Seattle Schools Community Forum

There's an op-ed in the Seattle Times in support of professional development for teachers by Patricia Wasley, dean and professor of Education at UW and Stephanie Hirsh, executive director of the National Staff Development Council. From the op-ed: Unfortunately, under the recently adopted Washington state budget, the Legislature appears to have ignored this fact by eliminating all state funding for professional learning. Local districts will have to scale back or eliminate entirely their professional-learning budgets, actions that will harm the quality of teaching and learning. They contrast the old professional development of in-service days/workshops to the "new" approach of the following: Seattle - specially prepared teacher leaders help their peers implement the new district math curriculum. To improve student performance in science, the district uses up-to-date performance data to identify specific learning needs at every school and provides corresponding tea...

I saw this question in today's Times (in the Home and Garden section) about what to do if your child says he/she "hates" a teacher. I was a little surprised at the answers given. It seemed to me to sway very heavily in the teacher's favor. (The discussion seemed to be more at an elementary level than middle/high school. All of them are different areas and you can't necessarily believe the same things will work at each level.) Some of the suggestions: self-advocacy . (This from a principal.) Seriously, for an elementary school student? I would say do this but only with a parent present. That's asking a lot of a little child to go to their teacher and say something like "I don't like it when you only give us 5 minutes to do an essay." personality conflicts . "I remind my children there will be teachers, coaches and ultimately co-workers and employers with whom they don't get along. Learning to coexist and, in some cases, win the...

[Here's a link to the Gates Foundation page with the links to each district.] Just an update on the Gates Foundation's new grants for studying how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure. Here's an article from the NY Times. From the article: "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced its biggest education donation in a decade, $290 million, in support of three school districts and five charter groups working to transform how teachers are evaluated and how they get tenure. A separate $45 million research initiative will study 3,700 classroom teachers in six cities, including New York, seeking to answer the question that has puzzled investigators for decades: What, exactly, makes a good teacher effective? The twin projects represent a rethinking of the foundation’s education strategy, previously focused largely on smaller grants intended to remake troubled American high schools. With these new, larger grants, the foundation is seek...

This article was in the Seattle Times today. It's about teachers selling lesson plans they have created to other teachers. It's an interesting idea but, as you can imagine, some issues. "Thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as William Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit-card bills, vacation travel and home renovation, leading some school officials to question who owns material developed for public-school classrooms." "Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006, $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York Cit...

Seattle Times' editorial writer, Lynne Varner, had a piece today about good teachers. Regarding Seattle schools: "I'm eagerly awaiting a study about teacher quality in the Seattle Public Schools. The report, from the nonpartisan National Council on Teacher Quality, was supposed to have been released during the summer. It will be similar to a study by the council — and funded by the Gates Foundation — that examined school policies and teacher contracts in Hartford, Conn. Now slated for early next month, the Seattle focus will be welcome because of fast-moving policy efforts on teacher accountability at the federal and local levels." Also, I asked her about what teacher blogs she read. She sent me a link to Teacher Magazine that has many blogs. Want to know what teachers and other educators think? Here's a plethora of blogs. I'm particularly interested to read what the Teacher of the Year who went on the road to schools around the country thinks. T...

Merit pay for teachers was discussed on KUOW's "The Conversation" this afternoon. I haven't had a chance to listen to the show yet, but did read some of the background links they provided: 'Merit pay plan's unintended lesson' , St. Petersburg Times 'Pros and Cons of Merit Pay For Teachers' , About.com: Elementary Education It's a tough issue to say the least. I like the idea of rewarding the best teachers. I think money for a rewards system would be easier to come by politically than simply raising pay for all teachers. But, setting up the right metrics to decide who is best is certainly problematic. Bonuses cannot be based on test results alone -- as per the Florida example, you don't want to set up a system where teachers in affluent schools reap most of the rewards. Also, teaching at its best is a team activity, and we cannot have a bonus system that pits good teachers against each other. Perhaps all of the teachers in a school should ge...