle, passed away unexpectedly.  Allen spent his life giving to others - always looking out for the less fortunate.  He often stopped by Solid ...

Washington Middle School decided, some time ago, to dissolve its Spectrum classes. Spectrum-eligible students at Washington would no longer be in self contained classes for English and Social Studies, but would be mixed in with the general education students, called "scholars". The school promised that the inclusive classroom would provide more rigorous instruction for all students and that all students would benefit. Is that what happened? Here is a link to Washington's CSIP . In it, we find the results of their experiment. But first, the propaganda:

Or, as more commonly referred to, the SAP. Background The district created a new Student Assignment Plan in 2009 that was approved by the Board.  It was a big change, primarily because the district went from a choice plan to a neighborhood plan.  I know that many of you don't like this form of SAP but, at the time, many parents were clamoring for a neighborhood plan because of the assurance of knowing what school their child would be assigned to.  The interesting thing I wonder about is that under the choice plan, 90% of people received their first choice.  That's a pretty good percentage but was that their desired choice or just the best choice they felt they could make in terms of knowing where their child would be?  I haven't heard any numbers on the choice within the neighborhood plan. Then, with the explosive growth in the district, the plan had to be tweeted and so there was a Transition Plan.  What is confusing to me is that the district is stil...

The Board work session on Wednesday had three components; a discussion about distribution services (very straightforward stuff), a 15-minute update on "Interrelated Initiatives for 2016-2107" and Advanced Learning.

The Board has scheduled a work session on Advanced Learning for an hour and a half on October 5 after the Management Oversight meeting for ELL and Distribution Services. This is the time to contact the Board as they prepare for this work session. If you do, please remember a couple things. First, the Board's focus is policy work. They should not be engaged in the details of how things are done, but setting a clear purpose and clear expectations. Second, the Board should address themselves to correcting the problems in the system, many of which, not coincidentally, come from the flawed policy in place, but many others come from the central office's refusal or failure to manage schools, enforce policies and procedures, and hold staff accountable. So what are the problems and how could the Board address them?

I'll just start by saying that I'm not surprised. You cannot have a district policy and/or a procedure about a program that does NOT clearly define all the elements/parts of that program.  If you are going to have ill-defined parts of a program, then at least the policy and/or procedure should say, "At this time and place, we are allowing principals to define the Spectrum program and/or ALO program at their school as they see fit for their community." Because that seems to be exactly what is happening.  Advanced Learning, as an office, seems now to only exist to test.  That's it.

I still have to do my write-up about my talk with Wyeth Jessee about his new role as head of Student Supports, overseeing AL, Special Education, ELL, counseling, nurses, etc.  One thing I will say now is that I asked him about changes in AL and he said he had just gotten the job (absolutely true) but it wouldn't happen without stakeholder input.  I reminded him that Spectrum disappeared like sugar dissolving in iced tea but he smiled and shrugged.  But now a reader has alerted us that the AL department wants our input.   Comments on the proposed DRAFT can be sent to advlearn@seattleschools.org with the subject line 2190SP. The proposed DRAFT will be reviewed by the Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee at their meeting on Monday, August 15, 2017. Please send your comments in before July 31 to assure it will be reviewed prior to the meeting. There are a number of documents to read. 

Advanced Learning Opportunities have never been very well defined. The discontinuation of self-contained Spectrum classes at all elementary schools and some middle schools has muddled that program's definition. Now, with the "de-tracking" and the introduction of "Honors for All" in 9th grade ELA and Social Studies at Garfield, questions are arising about the definition of Highly Capable Services and the Highly Capable Cohort. So let's explore how these programs and services are defined by Board Policy and Superintendent Procedures and compare that language with the actual situations we find in schools.

The Times has an article this morning on "de-tracking" which is quite illuminating. First, the expert they site, Carol Burris, is the head of a group I belong to, the Network for Public Education. Carol Corbett Burris became Executive Director of the Network for Public Education Foundation in August 2015, after serving as principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in NY since 2000.  Prior to becoming a principal, she was a teacher at both the middle and high school level.  Dr. Burris co-authored Detracking for Excellence and Equity (2008) and Opening the Common Core: How to Bring ALL Students to College and Career Readiness (2012), and authored On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the 21st Century Struggle against Re-segregation (2014). She is one of the brightest lights in pushing back on corporate ed reform and a great thinker on public education. The Times' article cites her work in New York wh...

It's been a while, but I've been feeling an Advanced Learning rant building in me. It got pushed over the edge today when I got thinking about the District's inability to implement MTSS. For those who prefer to skip rants - and especially rants on this topic - please do skip it.

The Friday memo to the Board for May 6 includes answers to questions from the Board that could not be answered at the Curriculum and Instruction Management Oversight meeting. It makes for interesting (and odd) reading.

My e-mail to the Board (via the schoolboard@seattleschools.org which means I sent it to senior management as well):

Update : interesting comment thread from the Community Forum for HCC (APP).

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...

I don't know if this effort would be at all worthwhile, but I would really like to see someone try it. Given the presumption and the suspicion that the advanced learning at most ALOs exists exclusively on paper, and that blended Spectrum is no different from an ALO, which is no different from nothing... has anyone ever tried to get their child's teacher or principal to provide evidence of an advanced learning opportunity? What would happen - or, if someone has tried it, what has happened - when a parent or guardian demands evidence that a school is actually providing the advanced learning opportunity that the Board Policy 2190 and the Superintendent Procedure 2190SP requires?

I attended the "listening tour" last night by members of the Legislature who appeared to want input on how to fund McCleary but had their own Senate bill that they presume will solve this issue.  I'll have a separate thread but the kid speakers did it best (along with the panel of teacher/principal/superintendents.  (One guy got thrown out of the room for interrupting and I had to ask a couple of legislators have a confab while I was talking if they might stop talking.) Readers, I have a question for you - district or District when I am talking about our "district?"  I go back and forth but it seems I should be more consistent.  I'm thinking upper-case but I note that the Times goes lower-case. The district has a blurb for parents about Schoology.   A couple of things to wonder about: 1) nothing is mentioned about student data privacy and 2) just like The Source, Use is optional for our teaching staff.

APP just grows and grows.  Now some of that may be better outreach, some may be parents seeing the writing on the wall and fleeing Spectrum but APP seems to be growing.  There are six classes of second graders at Cascadia.  It does beg the question of how all these students will fit into the new elementary at Wilson-Pacific.  The short answer would be that they probably won't but where would half of them go?

SPS put out a press release about Advanced Learning and testing.  The Board is due to vote on acceptance of the latest AL plan to OSPI at the Board meeting tomorrow night (and it's not even being discussed - it's on the Consent Agenda). After you read this thread, my recommendation if you are an AL parent or prospective parent, is to send an e-mail to your own director (or all of them or really just Director Peters who seems to listen on a regular basis) and ask that this item be REMOVED from the Consent Agenda.  That will put it on the path to being actively discussed. Write to: SPSdirectors@seattleschools.org Reader Lynn has been reading and asking questions and it seems that Advanced Learning will be changing policy almost at will (and without much notification to parents).  From AL: Now that we have formal Superintendent Procedures it will be necessary to update them periodically as do most other programs and services. The current 2190SP was presented to C...

As we all know, trying to understand how gifted education in SPS is presented is a losing proposition.  The District has this three-tier system that, on paper, looks somewhat orderly.  But, brush off the cobwebs on this old plan, and you find that: