Seattle Schools Community Forum

The District has claimed that equitable access to quality programs and services for all students is important to them. They say that, but where are the efforts to provide equitable access beyond the flowery talk? In one step towards equitable access the District math department has standardized math placement in middle school. All of our comprehensive middle schools use the same assessment and make the same placement based on the results. This is a positive step towards equitable access. A student is assigned to the same 6th grade math class regardless of their attendance area school. Too bad that commitment ends in the 6th grade.

 Update on this story with numbers from Rainier Beach High School: RB had the highest increase in reading scores for high schools in the district (17%). 22% increase in Science and 8-10% increase in Math  End of update From SPS Communications (bold mine): Seattle Public School students again made significant academic gains during the 2012-2013 school year, Superintendent José Banda announced today. The preliminary scores released by the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) show Seattle students outperforming the state average in multiple subjects. [1] In 2013, Seattle students met or exceeded standard on the state exams at a higher rate than the previous year (2012) in 19 of 21 exams taken. Seattle also exceeded the 2013 statewide average in 19 of 21 exams, remaining slightly behind in only 10th grade reading and writing. The district widened its lead over statewide averages in 18 exams reflecting a trend in recen...

Only one Director community meeting this Saturday .  That would be with Betty Patu from 10am-noon at Tully's, 4400 Rainier Avenue South.

I came across this article in the Science section of the NY Times about a young woman who see the world - almost the entire world - through mathematical eyes. She's almost hard to describe (so thank goodness for the writer of the article , Kenneth Chang). Read the article and then, I urge you, grab a kid and go check out Vi's blog with its great and fun videos about music, Harry Potter, balloon twisting, a mathematical food index and doodling in math class. From the article: She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician, an off-the-beaten-path choice with seemingly limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University , life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meager niche pursuit. Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class , which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art . The rapid-fire ...