Seattle Schools Community Forum

Great op-ed from the Washington Post from the 2015 Superintendent of the Year, Philip D. Lanoue,  as selected by the American Association of School Administrators.  He is the superintendent of the poorest county in Georgia.  As Clarke superintendent since 2009, he is credited with making more gains to close the achievement between economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students than any other district in the state. (highlights mine) Evaluating the total learning experience for either students or teachers through high stakes testing has no real research base and holds little value for students. Let’s not confuse the high-stakes testing movement with the practice of effective and meaningful assessment. I believe there is consensus among educators that conversations regarding school transformation must shift from problems and failure to solutions and successes. 

Diane Ravitch had this recording of a weekly ed reform show from Michael Petrilli at the Fordham Institute.  In the first 7 minutes of the show, he worries about the opting out going on in NY state.  It's everything from unhappy tweets to 1,000s of parents (actually hundreds of thousands) opting their kids out and hey, what does it all mean? He and his co-host say they just can't tell exactly why parents are doing this.  They opine that it can't be because Common Core testing is costing so much the arts are being cut (surmising that "affluent" schools just can't be cutting the arts).  They fret over this "big deal now" and what if it spreads nationwide? He says: If this goes national, this whole school reform thing is in serious trouble." Sorry, Mike, the genie is out of the bottle. Speaking of Ravitch, she also has news from Minneapolis via the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

First up, apparently poor Minnesota got hit by an overloaded processor AND some kind of hacking which lead to a shutdown of their testing on Tuesday.  Minnesota is using PARCC and that means our friends at Pearson had some explaining to do.  Pearson got it back and running but the Minnesota ODE was not quite prepared to say all was well.  From MPR : "We still need to hear from Pearson exactly what the issue is, how they have resolved it, and receive an assurance that testing can resume smoothly," department spokesman Josh Collins said. The department hopes to restart testing on Thursday if it gets those assurances, he added. The hacker attack went away after about 30 minutes. I'm just going to interject at this point.  Look, even without opt-outs, multiple states had to shut down testing.  ANYONE who knows how testing goes at a school, knows that it is a carefully planned event and anything that changes, throws the whole thing out of whack. My poi...