Seattle Schools Community Forum

Trump has selected Betsy DeVos of Michigan as his pick for the next Secretary of Education.  Who is she?  Well, for one, not an educator. 

Public disclosure requests can sometimes yield the oddest things (seemingly not related to your request, no matter how narrowly you tailor it.)  Such is the case with my public disclosure request from OSPI around charter schools. One e-mail in one batch was from sent in late Nov to various people in education from several districts including SPS about a meeting to discuss how to get attract more people of color to  teaching.  The e-mail was from the Gates Foundation's Edie Harding, Senior Program Officer, Pacific NW Initiative about their "DEW" work (Diversify the Educator Workforce.) The one SPS invitee was Karen Harris who is an assistant principal at Beacon Hill Elementary.  (Ms Harris appears to have worked for the Martinez Foundation whose principal mission is to support teachers of color.  The Martinez Foundation has been moved to the Technology Access Foundation.)  I did ask the district if they knew about this effort but no one has answered bac...

I thought it might be a good idea to review who's out there and what they have been doing.

Clarification: the forum on the school to prison pipeline (this Wednesday, the 29th at the New Holly Hall at 6pm) is NOT sponsored by either the King County Council or City Council.  It was organized by a few members from each group.  They have invited members of the Seattle School Board but it is unclear who may be going from that group.  The featured speaker is Professor Wayne Au from UW Bothell. This is a good opportunity to point out how valuable that Middle College is to preventing more kids from entering the pipeline.  (I also suspect a fair number of candidates from City Council races as well as School Board races will be in attendance.)

Well first, it's hot (but I'm from Arizona so you can't scare me) and dry so please have a safe and fun 4th and let the experts handle the fireworks AND be careful if you go out into the water (not in a pool).  The waters here in the Puget Sound region are very cold.   Kind of a fun survey on "How Creative Are You?"   if you draw (and I don't).  We like to talk about family engagement here and boy, did Arne Duncan fall flat in his latest Twitter chat.  From Conversation Ed: The topic of Arne Duncan’s July Twitter chat was “Parental engagement”. And that’s ironic for two reasons: He received a lot of parental engagement on the chat he probably wasn’t expecting. He didn’t “engage” much with the parents who were asking him the tough questions regarding his education policy that affect their kids. In fact, Duncan didn’t say much, but parents and educators certainly did. On the Seattle Craigslist, they are advertisin...

We all know - from photos, tv, etc - what a pixel is.  It's a tiny picture element - a point - to a larger picture.  You can't tell from one pixel what the picture is. Lately, I have been seeing several notable series of pixels that seem to be gathering speed to create the big picture.  This is a profile of one of those pixels. The big picture that I see gathering speed is that this district is being set-up for a transformation.  I would say set up for a fall but mostly a picture seems to be forming so that the district can look like it's in very bad condition but, simultaneously, that it's nobody in senior leadership's fault.  (Yes, that's quite the feat but I think that's how it's going to get played). I believe our district is being set-up to be taken over, at some point, by the Mayor and others in power in the city.    I think - like Bill Gates - they are frustrated (and, in some cases, rightly so) with the pace of student academic gains in ...

 The Times is reporting that five more Seattle area schools will have speed cameras at key intersections.  They name Roxhill (with private school, Holy Family nearby), Dearborn Park, Eckstein, and Bailey Gatzert.  The city made over $7M last year from four other schools with cameras and they say they will be using that revenue for more traffic safety (including crosswalks and sidewalks.) From the Answer Sheet ,  a report that Durham, North Carolina has dropped Teach for America.   The Herald Sun reported that several board members said they did not want to continue a relationship with the organization because TFA corps members are highly inexperienced.  There were also concerns expressed that corps members are required only to promise to stay for two years and though some stay longer, some leave before the two years are up, causing a great deal of turnover in many schools with at-risk students who greatly need stability.   School b...

That teacher would be 5th grade teacher Rafe Esquith from Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles.  He has taught for nearly 30 years and written several books.   But I'll let Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post's Answer Sheet tell you more: *When he goes to China he is so popular he needs security guards to protect him from the crush of the crowds. *He is the only K-12 teacher to be awarded the president’s National Medal of the Arts. *A documentary, “ The Atticus Finch of Hobart Elementary ,” was made about the famous Shakespeare program he has run for years at Hobart, where all of his students appear in at least one full-length production a year. The English actor Ian McKellen actually noticed some of Esquith’s young students mouthing the words to a Shakespearean play in which he was performing in Los Angeles. *He has been given the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award, Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life Award, and Disney’s National Outst...

