Seattle Schools Community Forum

It's been a busy weekend and day for education news (as always). First, SPS Communications put out a press release about the continued growth in Seattle Schools.  As I reported last week, the district projects to be about 60,000 students by 2020.  School by school projections here . Seattle Public Schools has released its annual spring enrollment projections for the 2014-15 school year. An estimated 52,400 students are expected to attend school in the district this fall – an increase of 1,300 students over the year ending in June. This continues the five-year trend of enrollment growth that began in 2009, after a decade of declining enrollment. During the last five years, enrollment grew by more than 5,000 students – from 46,000 in 2009 to 51,000 this year. Next year’s expected enrollment growth of 1,300 students means the district will be serving 6,400 more students next year than in 2009.   Remember ConnectEdu , the company that SPS used to try to help middle/hi...

Wear Red for Ed shared Susan Smith 's photo . FLORIDA from Susan Smith Last Night Jeb Bush's foundation and Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst group hosted a showing of the pro-parent trigger propaganda movie "We the Parents" in Jacksonville. Apparently, these are the Florida parents who support parent trigger. From Fund Education Now!, the story of the parent trigger law in Florida in 2012: We are here today to go on record: Not one legitimate Florida Parent Group has asked for this Parent Trigger/Parent Empowerment legislation. We do not support this corporate empowerment bill that uses a parent's love to "pull the trigger" and pass all that they hold dear into the hands of a for-profit corporation eager to peel off a chunk of every child's per pupil funding dollars for themselves. We will not be silent while our legislators use our money to fund three separate, unequal and unfair systems of education. We do n...

Well, it's not exactly hell freezing over but the Times has a very good piece about the small group of big money tech people pushing 1240 and examines the spending from previous charter elections.  To whit: State voters voted down charter school ballot measures in 1996, 2000, and 2004. But some wealthy individuals are committed to these schools and are funding I-1240.  Where's the money coming from? Of the $2.3 million raised by the “Yes on I-1240″ campaign as of the July 6 signature filing deadline $1.6 million came from seven families tied to Microsoft . Add one Amazon family to this tech millionaires club, and the total is $2.1 million. to get the initiative on the ballot, the state’s Public Disclosure Commission reports Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Paul Allen have been major supporters of this family of ballot measures to the tune of more than $5 million. Other heavy hitters have joined the cause since the filing deadline. Specifically, Alice...

This week, Orlando, FL is hosting the U.S Conference of Mayors.  According to Reuters, "hundreds" of mayors endorsed "parent trigger" laws... "...aimed at bypassing elected school boards and giving parents at the worst public schools the opportunity to band together and force immediate change." Well, it does force change but is it change the only outcome parents create?  Generally so.  The adage "be careful what you wish for" surely applies here to those parents. I called Mayor McGinn's office and they are going to let me know if he voted on this issue and if he did, how he voted.  It will be a great disappointment if he voted yes.   Parent trigger laws are in place in several states including California, Texas and Louisiana and are under consideration in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York. So far, though, the concept has never successfully been used to turn around a school. Though it has not yet been shown t...

From the Times' Danny Westneat , his take on some parents in Mill Creek and Snohomish who have decided  their children will not be taking the state test .  About 70 parents are participating and for one school, that includes 25% of students.  From his column: They'll be in another room, doing art or science projects.   Parents have the right to opt their kids out of the tests. There's no punishment, though the kids get a zero. Handfuls have opted out over the years, often at alternative schools. A few years back a Seattle science teacher refused to give the test, saying it was harmful to students.   But state officials say parents have never pulled their kids on this large a scale. "We're kind of shocked at the size of it," said Nathan Olson, spokesman for the state superintendent of public instruction. "No Child Left Behind is still the law of the land."

A reader asked about the Arbor Heights Elementary charter forum last week.  It went well.  There were about 35 people there, mostly from Arbor Heights but some from other surrounding schools.  The principal, Christy Collins, was there along with several of their teachers.  (What was really nice is that some of the PTA leaders from Olympic View, who had also put on their own charter forum a couple of weeks back, came to this forum and stayed for a tour of the building.) It was well-organized (with little Halloween candy packages for all). As per Olympic View, I was the fact-checker with Beth Sigall, pro side (from the Lake Washington School district) and Kristen King, con side.  Both of them had very good PowerPoints and I think the audience appreciated that. (Note: I did an update as I misspelled Beth's name and got her district wrong in the first version.  My apologies.) What was somewhat different from the Olympic View charter forum was Beth's empha...

( Update: from the LA Times : the California State Board of Education is asking the Attorney General to investigate parent complaints of misconduct over the petition drive at McKinley Elementary in Compton. Boy, this is one to sort out and really hurts Parent Revolution. Thank you to Phyllis Fletcher at KUOW for this heads up.) Okay, so we have the Parent Revolution . This is a group grown out passage of a law called the Parent Trigger in California that allows 51% of parents at a school (that is under certain criteria) to force a district to transform a school under a turnaround strategy that the parents choose. This sounds good, right? (What's interesting is that a school that is ID'ed as a "persistently lowest achieving school" is NOT eligible but only ones eligible for certain corrective actions.) The parents have five interesting choices: charter conversion, turnaround, closure, transformation and bargaining power. There is nuance to each but basical...