Seattle Schools Community Forum

Here's an interesting article from the Chalkbeat blog.  It's an interview with Amy Stuart Wells, a Teachers College professor. For the first time in the nation’s history, the overall student population is now less than half white. And while many schools remain deeply segregated , others are growing more mixed as Asian, black, and Hispanic families move to the suburbs and whites settle in gentrifying urban neighborhoods. But there is a difference between diverse schools and ones that are integrated, says Amy Stuart Wells, a Teachers College professor who has long studied race and education. History has shown that seating students of different colors side by side isn’t enough — real integration requires schools to adopt inclusive curriculums, teachers to reflect on their own biases, and students to learn how to interact across race and class lines, she says.

Two items have come up that only solidify my belief that the district has a very odd relationship with principals.  I say odd because there is no real way of knowing what the district will tighten the screws on and what they will completely look the other way on. One key issue is WHY principals make some of the decisions that they do and where they get the stated support for some decisions.   Principals say "their community" wants something and yet sometimes the PTA doesn't even know what is happening.  I have found that principals are people with their own philosophies and beliefs about education.  The problem is that a school can have a district program in them as well as a stated focus for the school.  I find it vexing that a new principal can come in and almost sweep all that away.   You can have parents, on the ground at their schools, telling Ex. Directors and others, "this is happening at my school" and the district will ignore it or shrug. I...

Inspired by Gen Ed Mom I am starting a conversation about increasing the rigor, challenge, opportunity and support for students working beyond the Standards in our general education classrooms. As I have written numerous times before, the Standards, intended in theory as a floor - the minimum that students should achieve - function in practice as a ceiling - the maximum that students can achieve. The reasons are multiple, but the primary one is that the focus is on supporting all students to reach the standards rather than supporting each student to achieve as much as they can. All of the focus is on getting students to the standard and there is no focus left for teaching them beyond the standards. In addition to that faulty frame, there are bureaucratic practices that cap student achievement. They include horizontal alignment, vertical articulation, fidelity of implementation, and a gross misunderstanding of how Standards are supposed to work. There is also political opposition to s...

What the word? First up, the hacked grades story in the Times.  Right now it looks like it's at Chief Sealth, Ballard and Ingraham (all corners of the city).  Apparently some kids are blabbing about this and I'm sure someone is going to get caught.  (I love when kids think they will never get caught and then go tell someone what they did.  Kids, loose lips sink ships.)  The Times also reported that the City signed a deal with the Space Needle Corp for a  Chihuly glass exhibition hall.  This includes a $1M for a children's playground (yay for kids) and again, some kind of educational tie-in with SPS. The deal was sweetened with the addition of the playground, as well as arts-education programs at the Chihuly museum in partnership with Seattle Public Schools and other arts organizations. The New York Times had a story about rigor in high school classes.  This idea is taking on Supreme Court visions akin to what the definition is of pornogr...

A thread was requested about ALOs (Advanced Learning Opportunities, the third tier of the Advanced Learning program) and differentiated teaching .   Differentiated teaching is a teacher knowing his/her students' strengths, challenges and readiness and being able to adjust teaching to the different levels in the classroom.  (This doesn't necessarily mean teaching to every single student's level but rather knowing that there are different abilities in the classroom and trying to meet those needs.)