There's almost something humorous about charter stories today.  They come faster and faster; stars who start charters that fail, financial scandals, and promises made and then broken. What's the funny part?  Well, the supporters of 1240 said "we have a lot to learn from charters."   I would agree and in more ways than one.   We should be the state to be uber-careful about who comes through that charter door.  No backdoors for anyone.  No one who has been indicted in another state.   y Here's the examples of what NOT to do: - In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the FBI, not just the state auditor, have moved in on a charter group. From AP :

 Update: From KPLU comes news that the City Council has delayed their vote on the Pre-K plan, apparently because a separate referendum (I-107) will likely be on the ballot in November.  The Mayor had wanted his proposal to go on the ballot in 2015.  Councilman Burgess says it might loosen the city's control over the qualifications for teachers.  But the I-107 side says that with their initiative more of the existing teachers would get professional development while with the City's proposal there would be many fewer current preschool teachers eligible.  end of update. Again, like mom, apple pie and the flag, we can all like the idea of providing enriching activities to stimulate the brains of our Seattle toddlers.  Research has shown that kids with good preschool do better when they enter kindergarten. Over at the Seattle Education blog , Dora Taylor does an incredibly heavy lift over the question of what exactly is being promoted (and by who) for t...

In breaking news from Politics Early and Often (in Illinois), the SEC has charged United Neighborhood Organization and its charter network with defrauding investors to the tune of $37.5M  b "making materially misleading statements" about contracts.  UNO leaders want to settle the case by "promising" to not use nepotism in their contracts and having federal oversight for a year.  But the SEC says the investigation is continuing.  The civil allegations from regulators with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission center on contracts the Chicago-based UNO gave to a window company owned by a brother of the group’s then-senior vice president, Miguel d’Escoto. SEC officials say the charter network should have told investors in a 2011 bond offering that it had hired Reflection Window Co., owned by Rodrigo d’Escoto, and that the contracts worth $11 million were awarded in violation of UNO’s grant agreement with the state. Interestingly (but not surprisingl...

 Stories from KUOW and Politico (highly recommended) and information I learned about what's in a TFA contract today about student data.  One is the KUOW piece about ConnectEDU and SPS .  It fleshed out what I had reported and had a couple of interesting comments.   Again: For the past three years, the school district has uploaded middle and high school students’ names, grades, addresses and demographic data to the website ConnectEDU. Students were able to add additional information, such as where they’d like to go to college, and how much they want to spend on tuition. The ConnectEDU privacy policy said that if the company was ever sold, users would be notified and allowed to remove all personally identifiable data from the site. After learning that the company had filed for bankruptcy and was looking to sell, Rahm said the district tried to end its contract with ConnectEDU and have all student data on the site deleted. The company’s lawyers ...

I had been waiting for this story to come out.  It's just what I thought because it is the reality of TFA in the Puget Sound region.  No real success at all.  Districts?  Just not interested or finding plenty of fully-qualified teachers right here in Washington State.  From Non-Profit Quarterly : Maldonado was also feeling the conflict, but also noted that TFA’s national office had stumbled in dealing with the challenges in Seattle. Maldonado said that “TFA just hadn’t done the research” and “national staff came off as ‘arrogant…they were assigning the blame to everyone but themselves.’” TFA’s original 38 approved applicants had been reduced to just 13, serving ten schools, only three of which addressed the high-needs population, a critical part of TFA’s mission. An official with TFA cited that the issues in Seattle were a “complete aberration” by the organization. I found this statement funny: TFA in Seattle has made adjustments following the ...

Two thoughtful articles have come across my computer about race and education. The first is from the blog , The Becoming Radical written by P.L. Thomas, a professor at Furman University.  Professor Thomas' blog subtitle is "A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness and the article that caught my eye is entitled "Are We (Finally) Ready to Face Teacher Education’s Race Problem?"   I find this issue has coming up frequently because of the continuing push from TFA.  Despite all of TFA's claims, they have a largely white teaching corps and, in places like, New Orleans, have pushed out many teachers of color.  The teacher quality and teacher education debates have been absent a fundamental acknowledgement of race in the same way that school quality and education reform have mostly ignored race. While the mainstream press and education reform agenda remain distracted by the whitewashed “achievement gap”—a metric not only identified by but created by standardized...

