Seattle Schools Community Forum

The president-elect is now considering Michelle Rhee for Secretary of Education .  (I find it interesting his actually going to keep it open because hard-core conservatives want it gone but then again, public education was of little interest on the campaign trail.)  Ed reformers love this because Rhee is all things ed reform (TFA, charters, etc.)  But still I smile.  Conservatives had plenty to say about Hillary's baggage from her husband.  Well, Rhee has even worse baggage with her husband, Sacramento mayor, Kevin Johnson. One of the most moving first-person narratives I have ever read, Academia, Love Me Back , by grad student, Tiffany Martinez.

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

 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 ...

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...

Seattle Public Schools' Agreement with Teach for America was approved by the Board on November 17, 2010. The agreement terminates on August 31, 2014 unless renewed by mutual consent of both parties. I don't believe that a majority of the current Board would vote to extend it. The Agreement has been more divisive than effective. Teach for America in Seattle has been mostly about angry debate. While the BAR for the Agreement only claimed benefit was a larger candidate pool and the benefits associated with that, the Powerpoint for the Board that came with the vote suggested that Teach for America corps members would make the candidate pool more demographically and educationally diverse and suggested that they were more dedicated to closing the academic achievement gap than other candidates or candidates in general.

Hey, Education Activists! Looking for a way to make a vocation of your avocation? Want to follow your passion? Do you believe that if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life? Here's an opportunity! Teach for America is looking for a Development Manager in Seattle . Want to work for the District? There are exciting opportunities such as: Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance Budget Director and Internal Auditor But, if you were thinking about the job as Manager of Advanced Learning, I'm afraid that job posting has been taken down for some time. The job hasn't been filled, they just aren't advertising it anymore.

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 ...

Back in 2010, Charlie wrote a thread on this ed reform group and a report they had written about the Seattle teachers contract. NCTQ - National Council on Teacher Quality - has now come out with another report, NCTQ Teacher Prep Review, and this one is about teacher preparation programs.   I haven't read all of it (it's 112 pages).  Their premise is that the overwhelming majority of teacher prep programs aren't worth it to their students.  What's interesting is not that they say the programs' content is bad but .. .that a vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars. I may be splitting hairs but I'm not sure return on investment is the same as low-quality. They also complain that most of the programs don't prepare teachers to teach Common Core.  For crying out loud, it's just barely coming online and hello! there is no "content", only the s...

That's a simplistic question - clearly - but part of the discussion of this column at Slate by Sara Mosle. You'll recall that I wrote a thread about an article in the NY Times about the movement of younger teachers in and out of of the classroom, particularly TFA teachers. So Ms. Mosle, a former TFAer (20 years ago), gives an interesting perspective (bold mine): The Times article, however, neglects another downside to charters' emphasis on youthful hiring: Many schools launch with few or no adults on staff who know first-hand what it's like to be a parent. If you aren't a parent, maybe this won't strike you as odd. It wouldn't have struck me that way more than 20 years ago when I joined Teach for America in the program's first year and taught for three years in New York City's public schools. I was single, childless, and clueless about even the most basic aspects of child-rearing. My students' parents seemed like creatures f...

 Update:   a great column at the Washington Post by UW College of Education professor Ken Zeichner about the issue of the issue of "highly qualified teachers" that references right with this thread. Our federal government supports a practice of putting the least-prepared teachers in the highest-need classrooms — classrooms that are most often filled with children from low-income families, English language learners, students with disabilities and students of color.  There are powerful players in the education reform world who are advocating for the Obama administration and Congress to maintain a federal policy that promotes this practice. Parents and guardians should be accurately informed about the certification status of their children’s teachers so they can question the wisdom of the policy that has supported the disproportionate assignment of the least qualified teachers to our most vulnerable students. You might remember that I had advocated for parents...

I know that many believe that the drumbeat, the concern, the outrage over corporate ed reform is a few voices in a canary mine.  Or exaggerating.  Or those voices are conspiracy therorists. And yet the evidence is stacking up as I have documented.  Against TFA, against charters, and now, in one of the biggest exposes - corporate ed reform.   The good news is that this house of cards is sagging and will fall.  From the eagle eye of Washington Post writer of The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss, comes a story about thousands of public disclosure e-mails, across six states, that show quite a lot of linkage between corporate ed reform and making money off of it. The non-profit that did the public disclosure request and released the information is In the Public Interest.   The correspondence is available at: • Rhode Island: http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/node/2746 • Oklahoma: http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/node/2745 • New Mexico: http://...

Via Mirmac 1, there is this public disclosure e-mail that is quite telling but of no surprise to anyone who reads this blog.  We asked these questions from the start.  From the e-mail (italics Dr. Ginsberg's, bold mine): 1) Whose interests are we serving and, related to this questions, how are we serving the interests of our most historically under-served K-12 students? 2) How are we serving the interests of TFA teachers? of our students and graduates who are working as instructors in the program? 3) How are we serving the effectiveness and morale of state-funded and fee-based funded full time CoE faculty when TFA instructors teach a class with as few as 2 students , while other CoE faculty are currently teaching unprecedented numbers of students.  (Some of our EDLPS colleagues are teaching 60 students in very complex disciplines .) 4) How are we serving the interests of the CoE when faculty have not had a chance to actively and collectively probe the implications an...

