Seattle Schools Community Forum

Today is the C&I meeting which I reported on in Seattle Schools This Week.  Somehow I missed that it's two meetings. The first one, starting at 4:30 pm is the regular C&I meeting and the other, starting at 6 pm, is a Committee Meeting of the Whole.  Why is the Committee Meeting of the Whole happening?  Because they are going to discuss Policy A01.00, Instructional Philosophy, which is a huge policy for teaching and learning for the district.

The core mission of Seattle Public Schools is to educate students. The executives and managers in the District who are most directly responsible for the accomplishment of that mission are: Superintendent, Jose Banda Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, Michael Tolley Executive Director of Curriculum and Instructional Support, Shauna Heath Executive Directors of Schools, Marni Campbell, Carmela Dellino, Kim Whitworth Principals I don't know about your workplace, but any organization with any kind of intentional management makes a periodic assessment of the effectiveness of the organization's efforts. The same can and should be expected from Seattle Public Schools.

This is the best guest column about the school district that I have ever read in the Seattle Times. You absolutely have to read this. You have to encourage other people to read this. And then you have to bring these questions to the Board and to the District staff. The column finishes like this: There are two districts in Seattle. Our children attend the failing one. What is the district's plan? How much longer will we have to wait for the kinds of schools our children deserve? The District's plan, as we know, is to do more of what hasn't worked in the past. The District's plan, as we know, is for these communities to wait for ever. The District's response to low-performing schools is described in their Performance Management System. It's all about the teachers: tighter control on teacher lessons, replacing teachers, teacher coaches, more pay for the teachers. There is nothing in the plan for the students despite the fact that all of the schools tha...

There were three schools that were the focus of the Southeast Education Initiative. Although that project was completed at the end of the past school year, let's remember that it formed the pilot for school Performance Management as the District will practice it going forward. So what was the performance for those three schools as measured by the WASL/MSP/HSPE? Rainier Beach High School Reading pass rates: 2006-2007 - 70.0% 2007-2008 - 69.1%, down 0.9 2008-2009 - 61.5%, down 7.6 2009-2010 - 54.9%, down 6.6 Cumulative change: down 15.1 Math pass rates: 2006-2007 - 37.4% 2007-2008 - 28.6%, down 8.8 2008-2009 - 17.6%, down 11.0 2009-2010 - 14.1%, down 3.5 Cumulative change: down 23.3 Writing pass rates: 2006-2007 - 72.0% 2007-2008 - 92.7%, up 20.7 2008-2009 - 82.4%, down 10.3 2009-2010 - 82.5%, up 0.1 Cumulative change: up 10.5 Science pass rates: 2006-2007 - 10.5% 2007-2008 - 10.9%, up 0.4 2008-2009 - 9.8%, down 1.1 2009-2010 - 8.0%, down 1.8 Cumulative...

Seattle Public Schools has a number of slogans. Among them is "Every School a Quality School". The District claims to be working towards this goal, but the District has no definition of a Quality School, so those claims lack credibility. Rather than clucking at the District for not having a definition of a Quality School, our time would be more productively used helping them to find one. What is a Quality School? We need to be clear that we separate the idea of a Quality School from the students in the school. If we were to rely on student achievement, for example, as our definition of a Quality School, then we might conclude that Bryant is good school and that Hawthorne is a struggling school. But does anyone believe that if the Hawthorne students were all transferred to Bryant and if the Bryant students were all transferred to Hawthorne that the outcomes for the students would be much different? Would the Hawthorne students suddenly start to achieve because they are now at ...

I remember political discussions about the Iraq war that ended when conservatives, unable to counter the arguments of those who opposed the war, would ask "Why do you hate America?" I remember how right-wing talk radio personalities discounted and dismissed oppostion to President Bush's policies by accusing those with opposing views of hating the President. This petty and obsessive hatred of G.W. Bush was the presumed source of the opposition to his policies and the fault-finding in his actions. Let me be very clear. I don't hate Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson. I don't even dislike her. I have no personal feelings about her of any kind. I have never met the woman, she and I have never talked, I have no personal sense of her at all. It wouldn't matter to me if she were a saint or an ogre. Honestly, I wouldn't care. It's not about her personally in any way. It's about her job performance. Her performance evaluation should be all about how well she has ful...