United Opt-Out , a website that has state-by-state resources for parents on how to opt their children out of tests got hacked recently.  They say it was " maliciously hacked and destroyed in an act of political sabotage." Odd, no? I mean, it's not Target or any money-making entity where you could get credit card info.  It's information for public school parents.  And yet it didn't just get temporarily interrupted - it got destroyed. From Reclaim Reform : How much money is involved for investors in the highly lucrative fields of testing, online programming, training, publishing, vendor contracts, etc.? The latest estimates from a Bill Moyers interview with Diane Ravitch is about $500 billion annually. View/read HERE .  And, of course, there is the power in directing the course of public education.  I'm sure some ed reformers could not have that taken away from them.  On Common Core and popular support (which supporters insist is huge). ...

Me and my hero, Diane Ravitch  I plan to go to the Board soon and ask that the district's contract with TFA be ended.   There are two reasons.  One, it seems like a lack of real support for the district's own fledgling Seattle Teacher Residency to support another teacher training program.  All SPS' attention and efforts should be towards STR. Second, TFA has just not been popular here in the least.  Our school-based hiring teams have found them lacking because if not, we would have seen far greater numbers hired.  And, as Charlie has pointed out, SPS can hire TFAers without the district having a contract.  Charters are coming in and they love TFA - let them hire TFA. At the Network for Public Education conference this weekend, I attended a packed workshop on TFA.  At first I was dismayed at the size of the panel but each one of them had something really great to say about this issue. What is interesting is that the panel offered the...

I will be attending several of the charter school applicant forums this week.  I am slowly making my way thru some of the applications and it makes for interesting reading (but what a slog - very long applications - one was 238 pages!). I don't want to give too much away because I do hope to make a public comment on several of them.  But here are a few highlights: no KIPP ? Not to worry, there's a KIPP-look-alike in the bunch.  Uniforms? Check.  Middle school handshake with administrator with scripted responses? Check?  Lots of TFA?  Check.  Very structured? Check.  Working with the Washington State Charter Schools Association? Check.  Punitive discipline over the small stuff? Check. Another one - Coral Academy - is a no-sale for me.  It appears to be aligned to Gulen and that's just not a group to trust.  There is way too much evidence - from multiple states who have their charters - that the overall answer should be no....

Whether it's ed reform or just plain old reform, there is praise to be given to anyone who speaks up for public education.  I have respect for even those with whom I disagree because public education matters. (I do have less respect for those in ed reform who do not want to have a dialog unless you agree to agree with them.  That's happened to me on charter schools.  I also have less respect for those who only want to tell one side of the story.  Tell me the WHOLE story and then we can agree to disagree but ed reformers, taking a cue from conservatives will never say, for example, that there are any significant concerns with charters.) The Times had a guest op-ed by Kimberly Lasher Mitchell last week entitled "There's no shame in being an education reformer."   It was better than most ed reform writing and that's to Ms. Mitchell's credit. I waited to write about this because I had submitted an op-ed that challenges some of her statements and was wai...

In some ways, it's been a disappointing School Board election season.  With no challenger for Betty Patu and no real challenger for Stephan Blanford, neither have really been heard from.  For whatever reason, more forums have only featured Suzanne Dale Estey and Sue Peters.  This is something of a disservice to voters because, while I like Betty Patu, I think anyone running to retain their seat should be questioned.  Ditto on any new candidate like Blanford. But to the marquee race that is Peters versus Dale Estey.   Money : Dale Estey's own campaign has raised a little over $124k (spent $70k). Peters' campaign has raised  just under $31k (spent $13k). PAC for Dale Estey's campaign (Great Seattle Schools) - $102k (spent $52k). Blanford's campaign has raised just under $31k (spent $22k). So Dale Estey's supporters have raised about $226k.  There has NEVER been that kind of money raised before in the history of Seattle School Board elections. ...

Politics makes strange bedfellows but there you are. I am doing some tutoring at Ballard and I told two kids who are skateboarders about this and they said, "Sweet."  From the Wall Street Journal : Where most people see ornate, neo-Classical federal buildings and sweeping stone plazas in this city, skaters see something else: opportunity, in the form of sturdy railings, low stone benches, ramps—ideal "obstacles" for skateboarding stunts. And now, after years of ducking the national park police that patrol these plazas, this week's closure of public buildings and easing of surveillance offered skaters hope of revisiting their favorite spots. It was, said one, "on." But from the lighthearted to the downright wrong, it appears that TFA continues to be the darling of Congress.  From The Washington Post's The Answer Sheet: Unobtrusively slipped into the debt deal that Congress passed late Wednesday night to reopen the federal government ...