Seattle Schools Community Forum

The Annual School Reports and the District Scorecard have been released. Discussion follows. The District Scorecard reports that the District is on pace to reach ZERO (0) of the 23 Goals. That is how bad they suck. Not only are they missing, they are missing badly. The District is within ten percentage points of the target in only four of the twenty-three categories. I cannot imagine a worse report. Superintendent Banda, on the other hand, says things look great: “The State of the District is strong,” Banda said. “We have work to do to make sure all of our students are succeeding, but I am pleased to see our schools improving and growth occurring both in test scores and enrollment.” That's from the District Press Release . Here's the PowerPoint that came with the State of the District .

The new school reports - for the school year 2010-2011 - have been released. They can be found here . This year's School Reports are different from last years in only two ways. The changes are the two corrections that were promised in December of last year. They are long overdue, but better now than later still. Last year, the measure of student academic growth was grossly mislabeled " Students making gains on the state reading test " but was actually a derived relative measure. This year the student academic growth gets a label like " 4th and 5th graders who met or exceeded typical growth on the state reading test " and it is a new measure. From the glossary : This measure shows how students are growing compared to other students in the same grade, with the same test score throughout the state. It is the percentage of students whose growth was above average (50th to 99th percentile) on the state test from one year to the next. Students are compared...

So I'm at the Work Session (got here late, terrible traffic even on 99). One thing that Charlie will appreciate is that SPS staffer Jessica de Barros was asked by Director Carr about the school reports that are to be approved tonight. Jessica said they were all done and on-line today at 11 o'clock. (Which is still too late if every Director wanted to check the schools in their district as Director Carr seemed to be trying to do last night.) I do not understand how staff can expect the Board to take a vote with information coming in so late. Charlie said he did a random check and they still aren't all there. The vote should be no.