Consider, for a moment, the Performance Management System as designed by Seattle Public Schools. All schools get some funding and resources from the Performance Management System. Schools with low performace or slow performance growth and deemed in need of help will get more additional funding and resources. Schools with high performance and adequate performance growth will get less additional funding and resources. So the worse your scores, the more funding and resources you get. They reward low performance. The downside is that the Education Director decides how those funds are spent at your school. Presumably the Education Director makes the decision based on a knowledge of the school's needs. And what is the reward for high performance? You get less money but the principal decides how it is spent. That, by the way, is the extent of "earned autonomy". That's the autonomy you can earn: the right to determine how your school's small allotment (less than $50,000) ...

A group of parents calling themselves the Seattle Shadow School Board and representing many interest groups within Seattle Public Schools, wants to present the School Board with evidence of the public's dissatisfaction with the Superintendent's performance on June 16th (or at least before their July 7 action on her evaluation/contract renewal). They have created a petition online very similar format to the No Confidence documents used by the schools who have taken those votes. The petition is available here : http://www.petitiononline.com/S3B62010/petition.html

The annual Board review of the superintendent's performance is coming up. We're seeing signs of it, calendar items on the Board calendar, hagiographies in the Seattle Times, etc. By what criteria should the superintendent's performance be judged and, by those criteria, how has she performed. We could look to Policy B61.00 for some clues. We could also look to any statement of the District's annual priorities . Here 's the tool used last year. I think her performance should be measured in a number of ways including: Overall satisfaction with the District as expressed on the District's student family surveys Overall academic achievement by all students Improvement in academic achievement by under-performing students Graduation rates Closing the Academic Achievement Gap Effective management of the budget Capital projects completed on time and on budget Compliance with Board Policy Progress on the Strategic Plan Effective management of her staff Labor relations Com...

Well, while folks are talking about having the public kibbitz on school district labor contracts, I suppose we can't help having comments on the Superintendent's contract as well. The Board will soon take up the matter of the Superintendent's annual performance review and action on her contract. How has the Superintendent done? I suppose the only proper way to answer that question would be to review her performance relative to her job description and the performance expectations for her that were established and defined in advance. These performance expectations should, of course, all be objectively measurable outcomes. That is, after all, her definition of accountability. She wrote: Accountability means that Seattle Public Schools understands our data and we use it to set performance targets for the district, school and classrooms. We decide what our data indicators should be, i.e.: WASL, dropout rates, teacher retention, etc. A concrete example about accountability is SPS...

I attended the joint meeting yesterday morning. There were a handful of other interested people including Ramona Hattendorf, the Seattle Council PTSA President. The entire City Council was there except Sally Clark and the entire School Board was there except for Michael DeBell. The Superintendent was also in attendance. As I mentioned elsewhere, I saw Tracy Libros, head of Enrollment, before the meeting started and asked her about the district decision to enlarge the enrollment at both Ballard and Roosevelt. I asked her how many students that might be. She said up to 25% of the functional capacity of each school except if the school did fill with attendance area students, they would need to keep the 10% Open Choice seats. A bit confusing but I'm sure it will all become clear by the end of May. I had forgotten that all City Council meetings have a public comment portion at the beginning so I did get up and speak. I just told the Council that as someone active in the distric...

Here's something that I don't really get: How will the District spend $3.1 million on Performance Management? I mean, where will the money go? Will it be spent on computers? on salaries? on consultants? When I think about Performance Management doesn't it just come down to supervisors doing meaningful performance evaluations of their employees? Why does that cost $3.1 million? I know that it shouldn't cost anything and that it should already be happening, but even if it isn't happening now, why does it cost money - and so much money - to make it happen? I know that a lot of the Performance Management work is misguided and has been misdirected into evaluating schools - an absurd idea - and that this somehow requires the collection and dissemination of data, but why does that cost $3.1 million? Don't we already have that data? How much could it cost to upload it to a database and run a few queries? I've seen the school scorecards (still in their draft state) a...

From the Washington Post : Delaware and Tennessee won bragging rights Monday as the nation's top education innovators, besting D.C. and 13 other finalists to claim a share of the $4 billion in President Obama's unprecedented school reform fund. The awards are worth as much as $107M and $502M, respectively. The contest gave credit to districts with support from unions and school boards. Georgia came in third and Florida fell just short. There is still $3B in the fund for next rounds. Clearly Duncan isn't looking to spread the wealth with only two winners. What is being said about this? "It's totally remarkable," said Cynthia Brown, an analyst at the Center for American Progress. "We've never seen this major kind of policy change in so many different states, all in a constrained time frame. They're taking actions that are usually debated over an extended period, often for multiple years." Other analysts call the impact limited. ...

