Seattle Schools Community Forum

I received a tweet on Monday from SPS, saying that Dr. Nyland was visiting with the City Council as part of their regular Monday morning briefing.  Here's the link .  It was worth listening to as I heard Dr. Nyland say, with some candor, various interesting things. Summary

From Ed Week and the NY Times comes word that Washington State, along with Wisconsin, have been granted waivers from some of the most "onerous conditions" of NCLB.  That brings the total number of states with waivers up to 26.   That's more than half the states and Andy Porter, the dean of U of Penn Graduate School of Education asks, " The more waivers there are, the less there really is a law, right?" From the Times: In exchange for the education waivers, schools and districts must promise to set new targets aimed at preparing students for colleges and careers. They must also tether evaluations of teachers and schools in part to student achievement on standardized tests. The administration said all schools would be required to show yearly improvement.  Instead of labeling all struggling schools as failing, the waivers direct states to focus most attention on the bottom 5 percent of low-performing schools. “With the waiver we can focus on thos...

From OSPI, Randy Dorn on Education Reform: January 2012 - State Superintendent Randy Dorn is pleased that education reform will be front and center during the 2012 legislative session. Dorn believes – and hopes legislators agree – that discussions around education reform must be mindful of the Supreme Court’s January 6 ruling on McCleary v. State, which held that the state isn’t providing adequate funding for basic education. Here are Dorn’s positions on the major reform issues: Improve/remove. Teachers who are not successful ought to be given every opportunity to improve. If they cannot improve, superintendents need the flexibility to remove those teachers without employing current expensive and unwieldy legal procedures. The Superintendent’s request legislation would change a teacher’s tenured status to “provisional” (instead of “continuing”) if that teacher gets two consecutive “unsatisfactory” ratings. Charter schools. Charter school legislation has been voted do...