Seattle Schools Community Forum

Two items have come up that only solidify my belief that the district has a very odd relationship with principals.  I say odd because there is no real way of knowing what the district will tighten the screws on and what they will completely look the other way on. One key issue is WHY principals make some of the decisions that they do and where they get the stated support for some decisions.   Principals say "their community" wants something and yet sometimes the PTA doesn't even know what is happening.  I have found that principals are people with their own philosophies and beliefs about education.  The problem is that a school can have a district program in them as well as a stated focus for the school.  I find it vexing that a new principal can come in and almost sweep all that away.   You can have parents, on the ground at their schools, telling Ex. Directors and others, "this is happening at my school" and the district will ignore it or shrug. I...

The first comes from an interview in the American Psychological Association with psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD who has a new book coming out called, "Raising Readers in the Age of Distraction." The interview, though, was about education and teachers and what works.  I do not think that anything he says will come as ANY surprise to teachers. I find it all basic, reasonable and, as he says, common sense.  The truth is that most teachers in my experience really have a lot of common sense. There are ideas that are peddled to them that are wrong, but most teachers are pretty skeptical of them. They're in the classroom every day, so they have a sense of what works and what doesn't work with kids. On evidence-based techniques for the classroom: One reason is that what works in the lab doesn't always work in the classroom. In the laboratory, we're typically looking at one or two variables at a time, whereas in the classroom, there are lots of variab...

Seattle Public Schools has re-defined the word "curriculum" no fewer than six times in the past four years. It seems to change with each new Chief Academic Officer, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, or Executive Director of Curriculum. It also changes anytime the District needs to weasel or make other people (the Board or members of the public) appear ignorant.

Here are two utterly compelling and important opinion pieces from the NY Times (thanks to Seattle Citizen for pointing them out). This is important stuff. The first is by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus called Who's Minding the Schools .   Both are professors and are co-writing a book about math. The second opinion piece is by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher. If you have ever worked with students in an academic sense - as a parent, a teacher, a tutor - you will recognize the worry in this piece.   Reading and writing are such personal skills that trying to mold a child's understanding of how to read and write by providing such a narrow focus gives me a lot of worry.  Ms. Hollander's piece is called No Learning Without Feeling . Highlights from Who's Minding the Schools: - Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.   These st...

Tomorrow evening the School Board will conduct an oversight work session to review the operation of the District's Teaching and Learning. Finally. This will be the Board's first review of Teaching and Learning EVER.

A student's family brought a complaint against the integrated humanities class at The Center School and, until the complaint has been resolved, the teacher has been instructed not to discuss race or gender in the class. More information here , from The Stranger.

Monday is the Curriculm and Instruction Policy Committee meeting from 4:30-6:00 (this is in the Board conference room). Charlie posted the agenda in a different thread but there are 5 items on the agenda and I have to wonder if they will get to them all. One thing that is of interest is that one item is the Alternative Schools Evaluation/Review (who/when) and also under the STEM update "alternative learning experience process". It is interesting that the alternative schools audit was done and nothing done with it and now they are talking more about it because of STEM. Then there is the School Board meeting on Wednesday, the 19th at 6:00 p.m . To sign up to speak, call (252-0040 )or e-mail (boardagenda@seattleschools.org) the Board office starting Monday morning. There is an Operations Committee meeting on Thursday from 4-6 p.m . in the Board conference room. That agenda is not yet posted.

A few comments on the agenda for this week's school board meeting. 1. University of Washington Excellence in Educational Leadership Award – Princess Shareef, Cleveland High School I happen to respect Ms Shareef, but I don't really see how anyone can give an award for excellence in educational leadership to the principal of a school that is getting transformed due to persistent low performance. It sends a strange message. I thought the idea was to hold the education professionals responsible for student achievement and for their evaluation to be based, in part, on student achievement. The low performance by Cleveland High School students would seem to disqualify Ms Shareef from any sort of award, regardless of her indisputable talents. 2. "Curriculum" Adoption action items All of the action items for materials adoptions are mislabeled "Curriculum Adoption". This misuse of terms contributes to the confusion of these terms. They should correct the titles of th...

I'm going to try to dash off a few highlights from this meeting (and hoping to get to the Board meeting later). Directors Chow, Martin-Morris and Carr were there, with Harium chairing the meeting. There were at least 8 staff there. The agenda included grading policy for giving credit to middle school students for high school courses curriculum alignment - delivery of a white paper textbook adoption and materials anaphylaxis policy (which I previously reported on so will skip here) math intervention; what was done over summer and plan for this year (I left so I missed this part The discussion did not stay in this order so I may skip around a bit. Dr. Enfield (our new CAO) started by saying that it had been a good day for principals with training on the integrated service delivery model for Special Ed and bilingual students. There was no fleshing out of this issue so I don't know what was done. Then Harium talked about fewer minutes with more Action items. Less of what he te...

I attended the Curriculum and Instruction Policy Committee meeting yesterday evening from 5:00 to 8:00. Wow! What a really frustrating meeting! On the good side, the Board was very clear that the District staff needs to be more open with the public about what they are doing, how they are doing it and why they are doing it. Moreove, they were clear that the public needs to have a voice in shaping the decisions. Director Carr in particular was very clear and effective on this point. Director Sundquist made the point very well at the end of the meeting. A number of Board members made reference to the anxiety in the community about the LA alignment, but only Director DeBell put his finger right on it: people like and want alignment; it's standardization they don't want. The Superintendent appeared to totally miss the point. It shot right past her. The meeting opened with a discussion of the players and the roles in the materials adoption process. The Board's role is to provide ...

The Times' Bruce Ramsey wrote an Op-Ed on the District's plans for Language Arts alignment. You can read it here: Seattle sacrifices Monster Lit

This got brought up in another thread and someone asked about it. So the basic answer is that this district swung very far in the direction of site-based management. And now? We are swinging the other way. People don't like change and they particularly don't like change that challenges their way of doing things. We have had some discussions at Roosevelt (indeed, we invited LA department teachers to come in and talk to the members at our PTSA meeting last Wednesday). Now when our PTSA heard from the district earlier this year, we were told this was going to be phased in over three years. Teachers at RHS are convinced there will be changes as early as this fall. Basically, the district wants to align the curriculum from school to school for a couple of reasons. One is that there are enough students who transfer from school to school and find completely different things happening. Another is that the district wants to have some continuity about what is happening from schoo...