With all of this talk about Performance Management I thought it would be a good time to review the Performance of the Board Directors and the Board as a whole. I know that the Board does their own self-assessment, but I can't find it. Besides, it is impossible for anyone to hold themselves accountable. I simply have no faith in self-policing. For accountability purposes we need some objectively measurable outcomes for the Board job. The Board job, as I have often written, has three components. First is to serve as the elected representatives of the public. This includes: A. Representing the public's interest B. Representing the public's perspective C. Advocating for the public's perspective D. Advocating for community engagement E. Providing community engagement Second, the Board is supposed to oversee the management of the District, to supervise the Superintendent. In that role they should: A. Confirm that the Superintendent's decisions comply with state and federa...

The Directors did their comment section, mostly about community meetings. However President DeBell did make a fairly major announcement. He read a formal statement that he would be recusing himself from any discussion or vote about certificated staff negotiations. His wife is a certificated nurse with SPS. He said as a practical matter his wife's employment would not affect his impartiality or judgment but he concluded that the statutes regarding his role would indicate that he should refrain talking to other Board members about that issue. He said he would attend Board meetings about this particular negotiation but only to listen. Steve Sundquist, in his role as Vice-President, would chair those meetings. Also as I said elsewhere, he said that they are in the processing of figuring out the non-compliance for Native American Students funding. (He also complimented Director Carr for meeting with some Native American parents.) He said now they are on a path to compliance. H...

As I said, it was quite full and quite rocking at the beginning with many counselors with signs about their job loss and teachers with signs against the performance policy. Also, as previously mentioned, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson left because of her daughter's preschool event and the crowd was not happy. (As it turns out, she magically appeared almost to the minute when the testimony ended which seemed odd. Maybe she had to make sure to give her Superintendent's remarks but it did not leave a good impression.) Some of the speaker comments: "It sounds like blame the teacher is the message." Meg did a great presentation that the audience really appreciated. Her data-driven testimony really strikes a chord. She explained how the Superintendent had given an explanation in a letter about Title One and LAP money but did not give a full picture/details to the story. Her specific example was what will happen to Thurgood Marshall with the loss of Title One dollars. an executi...

The School Board has a meeting this Wednesday, Feb. 3, at 6 p.m. The agenda is quite full. Among the items: approval of the NTN contract for STEM for $800,000. As has been widely discussed here, there are some troubling aspects of this contract with the bottom line being that it might not be the best and most cost-effective way to set up STEM at Cleveland. The Board has pushed back a lot and now we will see if they stand by their objections or not. From the agenda item: "The funding source for this project will be a combination of Learning Assistance Program (LAP), Building Excellence (BEX), and Cleveland High School budget dollars. Federal and private grant opportunities are also being pursued. " Which BEX and how much from each source? It's this kind of vagueness that always comes back to bite the Board. High school LA arts adoption. The 2010-2011 schedule is being introduced on Wednesday night.September 8th will be the first day of school and June 21 (!) the...

Remember all of that talk about the Superintendent not getting a raise this year due to the tight budget and how inappropriate it would be for her to make more money while the District is laying off teachers? Did you believe that? You did? You must be new. Here it comes; item for introduction tonight: Incentive pay for the superintendent. Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson will receive performance based-incentive compensation of $5,280.00 for the 2008-09 academic year because the students in the District met four of the twenty academic goals. Man! If I met four of twenty goals at my job I'm not sure that I would be allowed to keep it, let alone get incentive pay. She is eligible for up to 10% of her pay in incentives based on twenty point system of 16 academic measures (three are double weighted, one is yet undetermined). She got four of the twenty points, one fifth, so her incentive pay is one fifth of the possible amount, 2% of her pay: $5,280.00. The superintendent already makes mor...

The District has released a number of seriously overdue documents relating to Performance Management. The first is the District Scorecard . There are a number of interesting points about this document. First, there is absolutely no reason in the world that the District could not have delivered this scorecard on time in December 2008. There's nothing here that reflects 18 months of design work. Second, the scorecard, while it does show the results for each year does not show the annual benchmarks. Are there no annual benchmarks? Moreover, it doesn't show if the District had growth or was on pace in previous years. That could have been done with some simple color-coding. I don't understand the reason that the AYP data box in the lower right was included. Do we care about that? Does that tell us anything that we want to know? I would much rather that they used the space to show how many students scored 1, 2, 3, or 4 on the WASL. Pass/fail isn't as meaningful. The School Re...