Remember that column I linked to at the Washington Post written by the Dean of Education, Leslie T. Fenwick at Howard University?  She said: "Mayoral control, Teach for America, education management organizations and venture capital-funded charter schools have not garnered much grassroots support or enthusiasm among lower- and middle-income black parents whose children attend urban schools because these parents often view these schemes as uninformed by their community and disconnected from the best interest of their children. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. W hile mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more-often-than-not new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more ...

1) So how is TFA doing in our region?  From what I can see, not so great.  There are about 17 TFA teachers in the region.  Now as you may recall, a UW Vice-Provost, Dave Szatmary, had closely questioned the dean of the College of Education, Tom Stritikus, about the costs to UW. Szatmary: What assurances does UW have that the enrollments in TFA will increase to 50 in year 2?  How long would we be willing to run the program at a loss if the increased enrollments do not occur? Stritikus: This is TFA's growth plan,  They have hit their growth plans in virtually every district nationally.  If I were a betting man (which I am), I'd say they'll hit it." Well, this is coming into year three and they still don't even have 20.  So yes, folks, as tuition rises and the number of spots open in the freshman class get ever competitive, yes, UW has the money to lose on a program that apparently most districts in our state do NOT want.  I am still unclear ...

Pasi Sahlberg  of Finland wrote a lengthy and compelling piece for the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet.  He calmly and rationally explains why he thinks what is happening in the U.S. won't work.  (To note, he does not address charter schools or Common Core.)  He is talking, very specifically, about teachers and teaching.  In a short bite, he says: First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools. Singapore, Canada and Finland all set high standards for their teacher-preparation programs in academic universities. There is no Teach for Finland or other alternative pathways into teaching that wouldn’t include thoroughly studying theories of pedagogy and undergo clinical practice. Second, the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways...

Common Core and assessments and a new group, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium . More on assessments from The New Yorker; its story covers the Garfield assessment boycott. As the author and relapsed educator Garret Keizer observed in his return to teaching, of which he writes in the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, “No student I meet seems to believe that the universe formed in six days but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs.” Charter Schools The group that 1240 is following for authorizing guideline, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, released a 12-step "Index of Essential Practices" for charter school authorizers. Looking over them, it does not appear that 1240 meets them but then :   The report found that only a small percentage of those who responded have all 12 practices in place, but the majority are using at least nine. Also from Ed Week , a study about the early years of new charter schools:...

By the numbers:   In an interview on the Huffington Post in December 2012, TFA founder and CEO Wendy Kopp said the following: "On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years." Anthony Cody of the Living in Dialogue blog at Ed Week asked for substantiation of this claim because the generally previously accepted number was more that only 10-15% of TFAers stay past their third year. Others doing the math f ound that one study found that about 40% of TFAers leave after two years and another 25% after four years.  So if Kopp's claim is true, then 40% would have to be there for 14 years and another 25% for 12 years.  That's the only way you get an "average" of eight years. So Cody asked a TFA spokesperson who said:   "stat is a best estimate"  "data involved is national and based on our alumni survey"  Kopp finally answered saying her comment "created confusion. We can't definitively say what the ave...

I'm finally catching up on some backreading on education issues. Arne Duncan.   According to this article in Ed Week on the first speech Secretary Duncan has made since the re-election of President Obama, it appears he will stay on if asked.  His priorities? In his first major postelection remarks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he will use his second term to continue to leverage education improvement at the state and local levels, with a new emphasis on principal preparation and evaluation.  And, he made clear that if Congress isn't serious about reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which the No Child Left Behind Act is the current version, then his department won't devote a lot of energy to it. Duncan said, repeatedly, that he did not want reauthorization to happen through a bad bill. "We will lead, we will help, we will push, but Congress has to want to do it," said Duncan, who says he plans on staying in th...

The School Board will be meeting on Wednesday, October 3. The agenda is posted online and is full of pretty normal stuff. The Board will vote on three action items : to update a fairly non-controversial policy about fair use and copyright, the change order for Fairmount Park, and the approval of the revised Creative Approach School MOU. Yes, this is the same Creative Approach School MOU that we were told could not possibly be revised this quickly and easily when the need for the revision was first raised. Funny, huh? The introduction items are equally routine: a policy revision for actually tracking the District's assets, a contract for the new enterprise software for student information and gradebook, an administrative requirement for the E & O levy, a conditional certificate for one Teach for America corps member (only the second one this year), and final acceptance on three capital projects: Hawthorne's new roof, Rainier Beach's athletic fields, and the whole...

I just listened to the KUOW report (not yet available) on the vote of the TFA member to teach Special Ed at Franklin High.   What a mess and yet, interesting.  Here's what I understand happened. They had six members in attendance (I believe Director Smith-Blum was missing). Apparently the vote was 3 yeses (Martin-Morris, DeBell and Carr) and 3 abstained votes.  So the Board Manager said it did not pass. DeBell corrected her and said abstaining votes don't count, they have a quorum and the majority of the quorum said yes. THEN, Ron English, district counsel stepped up and said he wasn't sure. Now, as a former PTA president who is supposed to know Robert's Rules of Order (but I don't know them well), I do know there are two issues. One is what abstaining votes mean and the other is what constitutes a majority vote. "...Abstentions do not count in tallying the vote; when members abstain, they are in effect only attending the meeting to aid in consti...